by Yvette Granata

This text is a non-script that accompanies the film Superficie des Continents. While the film explores archival footage of the surface of the earth, this text traces the archive of the surface of the earth in another way. It is a textual montage or network of different surface areas. It is meant to be read as a separate fragment. 

​Des Continents:

​This is the Area of the Continents.














​This is not a map!

– Vladimir Dmitrov Ecology of Immortality (2007)

– Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1983) 1

For smooth surfaces, there is a unique natural notion of surface area.

If a surface is very irregular or rough, however, it may be impossible to assign an area to it at all. A typical example is given by a surface with spikes spread throughout in a dense fashion.

The mathematical definition of surface area in the presence of curved surfaces is considerably involved. The surface area is not the sum of an object’s faces. The surface area of a solid object is the total area of the object's faces and its curved surfaces.3

There are crevices and turns and parts of curves and other things to be measured. It is difficult to measure the surface of curves. They contain their own special face, and there are folds within the special faces.

Therefore: we cannot ever be sure how many faces an object has.

Many surfaces of this complicated type occur in the study of fractals. A fractal is a mathematical set that typically displays self-similar patterns, which means the patterns are the same from near as from far.

​The surface of the earth is a good example of an irregular surface that exhibits fractal patterns. 

Sometimes you must look from a far distance and other times from a very close one. In order to do this, you must change in size.

If you cannot see the sameness of things, it may be because it is not something you can see at all.

The Earth’s surface may seemed fixed, but underneath our feet there is a constant motion that we cannot notice until there is an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. There is molten rock.

​Sometimes it becomes lava. 

Beneath the surface of the Earth, the molten rock moves.

Heraclitis, the pre-socratic philosopher, lived between 535 - 475 BCE in Greece. He is known for coining the phrase “Panta Rhei” or “Everything must flow.”

He also said that you cannot step in the same river twice.

​And also that you cannot step in the same volcano twice. 

Panta Rei is an Italian Restaurant in North Beach, San Francisco. Here are some reviews:

“It is worth the walk.”

“Whenever my husband and I visit San Fran, we always make it a point to have either lunch or dinner at Panta Rei. It is by far the best Italian place in San Fran to eat and the atmosphere is very welcoming and fun. We have always ordered something different with every visit and have always had an excellent meal every time. Good Italian food is hard to find here in Phoenix, so I make my own which we like best; however, I say give Panta Rei a try.”

“I think I ordered the wrong thing. Squid ink pasta. I wouldn't recommend this. The noodles were dry and the seafood was tough. In hindsight I should have sent it back. I also felt sick later that night.” 

Microorganisms can cause people to become sick after eating at restaurants that have served food that contain certain microorganisms. Normally, this is an accident.

Perhaps that is what Voltaire meant when he said, “the definition of monsters is more difficult than is generally imagined.”

The surface area of the micro-world is also more difficult to describe than is generally imagined.

​The inner membrane of a mitochondrion has a large surface area due to infoldings, allowing higher rates of cellular respiration.

The surface area to volume ratio of a cell imposes upper limits on size, as the volume increases much faster than does the surface area, thus limiting the rate at which substances diffuse from the interior across the cell membrane to interstitial spaces or to other cells.

Indeed, representing a cell as an idealized sphere of radius r, the volume and surface area are, respectively, V = 4/3 π r3; SA = 4 π r2. The resulting surface area to volume ratio is therefore 3/r. Thus, if a cell has a radius of 1 µm, the SA:V ratio is 3; whereas if the radius of the cell is instead 10 µm, then the SA:V ratio becomes 0.3. With a cell radius of 100, SA:V ratio is 0.03.

​Thus, the surface area of a cell falls off steeply with increasing volume. 

​In other words, the more a cell contains, the less surface it has

The poet said, “Silent is the life of flowers.”

​At the University of Western Australia, plant physiologist Monica Gagliano says, "We have identified that plants respond to sound and they make their own sounds," and added that, "The obvious purpose of sound might be for communicating with others."6

The Earth is not a sphere. It is an oblate spheroid. 7

That means that all of the globes I have ever seen are wrong.

Even though the tallest mountain above sea level on Earth is Mount Everest, the feature that is furthest from the center of the Earth is actually Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador. It is also the point on earth that is closest to the Moon.8

If the Earth were a sphere, the top of Mount Everest would be the farthest point from the center of the Earth.

But it’s an oblate spheroid, not a sphere, and so it’s Chimborazo, not Everest.

​Not knowing that Chimborazo is the point on Earth that reaches farthest into space is also what is meant when the poet said, ‘Silent is the life of flowers.

The surface area of an organism is important in several considerations, such as regulation of body temperature and digestion.

Animals use their teeth to grind food down into smaller particles, increasing the surface area available for digestion.

The epithelial tissue lining the digestive tract contains microvilli, greatly increasing the area available for absorption.

Elephants have large ears, allowing them to regulate their own body temperature.

​In other instances, animals need to minimize surface area; for example, people will fold their arms over their chest when they are cold to minimize heat loss.

Someone once said to the writer that the truth can be found in a concrete tank.

The factory workers searched and dug holes and made machines that could dig more holes. They made the dirt into concrete and poured the concrete to build a room, the concrete tank.

Some people started to say that half of the universe was the result of a giant reflection of itself in a cosmic mirror.

​The workers found a broken shaving mirror underneath the dirt, where someone had forgotten it. “How did it get there in the first place?” They wondered as they sat in the tank, “Could this be the other half of the universe?” 

Earth is the densest planet in the Solar System.

When microscopic plants in the ocean die, they fall to the bottom of the ocean. Over long periods of time, the remnants of this life, rich in carbon, are carried back into the interior of the Earth and recycled.

This pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, which makes sure we don’t get a runaway greenhouse effect. That’s what happened to Venus.

So far, ours is the only planet that we have confirmed to have life.

​After Enrico Fermi won the Nobel Prize in physics, he asked the famous question, “Our galaxy should be teeming with civilizations, but where is everybody?” 

If we are the only planet with life, then Earth is a

​Single

            Point 
   
                      Of  
 
                         Data. 

                                   Albeit
                                              
                                              Recycled  

​                                                              Data.

​If we are a single point of data, then the Earth is a very heavy-hearted island. Or a floating washing machine. 

In Italy, Umberto Eco wrote a novel in 1988, called Foucault’s Pendulum. In the novel, there is a secret society called ‘Panta Rhei.’
​
The novel is about an invented conspiracy. The pendulum is not of or related to Michel Foucault.

Foucault’s pendulum demonstrates the rotation of the Earth. It also allows you to see the surface of the Earth move underneath a pendulum.

​I saw this demonstrated once with a pendulum and a series of empty coca cola bottles. 

Earth is lonely. It is surrounded by other planets without life. It wants to find others like it.

​People on earth have started to look for life on other planets and other worlds. People question whether or not they are alone on Earth, if Earth is alone in the universe. 

They say when there is one cockroach, there are a hundred more.

​What if another civilization of cockroaches had telescopes? 

​In December 1990, when the Galileo spacecraft flew by Earth in its circuitous journey to Jupiter, scientists pointed some of the instruments at Earth to see how the planet looked from space. Since we knew life could be found on Earth, this exercise helped create some criteria that if found elsewhere, would point to the existence of life there as well. 

One of the most telling of the criteria for finding life that was discovered by the Galileo flyby was what is called the vegetation red edge: a sharp increase in the reflectance of light at a wavelength of around 700 nanometers. This is the result of chlorophyll of plants absorbing visible light but reflecting near infrared light strongly.9

​If aliens look to Earth right now, they would see a red tinge covering the people looking back out to the skies for them. 

​To aliens, the surface of the human face looks red.

In The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, the authors chronicle how the Sun’s energy output is slowly increasing. 

​They say in as soon as 500 million years, temperatures on Earth will rise to the point that will make most of the world turn into a desert. 

​And then this will happen:

1. The largest creatures won’t be able to survive anywhere but on the relatively cooler poles.

2. Because of this, over the course of the next few billion years, evolution will seem to go in reverse.

3. The largest organisms and least heat tolerant animals will die out, leaving insects and bacteria.

4. Finally, it’ll be so hot on the surface of the Earth that the oceans will boil away.

5. There’ll be no place to hide from the terrible temperatures.
​
6. Only the organisms that live deep underground will survive, as they have already for billions of years.

​Notes

This text was created as part of the joint artistic research project, Fragmentation and Feedback Loops, with the University of Amsterdam & Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht (HKU). Fragmentation and Feedback Loops was exhibited at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam in January 2014. 

Yvette Granata: 
Phd media study/theory/practice SUNY Buffalo.
Non-philosophy, media art, tech, ultra-terrestrials

By Yvette Granata

While Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? begins and explores the question of its title, charting the planes and operations of philosophy, science and art, the last chapter of the book might be read as shifting towards another question. In bringing up ‘nonphilosophy’ near the book’s end, Deleuze and Guattari ask, it seems, not what but where is a non-philosophy? Here they speak of the non-localizable interference between the disciplines and their corresponding ‘non’, saying that: “Finally, there are interferences that cannot be localized. This is because each distinct discipline is, in its own way, in relation with a negative” and that “the plane of philosophy is prephilosophical insofar as we consider it in itself independently of the concepts that come to occupy it, but non-philosophy is found where the plane confronts chaos.” (WP, 218, my italics). Deleuze and Guattari’s pre-philosophical plane here does not consist of the historical concepts of philosophy, but is a plane not yet inhabited by philosophical concepts. They therefore make the distinction that a pre-philosophical plane is not a non-philosophical plane. A non-philosophy is still somewhere else. It is not on the planes of science or art; it is not in chaos either. Instead, they situate non-philosophy in a non-localizable place. While not localizable to a plane, it is also not completely ‘non-localizable’ either. As they point out, non-philosophy is located where the plane confronts chaos and so is located on the edge of philosophy, dangling off in an interstitial space (a space but not a plane) between philosophy’s plane and chaos.

Here is where they then put the footnote about François Laruelle as being engaged in one of the most interesting projects of contemporary philosophy, his project of non-philosophy. Laruelle’s non-philosophy, however, is in spatial disagreement with Deleuze and Guattari’s map at the outset. The non-philosophy of Laruelle is not located in a space between the edge of philosophy and chaos. While initially, this cartographic disagreement is useful for a comparison of their non-philosophies, this paper looks further to how Laruelle not only redraws the map of philosophy/non-philosophy, but also to where he performs inverse operations to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. I look not only where Laruelle departs from Deleuze, but where he connects and then engulfs, deforms, and debases Deleuze’s difference. In order to do so, this paper explores a few aspects of Laruelle’s non-philosophy and his concept of the gnostic matrix as an inverse operation and sublimation of Deleuze’s difference-itself. Ultimately, I think through the re-shaping of difference itself into a repetition of gnostic matrices.

Laruelle not only draws a different map than Deleuze and Guattari’s non-philosophy but also erases the outline around the plane of immanence; he does not so much ‘deterritorialize’ Deleuze and Guattari’s version of immanence as outright reject it. One of the main tenets of Laruelle’s thought is a critique of philosophy’s claim to be able to philosophize immanence, calling “this bewitched belief, which philosophy has known quite well . . . the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy (PSP)” (‘Non-Philosophy’, 98). Within Laruelle’s critique of the system of sufficient philosophy, immanence has been proclaimed by philosophers in which they “distinguish between themselves by a system of diversely measured mixtures of immanence and transcendence, by these infinitely varied twists and interlacings” (‘Principles’, 17). This mixology, or in Laruelle’s term amphibology, is the manner in which philosophers are always self-assigning their authority to describe the real, and merely creating an ad hoc combination of immanence and transcendence as exercises of performative authority.

Laruelle therefore neither agrees with Deleuze and Guattari on what the nature of philosophical ‘interference’ is or what it entails. Where for the latter, there is an interference pattern between the plane of philosophy and chaos, and an interference between the planes of the disciplines of art and science, for Laruelle the amphibology of a sufficient philosophy is already the philosophical interference. Philosophy itself has an interior interference pattern produced by its decisionism; it is the finitude of philosophy’s own decision that interferes with philosophy as a part of its planar design (a design bolstered by Deleuze). In this way, we need not draw an outline around the plane of immanence that separates it from an outside chaos. Amphibology is chaos. In a letter from 1988, Laruelle tells Deleuze, “By chaos, chora, or (non-)One, I describe an absolutely infinite and indivisible receptacle, containing an infinity of philosophical decisions”(‘Decision,’ 396). As such, Laruelle moves Deleuze’s chaos from its outside place and shapes it instead into the infinite garbage can containing philosophy’s decisions. Laruelle draws a philosophy receptacle that is already filled up with chaos.

Nevertheless, Laruelle’s non-philosophy is in a similar phase-state as Deleuze and Guattari’s in terms of its initial appearance, as both admit to be born out of a recognition of the condition of a philosophical interference. Whether from outside or from within, non-philosophy seemingly begins with the recognition of an interference. This condition is hinted at already in Deleuze and Guattari’s statement: “They [science, art, philosophy] do not need the No as beginning, or as the end in which they would be called upon to disappear by being realized, but at every moment of their becoming” (WP, 218). They thus point out that the ‘no’ of a philosophy would be at every point of the becoming of a non-philosophy, and not at a crossing of a threshold or at an edge. The No is neither the end of philosophy because of a realization of philosophy, but is a constant and corollary no — the becoming of a non. Indeed, they are here moving towards Laruelle.

In Laruelle’s letter to Deleuze however, he further unhinges the state of non-philosophy, stating: “a thing, a philosophy, will be called free when it exists as cause of itself … when it is at once determinate and determinant itself. On the contrary, a thing will be called constrained when it is determined by another to exist and to operate”(‘Decision’, 397). A ‘No’ is a constrain. A non, however, is a free radical. In this way, Laruelle also gets rid of their ‘No,’ His distinction of ‘constrain’ versus ‘free,’ directly addressed to Deleuze, allows instead for a non-philosophy which is not relational to a position to philosophy, is not between a philosophical plane and the chaos outside, and is now neither a ‘no’ in relation to ‘a philosophy.’ It is determinant from its own structure and instead uses philosophy as a material. We might then better compare Laruelle as making another Deleuzian-Guattarian ‘pre-philosophical plane’ rather than a version of their non-philosophy, but without the outlines of a plane. There is a constrain without constraint of another, or is self-constraint, in a non-positional space. The determination of non-philosophy is more radical, akin to a free radical or a doppelgänger to philosophy. Put another way, Laruelle’s non-philosophy is face to face with philosophy, not hierarchically above philosophy, not dangling at its edge, nor taking it from behind.1 Non-philosophy approaches philosophy from multiple angles, collides into it, re-mixes it, eats it. Looking further at an example of Laruelle’s non-philosophy as a doppelgänger in the act, I look to Laruelle’s repetition of a gnostic matrix as facing Deleuze’s system of difference and how Laruelle ultimately sublimates Deleuze’s repetition of difference.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues against the concept of difference as a destructive and ‘evil’ force as it appears throughout philosophy, asking, “it is obviously difficult to know whether the problem is well posed in this way: is difference really an evil in itself? Must the question have been posed in these moral terms? Must difference have been ‚mediated‘ in order to render it both livable and thinkable?” (DR, 30). Deleuze moves from the concept of difference as ‘evil mediation’ to the concept of difference-itself as a productive force, as a thing itself that shapes things. He thus begins with an effort to liberate difference from its status as a subordinate operation of ‘difference from.’ The problem of ‘difference from’ is that it necessarily frames difference as a negative operation by which things are compared to a transcendental sameness, or is an operation in which representation is what mediates from an original (the copy versus the original), and in which the mediated differs from a transcendental original by degrees of destruction.

For example, Deleuze gives Plato’s distinction between the original and the image, the model and the copy, where “the model is supposed to enjoy an originary superior identity (theIdea alone is nothing other than what it is: only Courage is courageous, Piety pious), whereas the copy is judged in terms of a derived internal resemblance” (127). Deleuze, however points out that it is not only the copy that is subordinated to the Idea, but that difference itself as a concept must come second to comparing two similar things, “[i]ndeed, it is in this sense that differencecomes only in third place, behind identity and resemblance, and can be understood only in termsof these prior notions” (127). Getting away from the Idea and difference as a comparison to itssameness, Deleuze constructs a system based on the primacy of difference, or difference itself,that henceforth prevents a system of comparisons of sameness orsimilarity. Difference itselfbecomes neither the description of a relation nor the comparison of the Idea and its mediated forms, but is the condition under which all things are subjected or through which they are produced. Liberating difference from its secondary nature of the Idea, Deleuze constructs asystem of differentiation and differenciation, a dynamic system that follows from difference itself. Difference is therefore no longer a secondary term that denotes comparison, but becomes the inherent function of the system. As Deleuze describes:

Difference as a noumenon of the phenomenon is an internal function of the phenomena by which all things are the result of that functional kernel. What makes difference perform its function and produce what is in the world via its inequality? It is God tied to a calculator that endlessly unevenly calculates, and it is the calculator that performs the function of difference-itself. Deleuze therefore makes it so difference is not repetition of variations of a transcendental same— because only that which differs via difference is what constitutes what is in the world.Difference-itself is the primary function that repeats, and the world is the garbage can for thejetsam of God’s calculator.

Deleuze’s gesture of thinking through difference is intimately connected to the gesture torethink the Idea, or to take it from behind. While on the one hand, the problem of representation of the Idea is framed as a mediation (the evilness of a difference negatively framed), Deleuze also describes that the ‘innate good’ of the Idea is also still a problem on the other side of thecalculator. He says: “The very conception of a natural light is inseparable from a certain valuesupposedly attached to the Idea – namely, ‚clarity and distinctness‘; and from a certain supposedorigin – namely, ‚innateness‘. Innateness, however, only represents the good nature of thoughtfrom the point of view of a Christian theology”(146). Deleuze, then speaks of the restitution of the Idea via not only difference on the one side, but also the explosion of the Idea with a Dionysian value. The priority of a difference-itself and the Dionysian destruction of the innategood are both parts of a two-pronged way to solve the problems of the innate ‘clarity and distinctness’ of the Idea and the evil of a negative difference.

For Francois Laruelle, however, we do not need to destroy the Idea with Dionysian value nor make difference a primary function — something else can be done. In his text, Christo- Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem, Laruelle seemingly gives an answer to Deleuze’s remark above on the concept of ‘clarity and distinctness’ as inseparable from innateness. While Laruelle similarly aims to remove the innate so-called goodness of Christian theology tied to theIdea, he instead speaks of “a gnostic-type knowledge” in which “it is possible to clarify a secret in a quantum-theoretical manner without absolutely destroying it”(‘Christo’, 5). For Laruelle, we do not have to destroy, or rectify the Idea with Dionysian value in order to clarify a secret. Laruelle switches thus from innate clarity of good knowledge, the Idea, to the ‘secret,’ and gives a method that is neither difference itself nor destruction, but a quantum theoretical limit point.Laruelle reminds us of the Heisenberg principle — that “it is a known principle that, in quantum theoreticalterms, to clarify a supposedly given or existent secret is automatically to undetermine it in and through this very knowledge” (5). In other words, Laruelle aims to generalize “the quantum ‘law’ of that phenomenon” in order to draw out an uncertainty principle of any ‘given secret’ — a principle of under-determinancy that is no longer only for quantum physics butclaimed as a non-philosophical principle. Instead, ‘the quantum manner’ is made into a conceptual principle of the necessary preservation of the unknownability of two states at once — a concept of simultaneity that functionally undermines both the innate stability or clarity of the Idea and also Deleuze’s difference-itself.

Laruelle henceforth, I argue, plays out the non-philosophical doppelgänger to Deleuze’s difference itself, and thinks through its inverse. Instead of the rectification of difference from its negative and evil mediation role, it is a debasement of the sameness of the innate that Laruelle puts forth. This takes the supposed good value, clarity and distinction away from innateness at the outset, not by constructing a difference-itself, but with the quantum as a non-theological innateness of uncertainty. As Laruelle states, “[w]ith new means, of nontheological provenance and of what we shall call a ‘quantum-oriented’ order, we have won the right to be atheist religious leaders—that is to say, atheists capable of taking religions from the side where they are usable, and of relating them to that special ‘subject’ called ‘last instance’” (CF, x). Similar to his description of the principle of sufficient philosophy, Laruelle frames theology in the same manner, naming a Principle of Sufficient Theology (PST). More so than a theological work, his text implements the method of non-philosophy in the context of theology and the context of theodicy. It is a non-philosophical free-radical facing both philosophy and theology, taking them from the side at the same time. As Laruelle emphasizes, the text “is not written so as to enrich the treasury of theological knowledge” and that “our problem is not that of traditional theology and christology. . . they are first-degree disciplines or symptomal material, like the philosophy with which they are impregnated” (vi). Laruelle makes clear that he is taking direct nonphilosophical aim at the philosophical decision of the innateness of the Idea with theology as his material. As he claims that all of philosophy contains an inner ‘christic kernel,’ the innate good clarity that Deleuze calls ‘natural light’, Laruelle goes on thus to take the concept of Christ (as Idea) and subtracts God from the equation. As such, we leave Deleuze’s God-with-a-Calculator, and go forward in an inverse reciprocal manner as Laruellian quantum atheists with christ without-god.

​While perhaps strange to think of ‘the quantum’ and ‘Christ’ together, Laruelle does so in order to establish the mode for an atheism of christ, a non-religious and godless christic thought — in order to take aim at philosophy. He does so by using the ‘gnostic’ as a sort of uncertainty principle inserted instead of god. In this way, Laruelle uses the gnostic uncertainty principle (a ‘gnostic orientation’) as a method of “bracketing out the theological point of view as thedominant point of view”(5). Thus, where Deleuze redeems difference, or makes difference-itselfa positive or primary function in order to take out the ‘evil’ of difference while leaving the rest of  philosophical decisionism intact, Laruelle resurrects the gnostic, making the christ-without-god, a positive force of heresy that preemptively leaves behind the evilness of difference. This christ without god is able to pre-empt the ‘evilness’ of difference because rather than destroy the Idea, it newly deforms it with uncertainty and debasement. The Idea itself is reformed as it is hollowed out and pulled down by Laruelle into a basement where it becomes a generic messiah dwelling in quantum uncertainty. As such, introducing the gnostic is neither destruction nor redemption of difference, but a lowering of innate good into a generic hole.

Laruelle poses the gnostic and the quantum christ, I stress, in order to work in a nonphilosophical manner that aims to remain always insufficient, where ‘we have on one side a Principle of Sufficient Theology, and on the other side (the side from which our struggle is prosecuted) a necessary but nonsufficient faith’ (xii). This is where he interchanges nonphilosophy and gnostic theology in which “Christ is simply the name of the science of Christ, that its other name is gnosis, and that ‘gnostic theology’ therefore means that theology is abased (without being completely negated) as object of gnosis—nothing in these radical axioms belongs to any known Christianity” (3). The gnostic orientation and the christ-without-god replaces philosophical decision in the form of a “messianic wave” that is “a vector, and not a circle” because, as Laruelle emphasizes, “the immanence of that which does nothing but come messianically must be sought in the greatest depth of the “without-return” or of the Resurrection of Christ” (173). This is the method in which Laruelle redrafts the notion of ‘return’, refashioning it as resurrection, which is not cyclical but operates like a wave function and a vector (i.e., it moves in one direction). Such is how he puts forth ‘immanent resurrection’ as a replacement of Eternal Return.

The functional behavior that Laruelle describes of this immanence is that it moves outfrom the ‘greatest depth’ of the ‘without return,’ or as a function that seems to come up from the depths of sameness (from the basement upwards). It is a ‘sameness’ function which undercuts the Deleuzian system of difference-itself that moves from virtual and actual in reciprocal entanglements, pointing out instead that “[t]he messianic wave… is not conflated with the closed-up oscillatory, with the symptoms of divine transcendence”(172), and also that “[t]he Resurrection is not a new creation… the determination of the order or the Last Instance is the Son who rises or ascends and brings down the Father . . . above all it does not form a plane of immanence like a secularized form of the plan of salvation” (210, my italics). Laruelle emphatically underdetermines the Idea and here specifically aims at Deleuze’s system of difference, transcendental empiricism, and the notion of the plane of immanence. With underdetermination, or ‘undergoing,’ the function of a wave-vector from the basement of sameness wipes out Deleuze’s God’s calculator of difference.

Undergoing is functionally equivalent to Deleuze difference-itself, but by other means, via a repetition of sameness. It is a part of what Laruelle describes overall as a matrix: “If you must have a governing thesis or a principle then here it is, in all its brutality: the fusion of christology and quantum physics “under” quantum theory in its generic power, and no longer under theology. This is called a matrix” (14). A repetition of the gnostic matrix is a repetition of under-determined sameness, which repeats the same under-determinancy. The gnostic matrix and its orientation is an undoing of the decisionism of innateness and difference (of philosophy and theology at once.) To rephrase, the gnostic matrix itself produces a known uncertainty (a cognizant gnosticism) that proceeds with the repetition of sameness. It is in this way that undergoing is the inverse of difference itself: it too decouples difference from an ‘evil’ comparison to an ideal, but does so by placing both under the cognizance of its axiomatic parts and within a matrix of uncertainty.

Thus a gnostic matrix empties out or discards both innate clarity and difference from the Idea. It does not claim a description of the real, but gets rid of the philosophical self-assignment that compares innate ideas and representations or differences thereof in order to move forward instead with an underdetermined state as the case: “Gnosis cuts down [the] absolute will to knowledge, and radicalizes or differentiates between knowledge and the cognizance of this knowledge”(10). As such, Laruelle reframes the problem that Deleuze sets out in the beginning: it is not difference attached to an Ideal that is the wolf at the door, but rather, it is the privation of the cognizance of knowing the decision of the Ideal which threatens. The cognizance afforded by the gnostic matrix is the manner in which we then “find some way to make intelligible its unintelligibility and its unlearned character” and “discover the means to conserve and manifest its secret without destroying it qua secret with an inadequate, rationalist light” (4). The gnostic matrix that repeats is then the form that gives us, not innate light, but an inadequate rationalist non-light. The repetition of the gnostic matrix can thereby underwrite the function of Deleuze’s difference in-itself, as its matrixial uncertainty allows us to move away from innate light altogether, making the Idea always a perpetually inadequate sameness repeating. Laruelle specifically lays out this notion, again in relation to Deleuze, stating:

What Laruelle here critiques of Deleuze is his ‘mélange,’ or the amphibology of the mixture of absolutes and oscillations of difference, because such is not cognizant of its own decisionism.Thus it requires a move away from mélange towards matrix, which does not mix but maintains axiomatic parts.

What then does the gnostic matrix repeating do when we look back to Deleuze? Ultimately out of the scope of this paper to cover all implications, my aim has been to explore one manner in which Laruelle’s non-philosophy does not simply break from Deleuze’s philosophy, but opens an inverse operation of difference. The repetition of the gnostic matrix does not preclude or prevent the notion of different itself, but rather, reformulates it as non primary. Instead of the primary mode of production of all things in the world (i.e., the remainders of God’s calculator), what does difference in-itself become in light of a gnostic matrix repeating under-determinancy?

We might see the repetition of the gnostic matrix, its under-going, as not only an inverse function of Deleuze’s difference itself but further as a type of sublimation of it. Deleuze describes of difference, “It is mediated, it is itself mediation, the middle term in person. It is productive, since genera are not divided into differences but divided by differences which give rise to corresponding species” and also that “it is attributed to the species but at the same time attributes the genus to it and constitutes the species to which it is attributed. Such a synthetic and constitutive predicate . . . has one final property: that of carrying with itself that which it attributes” (DR, 31). As such, difference itself has an inherent structure that determines its own divergent-ness. Whence the divergent-ness of difference itself? What is the structure of it as a predicate that can be both mediated and itself mediation, carrying with it its own attributes? Might this instead be thought more specifically as a matrix? A matrix structure that is able to describe difference that itself contains difference in a skeletal and under-determined structure, and thus as its own container separates axiomatic parts that are simultaneously a containment of the whole matrix. Difference as a matrix is in this way not only difference itself as a function of its structure, but describes further the axiomatic condition of difference containing in itself what it attributes. John Protevi bolsters this claim in his suggestion that “you could replace the title Difference and Repetition with Structure and Genesis: structures are differential, and genesis produces repetition: different incarnations of the same structure” (Protevi, 39). Seen as different incarnations of its ‘structure,’ difference as within a matrix becomes not differential but a matrixial form that contains difference. It is thus the structure of the matrix that repeats, which is a sameness of repeating, and is what Laruelle describes. In this way, difference is sublimated to the matrix (‘structure’), albeit in an undetermined skeleton and uncertain form, and this underdetermined sameness of the matrix is what repeats. The quantum theology of the gnostic matrix is the manner that allows for indiscernibility to be the condition of an underdetermined Idea and is what difference itself is then contained within.

Looking back to where I began on the last page of What is Philosophy, after Deleuze and Guattari say that every philosophy needs a non-philosophy, the last two sentences of the book go on to say: “if the three Nos are still distinct in relation to the cerebral plane, they are no longer distinct in relation to the chaos into which the brain plunges. In this submersion it seems that there is extracted from chaos the shadow of the ‘people to come’” and that “It is here that concepts, sensations, and functions become undecidable, at the same time as philosophy, art, and sciencebecome indiscernible, as if they shared the same shadow ”(WP, 218, my italics). Deleuze and Guattari point out here that when chaos is no longer on the outside, when it is inside and across planes of thought instead, we begin in an indiscernibility, in line with what Laruelle says of chaos itself as philosophical disturbance rather than at philosophy’s edge . The indiscernible does not dangle at a threshold in a place between philosophy and chaos, because it is within and extracted from chaos. For Deleuze and Guattari, it seems we can extract a shadow from it, not as a shadow differentiated through intensity or by the function of difference itself, but through a shared sameness of indiscernibility. What is this other non-process for the extraction of Deleuze and Guattari’s shared same-shadow? But this is where the book ends.

Where Deleuze and Guattari end, Laruelle continues. A shared shadow is a shared repetition of sameness, not the shadows of Plato or simulacra. It is a shared basement, a debasement, the generic sameness condition repeating. In this way, a shadow extracted from chaos begins out of a non-philosophy. The shared shadow of indiscernibility is the shadow of a gnostic matrix.

Lastly, on the people to come: the repetition of the generic gnostic matrix allows for us to say two things. That immanence is living the generic same shadow, and that transcendence is a ‘fallen-into-immanence’ without having fallen from a Ideal into an extension of a shadow (CF, 172). It is in the gnostic matrix, out of which we do not philosophize in decision, or as Laruelle says, it is “not a conceptual or discursive entity, an atom in the transcendent sense, but a discreteand indivisible quantum of messianity. It is at once a drive, the raising of a cry … the exclamation of a mystic” (CF, 154). ‘The people to come’ from Deleuze and Guattari, when out of a shared shadow thus come differently. They are now Laruelle’s messiahs that emanate. As implied by Deleuze and Guattari as well, what is to come is thus not by the repetition of the structure of difference, but with an underdetermined repetition of sameness. It is the shared shadow of the gnostic matrix in which the people to come will be matrixially repeated.

The ​essay is taken from: 

by  Steven Craig Hickman

—Henri-Charles Puech, Gnosis and Time

Most of us think of time as a linear process, a movement from the past to the future, but has this always been so? Is time truly an arrow, or is it also a return, a circle rather than a slide toward some apocalyptic abyss? Or, what if time could reverse course, or slip off into a non-time, a time of no time, a rhizomatic cleavage in time that would lock it and its inhabitants in a zone of stasis, a place where time stood still? Have we even begun to think about time?

The earliest recorded Western philosophy of time was expounded by the ancient Egyptian thinker Ptahhotep (c. 2650–2600 BC), who said, “Do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit.” The Vedas, the earliest texts on Indian philosophy and Hindu philosophy, dating back to the late 2nd millennium BC, describe ancient Hindu cosmology, in which the universe goes through repeated cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth, with each cycle lasting 4,320,000 years. Ancient Greek philosophers, including Parmenides and Heraclitus, wrote essays on the nature of time.

Plato, in the Timaeus, identified time with the period of motion of the heavenly bodies, and space as that in which things come to be. Aristotle, in Book IV of his Physics, defined time as the number of changes with respect to before and after, and the place of an object as the innermost motionless boundary of that which surrounds it.

In Book 11 of St. Augustine’s Confessions, he ruminates on the nature of time, asking, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.”

During the Medieval period with the influx of ancient Greek systems from the great philosophers and mystics of Islam came other concepts of Time. The Islamic world at the time was so large, and the intellectual milieu so rich and diverse, that no single book could put an end to its philosophy and discursive reasoning. Ibn ‘Arabī’s philosophical mysticism offers a vast synthesis of gnostic and Sufi ideas as well as a type of philosophical discourse which, for the first time, formulates the Sufi doctrine. With Ibn ‘Arabī, we see a monumental effort to comment on a full array of metaphysical, cosmological, and psychological aspects of Gnosticism, thereby providing a vision of reality whose attainment requires the practice of the Sufi path. Ibn ‘Arabī’s philosophico-mystical edifice is a process of spiritual hermeneutics (ta’wīl) which relies on the language of symbolism to guide a novice from the exterior (ẓāhir) to the interior (bāṭin). For Ibn ‘Arabī, the entire cosmos represents signs (ayāt) which lend themselves to symbolic exegesis, a process whose pinnacle is the Universal Man (al-insān al-kāmil). Ibn ‘Arabī, whose doctrine of the Unity of Being (waḥdat al-wūjūd) has been interpreted by many to be pantheism, was nevertheless careful to argue that even though God dwells in things, but the world “is not” in God. For Ibn ‘Arabī, humans are microcosms and the universe is the macrocosm; the Universal Man is the one who realizes all of his inherent potentialities, including the Divine breath which was blown into man by God in the beginning of creation as the Qur’an says.​

As the modern scholar Henri Corbin would say of Islamic Gnosticism and Sufi notions of Time: “Real time is concrete time, the time of persons. The abstract time of “everyone and no one” abolishes pluralism and makes totalitarianisms possible. The “No!” that he insists we cry aloud “draws its energy from the lightning flash whose vertical joins heaven with earth, not from some horizontal line of force that loses itself in a limitlessness from which no meaning arises.”1 This battle between concrete time of persons, and the abstract time or totalitarian time of the State or Sovereign power and authoritarian rule was at heart a war between monism and pluralism, autarchy and democracy.

For Corbin the Gnostics and their descendants in Sufic thought our time is a “time of return,” and the beings of Light who inhabit this time are haunted by intimations of Eternity and nostalgia for the source of Light … (Cheethem, p. 45) This notion that the whole of history is and has been a defensive measure against the dark side of Time, that we have already been thrown into this temporal continuum to not to condemn us but to protect us from the dark powers of Ahriman, the alien and evil power of Darkness who originates entirely outside the realm of Light in an unknowable outer abyss. That the God of Light and Eternity, the Time of Endlessness needed time to do battle against the dark one so formed and shaped this universe of finitude to stay the hand of the evil one. And, yet, it is the very power of the Evil One who is locked within the energetic multiplicity of this universes powers of mattering through the fallen labors of Sophia, the mother of all and Time. The time that we know is both necessitated and limited by the acts in the cosmic drama that is both its prelude and its consummation. We live in “cyclical time”— a time of a return to an eternal origin. In this mythology  the earthly soul is lacking its eternal half (Plato) — it is “lagging behind itself,” incomplete and confined within the limited time of the combat. The earthly soul lives in nostalgia and anticipation, in exiled incompleteness, in longing and hope. (Cheetham, pp. 44-46)

These mythical notions of time would fall away during the time of destruction, the age of demythologization we have come to know of as the Enlightenment. Secular time and the sciences would displace these ancient narratives and dramatizations of Time as part of this demythologization process. For Kant the watershed philosopher of the Secular Age time and space were neither objective nor real:

Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally.2

Kant would begin that epistemic turn toward the Mind and make both Space and Time categories of the Mind rather than ontological verities of existence, so that our conceptions of outer sense were from then own dependent on Mind rather than autonomous substances in their own right. This would be the beginning of what we now know as the Anti-Realist Continental traditions in which all thought of reality independent of the Mind would lose its relevancy within philosophy. This abstraction of time out of the real and substantive would lock us into a realm of pure evil according to Corbin and the Ismaili Sufi gnostics.

Whereas for the ancient gnostics Time (Zervan) was a Person, the modern cosmologies of the West have abstracted themselves out of the Real, produced a cut or gap or crack between the human and the universe at large displacing humanity into a realm of no-time, an internalized time of abstraction and probabilities, linearity and progression in which time is no longer cyclic and moving toward its origins, a return. But is now a time cut off in abstract time, a time of no-time in which humanity in its accumulation of abstractions seeks to stay the return of Time. Instead of combating the dark side of Time modernity seeks to join the dark side and contribute to its war against return, against origins and the Real.

Of course all of this is mystical mumbo-jumbo, a record of the mythologies of peoples star games and strategies of explaining time as a personal soteriology, a salvationist mythology in which humanity is seen as a pawn in an eternal war between Light and Dark, Good and Evil. As if we were members of a spiritual species that had been trapped and imprisoned in a realm of dark abstractions our memories lost in the deep well of past time. This notion that the cosmic drama of a cyclical time originating in a retardation of some dark progenitor (Ahriman) is carried toward its final act by “the torment of a ‘retarded eternity.’ (Cheetham, p. 49) As if the God of Light were neither all powerful, nor had the weapons available to combat this dark pull and lure of evil. As if the dark powers were in fact much older and powerful that this upstart, this demiurgic force who contested its ancient darkness.

In modern quantum cosmology we speak of the impossible mathematical models of those missing particles needed to explain the twelve or so dimensions of our universe under the rubric of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Why? What is this dark unknown force and its spectral material that seems to both engender our visible universe and stabilize and organize its substantive systems? We know little, and surmise much. Modern cosmology has spent over a hundred years seeking a theory of everything to fit all the missing pieces of time and space, the spacetime continuum together in a mathematical model that can be someday tested to put to sleep the questions of both the origins and end of our universe. While explaining the very structure and dynamism of that process of Time and its powers in the substance of space.

The late Mark Fisher in his Capitalist Realism brought many of these feelings and suspicions of the ancient gnostics to the fore as he studied the catastrophic consequences of late capitalism:  the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation. Could it be that there are no breaks, no ‘shocks of the new’ to come? Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the ‘weak messianic’ hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen.3 This is the heaviness and moroseness of the gnostic view of evil, of the realization that cut off in time we are trapped in a system of domination that harbors our ill-will and seeks to enslave us in a global system under the rule of absolute abstract Time.

As Fisher explicating T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland would tell us “the exhaustion of the future does not even leave us with the past. Tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested and modified. A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.” (Fisher, p. 7) A sense of despair and hopelessness ensues and we are bound to a world without past or future, cut off in a sidereal time of no-time; neither utopic, nor real, but rather a dystopic time of pain and suffering under archons of political and social control that seek total dominion over all life. We are living through a “transformation of culture into museum pieces” (Fisher, p. 8). Fisher asks us to imagine walking:

This notion that humanity is living in a museum under the gaze of invisible archons whose pleasure is in tormenting us within a planetary experiment of absolute torturescapes, playing out the eternal round of a time of no-time where our torments produce the pleasure and jouissance of strange Time-Lords: this is the horrendous message of a dark gnosis in which there is no reprieve, a sadism of ancient powers from which there is no redemption.

Of course for most of humanity none of this is perceived for as T.S. Eliot once said in a poem: “Humankind cannot bare too much reality.” (Four Quartets). Instead we have our local myths, our secret narratives and illusions, our delusions of grace and innocence to alleviate such dark truths. We shift between non-meaning, either passive or active nihilism, or the elder days of religious or political meanings of earthly power and corruption; else, the natural power of entropy and death of the scientific view… we sleep in a world of delirium believing we are awake to the truth of the Real. Others like my friend R. Scott Bakker pull the skeptical worldview out of the bag of ancient thought and update it for a new era with truths of brain sciences that speak of our ignorance, our ‘medial neglect’ in which humans by way of evolution evolved mental systems to help them survive and procreate over millennia in developing shared delusions and mental worlds full of errors to assuage the dark outer truth of our non-knowledge of ourselves and the environment surrounding us. Like magicians and shamans we dream of power and knowledge, but live in a realm or error and erroneous delusions, mental fallacies of reason and cognitive biases.

As Fisher would tell it what we are left with in our time is ruins: “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.” (Fisher, p. 8) Like zombies or ghosts we sleepwalk through existence, circle in this time of no-time, live out our lives as if this were all there was, as if this were real, the only world, the only way. Lost among our own delusions we accumulate profits for our masters as if we had no alternative, all the while being tormented by the disquieting thought that we have forgotten something profound and if we could just remember what it is we might suddenly wake up from this nightmare of civilization and history.

John Gray studying the Aztec civilization discovers another version of this overcoming of the evil of Time. For the Aztecs humans were fated to live in a world in which their rulers were their enemies, their gods were their enemies. Yet these same enemies ensured a type of order that would not otherwise be possible. If Hobbes had been right in his diagnosis of human conflict producing savagery and brutishness, Aztec life could only be a brutish anarchy, without art, industry or letters. The actuality was the thriving metropolis full of order, beauty, and artistic excellence that so amazed the invading Spaniards. Destroyed soon after the conquistadores arrived, the Aztec city was an experimental refutation of some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern western ethics and politics.4

The alien quality of the Aztec world does not come simply from the fact that they made a spectacle of killing. The Romans did as much in their gladiatorial games, but they did so for the sake of entertainment. The uncanniness of the Aztecs comes from the fact that they killed in order to create meaning in their lives. It is as if by practising human sacrifice as they did the Aztecs were unveiling something that in our world has been covered up.

Modern humanity insists violence is inhuman. Everyone says nothing is dearer to them than life – except perhaps freedom, for which some assert they would willingly die. Many have been ready to kill on an enormous scale for the sake of creating a future in which no one dies of violence. There are also some convinced that violence is fading away. All say they want an end to the slaughter of humans by other humans that has shaped the course of history.

The Aztecs did not share the modern conceit that mass killing can bring about universal peace. They did not envision any future when humans ceased to be violent. When they practised human sacrifice it was not to improve the world, still less to fashion some higher type of human being. The purpose of the killing was what they affirmed it to be: to protect them from the senseless violence that is inherent in a world of chaos. That human sacrifice was a barbarous way of making meaning tells us something about ourselves as much as them. Civilization and barbarism are not different kinds of society. They are found – intertwined – whenever human beings come together. (Gray, p. 87)

Again we see this use of violence against the violence of Time, a revolt against the crushing order of the chaosmos or thermospasm of existence in which we find ourselves locked up like rats in a maze without outlet. Humans kill one another – and in some cases themselves – for many reasons, but none is more human than the attempt to make sense of their lives. More than the loss of life, they fear loss of meaning. There are many who prefer dying to some kinds of survival, and quite a few that have chosen to go to a violent end. (Gray, p. 87)

Marx himself would see this dark god of violence at work in the 19th Century, saying, “We have seen how this absolute contradiction does away with all repose, all fixity and all security as far as the worker’s life-situation is concerned; how it constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labour, to snatch from his hands the means of subsistence, and, by suppressing his specialized function, to make him superfluous. We have seen, too, how this contradiction bursts forth without restraint in the ceaseless human sacrifices required from the working class, in the reckless squandering of labour-powers, and in the devastating effects of social anarchy.”5 For Marx modern society was a continuous sacrifice by the poor workers to the gods of violence and profit so that the elite could feed off the surplus value of their immolation.

As Franco “Bifo” Berardi in Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide would suggest it is not merely crime and suicide, but more broadly the establishment of a kingdom of nihilism and the suicidal drive that is permeating contemporary culture, together with a phenomenology of panic, aggression and resultant violence.6 For Berarid the recent rash of mass suicides and mass murder in the heart of the capitalist state economies in EU and the U.S.A. are about people who are suffering themselves, and who become criminals because this is their way both to express their psychopathic need for publicity and also to find a suicidal exit from their present hell. (Berardi, IL 60) As he states it:

The point for Berardi is that of the Aztecs who sought to create meaning out of the mass killings of it’s victims, victims who were the doubled face of the enemy, the enemy who was god, the god of violence of which the sacrifice and sacrificed were the dual face of the Dark Lord of Time. Ahriman – the violent one. Conversely, for Berardi our late capitalist era seeks to annihilate nihilism actively destroying the shared values (both moral and economic values) produced not in the present, but in the past by the human production of democratic political regulation under progressive liberal systems of managed societies of control. They do this to affirm the order of chaos and the primacy of the abstract force of money: the power of the absolute god of violence. Annihilating nihilism is the product of financial capitalism, destroying concrete wealth in order to accumulate abstract value. Ultimately, the financial game is based on the premise that the value of money invested will increase as things are annihilated (if factories are dismantled, jobs destroyed, people die and are sacrificed, cities crumble, etc.), that the god of violence will be appeased and the financial elite can continue their devastation of the human and natural worlds in an endless hyperloop outside time’s vectors. For those outside the loop this daemonic farce is the epitome of the ancient gnostic myth: financial capital as the ideal form of a Cosmic Crime, actively establishing suicide at the core of the sociopathic end game of Western Civilization.

taken from: 

by Himanshu Damle

Let us start at the beginning first! Though the fact is not mentioned in Genesis, the first thing God said on the first day of creation was ‘Let there be necessity’. And there was necessity. And God saw necessity, that it was good. And God divided necessity from contingency. And only then did He say ‘Let there be light’. Several days later, Adam and Eve were introducing names for the animals into their language, and during a break between the fish and the birds, introduced also into their language modal auxiliary verbs, or devices that would be translated into English using modal auxiliary verbs, and rules for their use, rules according to which it can be said of some things that they ‘could’ have been otherwise, and of other things that they ‘could not’. In so doing they were merely putting labels on a distinction that was no more their creation than were the fishes of the sea or the beasts of the field or the birds of the air.

And here is the rival view. The failure of Genesis to mention any command ‘Let there be necessity’ is to be explained simply by the fact that no such command was issued. We have no reason to suppose that the language in which God speaks to the angels contains modal auxiliary verbs or any equivalent device. Sometime after the Tower of Babel some tribes found that their purposes would be better served by introducing into their language certain modal auxiliary verbs, and fixing certain rules for their use. When we say that this is necessary while that is contingent, we are applying such rules, rules that are products of human, not divine intelligence.

This theological language would have been the natural way for seventeenth or eighteenth century philosophers, who nearly all were or professed to be theists or deists, to discuss the matter. For many today, such language cannot be literally accepted, and if it is only taken metaphorically, then at least better than those who speak figuratively and frame the question as that of whether the ‘origin’ of necessity lies outside us or within us. So let us drop the theological language, and try again.

Well, here the first view: Ultimately reality as it is in itself, independently of our attempts to conceptualize and comprehend it, contains both facts about what is, and superfacts about what not only is but had to have been. Our modal usages, for instance, the distinction between the simple indicative ‘is’ and the construction ‘had to have been’, simply reflect this fundamental distinction in the world, a distinction that is and from the beginning always was there, independently of us and our concerns.

And here is the second view: We have reasons, connected with our various purposes in life, to use certain words, including ‘would’ and ‘might’, in certain ways, and thereby to make certain distinctions. The distinction between those things in the world that would have been no matter what and those that might have failed to be if only is a projection of the distinctions made in our language. Our saying there were necessities there before us is a retroactive application to the pre-human world of a way of speaking invented and created by human beings in order to solve human problems.

Well, that’s the second try. With it even if one has gotten rid of theology, unfortunately one has not gotten rid of all metaphors. The key remaining metaphor is the optical one: reflection vs projection. Perhaps the attempt should be to get rid of all metaphors, and admit that the two views are not so much philosophical theses or doctrines as ‘metaphilosophical’ attitudes or orientations: a stance that finds the ‘reflection’ metaphor congenial, and the stance that finds the ‘projection’ metaphor congenial. So, lets try a third time to describe the distinction between the two outlooks in literal terms, avoiding optics as well as theology.

To begin with, both sides grant that there is a correspondence or parallelism between two items. On the one hand, there are facts about the contrast between what is necessary and what is contingent. On the other hand, there are facts about our usage of modal auxiliary verbs such as ‘would’ and ‘might’, and these include, for instance, the fact that we have no use for questions of the form ‘Would 29 still have been a prime number if such-and- such?’ but may have use for questions of the form ‘Would 29 still have been the number of years it takes for Saturn to orbit the sun if such-and-such?’ The difference between the two sides concerns the order of explanation of the relation between the two parallel ranges of facts.

And what is meant by that? Well, both sides grant that ‘29 is necessarily prime’, for instance, is a proper thing to say, but they differ in the explanation why it is a proper thing to say. Asked why, the first side will say that ultimately it is simply because 29 is necessarily prime. That makes the proposition that 29 is necessarily prime true, and since the sentence ‘29 is necessarily prime’ expresses that proposition, it is true also, and a proper thing to say. The second side will say instead that ‘29 is necessarily prime’ is a proper thing to say because there is a rule of our language according to which it is a proper thing to say. This formulation of the difference between the two sides gets rid of metaphor, though it does put an awful lot of weight on the perhaps fragile ‘why’ and ‘because’.

Note that the adherents of the second view need not deny that 29 is necessarily prime. On the contrary, having said that the sentence ‘29 is necessarily prime’ is, per rules of our language, a proper thing to say, they will go on to say it. Nor need the adherents of the first view deny that recognition of the propriety of saying ‘29 is necessarily prime’ is enshrined in a rule of our language. The adherents of the first view need not even deny that proximately, as individuals, we learn that ‘29 is necessarily prime’ is a proper thing to say by picking up the pertinent rule in the course of learning our language. But the adherents of the first view will maintain that the rule itself is only proper because collectively, as the creators of the language, we or our remote answers have, in setting up the rule, managed to achieve correspondence with a pre-existing fact, or rather, a pre-existing superfact, the superfact that 29 is necessarily prime. The difference between the two views is, in the order of explanation.

The adherents regarding labels for the two sides, or ‘metaphilosophical’ stances, rather than inventing new ones, will simply take two of the most overworked terms in the philosophical lexicon and give them one more job to do, calling the reflection view ‘realism’ about modality, and the projection view ‘pragmatism’. That at least will be easy to remember, since ‘realism’ and ‘reflection’ begin with the same first two letters, as do ‘pragmatism’ and ‘projection’. The realist/pragmatist distinction has bearing across a range of issues and problems, and above all it has bearing on the meta-issue of which issues are significant. For the two sides will, or ought to, recognize quite different questions as the central unsolved problems in the theory of modality.

For those on the realist side, the old problem of the ultimate source of our knowledge of modality remains, even if it is granted that the proximate source lies in knowledge of linguistic conventions. For knowledge of linguistic conventions constitutes knowledge of a reality independent of us only insofar as our linguistic conventions reflect, at least to some degree, such an ultimate reality. So for the realist the problem remains of explaining how such degree of correspondence as there is between distinctions in language and distinctions in the world comes about. If the distinction in the world is something primary and independent, and not a mere projection of the distinction in language, then how the distinction in language comes to be even imperfectly aligned with the distinction in the world remains to be explained. For it cannot be said that we have faculties responsive to modal facts independent of us – not in any sense of ‘responsive’ implying that if the facts had been different, then our language would have been different, since modal facts couldn’t have been different. What then is the explanation? This is the problem of the epistemology of modality as it confronts the realist, and addressing it is or ought to be at the top of the realist agenda.

As for the pragmatist side, a chief argument of thinkers from Kant to Ayer and Strawson and beyond for their anti-realist stance has been precisely that if the distinction we perceive in reality is taken to be merely a projection of a distinction created by ourselves, then the epistemological problem dissolves. That seems more like a reason for hoping the Kantian or Ayerite or Strawsonian view is the right one, than for believing that it is; but in any case, even supposing the pragmatist view is the right one, and the problems of the epistemology of modality are dissolved, still the pragmatist side has an important unanswered question of its own to address. The pragmatist account, begins by saying that we have certain reasons, connected with our various purposes in life, to use certain words, including ‘would’ and ‘might’, in certain ways, and thereby to make certain distinctions. What the pragmatist owes us is an account of what these purposes are, and how the rules of our language help us to achieve them. Addressing that issue is or ought to be at the top of the pragmatists’ to-do list.

While the positivist Ayer dismisses all metaphysics, the ordinary-language philosopher Strawson distinguishes good metaphysics, which he calls ‘descriptive’, from bad metaphysics, which he calls ‘revisionary’, but which rather be called ‘transcendental’ (without intending any specifically Kantian connotations). Descriptive metaphysics aims to provide an explicit account of our ‘conceptual scheme’, of the most general categories of commonsense thought, as embodied in ordinary language. Transcendental metaphysics aims to get beyond or behind all merely human conceptual schemes and representations to ultimate reality as it is in itself, an aim that Ayer and Strawson agree is infeasible and probably unintelligible. The descriptive/transcendental divide in metaphysics is a paradigmatically ‘metaphilosophical’ issue, one about what philosophy is about. Realists about modality are paradigmatic transcendental metaphysicians. Pragmatists must in the first instance be descriptive metaphysicians, since we must to begin with understand much better than we currently do how our modal distinctions work and what work they do for us, before proposing any revisions or reforms. And so the difference between realists and pragmatists goes beyond the question of what issue should come first on the philosopher’s agenda, being as it is an issue about what philosophical agendas are about.

The article is taken from:

by Himanshu Damle

During his attempt to axiomatize the category of all categories, Lawvere says:

However, if one tries to reduce categorial constructions to set theory, one faces some serious problems in the case of a category of functors. Lawvere (who, according to his aim of axiomatization, is not concerned by such a reduction) relies here on “intuition” to stress that those working with categorial concepts despite these problems have the feeling that the envisaged construction is clear, meaningful and legitimate. Not the reducibility to set theory, but an “intuition” to be specified answers for clarity, meaningfulness and legitimacy of a construction emerging in a mathematical working situation. In particular, Lawvere relies on a collective intuition, a common sense – for he explicitly says “our intuition”. Further, one obviously has to deal here with common sense on a technical level, for the “we” can only extend to a community used to the work with the concepts concerned.

In the tradition of philosophy, “intuition” means immediate, i.e., not conceptually mediated cognition. The use of the term in the context of validity (immediate insight in the truth of a proposition) is to be thoroughly distinguished from its use in the sensual context (the German Anschauung). Now, language is a manner of representation, too, but contrary to language, in the context of images the concept of validity is meaningless.

Obviously, the aspect of cognition guiding is touched on here. Especially the sensual intuition can take the guiding (or heuristic) function. There have been many working situations in history of mathematics in which making the objects of investigation accessible to a sensual intuition (by providing a Veranschaulichung) yielded considerable progress in the development of the knowledge concerning these objects. As an example, take the following account by Emil Artin of Emmy Noether’s contribution to the theory of algebras:

Similarly, Fréchet thinks to have really “powered” research in the theory of functions and functionals by the introduction of a “geometrical” terminology:

Mathematical terminology often stems from a current language usage whose (intuitive, sensual) connotation is welcomed and serves to give the user an “intuition” of what is intended. While Category Theory is often classified as a highly abstract matter quite remote from intuition, in reality it yields, together with its applications, a multitude of examples for the role of current language in mathematical conceptualization.

This notwithstanding, there is naturally also a tendency in contemporary mathematics to eliminate as much as possible commitments to (sensual) intuition in the erection of a theory. It seems that algebraic geometry fulfills only in the language of schemes that essential requirement of all contemporary mathematics: to state its definitions and theorems in their natural abstract and formal setting in which they can be considered independent of geometric intuition (Mumford D., Fogarty J. Geometric Invariant Theory).

In the pragmatist approach, intuition is seen as a relation. This means: one uses a piece of language in an intuitive manner (or not); intuitive use depends on the situation of utterance, and it can be learned and transformed. The reason for this relational point of view, consists in the pragmatist conviction that each cognition of an object depends on the means of cognition employed – this means that for pragmatism there is no intuitive (in the sense of “immediate”) cognition; the term “intuitive” has to be given a new meaning.

What does it mean to use something intuitively? Heinzmann makes the following proposal: one uses language intuitively if one does not even have the idea to question validity. Hence, the term intuition in the Heinzmannian reading of pragmatism takes a different meaning, no longer signifies an immediate grasp. However, it is yet to be explained what it means for objects in general (and not only for propositions) to “question the validity of a use”. One uses an object intuitively, if one is not concerned with how the rules of constitution of the object have been arrived at, if one does not focus the materialization of these rules but only the benefits of an application of the object in the present context. “In principle”, the cognition of an object is determined by another cognition, and this determination finds its expression in the “rules of constitution”; one uses it intuitively (one does not bother about the being determined of its cognition), if one does not question the rules of constitution (does not focus the cognition which determines it). This is precisely what one does when using an object as a tool – because in doing so, one does not (yet) ask which cognition determines the object. When something is used as a tool, this constitutes an intuitive use, whereas the use of something as an object does not (this defines tool and object). Here, each concept in principle can play both roles; among two concepts, one may happen to be used intuitively before and the other after the progress of insight. Note that with respect to a given cognition, Peirce when saying “the cognition which determines it” always thinks of a previous cognition because he thinks of a determination of a cognition in our thought by previous thoughts. In conceptual history of mathematics, however, one most often introduced an object first as a tool and only after having done so did it come to one’s mind to ask for “the cognition which determines the cognition of this object” (that means, to ask how the use of this object can be legitimized).

The idea that it could depend on the situation whether validity is questioned or not has formerly been overlooked, perhaps because one always looked for a reductionist epistemology where the capacity called intuition is used exclusively at the last level of regression; in a pragmatist epistemology, to the contrary, intuition is used at every level in form of the not thematized tools. In classical systems, intuition was not simply conceived as a capacity; it was actually conceived as a capacity common to all human beings. “But the power of intuitively distinguishing intuitions from other cognitions has not prevented men from disputing very warmly as to which cognitions are intuitive”. Moreover, Peirce criticises strongly cartesian individualism (which has it that the individual has the capacity to find the truth). We could sum up this philosophy thus: we cannot reach definite truth, only provisional; significant progress is not made individually but only collectively; one cannot pretend that the history of thought did not take place and start from scratch, but every cognition is determined by a previous cognition (maybe by other individuals); one cannot uncover the ultimate foundation of our cognitions; rather, the fact that we sometimes reach a new level of insight, “deeper” than those thought of as fundamental before, merely indicates that there is no “deepest” level. The feeling that something is “intuitive” indicates a prejudice which can be philosophically criticised (even if this does not occur to us at the beginning).

In our approach, intuitive use is collectively determined: it depends on the particular usage of the community of users whether validity criteria are or are not questioned in a given situation of language use. However, it is acknowledged that for example scientific communities develop usages making them communities of language users on their own. Hence, situations of language use are not only partitioned into those where it comes to the users’ mind to question validity criteria and those where it does not, but moreover this partition is specific to a particular community (actually, the community of language users is established partly through a peculiar partition; this is a definition of the term “community of language users”). The existence of different communities with different common senses can lead to the following situation: something is used intuitively by one group, not intuitively by another. In this case, discussions inside the discipline occur; one has to cope with competing common senses (which are therefore not really “common”). This constitutes a task for the historian.

The article is taken  from:

by Himanshy Damle

During the very years when orthodoxy turned Keynesianism on its head, extolling Reaganomics and Thatcherism as adequate for achieving stabilisation in the epoch of global capitalism, Minsky (Stabilizing an Unstable Economy) pointed to the destabilising consequences of this approach. The view that instability is the result of the internal processes of a capitalist economy, he wrote, stands in sharp contrast to neoclassical theory, whether Keynesian or monetarist, which holds that instability is due to events that are outside the working of the economy. The neoclassical synthesis and the Keynes theories are different because the focus of the neoclassical synthesis is on how a decentralized market economy achieves coherence and coordination in production and distribution, whereas the focus of the Keynes theory is upon the capital development of an economy. The neoclassical synthesis emphasizes equilibrium and equilibrating tendencies, whereas Keynes‘s theory revolves around bankers and businessmen making deals on Wall Street. The neoclassical synthesis ignores the capitalist nature of the economy, a fact that the Keynes theory is always aware of.

Minsky here identifies the main flaw of the neoclassical synthesis, which is that it ignores the capitalist nature of the economy, while authentic Keynesianism proceeds from precisely this nature. Minsky lays bare the preconceived approach of orthodoxy, which has mainstream economics concentrating all its focus on an equilibrium which is called upon to confirm the orthodox belief in the stability of capitalism. At the same time, orthodoxy fails to devote sufficient attention to the speculation in the area of finance and banking that is the precise cause of the instability of the capitalist economy.

Elsewhere, Minsky stresses still more firmly that from the theory of Keynes, the neoclassical standard included in its arsenal only those earlier-mentioned elements which could be interpreted as confirming its preconceived position that capitalism was so perfect that it could not have innate flaws. In this connection Minsky writes:

Whereas Keynes in The General Theory proposed that economists look at the economy in quite a different way from the way they had, only those parts of The General Theory that could be readily integrated into the old way of looking at things survive in today‘s standard theory. What was lost was a view of an economy always in transit because it accumulates in response to disequilibrating forces that are internal to the economy. As a result of the way accumulation takes place in a capitalist economy, Keynes‘s theory showed that success in operating the economy can only be transitory; instability is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism. 

The view that survived is that a number of special things went wrong, which led the economy into the Great Depression. In this view, apt policy can assure that cannot happen again. The standard theory of the 1950s and 1960s seemed to assert that if policy were apt, then full employment at stable prices could be attained and sustained. The existence of internally disruptive forces was ignored; the neoclassical synthesis became the economics of capitalism without capitalists, capital assets, and financial markets. As a result, very little of Keynes has survived today in standard economics.

Here, resting on Keynes‘s analysis, one can find the central idea of Minsky‘s book: the innate instability of capitalism, which in time will lead the system to a new Great Depression. This forecast has now been brilliantly confirmed, but previously there were few who accepted it. Economic science was orchestrated by proponents of neoclassical orthodoxy under the direction of Nobel prizewinners, authors of popular economics textbooks, and other authorities recognized by the mainstream. These people argued that the main problems which capitalism had encountered in earlier times had already been overcome, and that before it lay a direct, sunny road to an even better future.

Robed in complex theoretical constructs, and underpinned by an abundance of mathematical formulae, these ideas of a cloudless future for capitalism interpreted the economic situation, it then seemed, in thoroughly convincing fashion. These analyses were balm for the souls of the people who had come to believe that capitalism had attained perfection. In this respect, capitalism has come to bear an uncanny resemblance to communism. There is, however, something beyond the preconceptions and prejudices innate to people in all social systems, and that is the reality of historical and economic development. This provides a filter for our ideas, and over time makes it easier to separate truth from error. The present financial and economic crisis is an example of such reality. While the mainstream was still euphoric about the future of capitalism, the post-Keynesians saw the approaching outlines of a new Great Depression. The fate of Post Keynesianism will depend very heavily on the future development of the world capitalist economy. If the business cycle has indeed been abolished (this time), so that stable, non-inflationary growth continues indefinitely under something approximating to the present neoclassical (or pseudo-monetarist) policy consensus, then there is unlikely to be a significant market for Post Keynesian ideas. Things would be very different in the event of a new Great Depression, to think one last time in terms of extreme possibilities. If it happened again, to quote Hyman Minsky, the appeal of both a radical interventionist programme and the analysis from which it was derived would be very greatly enhanced.

Neoclassical orthodoxy, that is, today‘s mainstream economic thinking proceeds from the position that capitalism is so good and perfect that an alternative to it does not and cannot exist. Post-Keynesianism takes a different standpoint. Unlike Marxism it is not so revolutionary a theory as to call for a complete rejection of capitalism. At the same time, it does not consider capitalism so perfect that there is nothing in it that needs to be changed. To the contrary, Post-Keynesianism maintains that capitalism has definite flaws, and requires changes of such scope as to allow alternative ways of running the economy to be fully effective. To the prejudices of the mainstream, post-Keynesianism counterposes an approach based on an objective analysis of the real situation. Its economic and philosophical approach – the methodology of critical realism – has been developed accordingly, the methodological import of which helps post-Keynesianism answer a broad range of questions, providing an alternative both to market fundamentalism, and to bureaucratic centralism within a planned economy. This is the source of its attraction for us….

The article is  taken from:

by François Laruelle

The unified theory of thought and computing [calcul][2], a unification in-the-last-identity, is a task facing every encyclopedic mind (Morin, Serres). It is also the theme of the transcendental computer (TC), of a machine that would have a transcendental relation to philosophy in its entirety and would therefore be able to compute-think the blendings of thought and computing according to a “unified” mode, such as, for example, a transcendental arithmetic like Platonism or any other combination of these prevalent terms in philosophy and computing. Beforehand, a prejudicial question concerning the degree of non-philosophy’s automaticity should be dealt with. In this sense, what follows is an attempt at the limits of the theme of a transcendental computer.

If non-philosophical practice is localized in or measured by an effect (unification-effect or clone-effect), then, since the One-in-person cannot be this reference point due to being unidentifiable, this effect is a type of possible disalienation for statements of the World, which are de jure representable or philosophizable. It could already be objected, and one could already understand from what will be said, that this non-philosophical practice is not identifiable as specifically “non-philosophical,” since its cause is Identity-in-person, which is not identifiable in exteriority as an available criterion because it is lived-in-immanence. Its cause after all could be just as much the effect of a machine simulating a completely absent subject, a sort of charitable automatism (automatic operation), and then, all things considered, it would be unnecessary to critique philosophy. If a machine in the classical sense of this word can do what non-philosophy does, aren’t non-philosophy and its theory useless? More exactly, the objection is the consequence or the result of a division of non-philosophy liable to give rise to two images: an inert theoretical image of a machine or mechanism composed of objectified parts, and an image of practical functionality, the latter image given without distance of objectification, but lived. The objection supposes the right to resolve non-philosophical practice into an inert structure (of photographing), which supposes that this structure must be constructed beforehand, even before it is able to function and for it to be able to function. However, if there is indeed a presupposed to this thought, it’s not a structure, a schema, a legible figure in a space of transcendence (this type of structure exists for philosophy itself, it’s one of philosophy’s modes of givenness, which is itself philosophical), it’s precisely what defies every transcendence and every inert structure composed of terms and relations, points and vectors, etc.; it’s the Real-in-person.

​According to this objection, the effects alone would be appreciable as arising or not from non-philosophy’s presupposeds of “humanhood” [humanéité]. But this objection conceals its own presupposition, which is to consider a priori effects themselves as already being those of an automatism (and to consider this automatism and its effects as insertable into a structure), i.e. to consider inert effects registered and given in the World (Husserl would have said in the “natural attitude”). This is to prejudge the nature of Identity-in-person and, based on this vicious circle, to conclude from the automatic nature and supposed mechanism of these effects to their producibility by a machine. But nothing happens like this in non-philosophical practice, which is not an automaton simulating man. That would instead be a contemplative or theoreticist vision, and thus an objectivism that would be absolute, materialist or strictly mechanistic in an a priori manner, which is a philosophical possibility. Let’s examine these effects of non-philosophical practice, since this is what’s behind the objection’s secret argument or criterion.

Of course there are effects (of cloning), but there’s nothing automatic about them, and they shouldn’t be considered dogmatically as inert things. They are partly, on the material side, formed by the World’s inert things but already enveloped in a horizon of philosophizability or transcendence (which itself includes the possibility of a subject or whatever goes by that name), since these two components are blended. And another “part” of them is formed by a radical or “lived” immanence (the Lived-in-person) that excludes being blended and is not in any way a part of a whole. Yet the blending and non-blending do not blend together but, so to speak, wed or embrace one another, join together without a synthetic band[3] in an irreversible alliance known as the existing-Stranger-subject or subject-existing-in-struggle. This subject is the veritable effect, entire in its identity and its (unilateral) duality: this is practice as including a material of philosophy-form. Where is the effect of practice legible in the subject? In and as what we have called the phenomenon or the appearing of the practical subject, which is not the juxtaposition of two halves but the transformation of one of the sides by the other with which it is unified without synthesis. If, for example, the effects of textual statements are not continuously related to Identity-in-person or cloned, performed, then they again give rise to practice as thingified and inert, automatic, i.e. perceived from philosophy’s point of view alone and then left to the division that we mentioned above. The being-performed of Identity or of Man-in-person and of the latter’s cloned effects, however, is not itself visible or sensible, but leaves its mark through such effects not just in the visible and the sensible of history and the world, as in a receptacle, but directly on their philosophy- or world-form. Transformed in this way, this form gives rise to an appearing that is phenomenal or determined-in-the-last-identity (in-the-last-lived-experience?). This is philosophy-form as such given in-One, or better still, its transcendental identity.

Subjectivity, whose phenomenal appearing in-One is the fabric of the subject effect, is included in this philosophy-form in particular. This fully excludes that the determined effects, which are of philosophical extraction, can be produced by an automatic system, at least provided that philosophy’s transcendental mechanism can itself escape from this automatism and this reduction to a simple mechanism. It’s transcendence in general that excludes philosophy’s reduction to an algorithm. Now one can obviously pose the problem of the possible degree of automation of transcendence, which is philosophy’s transcendental nerve. But to the extent that it continues on, albeit transformed, in the subject, philosophy limits the chances of automaticity and formalism.

One can obviously compare the modes of immanence of Man and machine. Or instead the latter supposes a human whose functionality the machine imitates to the nearest degree; this is an interiority of consciousness spread out in space. Or instead this machinic and algorithmic immanence is first, and it’s consciousness or our concept of consciousness that imitates the machine. One turns in a vicious circle.

Man-in-person indeed is not a subject in the traditional sense or a “man” in the anthropological sense, a mode of consciousness or being in general. In a sense the “passivity” of Man-in-person does nothing but reinforce the “mechanistic” aspect, even if it be said that it’s of pure lived experience. Its aspect of automatism is perhaps an appearance created by the absence or the lack of an active, localizable and identifiable subject, which makes one believe in a machine. Identity-in-person resembles a machine without being a machine; here what makes one think of transcendence and of its void of subjectivity is radical immanence. Radical immanence is also devoid of subjectivity but not of lived experience: that’s what distinguishes radical immanence from a machine. Here it’s not the machine that simulates a man at the vanishing limit of consciousness, but Man-in-person that simulates a machine or an automatism.

Man, being neither a consciousness nor an unconscious, undoubtedly and in a negative way seems closer to the machine, if not its immanence, and is necessary qua presupposed, a logical and real necessity without blending. Everything that comes from philosophy or supposes it is of the order of the Real, at least as symptom; what comes from logic and necessity is of the order of identity. One could say that Man-in-person is an-axiomatic or an-hypothetical, in the sense that the privative “an-” is radical or expresses that Man is in-Man and not to (him) self or in (him) self[4], and thus is foreclosed to the philosopher and to all automaticity. Instead of supposing axioms true as in logic, one supposes them real or anaxiomatic. Not the axiom’s axiom, but a non-axiom or an-axiomatic axiom.

These are unilateral axioms, and they are unilateral only due to one of their sides; these are therefore not auto-referential axioms (non-Gödelism), although it’s not certain that such a thing exists, save in language and metalanguage form, since metadiscourse serves to articulate the axioms or their status. The One-in-One is not the 1 facing philosophy’s 2/3. It’s not describable in terms of absolute transcendence but by axioms that give where its effects are. Even qua automatism, the One is perceptible only through these effects of discourse or its practice, not in itself, since it’s not a thing or intellectual intuition. Michel Henry couldn’t keep himself from giving it an identifiable content in transcendence. But this isn’t algorithmic automatism, which is integrally visible and given in a finitary and quasi-geometrical way. Scientific automatism is that of transcendence, but it’s not philosophical; it thus supposes a metalanguage and is undoubtedly the complex form of the scientific relation to the real.

Man-in-person is neither an auto-maton, an auto-nomic auto-functional functionality, nor a functionality that supposes a multiplicity of pieces and effects. In all due rigor, Man-in-person is precisely a uni-maton determining a practice (uni-maton signifies that the “-maton” aspect is aligned with the “identity” aspect or determined-in-One). The term “immanence” is ultimately misleading, like all the others, and makes philosophers believe in a thing, whereas here it is like all the rest nothing but an attribute that disappears into an axiom which uses it, a term that designates the Real by objective appearance. Non-philosophical practice is indeed a uni-maton in the sense in which the latter is a unified first term and not a unitary syn-tagm. However, it can be nothing but the condition of knowledge for a philosophizable kind of automatism at best. The latter claims to be in “auto-” mode (which is never completely true). The auto- supposes an active-passive immanence, a transcendence, a unified system of multiple pieces, at least two pieces, and ultimately 2/3.

Ultimately one must begin by distinguishing between two forms of automatism, the philosophical and the logical, and a minimal form that is instead unimatic. The logical admits a metalanguage, the philosophical, instead, a hermeneutics; the unimatic prohibits metalanguage and hermeneutics or carries out their unified theory. In all three cases it is a matter of speaking “about” a discipline, philosophy, logic. These latter two resolve the problem by speaking of one another with their own language, which also allows them, obviously, to speak of themselves respectively.

Since the duality of logical metalanguage is opposed to philosophical blending, non-philosophy is perhaps what unifies these two practices, the transcendental and the metalinguistic, two types of duality, or better yet what I have always called the philosophical posture and the scientific posture. Since these would be the three grand styles, perhaps the word style is the best? What I call axiom is neither a metalanguage for philosophy and its own “axioms” nor a philosophical hermeneutics wherein something transcendental is conserved, even if the axioms take from metalanguage and the interpretation of philosophical postulates. The anaxiomatic or non-axiomatic Real prevents axioms from sinking into Being, Nothingness, the Multiple, ontology, or into logic’s finitary-intuitive space and prevents them from symbolizing with ideality. It withdraws them from their sufficiency.

The last twist on the problem who simulates whom? requires seeing that this simulation exists for a philosopher, not for human Identity itself which knows itself separated, from the machine as well as the rest. It would obviously be necessary to review the concept of simulation in all its usages and perhaps reverse the sense of this obsession with the machine. Ultimately isn’t it the philosophized machine or machine in-philosophy, which is what’s being talked about, that provides the fantasy[5] of a simulation of the machine through Identity-in-person? Would there be a narcissism of the philosophized machine that would throw the simulation operation back onto Man-in-person? Watch as I am beautiful and fascinating[6]…

Philosophy-form has not become a pure machine once it’s reduced to the state of symptom. In this case it’s Man-in-person who would reduce this form to the state of automatism, while in addition Man-in-person and its practice would arise from the uni-maton. Non-philosophy or the unimaton would utilize philosophy by reducing it as automaton in a truly special sense, but whence would the impression come that non-philosophy does things that a machine could do?

The thesis of the possibility of a transcendental computer (TC) could be sustained in two distinct forms:

— in a non-philosophical form for which a TC is a similar but indirect Idea that supposes a detour out of the machine. This bridge between the machine and the transcendental is the unified-in-the-last-instance theory of thought and computing. This goes without saying that the machine’s conditions are necessary but insufficient, and thus that a machine alone cannot be a TC but that Man is necessary for this (not as consciousness, which eliminates a part of the classical discussions between philosophers and computer scientists of AI, for we no longer fully oppose thought to computing).

Solution 1 would realize the same performances as the TC of solution 2. This implies that it would suppose that its machine attains the same effects as Real structure + Determination-in-the-last-instance (DLI). Can a machine imitate immanence and above all DLI? It’s at least doubtful. If one refuses to make this postulation (since the type of effects produced by DLI necessarily suppose this immanence, which cannot be simulated simply to the point of being mistaken), one is, however, obliged to suppose or to be given one third of synthesis between philosophy and the machine, which is the concept of performance (“the same performances”).

It is necessary to orient the discussion around the catchall concept of performance, which in general allows for AI to claim to equal the “performances” of intelligence and even thought (for the moment we are not yet distinguishing between the two). Performance is measurable and utilized or supposed as one of computing’s criteria of identification with thought, and inversely as the criterion of thought’s reduction to computing. However, the psychological situation is even more complex, since the machine does not attain the same performances as “human” intelligence except on condition of surpassing them or secretly hoping to surpass them more or less. If not, what’s the benefit or the point? (unless to suppose that it’s the intelligence itself which always wants to surpass itself by creating the machine’s mirror in which it can witness itself triumphing over itself)?

The notion of performance is a presupposed that encroaches on the meaning of intelligence and of what it can do. This is a notion of technological and quantitative measure but which is supposed valid for intelligence. It supposes between the departure and the target an identity of effects or ends and undoubtedly a homogeneity of syntax and semantics, an algorithmic transparency. This is to say that it’s worth nothing in philosophy (as much a failure as a success, and failure here is not necessarily the opposite of success) for which such a transparency does not exist, since philosophy determines dualities reciprocally, for example its syntaxes and its matters. Here, one must distinguish between intelligence and philosophy. “Cognition” is a priori parceled into more or less closed and isolated systems that in effect can be measured in terms of performance. AI prejudges intelligence, what intelligence can do by setting for it limits or goals (determined and finite in the measurable sense) in order to compare it to the machine. With philosophy, everything runs in another manner. One could even define intelligence rigorously by the type of performance that a machine can simulate, either in its functionality or in its effects. But philosophy cannot be reduced in this way a priori, i.e. parceled into functions or effects and prejudged. Why? Philosophy uses intelligence or cognition but on behalf of a special form of thought, probably irreducible to any numerical combination. No doubt many objects or operations “of” philosophy are therefore reducible to performances, but they are in reality intra-philosophical and hearken back to an operative horizon that is forgotten on principle and strictly cannot be “recalled” by computing. This transcendental horizon is auto-position or “philosophical decision.” Auto-position seems like a goal to be attained, and one that philosophy attains, but philosophy attains auto-position as much as it misses it or at least includes its misfire in its success. Auto-position is a superior performance or the “superior” and transcendental concept of performance. The schema in 2/3 or 3/2 is an arithmetical approximation, whereas philosophy is a transcendental arithmetic or is valid for existence or the real. Arithmetic also “equals” the real, but a region of the real and not fundamentally the real itself, and moreover is valid for it or possesses a constituting power of legislation. Philosophy is transcendental in a narrow sense for experience, and in a broader sense for itself, insofar as it is sometimes thought of the real but also the real or thought as real. Yet this relation to experience and/or to itself is called transcendental because it conditions or legislates on its object, to which it appears at the same time to be neither exhausted nor reduced thereby. Here the concept of performance therefore only has a local and not global, provisional but not final, sense. Wouldn’t this paradoxically be an artifact or a concept, a representation of consciousness?

How does one imagine that the act of position, which has both a status of metaphor and of proper sense (here the proper or the real must exist in philosophy and it must not be metaphorical through and through, even if it is revealed to be hallucinatory under other conditions), can be computable, reducible to effects of numerical combinations? Even more so, how does one imagine that the division and duplication of position, the acts of de-position and over-position, in short the “auto,” can be computable? One last argument of the same type can be grounded on philosophy’s auto-speculative kernel qua speculation. Philosophical specularity (the foundation of its theoreticism) is not simple; there must be a mirror for it that can take the place of the real and in certain “idealist” cases can itself be grasped in the play of reflections. This ultimate structure of philosophy, presupposed by the doctrines that claim philosophy as a reference but do not pursue its analysis up to its last or minimal end, is a phenomenon that could be called qualitative, at least as much as certain thinkers could want it to be quantitative or simply to derive it as inessential. Philosophy’s grand law, the law that is such that philosophy submits to it, is to be a blending of the numerical and the qualitative, here in the form of position or specularity. Nothing authorizes a philosopher, i.e. someone who distinguishes between philosophy and cognition, to let himself be intimidated by the machine’s performances, which are truly performances but nothing more.

The philosopher must seem to allow the machine to grow and even to make it grow where he can, accepting, more or less approximately, to empty philosophy of its substance of intelligence. But a residue survives this cognitivist reduction, which is the first and last, numerically invulnerable kernel. Why does one want to save this envelope that philosophers themselves ostensibly create to forget? It merits being saved if it is as original and specific, incalculable, as it is probable. Even Badiou, who develops an ontology of the “pure” numerical, reserves philosophy’s role as the power of gathering, and thus of quasi synthesis or system, a sort of complement or supplement to mathematics. Furthermore, the duality of the numerical and the continuous, of the mathematical and the philosophical (these terms should merit being nuanced and utilized with caution…), is a historical constant that traverses every occidental thought, wherein the numerical regularly announces its victory and the continuous its survival. In their generality, these are imaginary “transcendentals” or apparently inseparable paradigms (Bachelard), as if thought were condemned to follow a double path or to struggle on two fronts. These are good reasons for maintaining philosophy’s originality, at least that of its essence. Non-philosophy is among other things a manner of registering this survival without claiming to see one of the parts crush the other but by relating each to an instance that is neither the continuous (dominant in philosophy) nor the discontinuous (dominant in science).

The contradictory argumentation between AI and the advocates of Consciousness is always wearisome and the same. The first states that it has already realized such a performance and therefore that it will realize others still more important in the field of thought. It is animated by a philosophical claim but advances under the guise of science. The second always responds by one last domain in which it takes refuge in its mastery and challenges AI to access it. But this is always one of philosophy’s objects or domains, not philosophy in its essence. I will consider that both this conquest and this self-defense have a positivity and a validity, that they even only have sense due to their reciprocal opposition, and that this indeed testifies to their common claim, their will to the absolute, which this opposition divides. I propose to call this conflict the antithetic of cognition or of computing-thought, a restrained antithetic in Consciousness/Cognition form that is generalized or expanded in Philosophy (rather than thought)/Computing form. It will be posited that non-philosophy is an attempt to give a (non-Kantian…) solution to this conflict, i.e. in order to “exit” it or more precisely to show how and under what conditions thought can never have entered it.

As for the program/execution distinction (and, on this model, theory/practice), it’s a duality of another nature, internal to computer engineering. In a sense every duality of this kind is always usable to characterize non-philosophy, which functions with such dualities but on condition of previously interpreting each duality in a philosophical rather than unilaterally machinic sense, i.e. on condition of deploying their potential horizon of philosophical sense. Non-philosophy only denies “over-human” or “ultra-human” claims, but it is a pragmatics that can make good use of all dualities. If this preliminary preparation phase of the material is not gone through, one reduces philosophy and non-philosophy inversely to inert sets and one forgets what truly constitutes “life,” which is perhaps hallucinatory but philosophy’s life all the same, including auto-position, not to mention non-philosophy’s life, vision-in-One. One can believe to have resolved the TC in a purely machinic manner if one begins by reducing or restricting the problem’s extension and its givens in the program/execution couple. Transcendental life and, even less so, real lived experience are not reducible to algorithmic repetitions but can make use of them (always unilaterality…).

A performance fundamentally consists in simulating either a functionality or more simply the effects (“the same effects,” but one last simulation is concealed in this notion), by doing as well as…succeeding in an already defined or fixed task, however much it surpasses the latter. But who has completed the task or determined the goal to be attained, and therefore who has already realized it in a certain way? This question does not have meaning for numerical representation but has a fundamental meaning for philosophy, which realizes or effectuates things for the first time, which is first philosophy or radical commencement. Even if that would be a claim, that’s what the meaning of philosophy and of its life is, or of its “functionality”: it’s undoubtedly a repetition, but second or in relation to itself, an auto-repetition, and thus ultimately first. Philosophy is first, engineered computing or the machinic use of computing (I’m not speaking of arithmetic but of its usage in AI, a “usage” which should already attract attention to the degree that there is philosophizable virtuality in this notion) imitates or simulates something other than itself. Philosophy is not a performance, neither a simple machine despite “desiring machines,” nor even a “comporting” despite the Verhalten[7] of Heideggerian Dasein, which are intra-philosophical interpretations impregnated with metaphor and thus inseparable from language.

If philosophy is not reduced to Consciousness and to its… “performances” and is revealed to be all the more irreducible to a machine using computing, non-philosophy radicalizes this irreducibility. Just as the Lived-without-life radicalizes Life (one of philosophy’s regular transcendental themes), the Performed-without-performation (and hence, more so, without-performance) radicalizes the concepts of performativity and performance. The Performed-without-performation is the first name or symbol (already an axiom) that grounds the critique of sufficiency, which quite visibly impregnates the notion of performance, but without simply denying it or conflicting with it.

It is undoubtedly this refusal of the Consciousness/AI antithetic that gives the impression that non-philosophy is better prepared than philosophy to knot together “amicable” (Heidegger) relations with computing and more generally every form of automaticity. Non-philosophy can appear like an attempt to save philosophy against or “from” its traditional adversaries, but that would be merely a consequence, and the attempt at the solution of the antithetic merely an effect, not a cause or a motif of non-philosophy. The resistance in philosophy that non-philosophy critiques fully exceeds philosophy’s resistance to cognitivism. But the most expanded concept of philosophy is required in order to reveal the force and resistance, perhaps the source, of the continuous or the analogical. Let’s attempt to uncover the reason for this broader proximity and what obliges us to avoid believing in a seemingly possible computerized reduction of non-philosophy.

The Performed is not defined by the doing-saying couple in the style of linguistic performativity, but as that which determines in-the-last-identity the blending of performation and the performed. This type of Real seems at first sight to require us to rid ourselves of philosophy, even though it only rids us of Consciousness at best, and therefore requires us to be able to simulate the machine or simply the Unconscious. It is not said so easily that philosophy simulates the machine, but one is more easily tempted to say this of non-philosophy. This is because the Performed or Man-in-person seems to be a standstill, an ontological or even formal void or a blank screen. Hence the impression that non-philosophy is an automatism and above all a machine. But nothingness or even the void can be defined ontologically, not the Performed. Non-consistency is what’s important; it’s not more Nothingness than Being but determines their blending; it’s non-nothingness, the (non-) One such that it applies just as much to non-being, i.e. to nothingness. Just because it’s a “negative condition” or sine qua non doesn’t make it a positive essence (= that without which); it’s a non-essence, a non-(that without which), which therefore determines but as a negative condition, necessary but without contributing any positive predicate to the material and to its positivity. The cause is positively or philosophically absent, but retracting it from this positivity doesn’t relegate it to nothingness. It is absent qua activity and passivity insofar as these are blended. Can one speak of a negative acting? No more than of a positive acting. Even the positive and the negative couple are not satisfactory if one claims to use them predicatively and with apophantic definitions. There is thus nothing positive in general about this “negative” trait, but it’s positive, so to speak, in its kind. It can therefore be said of the real cause that it either acts or does not act (neither is their synthesis or their “at the same time,” cf. Derrida)—this is its non-consistency, and the real cause completely determines the blending of acting and non-acting. “To determine,” in philosophy and under any positive material condition, is to affirm or to imprint real identity “negatively.” It appears to me that this manner of thinking, which undoubtedly can seem by its apparent dogmatism to bring non-philosophy and a certain scientific argumentation closer, is foreign both to philosophy and to science.

This effect is extended explicitly in the Stranger-subject. The clone, i.e. the transcendental phenomenon, is structured as One (of) philosophy, or as uni-lateral Identity[9]. This structure at the outset makes the clone foreign to philosophy in itself, which is constructed at least on two basic sides. The One itself has no side, contrary to what M. Henry, who turns the One into a transcendental Ego, posits; the clone-Identity has a single side, philosophy in itself has 2/3 sides or thinks itself as 2/3. The trait of strangerhood [étrangèreté] no longer has anything to do with an otherness or a transcendence simply opposed to philosophy. There is transcendence of the two sides, which is necessary for there to be a certain efficacy or for the clone to cut out and into the World’s transcendence. But the two transcendences (which obviously contain correlative immanence) are heterogeneous structures, the philosophical in itself is bi-facial, the cloned is uni-facial. A machine is always bi-facial in each of its “pieces” and effects, i.e. multi-facial. The machine tends toward autonomy and wants to think like philosophy does by making a success of its tour de force; it pushes autonomy as far away as possible and stumbles on the machine’s agent manufacturer, but gets nearer to non-philosophy in so far as it has a presupposed. The idealistic argument according to which machines can build other machines does not, despite appearances, forget that a first constructor, an anthropomorphic inventor of the first machine, is necessary, but it can always hope to reduce this inventor in turn to a component inseparable from a continuous “man-machine system,” obviously at the risk of inciting protests from the rival party of Consciousness. On the other hand, it “forgets” something else, which is that man-machine systems tend toward the auto-dissolution of all their internal distinctions and toward inherent nihilism, and that if this phenomenon is only tendential, this is because there is an instance capable of re-determining them and re-launching them, so to speak. It is necessary to distinguish between an absolute commencement (thus relative-absolute) of the man-machine circuit that disappears in the system. And a radical commencement, a first techno-logy or a non-technology, a human subject in-the-last-identity but existing in accordance with variables that are technical discoveries: therefore, a human subjectivity but co-determined by the forms and the style of various technologies. This argument is apparently too simple and formal, but here there is also an antithetic of technology between those who want a first anthropological commencement of the tool circuit, a human agent, and those who, like Leibniz, infinitely prolong the circuit up to a God-machine or a universe-machine. Non-philosophy resolves this antithetic between the constructor man of consciousness and the machine of machines, by suggesting that its sense is purely apparent, indeed hallucinatory, and by relating it unilaterally to Man-without-machine, who determines a machine-thought qua clone of the techno-logical blending. This is to say that the hypotheses on the machine’s exact origin and power remain those of the metaphysical order, and thus their solution is not within our scope.

Don’t conflate the program (non-philosophy supposed achieved or in a stable state) with non-philosophy’s material. What one puts in the program is variable, provided that it has philosophy’s variance-and-invariance. The rules and procedure of unilateral duality are fixed once the material itself is given and fixed, since it intervenes in the formulation of the rules (which always have a concrete aspect). Under this condition of the material’s fixedness, non-philosophy is indeed a machine or regularly transforms a given material into a given product, and as a result can appear like a program that simply awaits its execution. It’s even a human machine, or a machine lived and determined in-the-last-instance by Man. Yet there is then something bizarre, close to science-fiction in this concept, as if a machine in good and due form, selected from a technological circuit, has been transplanted not into a Consciousness but into Man-in-person. Non-philosophy is no longer this monster obtained by synthesis of technology and the Real. Not to mention that the material’s fixation, once and for all, is a return to a philosophical gesture that equally fixes in turn and thus makes the Real transcendent. All is lost, but this would be a joke of science-fiction, in some sense a “radical” joke.

The material only varies, and with it the rules of unilateral duality in their formulation, if a transcendental indifference and equivalence, which suppose a radical immanent Real, of the materials are posited. When transcendence is the unique principle, the material’s contingency disappears and the process becomes fixed in a new circle, in the philosophical thesis or doctrine. It is necessary to oppose philosophy’s “once and for all” (cf. Deleuze) with non-philosophy’s “one time each time” and its special “performativity.” It’s lived experience or the Real in its radical identity that one time each time determines (without creating) the material (and its invariant form) and clones a subject from it. Thus the most “singular” identity is now said of totality or of wholes, therefore also of invariant phenomena (since these exist), which makes them foreign to philosophical and technological economy. Non-philosophy is a machine necessarily specified or even “singularized” (identified) qua machine by what information “enters” there, which is a necessity that in fact stems from its “negative” cause. Unilateral duality is indeed an invariant structure, but one must distinguish in this formulation between the invariance effect that comes from the surreptitious or senseless fixation of a philosophical vocabulary with its horizon of potentiality (an artifact-invariance), and a deeper invariance that is reduced in-the-last-instance to the cause’s identity-in-identity. As if (this is an objective effect or an objective appearance) philosophy’s invariance vanished here, became elusive and were no longer even identifiable and recognizable except by the invariance of philosophy-form and its content of terms or its “semantics.”

It is difficult under these conditions to make a program of non-philosophy in the computerized sense. Or in that case it is a program one time each time, the Program’s transcendental identity or clone. The whole chain of causes and effects (Real + DLI) is contaminated by the transcendental contingency (which comes from the Real) that affects philosophy’s variant-invariant form (with, in addition, the contingency of the last philosophizable, empirical thing). The formulations given of non-philosophy until now, for example here at present, if they are objective through and through at a given moment, can give the impression that it is a matter of a program to be executed. This is a theoreticist normalization of non-philosophy by the philosophical posture. This program’s objective appearance is not its essence, only its reification or its worldification in a T1 moment. If the given worldly or historical time is posited as the essentially determining affair, then philosophy returns through its intermediary. This is a contemplation of practice, with the latter always one time each time in its transcendental identity, but its contemplation denies or negates the character of the material’s radical-transcendental contingency. Syntax and material are already inseparable in philosophy (this is the transcendental as philosophy’s trait), and if this connection seems to slacken in non-philosophy, this is perhaps an illusion, because the independent cause of every material that it renders contingent turns this contingency into an imposed or forced negative necessity. One cannot separate or isolate pure, formal and algorithmically manipulable rules; non-philosophy solely has an algorithmic aspect (a transformed material) of the machine, even of the automaton, and it’s a machine indeed, but determined in-the-last-instance by Man.

[1]François Laruelle, “L’ordinateur transcendantale: une utopie non-philosophique,” in Homo ex machina, ed. F. Laruelle (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2005). [TN]

[2] This word is quite broad, and means calculus and calculation, but also counting or arithmetic (informally), and computation. Here, although counting is implied and should be kept in mind, the notion of “computing” comes closest in theme to the title of the essay, i.e. the transcendental computer. However, it should be noted that the word for “computer” in French is “ordinateur”, which again points to the numerical aspects of counting (ordinal numbers). Thus to reflect the coordination of the terms “calcul” and ”ordinateur”, I have chosen to translate calcul in the loose, conventional and ordinary sense of “computing”, taken broadly. This is also mainly because calculating/counting does not get at the active, programmatic (literally) sense of the performances that computing and computers imply. [TN]

[3] French anneau de synthèse, the anneau or ring signifying a wedding ring. [TN]

[4] French soi, reflexive pronoun. [TN]

[5] French fantasmer. [TN]

[6] Strange phrase…It should be noted that the adjectives are feminine in gender here…So the I of the enunciation could either be taken as sexualized (a female voice), or the I could be that of radical immanence…(a feminine noun). But, perhaps more likely, since the idea concerns machine/man simulating one another (What simulates what?), the feminine noun that the “I” in the sentence is simulating is ‘la machine’. [TN]

[7] Apparently the French translation of Heidegger’s Verhalten is “comportement”, broadly meaning “behavior” or comportment (cf. Merleau-Ponty’s first book). The notion is to be taken in the sense of grammatical reflexivity (comporting-oneself). [TN]

[8] “Qui simule qui”, which could also read “who simulates whom,” referenced a few paragraphs above. [TN]
​
[9] This redescription of ‘uni-lateral Identity’ indicates why in the previous phrase “One (of) philosophy” only the first two words would be italicized, while the word philosophy is not. [TN]

taken from:

by ​Dominic Fox

Nothing could be more decidedly foreign to the non-standard philosophy of François Laruelle than the mathematical treatment I am about to give here. This alone seems an excellent reason to proceed. The reader should not expect a thorough formalisation of Laruelle’s theoretical machinery, nor (more likely) a failed attempt at such a formalisation. The question taken up here is simply whether there is an analogy to be drawn between the following: “suture” / “name of the void” in Badiou, “generic” / “radical concept” in Laruelle, and “initial / terminal / zero object” in category theory.

To begin with Badiou, it is well known that in Being and Event the empty set is uniquely positioned as the point of suture between “beings”, qua sets or consistent multiples, and “being” as pure inconsistent multiplicity. The suture operates via an equivocation between the notions “not a set” and “set of nothing”. In both notions, nothing is formed into a consistent multiple. But on the side of “being”, this means that no formation of the unformed has taken place, while on the side of “beings”, it means that a formation of none of the unformed has taken place. Badiou gives the equivocal name “void” to both of these cases, and calls the empty set the “name of the void” by which the void is registered within the ontological system of set theory.

The empty set has this role because it is a minimally-determined object within a system of determinations, and can thus play the part of emblem of the undetermined for that system. Badiou’s set-theoretic ontology is both stabilised by the axiomatic nomination of this object, which forms the starting point for the elaboration of the entire set-theoretic universe, and exposed at this point to the limit of its own coherence. This enables Badiou to manage the dialectic of coherence and incoherence, systematicity and a-systematicity, in a more or less disciplined way. For example, the appearance of the empty set within the power set (or “count-of-the-count”) of every set is characterised by Badiou as presenting the “errancy of the void”, or the haunting of superstructural repetition (which Badiou associates with the bureaucratic machinery of the State) by inconsistency. Or, to give another example, the “evental site” on which the “matheme of the event” supervenes is characterised as a multiple “on the edge of the void”, a set whose intersection with any of its members is the empty set.

If the meta-mathematical narrative of Being and Event is possessed of an impressive sprezzatura, a mixing together of felicity and virtuosity such that one often cannot tell where contrivance leaves off and happy coincidence begins, then much of its dialectical agility is owing to the equivocation at the heart of the system. Where structure is required, the empty set as minimal structural element is on hand to provide a sound basis. Where the system needs to be opened out to the a-systematic, the empty set as “name of the void” provides an escape hatch. The void thus functions as a kind of bellows within Badiou’s mathematical oratory, inflating and deflating as needed, supplying more “beings” here and more “being” there.

All of this Laruelle confronts with a kind of vulgar skepticism, deriding Badiou’s “ontology of the void” as an exercise in philosophical “auto-position” facilitated by a mathematical mirror. If Laruelle’s Anti-Badiou shows little sign of its author’s having comprehended the mathematical apparatus of Being and Event, its sarcasm is nevertheless effectively targeted at the entire character of the enterprise. For Laruelle, Badiou’s “ontology of the void” (“OV”) remains a hierarchical, “planifying” arrangement, secured by the privilege given to the empty set as its central operator: a strait gate through which every concept must be made to pass. By contrast, Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy, modelled (so he says) on quantum physics, holds within it no such place of privilege: there is no single point of “suture” securing a system, but rather a polyphony of theoretical “undulations” rolling in the depths of a matricial, oceanic Real.

There is nevertheless in Laruelle a characteristic operation of unstraitening or destructuration, which aims at producing a “generic” instance which can stand, amidst the other terms of a theory, as a name of the Real itself. This operation does not fix on any single foundational term, such as the empty set, but seizes on the privileged operators of whatever theoretical “material” is at hand, asset-stripping them and repurposing them as what Katerina Kolozova calls “radical concepts”. Laruelle will speak of the “non-Mandelbrotian fractal”, separated from the geometric and algorithmic affordances that give the term “fractal” its strong, specific technical sense and diverted towards a “generic” rendition in which it becomes a figure amongst others of indivisible self-similarity: a pseudonym of the Real.

Detached from context, emptied of content, the generic term does not serve as the cornerstone of a conceptual architecture but instead represents a kind of weak force of identity, according to which anything whatsoever can be disposed within immanence alongside anything else. It is thus taken up as an emblem of underdetermination. What can be a non-Mandelbrotian fractal? Anything one wishes to consider as one; that is, consider according to its generic fractality, its imbrication in the Real. If a technical term affords certain kinds of use, distinguishing one thing from another, the generic term withdraws what it names from distinction. It is a sword beaten into a plowshare.

We can now compare the two emblems, the Badiouvian “name of the void” (of which there can be only one) and the Laruellian “name of the Real” (of which there are many, in illimitable series). Each names a minimal instance of structure: the one given axiomatically, a philosopher’s stone; the other produced through a kind of inverted alchemical reduction to dross. Each represents the starting point of a procedure: the one subtractive, elaborating through purification a conceptual universe; the other subsumptive, drawing philosophical edifices down into the undertow of the Real.

Take for example the effect of the two procedures on the philosophical category of “Life” (as organic process, as intrinsic value, as that which resists the power of death and so on). The subtractive Badiouvian approach refuses to accept “Life” as a name of the Real, assigning it instead to procedures which partition it and develop the pieces according to their own separate logics: thus we find “life” as poetic figure of organic integrity; “life” as the ultimately manipulable material of the sciences which are on their way to knowing how to remake it in their own image; “life” as a field of inert subjectivity fecundated by the amorous encounter; or “life” as the renewed enthusiasm of the political convert, incorporated into the body of a political truth. Finally, “life” for Badiou is the object of a maxim: to live according to an Idea, which alone can bring it to the fruition of which it is capable. What authorises this refusal of authority to “Life” as a philosophical first concept, its handing-over to procedures which take it as a mere skeleton to be invested with glittering logical raiment? Nothing other than the name of the void: the only acceptable final name, precisely because it is the name of nothing.

What is the Laruellian approach? To turn from the strong philosophical concept of “Life” to the weak names of “the lived” (le vécu) and “the enjoyed” (le joui), to that which is lived by the living and enjoyed in their enjoyment (jouissance). Rather than a metaphysics of vital energy, or of desire capillarising pathways and lines of leakage, Laruelle proposes through these generic terms an infraphysics, a principle of underdetermination which gives not laws but occasions, instances of the Real. “Life”, the life of the philosophers, is then neither refused nor mathematically purified, but subjected to its own insufficiency to the lived as it is lived. This is not the philosophical ruse according to which Life is posited as always in excess of “its” concept (the excess thus being philosophically specified and controlled, as philosophy’s own), but the non-philosophical disposition according to which Life, however you conceptualise it, is thought according to the lived, of which it is never more than a model occasioned by (some) living.

For Badiou, the minimal term — the empty set — is an absolute minimum: this is what gives it its structuring power. The generic term in Laruelle is only ever relatively minor: just “minoritised” enough, in the circumstances, which may indeed be varied and admit of multiple generic operators. This is then the difference between determinate indetermination and underdetermined underdetermination.

We come now to our formalisation, which will no doubt seem all the more perverse given the preceding discussion. We suppose that a category (in the mathematical sense) is given in which the morphisms between objects are understood to carry some determination between their domain and codomain. In other words, the existence of a morphism f: A -> B implies, in the category at hand, that “A determines B” in some sense. In Lawvere and Schanuel’s usage, for example, such a morphism in the category of abstract sets represents a “general element” of B: that part of the set B which bears the image of the set A under the mapping f. The collection of all morphisms from other objects into some object A is thus understood to carry all of the possible determinations of A within the category: everything that is determinate about A, from the point of view of the category in which it appears, is determined extrinsically through these morphisms. (This is, very hand-wavily, one way of taking the general import of the Yoneda Lemma).

What does it mean, in such a category, for an object to be “minimally determined”? The answer must be given by way of the morphisms connecting that object to other objects. An “initial object”, if one exists in the category, is an object such that, for every object in the category, there is a single uniquely determined morphism from the initial object to that object. It is provable that if more than one such object exists, all such objects are “isomorphic”, or functionally indistinguishable from each other in terms of the roles they can play within the category.

It so happens that in the category “Set”, the initial object is the empty set. For every set, there exists one and one only mapping from the empty set to that set: the empty mapping which takes no elements of the empty set to no elements of the target set. There is no mapping from any set other than the empty set into the empty set: it is thus both minimally determined and unilaterally determining.

Other categories may have multiple (isomorphic) initial objects, or none. An example worth paying attention to is that of the category of pointed sets. A pointed set is a pair (A, a) of a non-empty set and a single element of that set, which “anchors” it. The morphisms between pointed sets are the mappings between them that take the “anchor” of the source set to that of the target set. In this category, every singleton pointed set ({a}, a), containing only its anchor element, is initial. Unlike the category of sets, however, in the category of pointed sets there is also a unique mapping from every pointed set back into the initial object; which is also, therefore, a “terminal” object. An object which is both initial and terminal is known as a “zero” object, and represents a kind of maximally stable point within a category, being both universally determined and universally determining.

It is clear that initial, terminal and zero objects represent, within a category, privileged structural positions. The Real is of course not a mathematical object; but might not such a minimally-structured object be considered as an emblem of indetermination, and hence a point of conformance to the Real, within the mathematical system regulated by a category? We have seen that this analogy holds with regard to Badiou’s set-theoretic ontology, inasmuch as the empty set Badiou takes as his privileged point of suture with the Real is also the initial object in the category of sets. But does it communicate in any way with Laruelle’s selection of generic terms, local or relative minoritisations which serve to re-orient the systems to which they belong “according to” the Real?

The question can be put more generally: why, among all the languages and “modelisations” considered by Laruelle, do some terms present themselves for genericisation more readily than others? What, given Laruelle’s desire to operate a “democracy of thought”, picks out just these terms as structurally privileged, and therefore apt cases for the “dualysing” treatment? Here the category theoretic analogy suggests a possible answer: a “minimal instance of structure” is always minimal relative to some particular system of structuration. If Laruelle disdains the notion of a universal minimum, a single foundational point of suture, he nevertheless practices a selection of local minima guided by the system at hand. If Laruelle is not himself a systematic thinker, a builder or maintainer of systems as Badiou unarguably is, he is nevertheless inexorably tied to systematic evaluation in his non-philosophical practice: a “heretic”, yes, but loyal to the last.

taken  from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

--Lawrence Durrell,  The Alexandria Quartet

The novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell presented a modern version of the Gnostic vision in a series of novels, The Avignon Quintet (1974– 85). Akkad, an Egyptian merchant-banker who is also a latter-day Gnostic, preaches to small groups of European expatriates. At times plump and sluggish-looking, at others looking ascetic and haggard, at home in four capitals and speaking as many languages or more, sometimes wearing western clothes and sometimes traditional dress, Akkad offers to piece together the surviving fragments of Gnostic teaching, which the established religions had tried to destroy: the bitter central truth of the gnostics:

In classical and medieval astrology, there was a planetary significator that was antithetical to the Hyleg – Giver of Life, Health, and Longevity.  It was called the Anareta, and was also known as the Interfector or the Killer Planet.  It was considered to be the planet most involved with illness, pathology and death. Our Earth is Anareta, entropic and self-immolating, a predatory machine that feeds on its children in endless cycles of creation and destruction. In the East Kali is the figure of this dark mistress as giver and taker of life.

The Anareta may be a planet that is particularly afflicted or debilitated, preferably a malefic.  It may also be the lord or dispositor of the Eighth house, or the Almuten of that lord.  It could also be a planet in the Eighth House, which was classically considered to be the House of Death.

Seeing the world as an evil piece of work, the Gnostics advanced a new vision of freedom. Humans were no longer part of a scheme of things in which freedom meant obedience to law. To be free, humans must revolt against the laws that govern earthly things. Refusing the constraints that go with being a fleshly creature, they must exit from the material world.1

—Francis Bacon

In modern times it was the emergence of the sciences out of the traditions of occult, hermetic, magical, and Gnostic mythologies a new gnosis arose – the secular or demythologized knowledge and mastery of Nature. The project of liberating the spirit from the material world has not disappeared. The dream of finding freedom by rebelling against cosmic law has reappeared as the belief that humans can somehow make themselves masters of nature.

In the early 20th Century J.D. Bernal would envision a future in which humans through the mastery of the natural sciences would transform the dreams of ancient hermetic, magic, and Gnostic folklore into a reality. Following the Cosmists of Russia for whom Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers were key, Bernal would develop his own theories. As Count Tolstoy said of Fedorov, he “can in no way reconcile himself with the thought that men are dying and that people now very dear to us will vanish without a trace, and he has developed a theory that science, by a giant step forward, will discover a means to extract from the earth the remains—the particles of our forefathers, in order then to restore them again to living form”.2

As a professed communist Bernal would infuse his notions of the sciences with these ancient dreams of immortality and escape from the organic. At one time ranked among Britain’s most influential scientists, a lifelong communist and proud recipient of a Stalin Peace Prize, Bernal was convinced that a scientifically planned society was being created in the Soviet Union. But his ambitions went beyond the rational reconstruction of human institutions. He was convinced that science could effect a shift in evolution in which human beings would cease to be biological organisms. As the historian of science Philip Ball has described it, Bernal’s dream was that human society would be replaced by ‘a Utopia of post-human cyborgs with machine bodies created by surgical techniques’. Even this fantasy did not exhaust Bernal’s ambitions. Further in the future, he envisioned ‘an erasure of individuality and mortality’ in which human beings would cease to be distinct physical entities. (Gray, 14)

Much as many current theoreticians would like to see the erasure of the human, the notion of the Self as nothing and no one, etc. it was already old hat in this early age of collective generic sociality. Already seeking to undermine the whole liberal subjective tradition we can see in these early scientific fantasies many of the conceptual aspects of what we term transhuman or posthuman ideologies and philosophies feeding into the convergence technologies and sciences of our own time.

As Bernal himself would say in a passage in his book The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies  of the Rational Soul (pfd), Bernal spells out what he has in mind: ‘Consciousness itself might end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light.’

Of course this notion of the Body of Light has a long history in Gnostic thought, and is probably best captured – at least for English audiences – in the works on Ismaili gnosis by Henry Corbin. As Corbin would describe it “we shall learn that the “black light” is of the divine Ipseity as the light of revelation, which makes one see. Precisely what makes one see,  can in nowise become a visible object. It is in this sense that the Light of lights, that by which all visible lights are made visible, is both light and darkness, that is, visible because it brings about vision, but in itself invisible.”3 Without going into an abstruse lecture on the whole amalgam of traditions feeding into these Sufi traditions, what Corbin is relating is the basis of this quest for superconsciousness released from the darkness of matter into the energetic folds of dark matter (in our modern physics terms). In most of these traditions there are two forms of darkness which resolve into our everyday consciousness which is split off from the unconscious producing the illusion of reality, etc., and a greater or higher superconsciousness which incorporates and fuses the two into a higher form or ‘body of light’.

Returning to Bernal we discover his book published in 1929, conceptions that even now inform the vision of the Singularity of the futurologist and director of engineering at Google Ray Kurzweil – an explosive increase in knowledge that will enable humans to emancipate themselves from the material world and cease to be biological organisms. The subtitle of Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near is When Humans Transcend Biology, and while the technologies involved are different – uploading brain information into cyberspace rather than using surgery to build a cyborg – the ultimate goal of freeing the human mind from confinement in matter is the same as Bernal’s. The affinities between these ideas and Gnosticism are clear. Here as elsewhere, secular thinking is shaped by forgotten or repressed religion. (Gray, 15)

Whether ancient or modern, Gnosticism turns on two articles of faith. First there is the conviction that humans are sparks of consciousness confined in the material world. The Gnostics did not deny that order existed in the world; but they viewed this order as a manifestation of evil to which they refused to submit. For them the creator was at best a blunderer, negligent or forgetful of the world it had fashioned, and possibly senile, mad or long dead; it was a minor, insubordinate and malevolent demiurge that ruled the world. Trapped in a dark cosmos, human beings were kept in submission by a trance-like ignorance of their true situation. Here we come to the second formative idea: humans can escape this slavery by acquiring a special kind of knowledge. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, and for Gnostics knowledge is the key to freedom. (Gray, 16)

As Gnostics see them, humans are ill-designed and badly made creatures, gifted or cursed with flickering insight into their actual condition. Once they eat of the Tree of Knowledge, they discover they are strangers in the universe. From that point onwards, they live at war with themselves and the world.

In asserting that the world is evil, the Gnostics parted company with more ancient ways of thinking. Ancient Egyptian and Indian religion saw the world as containing light and dark, good and bad, but these were a pair that alternated in cycles rather than being locked in any sort of cosmic struggle. Animist conceptions in which the world is an interplay of creative and destructive forces frame a similar view of things. In a universe of this kind the problem of evil that has tormented generations of apologists for monotheism does not exist.

The idea of evil as an active force may have originated with Zoroaster. An Iranian prophet who lived some centuries before Christ (the exact dates are disputed), Zoroaster not only viewed the world as the site of a war between light and dark but believed light could win. Some centuries later another Iranian prophet – Mani, the founder of Manichaeism – also affirmed that good could prevail, though he seems to have believed that victory was not assured. It may have been around this time that the sensation of wavering between alternatives crystallized into an idea of free will. (Gray, 17)

Bataille as I’ve written of before would present the notion of active evil as a creative force in the universe, one that is based on conflict relations. In his widely regarded survey of Gnosticism Hans Jonas once described the gnostic cosmology, the “universe, the domain of the Archons, is like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon is the earth, the scene of man’s life”.4

Georges Bataille would say of these ancient systems: “It is possible to see as a leitmotif of Gnosticism the conception of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness (which would not be simply the absence of light, but the monstrous archontes revealed by this absence), and as evil (which would not be the absence of good, but a creative action).”5 As Jonas would affirm the world is the product, and even the embodiment, of the negative of knowledge. What it reveals is unenlightened and therefore malignant force, proceeding from the spirit of self-assertive power, from the will to rule and coerce. The mindlessness of this will is the spirit of the world, which bears no relation to understanding and love. The laws of the universe are the laws of this rule, and not of divine wisdom. Power thus becomes the chief aspect of the cosmos, and its inner essence is ignorance (agnosia). To this, the positive complement is that the essence of man is knowledge—knowledge of self and of God: this determines his situation as that of the potentially knowing in the midst of the unknowing, of light in the midst of darkness, and this relation is at the bottom of his being alien, without companionship in the dark vastness of the universe. (p. 327-328)

The idea of a demonic presence in the world emerged with dualistic faiths. It does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, where Satan features as an adversarial figure rather than a personification of evil. It is only in the New Testament that evil appears as a diabolical agency, and throughout its history Christianity has struggled to reconcile this notion of evil with belief in a God that is all good and all powerful.

A convert from the religion of Mani, Augustine tried to resolve the conundrum by suggesting that evil was the absence of goodness – a fall from grace that came about through the misuse of free will. But there always remained a strand in Christianity that saw good and evil as opposed forces. Composed in the early thirteenth century, the most systematic surviving work of Cathar theology, The Book of the Two Principles, asserts that along with the principle of good there is another principle, ‘one of evil, who is mighty in iniquity, from whom the power of Satan and of darkness and all other powers which are inimical to the true Lord God are exclusively and essentially derived’. In support of this view, the Cathar tract goes on to quote Jesus saying (Matthew 7: 18), ‘A good tree cannot being forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.’ (Gray, 18)

During the Enlightenment modern rationalists came to reject the idea of evil while being obsessed by it. Seeing themselves as embattled warriors in a struggle against darkness, it has not occurred to them to ask why humankind is so fond of the dark. They are left with the same problem of evil that faces religion. The difference is that religious believers know they face an insoluble difficulty, while secular believers do not. (Gray, 19)

In our own time this secular rejection of metaphysical evil has led to some strange twists. Aware of the evil in themselves, traditional believers know it cannot be expelled from the world by human action. Lacking this saving insight, secular believers in the transhumanist dream of creating a higher species have not noticed the fatal flaw in their schemes: any such species will be created by actually existing human beings. So humans have replaced the older metaphysical gods or God of pagan and monotheistic religions, and instead of the quest for spiritual mutation and transformation into a metaphysical ‘body of light’ transcending matter and entering some spiritual universe, these later day prophets of techgnosis have entered into a Faustian bargain to immortalize humanity through a combination of pharmaceutical, technological, and scientific quests in which humanity migrates over time into technological objects or beings. The ancient spiritual vision of hermeticism (Perfect Nature), Gnosticism (Body of Light), Magic (Self-deification), etc. are all oriented toward a literal manifestation of physical immortality and transmutation from organic to anorganic matter.

Whether one is for or against such a move is another matter, but revealing the underlying metaphysics of this vision of the sciences shows us that the ancient traditions have not died at as once thought. In our time the older traditions of hermetic, magic, Gnostic, Alchemy and other systems seem strangely to be merging back into the sciences as if they’d never left off. With the slow erosion of secular culture and its conceptions of the sciences as atheistic and divorced from all metaphysical, mythic, and religious notions coming under fire it remains to be seen what will transpire in the near future as the philosophical and scientific implications of posthuman, transhuman, and other hybrid forms of thought emerge and rechannel these ancient streams that have not wholly disappeared from our civilization.

The modern sciences from Francis Bacon till now tell us that humankind may be a sport of nature, but having chanced into the world the human animal can use its growing knowledge to recreate itself in a higher form. Embodied in a cult of evolution, it is an unwitting version of demiurgy. When humans pursue the dream of creating higher versions of themselves they obey matter’s imperative (i.e., Spinoza’s God = Nature), and their creations will be different from anything they can imagine.

The article is taken from: 

​by ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY

First a frank assessment: There are very few books on new media worth reading. Just when the nay-sayers decry the end of the written word, bookstore shelves still overflow with fluff on digital this and digital that. And even as a countervailing chorus emerged that was more skeptical of the widespread adoption of new media - in France Jacques Chirac once spoke disparagingly about "that Anglo-Saxon network" (for, as anyone knows, in the beginning there was Minitel) - it was evident that the Internet revolution had already taken place in the US, in Europe, and elsewhere. Like it or not the new culture is networked and open source, and one is in need of intelligent interventions to evaluate it. In the years since its original publication in 2001, Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media has become one of the most read and cited texts on the topic .' It is a key entry in the disciplines of poetics and cultural aesthetics, and has helped define the new field of software studies. So I will start with Manovich, deferring to the influence of the text, and betting that it might already be familiar to readers. The book is not without its limitations, however, and perhaps today we may begin to look again on the text with the fresh eyes of historical distance, and, using the book as a springboard into other topics, reassess many different aspects of cultural and aesthetic life, from our tools to our texts, from our bodies to our social relations, from our digital objects to our digital interfaces. 

Internet culture spawned The Language of New Media, particularly the first generation of 1990s web culture. What this means is that the book is the product of a specific sliver of history when the conditions of the production and distribution of knowledge were rather different than they are today. What was once a subversive medium is now a spectacle playground like any other. The first phase of web culture, one must admit, carried a revolutionary impulse; call it the Saint-Just to today's imperial era. Manovich's book is a product of that first phase. Walls were coming down, hierarchies were crumbling, the old brick and mortar society was giving way to a new digital universe. On the one hand, new virulent ways of looking at the world were forming with unprecedented ferocity - sometimes conveniently labeled the "California ideology" - coalescing around the neoliberal impulse to open source everything (information wants to be free, desire wants to be free, capital wants to be free) and the promise to liberate mankind in ways only dreamed ofby our forebears in the new social movements of the 196os. On the other hand, amid this process of leveling, a new Republic of Letters began to form using email and bulletin-board systems that seemed to offer a real intellectual and social community devoted to the exploration and critique of new media. The Language of New Media is a product of this community. Discussed and refined in online forums like Nettime, and partially previewed prior to publication on the email list Rhizome (a web site named enthusiastically, if naively, after the emancipatory topology described in Deleuze and Guattari) , The Language of New Media was written for, within, and against the new Internet culture of the late 1990s. 

Looking back like this is not to suggest that we should dwell on previous decades with nostalgic yearning for a simpler time, nor that Manovich's book has nothing more to say to us today. On the contrary, the simple premise of the book - that new media may be defined via reference to a foundational language or set of formal and poetic qualities identified across all sorts of new media objects, and indeed across historical and social context - suggests the opposite approach: we are required to think critically and historically because of the very fact that the digital is so structural, so abstract, so synchronic . 

Manovich's strength lies in the description of digital technologies as poetic and aesthetic objects. His book aims to be a kind of general textbook on new media. Manovich begins from his own experience with software, then he extends his observations so that the "telling detail" becomes a piece in a larger system. 

Is Manovich's view on the world a modernist one? I think so. His is a modernist lens in the sense that he returns again and again to the formal essence of the medium, the techniques and characteristics of the technology, and then uses these qualities to talk about the new (even if he ends up revealing that it is not as new as we thought it was) . This is illustrated most vividly in the conceptual heart of the book, part one entitled "What Is New Media?" Here Manovich offers a number of defining principles for digital technology, and at the same time debunks several of the myths surrounding it. The five principles - numeric representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding - are not to be understood as universal laws of new media. Rather, they describe some of the aesthetic properties of data, and the basic ways in which information is created, stored, and rendered intelligible.  

Scattered throughout the book, Manovich advances a number of aesthetic claims that have become commonplace parlance in the discourse on digital interfaces, including the idea of a "logic of selection," the importance of com positing, the way in which the database itself is a medium, the emphasis on navigation through space, the reversal of the relationship between syntagm and paradigm, the centrality of games and play, the waning of tern poral montage (and the rise of spatial montage) , and many other observations. All of these concepts and claims are now taken for granted in the various debates that make up today's discourse on new media. 

Dissent exists of course. Given that the operative question is "What Is New Media?" we should remember that more than one response exists to such a question. It is clear where Manovich puts his favor: new media are essentially software applications. But others have answered the same question in very different ways. There are those who say that hardware is as important if not more so than software (Friedrich Kittler or ​Wendy Hui Kyong Chun) , or those who focus on the new forms of social interaction that media do or do not facilitate (Geert Lovink or Yochai Benkler) , or even those who focus on networks of information rather than simply personal com puters (Tiziana Terranova or Eugene Thacker) . Perhaps because of the wide degree oflatitude afforded by the topic, Manovich's book has elicited a healthy stream of dialogue and debate since its original publication. I for one consider his claim about "the myth of interactivity" (55) to be misguided: yes, the term "interactive" is practically meaningless due to overuse, but that does not mean the term should apply willy-nilly to static works of art. But such quibbles are neither here nor there. 

Rather, I would like to spotlight two issues of more profound significance that are worth addressing in the book. The first has to do with cinema, the second with history. 

As the opening pages divulge, the dirty little secret of The Language of New Media, and the detail that reveals Manovich's first passion, is this: cinema was the first new media. New media did not begin in the 198 os in S ilicon Valley; it began a hundred years prior at Etienne-Jules Marey's Station Physiologique in the outskirts of Paris. The reason for this is that cinema is the first medium to bring together techniques like compositing, recombination, digital sampling (the discrete capture of photographic images at a fixed rate through time) , and machine automation, techniques that, of course, are present in other media, but never as effectively as the singular synthesis offered by the cinema. Thus, the technique of layering inside Photoshop is simply the same technique used in the color key effects afforded by video, or the cinematic convention of shooting actors standing in front of a rear-screen projection backdrop. Or to choose another example , the binary zero-and-one samples of a digital music file are also present decades earlier in the on and off regularity of a single film frame transiting across the projector's beam, stopping for a split second, and then moving again. For Manovich the flicker of film was always already a digital flicker. 

​With such fuel for controversy, many were quick to confront Manovich on his claims, perhaps most notably M ark B. N. Hansen in his book New Philosophy for New Media. Hansen acknowledges the influence of The Language of New Media, writing that "Manovich's depiction of digital technology is undoubtedly the most rich and detailed available today."l Yet he also argues that Manovich's book is tinted by an over investment in the cinematic. Manovich's position "extends the sway of the 'cinematic' in the narrow sense, and in particular serves to ratify cinematic immobility as the default condition of the human-computer interface." (Yet H ansen's subsequent claim, that Manovich cannot think beyond the rectilinear cinematic frame, is unconvincing, given M anovich's argument in the book about the waning of temporal montage and the rise of spatial montage, or what is often simply called "windowing.") In short, Manovich's greatest trick, the cinema, is also, in the eyes of some critics, his greatest vulnerability. 

In addition to cinema, a second large issue looms in the book, that of history. Would it be entirely correct to say that this book has no interest in the social, that it has no interest in the political, that it is blinded (by poetics and formal structure) from seeing history itself? As with anyone who gravitates to pure poetics, Manovich is not immune to such questions. Like some of his critics, I too am concerned by the emphasis on poetics and pure formalism. One might think of Manovich as the polar opposite of someone like Fredric Jameson and the commitment to what he calls the "poetics of social forms." One sees the poetics in Manovich, but one loses the social forms. So there is something to be said for the argument that Manovich is participating in the tradition of those media theorists, like Kittler or Marshall McLuhan, who, while they may discuss the embeddedness of media systems within social or historical processes, ultimately put a premium on media as pure formal devices. (Kittler's politics are complicated, but in general he falls prey to some of the same traps of nostalgia and H ellenistic longing as his romantic forebears; McLuhan knew which way the wind was blowing in his public persona, but in private was a good traditional catholic who was more than a little unnerved by the social upheavals happening around him.) 

Near to his heart, Manovich opens the book with Dziga Vertov. Featuring the Soviet filmmaker so prominently did not go unnoticed by the intellectual establishment. In the following passage he is held at arm's length by the editors of the journal October, a publication known to have a special relationship to the avant-garde as well as poststructuralism and continental philosophy: 

It is thus with some interest that we witness the usage of a crucial avant-garde film such as Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera as the opening device of a recent text on the "language of new media, n just as it once provided the signal image some years ago for the very first issue of this journal. And it is also with some doubt that we listen to these same theoreticians of the new digital media proclaim that cinema and photography - with their indexical, archival properties - were merely preliminary steps on the path to their merging with the computer in the aber-archive of the database. Much of what was most important to cinema and photography is wiped away by such a teleology. And much of what seems most critical in contemporary artistic practice reacts to just such an erasure.

Going a step further, Brian Holmes continues this line of dissent, as he bemoans what he sees as Manovich's "smug insistence that the new media were essentially defined by a certain kind of rhythm, a certain multiplication of screens, a certain connection to databases, etc. - in other words, that the new media were essentially defined by the dominant trends of contemporary capitalist society. 

While such dismissals might be seductive, here too I am not entirely convinced, and perhaps against my better judgment wish to offer something of a defense on his behalf. Yes, Manovich refuses a specific kind of American or European politico-historical critique of media technologies, the kind we might associate with any number of theorists on the left, from Louis Althusser, to Jean Baudrillard, to Guy Debord, or even today with Giorgio Agamben or Bernard Stiegler. But to understand Manovich, one must understand two important aspects of his work. 

In an important short essay from 1996, "On Totalitarian I nteractivity," Manovich admits that he sees digital interactivity as a type of political manipulation. He harbors a deep-seated phobia of political ideology, due largely to his youth spent in the Soviet Union: 

As a post-communist subject, I cannot but see [the] Internet as a communal apartment of [the] Stalin era: no privacy, everybody spies on everybody else, [an] always present line for common areas such as the toilet or the kitchen. Or I can think of it as a giant garbage site for the information society, with everybody dumping their used products of intellectual labor and nobody cleaning up. Or as a new, Mass Panopticon (which was already realized in communist societies) - complete transparency, everybody can track everybody else.

These kinds of passages should put to rest any murmurs over whether or not M anovich has a knowledge of history. By the early 1930s, Stalin had made socialist realism the only possible style in the Soviet Union. During this period the Russian formalists were criticized for not paying enough attention to social and historical issues, in essence for being apolitical. The power of the Stalinist machine eventually forced many of these formalists to the margins, or worse, into exile or death. Of course Manovich is no exiled enemy of the state, but because of this history he considers it intellectually dangerous to deny questions of form, poetics, and aesthetics. The irony is that, in making this gesture, which Manovich would classify as a gesture of political independence in the face of state power, he has been accused of overlooking the political sphere entirely. What worked one way in the Eastern Bloc, apparently works another way in the contemporary West. 

His apparent abdication of the political (and his taking up the question of poetics), then, must not be measured against an Americo-European leftist yardstick, but as a kind of glasnost of the digital. Manovich is saying, in essence: the technological infrastructure may or may not have dubious politics, but let us put the old hobbyhorse of the critique of state-driven ideology behind us and dive into the semiotics of software so that we may first understand how it works. 

Let me acknowledge therefore - and this is the second aspect - that Manovich's political gesture exists, even if it is a counter-intuitive one. He is not a politicized Western intellectual in the Sartrean mold. But that is the point. In other words, when he writes on Vertov, he slices Vertov free from the grasp of traditions such as "The Dziga Vertov Group" and other red-flag comrades wishing a neat and tidy equation between radical aesthetic experiments and radical politics. In Manovich a medium is never a dispositif. (Mind you, I am not endorsing this myself, merely attempting to offer a charitable description of it.) Manovich would rather make the argument that new media are first and foremost aesthetic objects. His proof for this is, ironically, a profoundly historical one, that Vertov simply does not have the same status today as he did during the early and middle twentieth century. In an age when Vertov's cinematic principles are embodied in code and bundled as mere filter effects for desktop movie-making software, as they are today, the revolutionary power of radical aesthetics seems rather deflated. When Jean-Luc Godard becomes a plug-in, we must look beyond the Nouvelle Vague. Manovich understands this. H is book thus serves as a provocation to those who still think that formalism is politically progressive. It is not, for new media at least, and that is the point.

In the end The Language of New Media seems to be doing two things at once. On the one hand it tries to outline the specificity of new media, the particular qualities of the medium that should be understood as absolutely new. But on the other hand Manovich insists that new media are essentially cinematic , suggesting that we must look not to the new, but backward to the various media that have come before. "To summarize," he writes in the middle of the book, "the visual culture of a computer age is cinematographic in its appearance, digital on the level of its material, and computational (i.e., software driven) in its logic" (180). The use of a layer metaphor is telling. At one layer is cinema, at a second layer are bits and bytes, at a third algorithm. Manovich's new media thus follow the same structure of the mise en abtme: an outside that leads to an inside, which leads to another inside, and on and on. This too shows how Manovich's methodology is implicitly historical, for the media landscape changed fundamentally after the invention of cybernetics in the late 1940s. Today all media are a question of synecdoche {scaling a part for the whole), not indexicality {pointing from here to there). This assumption is absolutely central in The Language of New Media, and it helps explain why Manovich is prompted to look within, to cinema, in order to look to the present. 

​Google or Facebook have already broached the question of the interface . The open-source culture of new media really means one thing today, it means open interfaces. It means the freedom to connect to technical images. Even source code is a kind of interface, an interface into a lower level set of libraries and operation codes. Thus, when Google or Facebook "open-sources" resource x, it provides an API or "Application Programming Interface" granting managed access to x. Let us not be fooled: open source does not mean the unvarnished truth, but rather a specific communicative artifice like any other. And in this sense one should never celebrate a piece of source code, open or closed, as a bona fide original text {whatever that might mean) . The interesting question is not so much whether open source is "more open" or "less open" than other systems of knowledge, but rather the question " How does open source shape systems of storage and transmission of knowledge ?" If one is willing to assent to a synecdoche model for media systems, then it follows that sources {or partial sources) will play a more important role, since the system/subsystem or wholejpart arrangement necessitates that one think about the innards of things as one scales from outside to inside. 

However, the bad news, or good depending on one's proclivities, is that this "source" has almost nothing to do with concerns around sources and essences from a generation or two ago, particularly the concerns native to that intellectual movement so thoroughly gauche today, poststructuralism. The general open sourcing of all media systems, including the human form as the most emblematic media system, has almost nothing to do with the lingering phenomenological anxiety around presence and truth fueling poststructuralism's long obsession over sources. What was once an intellectual intervention is now part of the mechanical infrastructure. And so goes the dialectical machine, co-opting critique as fuel for the new spirit of capitalism.9 I nstead one sees that the open sourcing of media systems (information wants to be free, desire wants to be free, capital wants to be free) is really about the migration into a new way of structuring information and material resources, which as Ranciere might say also has its corresponding regime of art. But as in previous times one is still free to read the truth of social life through such structures - as Jameson does with his perennially useful methodology known as "cognitive mapping" - provided of course that one is not dazzled by the short-term candy of openness as such.

The dual move in Manovich - both to the past and to the present - is in fact a single gesture, for the grand argument given in his work is really one about media in general, that to mediate is really to interface, that mediation in general is just repetition in particular, and thus that the "new" media are really all the artifacts and traces of the past coming to appear in an ever expanding present. 

T. J. Clark observed once, with the calm voice of experience, that in Courbet the entire world is one of proximity; the paintable is that thing, that space, that can be transformed into a Second Empire drawing room. This is Stanley Cavell's assessment too when, in The World Viewed, following Michael Fried's 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood," he likens painting to a certain desire for presentness. Painting assembles a space. But it is always a proximal space, a bounded space of textures and things brought around, not too close exactly, but certainly unconcealed and arrayed for handling. Painting is not Cavell's primary concern in The World Viewed, it is cinema after all, but painting offers a road down which one might travel to ascertain a certain quality shared by painting, photography, film, and a number of other art forms. It is the desire that the world be brought near to us. 

Having a desire to be brought near - such a desire is most certainly at the very base of human life. In deed the relative ​nearness and farness of things may account for all manner of action, from love to hate, from the joy of communion to the perils of exile. But that is not all, for in art it concerns a specific, not a general, iteration of this desire for nearness. The phenomenon is most acute in photography, and thereby, for Cavell, in cinema (for him, a photography derivative) ; as he puts it: the world of the image is present to us, but we were never present to it. So it is nearness with a catch. The viewer does not attend the filming of the "profilmic event," to use the parlance of cinema studies. Thus it is a desire to be brought near, but one already afflicted with a specific neurosis, that of the rejection of the self. With each attempt to array the world in proximal relation to us, we must at the same time make ourselves disappear. With each step forward in Cavell's world, one becomes that much more inert. Every step done is a step undone. 

Evoking questions of ethics and responsibility, Plato writes of a magical ring, the Ring of Gyges, that grants invisibility to the wearer and thus potential immunity from moral consequence . In effect, the cinema forces us to don the Ring of Gyges, making the self an invisible half-participant in the world. The self becomes a viewing self, and the world becomes a world viewed. This is, in a nutshell, the cinematic condition for Cavell, and I guess I agree with him. The penalties and rewards are clear: to be "cinematically" present to the world, to experience the pleasure of the movies, one must be a masochist. That is to say, to be in a relation of presence with the world cinematically, one must subject the self to the ultimate in pain and humiliation, which is nothing short of complete erasure. It has been said that the cinema is the most phenomenological of media. But whether this is a phenomenology or the absolute impossibility of one is not entirely clear.

Cavell wrote: "A painting is a world; a photograph is of a world."" What can one say then of the cinema? Or the computer? Paraphrasing Cavell's definition of cinema, one might say, with considerably less panache than he, that the cinema automatically projects worlds (in series) . So might it be for a world? The computer, then, is simply on a world, as it tends ​to rise in separation from some referent, modeling and supplementing it. But enough phrase making, the crucial thing is to determine the nature of the machine. 

​Objects are never humans to a computer, nor are they faces or bodies. In this sense the computer breaks with those arts (painting, photography, cinema) that fixate upon the embodied human form - the face, but not always, the hand, but not always - and its proximal relation to a world, if not as their immediate subject matter then at least as the absolute horizon of their various aesthetic investments. The computer has not this same obsession. It aims not for man as an object. The reason is simple: because the computer is this object in and of itself.

​Maybe this is why we do not cry at websites like we cry at the movies. Maybe it is why there is no "faciality" with the computer, why there is no concept of a celebrity star system (except ourselves) , no characters or story (except our own), no notion of recognition and reversal, as Aristotle said of poetry. If the movie screen always directs toward, the computer screen always directs away. If at the movies you tilt your head back, with a computer you tilt in. 

Profiles, not personas, drive the computer. Even as a certain kind of modern affect is in recession (following Jameson's famous argument about "the waning of affect" under postmodernity) , there seems to be more affect today than ever before. Books are written on the subject. Conferences are devoted to it. The net is nothing if not the grand parade of personality profiles, wants and needs, projected egos, "second" selves and "second" lives. This is all true. So the triumph of affect is also its undoing. The waning of an older affective mode comes at the moment of its absolute rationalization into software. At the moment when something is perfected, it is dead. This is the condition of affect today online, and it is why the object of the computer is not a man: because its data is one.

Ultimately an additional step is necessary to explain the current reversal: the computer is an anti-Ring of Gyges. The scenario is inverted. The wearer of the ring is free to roam around in plain sight, while the world, invisible , retreats in absolute alterity. The world no longer indicates to us what it is. We indicate ourselves to it, and in doing so the world materializes in our image. 

To be "informatically" present to the world, to experience the pleasure of the computer, one must be a sadist. The penalties and rewards are clear. In contrast to the cinema, in order to be in a relation with the world informatically, one must erase the world, subjecting it to various forms of manipulation, preemption, modeling, and synthetic transformation. The computer takes our own superlative power over worlds as the condition of possibility for the creation of worlds. Our intense investment in worlds - our acute fact finding, our scanning and data mining, our spidering and extracting - is the precondition for how worlds are revealed. The promise is not one of revealing something as it is, but in simulating a thing so effectively that "what it is" becomes less and less necessary to speak about, not because it is gone for good, but because we have perfected a language for it. 

Every object has its relations. As Alain Badiou writes, there are only bodies and languages.'l It is necessary then to distinguish two grand domains which are, like fighting siblings, so much more different from one another strictly by virtue of being so intimately conjoined. Media and mediation, one might speak casually about one or the other without realizing the fundamental difference dividing them. It would not be necessary to accentuate the difference if others had not already mixed them up so awkwardly, or as is often the case failed to understand the subtlety in the first place. In reality these two systems are violently unconnected. 

Recall the famous pronouncement from Friedrich Kittler that all technical media either store things, transmit things, or process things. At the risk of sounding too juvenile, I will observe that this definition of media is particularly mediacentric ! By which is meant that Kittler first posits the existence of specific media technologies, say the camera obscura or the magic lantern, and then shows how they may or may not be furnished with special characteristics (sending, saving, or calculating). Technical media exist in various forms, and they do x, y or z. H is is a revelatory story of objects and the qualities ​they carry. His is, in short, a hermeneutics of media devices as they appear after being pulled from the pit of history.  

It leads to some delightful places, in particular the central thesis of the first section of his Optical Media lectures, in which he places the camera obscura and the magic lantern at the center of the history of all optical media. The camera obscura has a special relationship to linear perspective , the so-called "self-depiction of nature," and hence to Renaissance figures like Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti. Because of this, it typifies for Kittler what Heidegger later would call "the age of the world picture." "[B]eing first constituted itself in the form of a representation (Vorstellung) in European modernity. Representational thinking delivered being as an object for a subject ... [I]t can be said, following Heidegger's line of thought, that linear perspective and the camera obscura were precisely the media of this representation." As a device for automatically recording images, the camera obscura functioned as a first-order simulation. It allowed reality to appear on a wall. By contrast, as a device for automatically reproducing or transmitting images, the magic lantern functioned as a second-order simulation. It allowed smaller images to appear larger on a wall. (The progression from first order to second order is appealing, and it sets Kittler up for a nice denouement: the film projector adopts the second-order quality of the magic lantern while adding a new digital simulation along the axis of time; television departs from the image entirely and instead goes for the symbolic space of language in which things are arranged in pixels and grids; and the computer annihilates the imaginary entirely, reverting back to that oldest of age-old media, writing.) Putting small, portable images up on a wall as large images, the essential task of the magic lantern, Kittler associates with Descartes' cogito ergo sum, wherein "the representation of the subject is re-presented to the subject once again as such."'6 Descartes' insistence in the Meditations that the philosopher must blot out the sun and sky and ball up his ears with wax illustrates for Kittler a particular model of mediation. Only the Cartesian self does what the magic lantern had already demonstrated: projects a representation, the thinking mind, back inward toward a previous representation, the ​self, and therefore (for Descartes at least) shores up the metaphysical relation. So what Heidegger saw as a vital spark in early-modern European man, his ability to cognize the world as a reflection, Descartes bent back into the folds of a baroque philosophy in which man reflects not on the primary data of nature but on the image of man himself. Copernicus, it seems, was wrong. 

Still, Kittler's fixation on the media-centric nature of media puts him tern porarily on some dangerous ground. For instance, this foolishness that "philosophy ... has been necessarily unable to conceive of media as media," owing chiefly to the lack of imagination in a certain Aristotle, whose "ontology deals only with things, their matter and form, but not with relations between things in time and space. The very concept of a (physical) medium (to metaxu) is relegated to his theory of sensorial perception (aisthesis)." The insinuation here is bright and clear, why not state it unequivocally: Western philosophy since the Greeks has had no theory of mediation.'

Doubtless certain Greek philosophers had negative views regarding hypomnesis. Yet Kittler is reckless to suggest that the Greeks had no theory of mediation. The Greeks indubitably had an intimate understanding of the physicality of transmission and message sending (Hermes) . They differentiated between mediation as immanence and mediation as expression (Iris versus Hermes) . They understood the mediation of poetry via the Muses and their techne. They understood the mediation of bodies through the "middle loving" Aphrodite. They even understood swarming and networked presence (in the incontinent mediating forms of the Eumenides who pursued Orestes in order to "process" him at the proces of Athena) . Thus we need only look a little bit further to shed this rather vulgar, consumer-electronics view of media, and instead graduate into the deep history of media as modes of mediation, a task that with a bit of luck will be accomplished presently vespere et mane. 

Realizing the danger, Kittler retreats slightly from the more extreme argument. He explains that, while Aristotle might exclude media from his theory of matter and form, he doesn't act likewise in his discussion ofhuman perception. "Aristotle, however, speaks of two elements, namely air and water, as of two 'betweens.' In other words, he is the first to turn a common Greek preposition - metaxu, between - into a philosophical noun or concept: to metaxu, the medium. 'In the middle' of absence and presence, farness and nearness, being and soul, there exists no nothing any more, but a mediatic relation. Es gibt Medien, we could say." Hence even if Aristotle does not discuss mediation when he talks about hylomorphism and ontology, he nevertheless inaugurates philosophy's centurieslong relationship to media via a discussion of the human senses. The missing interlocutor here is Bernard Stiegler, who has perhaps more clearly than anyone since Heidegger framed the intimate co-construction of technology and being. 

All of this now in the light of day, I am in a position to identify more clearly the conservatism of Kittler, who on this point finds a confrere in Marshall McLuhan. By conservative I mean the claim that techne is substrate and only substrate. For Kittler and McLuhan alike, media mean hypomnesis. They define media via the externalization of man into objects. Hence a fundamentally conservative dichotomy is inaugurated - which to be clear was in Plato before it was in Aristotle - between the good and balanced human specimen and the dead junk of the hypomnemata. Contrast this with an alternate philosophical tradition that views techne as technique, art, habitus, ethos, or lived practice. Such an alternate tradition is what was alluded to previously, through the contrast between media (as objects or substrates) and practices of mediation (as middles or interfaces) . I ndeed it is ironic that Kittler hews so closely to Heidegger, as Heidegger was one of the philosophers who best understood both aspects of techne. 

We are not finished yet however. For Kittler also harbors a deep-seated interest in another ancient yearning of philosophy, one which is as old as it is powerful. It is the desire to reduce the many to the one. In Optical Media, during his discussion of film Kittler stresses the way in which Etienne-Jules Marey was committed to a single camera, thereby reducing many devices to a single apparatus: "By holding tight to the unifying, linearizing power of writing paper, Marey always only needed one single piece of equipment, while Muybridge ​had to position 12 different cameras. The task, therefore, was to dispose of n cameras and still be able to supply serial photographs. In the process, Colt's good old revolver was once again honored, as it had also reduced the need for six pistols down to one."20 Later, in his discussion of television he says something similar: "I n contrast to film, therefore, the problem of television from the very beginning was how to make a single channel dimension from two image dimensions, and how to make a single time variable from convertible surfaces."2' And again later in the albeit short discussion of computers: "[C]omputers represent the successful reduction of all dimensions to zero."22 (Given what I intend to argue in a future essay addressed to the fundamental "parallelity" of the image, it will be possible to demonstrate that the computer is never the product of a reduction from two to one, or from the multiple to the zero, but in fact the reverse, for the computer belongs to that long aesthetic tradition that derives all of its energy from a fission of the one dividing into the multiple!}) The reduction of the many to the one is symptomatic, not only of a latent politics lurking within the Kittlerian corpus, but also, more simply, of the aforementioned prioritization of the object over the middle. A philosophy of mediation will tend to proliferate multiplicity; a philosophy of media will tend to agglomerate difference into reified objects. Perhaps this is why Kittler, although notable among his peers for an intrepid willingness to write on computers, never fully theorized digital media as much as other media technologies and platforms, for where is the object of distributed networks located, where is a rhizome, where is software ? For Kittler, alas, "there is no software."

I applaud Kittler, though, for his understanding of the relation between computers and the optical. Many scholars today continue to classify the computer as another installment in the long march of visual culture. As Kittler makes clear, such a position is totally wrong. Subsequent to television, which began a retreat away from optical media and a return to the symbolic in the form of signal codification, the computer consummates the retreat from the realm of the imaginary to the purely symbolic realm of writing. "I n contrast to film, ​television was already no longer optics," he writes. "Digital image processing thus ultimately represents the liquidation of this last remainder of the imaginary. The reason is simple: computers, as they have existed since the World War II, are not designed for image-processing at all."

Nevertheless the archive extends its influence over Kittler's thinking. For he thinks of technical media primarily in terms of artifacts, artifacts for storage, transmission, or processing. But what if we were to take the ultimate step and pose the question of media in reverse ? What if we refuse to embark from the premise of "technical media" and instead begin from the perspective of their supposed predicates: storing, transmitting, and processing? With the verbal nouns at the helm, a new set of possibilities appears. These are modes of mediation, not media per se. The shift is slight but crucial. The mode of storage appears instantly within its own illumination; the mode of transmitting returns from a far-off place; the mode of processing wells up like a flood of pure energy. 

Gilles Deleuze has suggested as much in his work. In the essay "What Is a Dispositif?" Deleuze writes that one should not focus so much on devices or apparatuses as such and more on the physical systems of power they mobilize, that is, more on curves of visibility and lines of force. "These apparatuses, then, are composed of the following elements: lines of visibility and enunciation, lines of force, lines of subjectification, lines of splitting, breakage, fracture, all of which crisscross and mingle together, some lines reproducing or giving rise to others, by means of variations or even changes in the way they are grouped." When Kittler elevates substrates and apparatuses over modes of mediation, he forfeits an interest in techniques in favor of an interest in objects. A middle - a compromise, a translation, a corruption, a revelation, a certainty, an infuriation, a touch, a flux - is not a medium, by virtue of it not being a technical media device.

What is the computer, then, as a mode of mediation? Cavell, and he is not the only one simply the most convenient, speaks of the possibility of a medium. The possibility of a medium stands in intimate relation to what a medium is, that is to say, the definition of whatever medium is in question. Thus when one asks "What is the possibility of video?" one is in the same breath asking "What is the definition of video ?" Yet the computer occupies an uneasy position in relation to both definition and possibility, for in many cases the very words that people use to address the question of the computer are those selfsame words "definition" and "possibility." One hears stories about computers being "definitional" machines: not only does computer code operate through the definitions of states and state changes, but computers themselves are those special machines that nominalize the world, that define and model its behavior using variables and functions. Likewise one hears stories about computers being "possibility" machines: they operate not through vague estimations of practice , but through hard, machinic possibilities of truth or falsehood, openness or closed ness, on or off. So I suggest that these terms "definition" and "possibility" might do more harm than good if our aim is to understand the machine and how it works. How can we determine the possibility of new media if new media are nothing but possibility machines? How can we define them if they are already cast from the mold of definition? To adopt a shorthand, one might summarize this state of affairs by asserting that the computer has hitherto been understood in terms of metaphysics. That is to say, when people speak about the computer as an "essencing machine" what they really mean is that computers simulate ontologies, they define horizons of possibility. This is the terrain of metaphysics. These sorts of definitions can be found in Lev Manovich, Janet Murray, and all across the discourse on new media today. The notion is that one must define the medium with reference to a specific "language" or set of essential formal qualities, which then, following the metaphysical logic, manifest in the world a number of instances or effects. (One of the shortcomings of this approach, which I will not delve into very deeply here, is the problem of essentialism, that is to say, the notion that new media objects are a priori a certain way, and it is merely the job of the critic to examine them, and extract the universal laws or languages that constitute their proper functioning in the world; my elders in the anti-essentialist critical tradition - from Homi Bhabha to Donna Haraway and beyond - have rightfully pointed out ​how this leads eventually to a number of political and theoretical problems, least of which being that it forecloses on contingency and historicity, two things that turn out to be quite desirable indeed.) 

I noffensive thus far, however the story becomes more complicated once we acknowledge that the computer is dramatically unlike other media. I nstead offacilitating the metaphysical arrangement, the computer does something quite different: it simulates the metaphysical arrangement. In short, the computer does not remediate other physical media, it remediates metaphysics itself (and hence should be more correctly labeled a metaphysical medium). I shall refrain from saying it remediates mediation itself, but the temptation exists. The metaphysical "medium" of essences and instances is fundamentally dead today. And because it is dead, the medium of essences and instances reemerges in a new mediatic form, the computer. Informatic machines do not participate in the worldly logic of essences and instances, they simulate it. For example, principles like disposability and planned obsolescence, on the one hand, seem to occlude age-old metaphysical problems about the persistence of essential identity in the form of universals or transcendents. Quite frankly, the metaphysical questions are simply not the interesting ones to ask in the face of all this junk. But on the other hand, within the logic of the machine one sees little more than an effigy for, and an undead persistence of, these same metaphysical principles. As was said previously regarding affect, things always reach their perfection in death. 

The remediation argument (handed down from McLuhan and his followers including Kittler) is so full of holes that it is probably best to toss it wholesale. So what to do with the notion of remediating metaphysics itself? If any hope may be found for the remediation theory, it is in the "itself." Television does not simply remediate film, it remediates film itself. The important issue is not that this or that film is scanned and broadcast as the "content" of television (this being one version of McLuhan's remediation argument) . The important issue is that television incorporates film itself, that is, it incorporates the entire , essential cinematic condition. 

Hypotheses governing remediation are quickly put to the test. Kittler's amazing discussion of time axis manipulation in recorded sound is instructive on this point. ,s Recorded sound may remediate performed music, but what is being remediated when a musician plays magnetic tape backward and hears for the first time a true sonic reversal (not simply the reversal of phonemes) ? Or consider the computer. A computer might remediate text and image. But what about a computer crash? What is being remediated at that moment? It can't be text or image anymore, for they are not subject to crashes of this variety. So is a computer crash an example of non-media? In short, the remediation hypothesis leads very quickly to a feedback loop in which much of what we consider to be media are in fact reclassified as non-media, thereby putting into question the suitability of the original hypothesis. 

A brief reference to object-oriented programming will help illustrate the problems surrounding the remediation of metaphysics itself. The metaphysico-Platonic logic of objectoriented systems is awe inspiring, particularly the way in which classes (forms) define objects (instantiated things) : classes are programmer-defined templates, they are (usually) static and state in abstract terms how objects define data types and process data; objects are instances of classes, they are created in the image of a class, they persist for finite amounts of time and eventually are destroyed. On the one hand an idea, on the other a body. On the one hand an essence, on the other an instance. On the one hand the ontological. on the other the on tical. 

Cinema so captured the twentieth-century imagination that it is common to assume that other media are also at root cinematic . And since the cinema is, in general, an ontology (in particular it is a phenomenology) . it seems logical to assume that other media are ontological in the same way. The computer however, is not of an ontological condition, it is on that condition. It does not facilitate or make reference to an arrangement of being, it remediates the very conditions of being itself. If I may be so crude: the medium of the computer is being. But one must take this in an entirely unglamorous way. It is not to say that the computer is the ontological actor par excellence, that it marks the way for some cyborg Dasein of the future . No, the point is that the computer has so degraded the ontological plane, that it may reduce and simulate it using the simple principles of logical relation. Being is its object, not its experience. And if being is merely its object, we ought to look elsewhere to try to understand its experience.

The computer instantiates a practice not a presence, an effect not an object. In other words, if cinema is, in general, an ontology, the computer is, in general, an ethic. Perhaps a useful way to understand the distinction is to differentiate between a language and a calculus. A language operates at the level of description and reference. To encode the world, this is the primary goal of language. (Of course one might also speak about the autonomous space of language, in for example textuality, as a space of interconnection and deferral of meaning, and so on.) A calculus, on the other hand, operates at the level of computation and process. To do something to the world - or if you like to simulate doing something to the world - this is the primary goal of a calculus. With a calculus, one speaks of a system of reasoning, an executable machine that can work through a problem, step by step. The difference between the two, in one aspect, is that a calculus implies a method, whereas a language does not. 

I make a distinction between an ethic, which describes general principles for practice, and the realm of the ethical, which defines such general principles for practice within the context of a specifically human relationship to moral conceptions of the good. So to say that the computer is in general an ethic is not to say that computers are "ethical." Note therefore that mine is not a personification of the machine , but rather an anti-anthropocentrism of the realm of practice. And I will always defend the unpopular notion that, in the end, machines really have no need for humans at all (just in the same way that the Real has no need for us, but we have a horrifying need for it) . Yet in actual fact the machine does have an anthropocentric relation, and this is where one might speak to the question of a computer ethic. As an ethic , the computer takes our action in the world as such as the condition of the world's expression. So in saying practice, I am really indicating a relationship of command. The machine is an ethic because it is premised on the notion that objects are subject to definition and manipulation according to a set of principles for action. The matter at hand is not that of coming to know a world, but rather that of how specific , abstract definitions are executed to form a world. 

Ontology often receives top billing in questions philosophical, even in cases when its hegemony is not warranted. So let me restate the argument: the computer has hitherto been defined ontologically; but this approach (using the ontological concepts of possibility and definition) is dubious because the computer itself is already a matter of possibility and definition; thus if the computer might better be understood in terms of a practice or a set of executions or actions in relation to a world, the proper branch of philosophy that one should turn to is ethics or pragmatics, not ontology or metaphysics; as an ethics, the computer takes our execution of the world as the condition of the world's expression. And this is the interface effect again, only in different language: the computer is not an object, or a creator of objects, it is a process or active threshold mediating between two states. 

Neither an object nor a creator of objects - but where does this get us? First, beyond the response to Kittler, we can now rekindle the response to Manovich begun at the outset. The main difficulty with a book like The Language of New Media, for all its strength, is not simply that it participates in the various squabbles over this or that formal detail. Are games fundamentally about play or about narrative? What has greater semiotic priority, code or interface? In the end these territorial skirmishes do not interest me much. The main difficulty is the simple premise of the book, that new media may be defined via reference to a foundational set of formal qualities, and that these qualities form a coherent language that may be identified across all sorts of new media objects, and above all that the qualities may be read, and may be interpreted. This is what was called, many years ago, structuralism. Let me be clear, it is not so much that these sorts of books are misguided (and not so much to pick on Manovich, for there are scores of other texts that do similar work; his simply is one of the earliest and ​most accomplished examples) , but that their conclusions are unappetizing. This is the crux of the matter: they contain no injunction. They talk more about objects and operations than practices and effects. The problem is not formal definition - for after all I am willing to participate in such a project, suggesting for example that with informatic machines we must fundamentally come to terms with the problem of action. The sticking point is that, in this instance, the use of formalism as a method does not ultimately conform most faithfully to the subject at hand. That is, if the computer were a formal medium, then perhaps our analysis of it could be too . But my position is that it is not exclusively or even predominantly formal. So in a certain sense, Manovich is, shall we say, slightly more avant-garde, performing an "intervention," while my call is much more conservative. If the language (of new media) is really an executable language and not simply a natural one, then would it not make sense for one's critical appraisal to be in step with that same notion of executability? So when I say that these other authors' conclusions are unappetizing it should be taken in the most mundane sense: that the current discourse on "excitable " machines - to put it bluntly - is not that exciting. In other words, if computers must be understood in terms of an ethics (those who wish instead to call it a politics should do so) , then the discourse produced about them must also fulfill various ethical and political expectations. Else what is the good?

Introduction from the book: The Interface Effect by ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY 

by Steven Craig Hickman

As that non-philosopher François Laruelle recently said “It is necessary to welcome a certain return of gnosis against philosophy, institutional and academic conformism (amongst other things), but we have to ask ourselves, how do we finally make room for it when it has been condemned to an eternal rebellion. Is it possible to introduce gnosis into the very foundations of thought, even if it means shaking those foundations? … If there is any future for rebellion (having a gnostic motif rather than a classically philosophical one) then it is a rediscovery of contemporary post-Marxist gnosis.” (Larulle, p. 189: Struggle And Utopia At The End Times Of Philosophy)

​One of the dangers in any hyperstitional endeavor is to literalize what is figural and hyperbolic, spiritual and sacred, thereby turning what is a road to exuberance, waste, and expenditure into a campaign for political mastery and control. As I’ve begun restudying the ancient Gnostics and their heirs, the ancient dualisms both spiritual and political I’ve begun to see a pattern take shape as the ideologues of the past two centuries have battled over the political body of the world. Below is just a flight of anguish in the registry of such strangeness…

In his A Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle Laruelle proposes a non-philosophical critique of non-religion, which he tells us is “urgently needed” (188). The monstrous discourse against which he seeks to test his non-philosophical prowess, along with the use of gnosis as an “a posteriori source” (189), is the Platonic core of Marxism as exposed in the writings of Marx and Engels Hegelian materialism.

An interesting alternative from a more reactionary front is the work of Luciano Luigi Pellicaniwhose Revolutionary Apocalypse: Ideological Roots of Terrorism paints a sharp and bitter picture of the underlying literalisms of the Gnostic Mythos as applied to political movements from the Jacobins to the Communists and Fascists of the last century. The refrain or leitmotif resounding as a small bell in the abyss of socialist and fascist abysses heard in his pages revolves around the “concerned with tragic events that were dominated by one of the most extraordinary anthropological “types” that has ever existed in the history of humanity: the professional revolutionary, generated by the cultural catastrophe provoked by the uncontrollable advance of modernity.” (from preface) … An ‘Orphan of God’ this rebel seeks none other than the purity of the Absolute, the Idea. Even in Marx, as in his modern heirs Badiou and Zizek the Idea of Communism will infest the literal gnosis of their thought, permeate it to the point of obliterating reality in favor of an imagined Socialist Utopia. As Pellicani will have it:

Whereas for the ancient Gnostics the Universe is the great enigma – House of the fallen Demiurge who has shaped the degraded matter of dust, stars, galaxies through the forces of black holes and gravity to his desires; creating an Iron Prison within which to play out his sadistic games upon those forlorn and naked apes, humanity. The dialecticians of socialism, that new gnosis seeks to literalize and reduce this soteriological heterodoxy by infesting it in the movement of History itself, where the new Demiurgic powers and archons are none other than the elite brotherhood of those avant guard Intellectuals who will oust the old gods of Capitalism, and institute a new world of primitive communism: a society of equals living out their lives in a flat world of deregulated and stateless justice. Yet, as we all know what happened with such ideas was just the opposite: this strict voluntarism of the brotherhood of man turned into a primal horde of dictators and tyrannical war, a struggle for bare existence in which humans were sacrificed to the abstract principles that hung over their heads like so many Archons – a materialist Idealism.  Whether in Communist Socialism or Fascist Socialism a collective tyranny ruled by the iron law of necessity dictated the terms and the terminal disease of these systems which in the end failed to deliver on their promise for the simple reason that they were built on a tissue of lies and subterfuge.

But let us return to Laurelle, see what he has discovered in the hinterlands of this rebellious gnosis. Laurelle will begin by asking a specific question of this new gnosis: Is a non-philosophical project capable of carrying the Idea of Revolution to a higher power than Marxism, be it by contesting the philosophies of history and their criminal implementation, or does it remain a theoreticist activity without a tomorrow? (189) For him the key to the project is to save gnosis from its religious and Platonic forbears, to reevaluate the problem of rebellion itself, to interrogate it and even risk the naïve reintroduction of a reactionary and resentful aspect into its sacrosanct halls, yet in doing so to purge these very elements, critique their dark force of contamination. As he’ll state it every “philosophy of force and action is contaminated by division and reciprocity of action and reaction, which makes action turn into reaction” (192). Instead this must be short-circuited through the power of non-action, by the force of “action-without-reaction” (192).

Reading Laurelle is like entering an abstract world of strange relations, his linguistic arsenal exposes itself as a thick and opaque system of non-language, a world where one edges into the borderlands where the forests are so ingrown with thorns and briars that one has difficulty even knowing where one is at much less discovering a path into the inscapes of this wilderness beyond philosophy. He’ll spend pages in shadows, repeating gestures in a language of silence that exposes nothing more than the hint of a non-conceptual movement, and when one is suddenly exposed to the nakedness of some non-concept like ‘Overmaster’ or ‘Rebel’ one almost confuses these with known words rather than the unknowing textures of unbidden non-thought. It’s as if in naming he is actually operating within an unaming process, not a deconstruction of the linguistic blanks (those undecidable junctures sinking into the abyss of non-meaning) but rather a sheer suspension of the word in its absence; neither a tracing of the infinite genealogies of its relations, nor the exposure of its unconcealment, but a jutting up of black forces and sounds out of anterior regions where thought gives birth to its othering… (Lorca would call it “duende”…).

Instead of learning to learn, it is more of a long education in unlearning, not so much a destruction of the rhetorical power of anterior thought as it is the grafting of what cannot be named onto the Real. There is something of the daemonic in this discourse that is itself non-discursive and more of a gamble, a reckoning against the Logos of philosophical speculation. Like Satan in Milton’s great epic Laurelle will speak from the depths of a non-religious struggle, a rebellion into the Real:

The Rebel assumes the habitation of the hylic man of the Gnostics, a sleeper and automaton a “quasi-robot… but without having the materiality of a robot. Because he is Man-in-person or the future…” (205). Why transcendental, then? Because the Rebel is the carrier of the event, the happening and movement which carries the “foreclosing of Humaneity to overmastery” (206). To enact the dictum of Marx to transform the world the Rebel must “constitute his proper domain” by blending mastery and rebellion. Laurelle tells us there is a Kingdom of Rebels, or at least a “City of Heretics and Irreconcilables” (206). The Rebel exists in that transitional moment between past and future, a movement that intervenes indirectly into the material domain enacting its struggles as from the outside in.

The Rebel is this cloned creature of the Angel. “If we, in our way, resume the thread of the vocabulary of (non-)religious gnosis and say the Angel, if we are fond of this term, then it is as just that aspect of the blend of mastery and rebellion but yet such that it appears transformed in its transcendence within the Rebel-subject” (207). Rather than some Platonic Idea incarnating itself in the flesh, Laurelle parses a non-Platonic non-philosophical “critique of the dialectic of Master and Slave” (Hegel) (207). In this strange amalgam of Angels of Philosophy, Rebelious dopplegangers of split realms, of a non-religious gnosis which disturbs both thought and struggle we discover the heart of this gnosis: it “is in reality the exterior perspective of the Angel or the People who come to theory or support a thoreticist position” (208). As he will admit in reality the Angel is a philosopher but in a religious mode by which religion redoubles itself (208). Suddenly Platonism has returned by way of this doubling, this insertion of the transcendental Rebel “is of the order of a transcendental metaphysics, in the tradition that Kant called the “transcendental philosophy of the Ancients” having formed those famous “transcendentals” (Architypes) (209).

Here we see falling back into that ancient form of Gnosticism of the World as absolute Evil. “Hence the result is a hatred of the World that conditions the general structure of the apparatus utilized, and brings with it a certain refusal of cloning, the love of pure theory or theoreticism…” (209). Ultimately this dualising tendency of Platonism undoes itself in the movement of this doubling and redoubling, this cloning that shifts between transcendental and the immanence of the non-religious Rebel who no longer multiplies the mirrors of its existence. (The more I read Laruelle one wonders of the sanity of this project? Like William Blake creating his private mythologies of Los and Orc, Laurelle reenacts the labors of the negative as a hypergnostic strategy that folds itself in an atheistic extremity of immanent quarantine.) In fact he is aware of this double-bind this slippage into a sort of no-man’s zone or schizophrenic delirium:

In some ways Laruelle sees Philosophy as a demiurgic world in which the non-philosopher like an Angel of Philosophy enters its secret labyrinths and closed revolving systems of decision and non-decision as a messenger from the outer spheres troubling its irresolute and error prone habitation. Plato is the Father, Progenitor, and Demiurge of this “completed” realm, while he works the faulty materials from his transcendental position he does not and cannot encompass the exterior of thought, materialism (215). “Non-philosophy risks passing for an excessive wager on intelligence, and on philosophy, while gnosis wagers on popular stupidity, on the poor in spirit” (216). Ultimately non-philosophy hinges on the question of immanence:

Non-philosophy has no doctrinal position of its own, it enters and disturbs the doctrines of the others as so many materials to be worked over, shaped, molded, realigned through the gnosis of a the Real. Philosophy is a sham, a fake simulation of the Real, a broken fabrication of ignorance and silence. The Real is outside language and philosophy, yet both are partially determined by the immanent influx of the real by indirection, a sleight-of-mind trick. The Real is a placeholder for the absolute outside of all thought, that which must not be named; only a mask reveals its dark impenetrability. “So we must hear by the Real a religious notion, God evidently, but yet we are not told how to philosophically reduce it?” (218)

“We must include figures that are sometimes more anonymous and inhuman.” (220) Under the sign of no sign – the empty sign, the World becomes Angel in this non-philosophical gnosis:

​…

In my own reading of the ancient Gnostics both the Aeons and Angels were considered to be both entities and environments through which one moves as through a sphere or dimension both of time and space. Angels were considered messengers from either the powers of that which is within the Ogdoad or eight circles of the various dimensions of the Real. Under both Sufic, Christian-Gnostic, Jewish Kabbalist, and, even aspects of the Hermetic traditions Angels were not to be confused with the daimons of Greece as in Socrates. Rather they were partially the figural archetypes of Plato’s Ideas, as well as the unformed and formless energetic forces of the Real that were apprehended only in that intermediate realm between Intellect and Affective (Passion), the Mundus Imaginalis – the World as Angel and the Angel as World. It was here in this mundane imaginal realm that those shamans, prophets, dreamers were lifted up into figural imaginings undisturbed by either intellect or passion. Laruelle takes this whole tradition and inserts it into a secular revitalization that seems to seek a transvaluation of these myths into a non-philosophical apparatus to explain his use of Angel, Rebel, Overmaster, etc. Laurelle is an acquired taste not something one can suddenly take up and understand at first sitting, rather one must live with his works let them resonate off other non-philosophical worlds. “…it does not appear too extravagant that we set the Platonic clock back to the hour of the crime-World, that in particular we reevaluate the relation which gnosis has placed implicitly between philosophy and the category of the mortiferous (Heimarmene, fatal, deadly… causing spiritual death.) (226).

The only exception to Man is that they kill and philosophize their own kind: “the thought-world proceeds by way of an alienating belief that touches every human being, in knowing that their persecution or their murder, always local and particular, is accepted as being crime par excellence and reflects itself spontaneously as a dimension of the World, form-crime or crime-World (227). In the crime-World victims turn persecutor, persecutors victims; evil is the trap of belief in the crime-World, its mirror repeating the cloning process to an infinity of sets. The merciless precision of mathematical certainty becomes the pure gnosis of evil. Labyrinth or Abyss? Both? One wanders in a vacuum foundering in an endless sea of victims. Which comes first crime or victim? Causal reduplication turns toward inverse relations where time intersects the monstrous. “It is impossible to pass over this without saying more, without saying a non-philosophical word or two regarding the millions of murdered or persecuted left by history and so abandoning them to what may be a new form of generality” (229).

Here in the instant of last-Humaneity the Angel becomes the figure of subject subjected and subjugated to the power of persecution: the Angel becomes that part of Man which comes under persecution by the last-Humaneity. The identity of the Angel as the “divine or superhuman character of man” comes as the last “identity, that after which there will be nothing else, not even nothingness, above all not difference, comes to the subject from the depths of messianicity which forms humans” (230)

Ultimately those who fall between the interstices of the Law and the Book wander the world in heretical non-dispersal: “Heretics are not a people dispersed to the four corners of the Earth, but a people without-World, of a diaspora of every place” (241).  Only those abandoned to the winds, in exile from both heaven and earth, covered in the crimes of a crime-World find “grace in the eyes of Man who first loved them” (231). Man is the Anthropos, the First Man, the Adamic or Kabbalistic progenitor – the body of the dead Demiurge from whom all broken vessels of light and darkness fell into this crime-World. The Gravitas or gravitational pull, the grave and sepulchral force of entropic decay moving through us in the spin of micro-particles, to the largest black holes; this pull toward heat-death and zero. Only in the instant of last things will that stasis and certainty we’ve sought for so long reveal itself as Death – the only absolute. The final gift to the last instance of Humaneity is the gift it gives itself: the gift of euthanasia; death by suicide. Only then will the World-less ones rise from their disaffected exile into a new Earth – an angelic realm devoid of angels or demons – and, some say, or humans, as well.

The article is  taken from: 

by ​Himanshu Damle

In the Hegelian Marxism of Lukács, for instance, the historicist problematic begins from the relativisation of theory, whereby that it is claimed that historical materialism is the “perspective” and “worldview” of the revolutionary class and that, in general, theory (philosophy) is only the coherent systematisation of the ideological worldview of a social group. No distinction of kind exists between theory and ideology, opening the path for the foundational character of ideology, expressed through the Lukácsian claim that the ideological consciousness of a historical subject is the expression of objective relations, and that, correlatively, this historical subject (the proletariat) alienates-expresses a free society by means of a transparent grasp of social processes. The society, as an expression of a single structure of social relations (where the commodity form and reified consciousness are theoretical equivalents) is an expressive totality, so that politics and ideology can be directly deduced from philosophical relations. According to Lukács’ directly Hegelian conception, the historical subject is the unified proletariat, which, as the “creator of the totality of [social] contents”, makes history according to its conception of the world, and thus functions as an identical subject-object of history. The identical subject-object and the transparency of praxis therefore form the telos of the historical process. Lukács reduces the multiplicity of social practices operative within the social formation to the model of an individual “making history,” through the externalisation of an intellectual conception of the world. Lukács therefore arrives at the final element of the historicist problematic, namely, a theorisation of social practice on the model of individual praxis, presented as the historical action of a “collective individual”. This structure of claims is vulnerable to philosophical deconstruction (Gasché) and leads to individualist political conclusions (Althusser).

In the light of the Gramscian provenance of postmarxism, it is important to note that while the explicit target of Althusser’s critique was the Hegelian totality, Althusser is equally critical of the aleatory posture of Gramsci’s “absolute historicism,” regarding it as exemplary of the impasse of radicalised historicism (Reading Capital). Althusser argues that Gramsci preserves the philosophical structure of historicism exemplified by Lukács and so the criticism of “expressive totality,” or spiritual holism, also applies to Gramsci. According to Gramsci, “the philosophy of praxis is absolute ‘historicism,’ the absolute secularisation and earthiness of thought, an absolute humanism of history”. Gramsci’s is an “absolute” historicism because it subjects the “absolute knowledge” supposed to be possible at the Hegelian “end of history” to historicisation-relativisation: instead of absolute knowledge, every truly universal worldview becomes merely the epochal totalisation of the present. Consequently, Gramsci rejects the conception that a social agent might aspire to “absolute knowledge” by adopting the “perspective of totality”. If anything, this exacerbates the problems of historicism by bringing the inherent relativism of the position to the surface. Ideology, conceptualised as the worldview of a historical subject (revolutionary proletariat, hegemonic alliance), forms the foundation of the social field, because in the historicist lens a social system is cemented by the ideology of the dominant group. Philosophy (and by extension, theory) represents only the systematisation of ideology into a coherent doctrine, while politics is based on ideological manipulation as its necessary precondition. Thus, for historicism, every “theoretical” intervention is immediately a political act, and correlatively, theory becomes the direct servant of ideology.

The article is  taken from: 

by Terence Blake

The problem with Laruelle’s attempt to escape from philosophical sufficiency is that he is only able to do so under the sign of a sketchy fusion, or suture, between philosophy and one or other of its conditions. This inevitably results in a form of reductionism passing itself off as genuine conceptual creation within a renewed, or non-standard, philosophy.

Laruelle’s sutures pass fluidly from science to ethics to psychoanalysis to aesthetics to marxism to gnostic religion. This has led to a fragmented Anglophone reception where each disciple latches on to the suture that confirms their own pre-existing theoretical engagements. Instead of dethroning the complacent self-absorption of the sutural specialist, Laruelle’s non-philosophy has elevated it to new heights.

​This problem of reinforced sutures leading to a multiplicity of caricatural reductionisms (pseudo-science, crypto-religion, quasi-art, neo-marxism) is not so much an issue of translation as one of cultural transposition. The transplantation often results in partial petrifaction and de-philosophisation. This is not unique to the Anglophone adaptation of Laruelle’s ideas, as many other French philosophers (Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze) have undergone the same fate.

In the case of Laruelle this “de-philosophisation” has seemed to serve his own message of non-philosophisation, but is in fact its involuntary parody. The regression to older styles of structuralist theorisation is packaged as a progress in rigour and in relevant content.

An intriguing example of this de-philosophised regression is the expression employed by some Laruelleans “the syntax of the real”, which embodies a confusion of the real object and the theoretical object, recovering a pre-Althusserian conceptual constellation under a semiotic masquerade.

I say “masquerade” deliberately, because such regressive formulas show that words are being employed as de-philosophised jargon rather than as conceptual expressions. This regression adds to the regrettable state of concept-blindness (instigated and enforced by object-oriented ontologies) rather than fighting against it.

The article is taken from:

by Himanshu Damle

Kant’s first antinomy makes the error of the excluded third option, i.e. it is not impossible that the universe could have both a beginning and an eternal past. If some kind of metaphysical realism is true, including an observer-independent and relational time, then a solution of the antinomy is conceivable. It is based on the distinction between a microscopic and a macroscopic time scale. Only the latter is characterized by an asymmetry of nature under a reversal of time, i.e. the property of having a global (coarse-grained) evolution – an arrow of time – or many arrows, if they are independent from each other. Thus, the macroscopic scale is by definition temporally directed – otherwise it would not exist.

On the microscopic scale, however, only local, statistically distributed events without dynamical trends, i.e. a global time-evolution or an increase of entropy density, exist. This is the case if one or both of the following conditions are satisfied: First, if the system is in thermodynamic equilibrium (e.g. there is degeneracy). And/or second, if the system is in an extremely simple ground state or meta-stable state. (Meta-stable states have a local, but not a global minimum in their potential landscape and, hence, they can decay; ground states might also change due to quantum uncertainty, i.e. due to local tunneling events.) Some still speculative theories of quantum gravity permit the assumption of such a global, macroscopically time-less ground state (e.g. quantum or string vacuum, spin networks, twistors). Due to accidental fluctuations, which exceed a certain threshold value, universes can emerge out of that state. Due to some also speculative physical mechanism (like cosmic inflation) they acquire – and, thus, are characterized by – directed non-equilibrium dynamics, specific initial conditions, and, hence, an arrow of time.

It is a matter of debate whether such an arrow of time is

​1) irreducible, i.e. an essential property of time,

2) governed by some unknown fundamental and not only phenomenological law,

3) the effect of specific initial conditions or

4) of consciousness (if time is in some sense subjective), or
​
5) even an illusion.

Many physicists favour special initial conditions, though there is no consensus about their nature and form. But in the context at issue it is sufficient to note that such a macroscopic global time-direction is the main ingredient of Kant’s first antinomy, for the question is whether this arrow has a beginning or not.

Time’s arrow is inevitably subjective, ontologically irreducible, fundamental and not only a kind of illusion, thus if some form of metaphysical idealism for instance is true, then physical cosmology about a time before time is mistaken or quite irrelevant. However, if we do not want to neglect an observer-independent physical reality and adopt solipsism or other forms of idealism – and there are strong arguments in favor of some form of metaphysical realism -, Kant’s rejection seems hasty. Furthermore, if a Kantian is not willing to give up some kind of metaphysical realism, namely the belief in a “Ding an sich“, a thing in itself – and some philosophers actually insisted that this is superfluous: the German idealists, for instance -, he has to admit that time is a subjective illusion or that there is a dualism between an objective timeless world and a subjective arrow of time. Contrary to Kant’s thoughts: There are reasons to believe that it is possible, at least conceptually, that time has both a beginning – in the macroscopic sense with an arrow – and is eternal – in the microscopic notion of a steady state with statistical fluctuations.

Is there also some physical support for this proposal?

Surprisingly, quantum cosmology offers a possibility that the arrow has a beginning and that it nevertheless emerged out of an eternal state without any macroscopic time-direction. (Note that there are some parallels to a theistic conception of the creation of the world here, e.g. in the Augustinian tradition which claims that time together with the universe emerged out of a time-less God; but such a cosmological argument is quite controversial, especially in a modern form.) So this possible overcoming of the first antinomy is not only a philosophical conceivability but is already motivated by modern physics. At least some scenarios of quantum cosmology, quantum geometry/loop quantum gravity, and string cosmology can be interpreted as examples for such a local beginning of our macroscopic time out of a state with microscopic time, but with an eternal, global macroscopic timelessness.

To put it in a more general, but abstract framework and get a sketchy illustration, consider the figure.

Physical dynamics can be described using “potential landscapes” of fields. For simplicity, here only the variable potential (or energy density) of a single field is shown. To illustrate the dynamics, one can imagine a ball moving along the potential landscape. Depressions stand for states which are stable, at least temporarily. Due to quantum effects, the ball can “jump over” or “tunnel through” the hills. The deepest depression represents the ground state.

In the common theories the state of the universe – the product of all its matter and energy fields, roughly speaking – evolves out of a metastable “false vacuum” into a “true vacuum” which has a state of lower energy (potential). There might exist many (perhaps even infinitely many) true vacua which would correspond to universes with different constants or laws of nature. It is more plausible to start with a ground state which is the minimum of what physically can exist. According to this view an absolute nothingness is impossible. There is something rather than nothing because something cannot come out of absolutely nothing, and something does obviously exist. Thus, something can only change, and this change might be described with physical laws. Hence, the ground state is almost “nothing”, but can become thoroughly “something”. Possibly, our universe – and, independent from this, many others, probably most of them having different physical properties – arose from such a phase transition out of a quasi atemporal quantum vacuum (and, perhaps, got disconnected completely). Tunneling back might be prevented by the exponential expansion of this brand new space. Because of this cosmic inflation the universe not only became gigantic but simultaneously the potential hill broadened enormously and got (almost) impassable. This preserves the universe from relapsing into its non-existence. On the other hand, if there is no physical mechanism to prevent the tunneling-back or makes it at least very improbable, respectively, there is still another option: If infinitely many universes originated, some of them could be long-lived only for statistical reasons. But this possibility is less predictive and therefore an inferior kind of explanation for not tunneling back.

Another crucial question remains even if universes could come into being out of fluctuations of (or in) a primitive substrate, i.e. some patterns of superposition of fields with local overdensities of energy: Is spacetime part of this primordial stuff or is it also a product of it? Or, more specifically: Does such a primordial quantum vacuum have a semi-classical spacetime structure or is it made up of more fundamental entities? Unique-universe accounts, especially the modified Eddington models – the soft bang/emergent universe – presuppose some kind of semi-classical spacetime. The same is true for some multiverse accounts describing our universe, where Minkowski space, a tiny closed, finite space or the infinite de Sitter space is assumed. The same goes for string theory inspired models like the pre-big bang account, because string and M- theory is still formulated in a background-dependent way, i.e. requires the existence of a semi-classical spacetime. A different approach is the assumption of “building-blocks” of spacetime, a kind of pregeometry also the twistor approach of Roger Penrose, and the cellular automata approach of Stephen Wolfram. The most elaborated accounts in this line of reasoning are quantum geometry (loop quantum gravity). Here, “atoms of space and time” are underlying everything.

Though the question whether semiclassical spacetime is fundamental or not is crucial, an answer might be nevertheless neutral with respect of the micro-/macrotime distinction. In both kinds of quantum vacuum accounts the macroscopic time scale is not present. And the microscopic time scale in some respect has to be there, because fluctuations represent change (or are manifestations of change). This change, reversible and relationally conceived, does not occur “within” microtime but constitutes it. Out of a total stasis nothing new and different can emerge, because an uncertainty principle – fundamental for all quantum fluctuations – would not be realized. In an almost, but not completely static quantum vacuum however, macroscopically nothing changes either, but there are microscopic fluctuations.

The pseudo-beginning of our universe (and probably infinitely many others) is a viable alternative both to initial and past-eternal cosmologies and philosophically very significant. Note that this kind of solution bears some resemblance to a possibility of avoiding the spatial part of Kant’s first antinomy, i.e. his claimed proof of both an infinite space without limits and a finite, limited space: The theory of general relativity describes what was considered logically inconceivable before, namely that there could be universes with finite, but unlimited space, i.e. this part of the antinomy also makes the error of the excluded third option. This offers a middle course between the Scylla of a mysterious, secularized creatio ex nihilo, and the Charybdis of an equally inexplicable eternity of the world.

In this context it is also possible to defuse some explanatory problems of the origin of “something” (or “everything”) out of “nothing” as well as a – merely assumable, but never provable – eternal cosmos or even an infinitely often recurring universe. But that does not offer a final explanation or a sufficient reason, and it cannot eliminate the ultimate contingency of the world.

The article  is  taken from:

by Himanshu Damle

Lukács would be the condensation of everything that is deemed politically regressive about the social theory of “the rationalist ‘dictatorship’ of Enlightenment” (Ernesto Laclau New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time), of just about everything that the new social logic of postmodern culture brings into crisis. In this context – which is theoretically and politically hostile to the concept of totality – Laclau and Mouffe’s recasting of the Gramscian concept of hegemony is designed to avoid the Lukácsian conception of society as an “expressive totality”. For Lukács, a single principle is “expressed” in all social phenomena, so that every aspect of the social formation is integrated into a closed system that connects the forces and social relations of production to politics and the juridical apparatus, cultural forms and class-consciousness. By contrast, Laclau and Mouffe insist that the social field is an incomplete totality consisting of a multitude of transitory hegemonic “epicentres” and characterised by a plurality of competing discourses. The proliferation of democratic forms of struggle by the new social movements is thereby integrated into a pluralistic conception of the social field that emphasises the negativity and dispersion underlying all social identities. “Radical and plural democracy,” Laclau and Mouffe contend, represents a translation of socialist strategy into the detotalising paradigm of postmodern culture.

For Lukács, the objective of a new conception of praxis is to establish the dialectical unity of theory and practice, so as to demonstrate that the proletariat, as the operator of a transparent praxis, is the identical subject-object of the historical process. The subject of history is therefore the creator of the contents of the social totality, and to the extent that this subject attains self-reflexivity, it is also the conscious generator of social forms. This enables Lukács to emphasise the revolutionary character of class conscious as coextensive with revolutionary action. Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of discursive practice has the same effect – with this difference, that Laclau and Mouffe deny that discursive practices can become wholly transparent to social agents (Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Towards a Radical Democratic Politics). By reinscribing the concept of praxis within a deconstruction of Marxism, Laclau and Mouffe theorise a new concept of discursive practice that “must pierce the entire material density of the multifarious institutions” upon which it operates, since it has as its objective a decisive break with the material/mental dichotomy. “Rejection of the thought/reality dichotomy,” they propose, “must go together with a re-thinking and interpenetration of the categories which have up until now been considered exclusive of one another”.

Critically, this means a fusion of the hitherto distinct categories of (subjective) discourse and (objective) structure in the concept of “hegemonic articulation”. This theoretical intervention is simultaneously a decisive political advance, because it now becomes clear that, for instance, “the equivalence constituted through communist enumeration [of the alliance partners within a bid for political hegemony] is not the discursive expression of a real movement constituted outside of discourse; on the contrary, this enumerative discourse is a real force which contributes to the moulding and constitution of social relations”. In other words, the opposition between theory and practice, discursive practice and structural conditions, is resolved by the new theory of hegemonic articulation. The operator of these discursive practices – the new agent of social transformation – is at once the instigator of social relations and the formulator of discourses on the social.

The most significant difference between Lukács and Laclau and Mouffe is their respective evaluations of Hegelian dialectics. Where, for Lukács, a return to dialectical philosophy held out the prospect of a renewal of Marxian social theory, for Laclau and Mouffe it is “dialectical necessity” that constitutes the major obstacle to a radical postmodern politics. Laclau and Mouffe’s fundamental objection to dialectics is to the substitution of a logically necessary sequence for the contingency of the historical process. They applaud the dialectical dissolution of fixity but deplore the supposed inversion of contingency into necessity and the imposition of a teleology of reconciliation. Hegel’s work, therefore, “appears as located in a watershed between two epochs” and is evaluated as “ambiguous” rather than simply pernicious. On the one hand, Laclau and Mouffe reject the Hegelian notion that “history and society … have a rational and intelligible structure”. This is regarded as an Enlightenment conception fundamentally incompatible with the postmodern emphasis on contingency, finitude and historicity. On the other hand, however, “this synthesis contains all the seeds of its own dissolution, as the rationality of history can only be affirmed at the price of introducing contradiction into the field of reason”. Once the impossibility of including contradiction within rationality is asserted, it then becomes clear that the “logical” transitions between historical “stages” are secured contingently:

It is precisely here that Hegel’s modernity lies: for him, identity is never positive and closed in itself but is constituted as transition, relation, difference. If, however, Hegel’s logical relations become contingent transitions, the connections between them cannot be fixed as moments of an underlying or sutured totality. This means that they are articulations.

This is not a rejection of Hegel but a re-interpretation. Interpreted in this light, Hegel’s “logical” relations are the language games that frame social practices – rather than formally rational structures deducible a priori – and their “transitions” are only the contingent connections created by political articulations. In opposition to the logically necessary sequence of closed totalities, Laclau and Mouffe insist on a historically contingent series of open discursive formations. Resolutely contesting the category of the totality, Laclau and Mouffe declare that:

The incomplete character of every totality leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of “society” as a sutured and self-defined totality. “Society” is not a valid object of discourse.

So where Lukács once declared that “the category of the totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science”, Laclau and Mouffe now announce, by contrast, that totality is an illusion because “‘society’ as a unitary and intelligible object which grounds its own partial processes is an impossibility”. Where Hegel was, there deconstruction shall be – or so it would seem.

The article is  taken  from: 

by ​Terence Blake

Laruelle has classified Deleuze’s thought within the category of the “philosophies of difference” and has further criticised it as remaining within the confines of the principle of philosophical sufficiency. This claim may be plausible applied to DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, but it certainly is falsified by Deleuze’s succeeeding books, starting with LOGIC OF SENSE.

Given that Laruelle makes far-reaching claims about his “non-philosophy” and about its purported “scientific” use of philosophical material, it is interesting to see that he shows no sign of taking such falsifying instances seriously, and prefers to remain in the element of sweeping generalities. More generally Laruelle is constantly analysing and evaluating rival philosophical positions in terms of criteria and standards that he himself makes no effort to satisfy.

It has been the constant thesis of this blog that the sorts of criticisms that Laruelle makes of his contemporaries are not original nor are they of any actual relevance. Rather, they are long-winded out-dated parasitic re-formulations of self-criticisms made by these thinkers many years before Laruelle began publishing his “non-philosophical” works.

An interesting example of this constant process of creative self-criticism can be seen in Deleuze’s passage from a philosophy of difference in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION to a philosophy-fiction in LOGIC OF SENSE. While DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION (1968) is a work of philosophy of classical facture, still presenting a diversity of concepts under the umbrella of a totalising concept, that of “difference”, LOGIC OF SENSE (1969) breaks with that model from the beginning.

Indeed in this book from 1969 Deleuze anticipates not only Laruelle’s “non-philosophy”, by working in terms of the marriage of philosophy with an outside, but also its later evolution into “non-standard philosophy”. On page one of the preface Deleuze tells us:

This is no doubt one of the unavowed sources of inspiration for Laruelle’s own notion of “philo-fiction”, expounded forty years later, when Laruelle tardively showed signs of at last breaking with his antiquated scientism.

Laruelle’s work, wittingly or unwittingly, forms part of a more general movement to re-write the history of Continental Philosophy of the last fifty years by replacing subtle and complexly creative research programs such as Deleuze’s (and also those of Foucault, Althusser, Bourdieu, Derrida, and Lyotard) with simplistic stereotypes that are designed to provide a flattering contrast for our current “nouveaux philosophes”.

Despite his obscurantist prose Laruelle’s vision of philosophy is no exception to this movement of simplification of thought by falsification of the historical record. His “non-philosophy” is from this point of view merely a neo-philosophy.

This sketchy analysis of the pivotal role of LOGIC OF SENSE in Deleuze’s path of research is borne out by his remarks in the “Author’s Note for the Italian Edition of Logic of Sense“, published in the collection of essays, Two Regimes of Madness. Deleuze explicitly draws attention to the change in style inaugurated with this book, and affirms that it is part and parcel of a more encompassing conceptual change:

Laruelle is blind to such heuristic ruptures, seeing only a continuous reign of “sufficient” philosophy until his own attempts at something different.

One particular instance of this blindness lies in Laruelle’s contribution to the continuing vision of Deleuze as a philosopher of “difference”. Deleuze himself emphasises that all his concepts take on new roles in LOGIC OF SENSE, as they are reorganised according to the new dimension of the surface. He claims that the concepts remain the same but that their sense is transformed. Interestingly, his list of concepts (multiplicities, singularities, intensities, events, infinity, problems, paradoxes and proportions) makes no mention of “difference”, supposedly the key concept of his philosophy.

Another major blind spot of Laruelle’s is the transformation of the image of thought that Deleuze analyses in terms of a changing geography and topology of thought. Deleuze tells us of the movement along a vertical axis from Pre-Socratic depths to Platonic heights to the return to Pre-Socratic depths, etc. This displacement back and forth from heights to depths defines classical philosophy for Deleuze as movement within a vertical axis, that we may well call the axis of sufficiency.

For Deleuze the non-philosophical step outside sufficiency does not come with the return to the depths (Boehme, Schelling, Schopenhauer, ealy Nietzsche) but with the exploration of a new axis of thought, the horizontal axis of the surface of immanence (Nietzsche after the break with Wagner).

In contrast, there is still too much of the “depths” in Laruelle’s movements. His concept of the “One-in-One” is vertically abyssal rather than superficial, and his determination in the last instance reinstates the verticality of a determination that plays with the surface of multiple causalities (overdetermination) only to collapse them all vertically in the “final” instance.

In LOGIC OF SENSE Deleuze breaks with this vertical axis:

A key transformation coming with that break with the vertical axis is in the concept of intensity, which is reassigned to the surface. On the role of intensity in DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION Deleuze affirms

This whole tradition of the vertical axis, which is Deleuze’s equivalent of Laruelle’s axis of sufficiency, is analysed and left behind in the course of, and in the terms of, Deleuze’s own self-analysis. This move accounts for the striking difference in the style of the two books.

Deleuze reassigns intensity from the depths to the surface and tells us that his very use of language changed. He wanted the language to be ever-more intensive, and for it to move along a path of various flows and gusts.

Note: the translation talks of “spurts”, but this is more reminiscent of a puny water pistol. “Gusts” would be a better translation. Gusts of wind, as in a storm, not spurts, or squirts.

All these changes work in the sense of moving away from sufficiency. However, Deleuze does not think that the book is fully successful in that attempt. He argues that his book is marred by remnants of complacency and connivance with respect to psychoanalysis:

In his defence, Deleuze argues here that he was trying to divest psychoanalysis of its own principle of sufficiency as “depth” psychology and to align it with the immanence of the surface and its series.

Lest we conclude overhastily that surface and series have become the totalising concepts of a new instance of philosophical sufficiency Deleuze finishes this short note informing us that the next book ANTI-OEDIPUS is no longer authored by a classical subject, Deleuze the sufficient philosopher, but by a collaborative subject (Deleuze and Guattari).

The style changes, becoming more intensive, and the key concepts disappear:

The practice of heuristic rupture is one of the ways in which Deleuze breaks with the risk of sufficiency in LOGIC OF SENSE and in the succeeding works.

The article is taken from:

​by ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY

​Part II began the process of withdrawing from the standard model. Relying first on Deleuze and Marx, we saw the difficulties of actually existing digitality. With the infrastructure of the world understood as essentially digital and computational, a number of alternative logics and conditions become important, among them the irreversibility of relation and the generic determination of the material base. 

​Several areas remain to be explored. Because if the event and the prevent operate on being as apparently "political" forces, the one bent on transforming it internally and the other on rendering it determined and impersonal, the exact nature of these forces remains to be seen. Are the event and the prevent merely two different avatars for the political, or do they reveal the distinction between the political and the ethical? Such is the agenda of the last two chapters of the book, chapters 9 and 10. 

​Yet before addressing the political and the ethical in earnest, we turn to the art and science of the one. Aesthetics is a recurring theme in Laruelle's work. He has written two short books on photography and has several essays on art and related topics, including texts on color, light, seeing, drawing, dance, music, and technology.

​Technology or science? And what of art? Laruelle's position on these \ different domains is not entirely intuitive. For example, he does not follow someone like Heidegger and reestablish a lineage from technology back to art, via the Greek concept of techne. Nor is he phobic of science following those skeptical of industrial modernity. Instead Laruelle is something ​​of a purist about technology and science. He denigrates technology and elevates science, elevating it to such a degree that it becomes synonymous with non -standard philosophy overall.

​The technology that surrounds us, from cars to computers to rocket ships, is all rather repulsive for Laruelle. Such technology provides little more than an avenue for transit or mediation in and out of things. From this perspective philosophy is the ultimate technology, because philosophy is the ultimate vehicle of transit, and philosophers the ultimate mailmen. Philosophy is all technology wrapped into one, for it is at once mirror, conveyance, energizer, and processor. By contrast, science is the realm of immanence and unilateral relation. Science is the realm of discovery, axiomatics, and theory. If philosophy were a science it would remain immanent to itself, never transiting anywhere, never synthesizing or reflecting on anything. 

Philosophy would remain where it is, in the dark. But philosophy, always quick to demonstrate its illuminating potential, is never in the dark. "Our philosophers are children;' Laruelle reminds us. They are children "who are afraid of the Dark"

Alternations of light and dark are the fuel of philosophy. From Plato's cave to Paul de Man's "blindness and insight;' philosophers are forever transiting between shadow and illumination. Yet darkness itself is not the problem. The problem is alternation. The problem is not that philosophy is dark. The problem is that philosophy is not dark enough. 

According to Laruelle we must jump further, not from light to dark but from dark to black, from the darkness of philosophy to the blackness of science. So forget your rocket ships and rocket cars. Leave behind the scaffolding of reflection and alternation. "Do not think technology first;' Laruelle commands. "Think science first'".

​Science is, in this way, the least illuminating profession, because it surpasses mere darkness by way of a profound blackness. Never afraid of the dark, Laruelle's science begins from the posture of the black, communing with the agnostic darkness of the real. 

​But what is this darkness? What is this black universe of which Laruelle sings? Is black a color, and if so can we see it? 

Alternations between black and white drive philosophy, but they have also long been the subject of art, from chiaroscuro in Caravaggio, to the shadows in Night of the Hunter (1955). Just as there is an art of light, there is also an art of dark. Just as art has forever pursued what Victorian critic Matthew Arnold called "sweetness and light;' it has also been corrupted by the gloomy gloaming of blackest black. 

What are the great explorations of black in art? Chief among them would be the Malevich square, or Ad Reinhardt's black paintings, or the Rothko Chapel in Houston, or some of Stan Brakhage's films with their murky darkness, or Guy Debord's notorious "Howls for Sade" (1952), a film that uses its blackness as a kind of weapon. But is the black screen in Debord truly black? Is the Reinhardt canvas a black canvas? 

All these heroic experiments are no more black than a bright summer day. As attempts to capture black they are abject failures, and all the worse for trying to be so avant-garde, so utterly modern. Such meditations on the color black are quickly revealed to be what they are, meditations. Black appears only in alternation with white, just as quietude is punctuated by noise, and immobile finitude by infinite mobility. 

​The black screen in "Howls for Sade" is not black, but a black box. The film offers us blackness, but only in as much as the blackness can withdraw from other things, in this case from whiteness or from the audible voice. These are all works of alternation, of oscillation into and out of the black. Thus they are properly labeled "reflections" on black even "howls" for black-because black never appears in these artworks, only the optical alternations of black-against-white, black-against-color, or black-against-sound. 

​Deleuze explains such phenomena near the end of his writings on cinema:

Reinhardt's paintings are the ultimate false lure. What appears at first glance to be black quickly shifts into a complex economy of micro shades of black, each with a different tone and luminosity. Richard Serra's drawings using black paint sticks-or some of Gerhard Richter's works-are similar in their reinvention of an entire color cosmos thriving both on the interior of black and as black relates to its own exterior. 

There is thus nothing black about these works, just as there is little silence in that notorious John Cage composition 4'3]'' in which no notes are played. Instead, these works are works of division and alternation, of contrasted extremities, of absence appearing as presence and presence returning to absence. These are meditative works, reflective works, great metaphysical works, great philosophical works even. But at the same time, merely reflective, merely metaphysical, merely philosophical. 

"Philosophers have divided up the undivided simplicity of the nothingness and the all;' Laruelle reminds us, "but human eyes have never divided up the unique night:' The universe is, for Laruelle, a night universe, and to look at the universe means to look into the darkness of the night. "Vision is foundational when it abandons perception and sees in-the-night:' In other words, vision is never vision when the lights are ablaze. Vision is only vision when it looks avidly into the pitch black of night. Likewise art will never be art until it ceases to represent and begins to look into the Stygian monochrome, that blackness that has yet to be exposed to any living light.

Is this all just another flavor of modern nihilism? Just another existentialism? Laruelle answers no: "The philosophical eye wants to see the nothing in man's eye rather than see nothing. The philosopher wants to look man's nothingness in the eye rather than be a nothingness of vision" -nothing in man's eye versus seeing nothing. Recall those horrible nothing worlds of the existentialists. The existentialist can see man as nothing; the existentialist might even be able to see the world as nothing. But he cannot yet see nothing as nothing. 

Philosophers have long asked why there is something rather than nothing. For Aristotle the question was always: Why is there something rather than something else? For Nietzsche or Kierkegaard it was: Why is there nothing rather than something? But for Laruelle the question is poorly formed from the outset. For Laruelle the question might rather be, Why, in looking at nothing, do we still never see nothing? For as Parmenides said, nothing comes from nothing. "Man is this middle between night and nothing" writes Laruelle. Or rather, "less than this middle: nothing which is only nothing; night which is only night."

​But still, what is this darkness, and where is the light? How does dark relate to black, and light to white? 

What is a hermeneutic light? Of the many unresolved debates surrounding the work of Heidegger, the following question returns with some regularity: Is Heidegger's phenomenology ultimately a question of herme' neutics and interpretation, or is it ultimately a question of immanence and truth? Is Dase in forever questing after a Being that withdraws, or does it somehow achieve a primordial communion with the truth of Being? In other words, is Heidegger the philosopher of blackness or the philosopher of light? 

​Hermeneutics was an important topic for theory in the 196os. Hence it is not surprising that Heidegger, who was being rediscovered and rethought during that period, would often be framed in terms of hermeneutics. To be sure, the critical tradition handed down from post-structuralism leaves little room for modes of immanence and immediacy, modes that were marginalized as essentialist or otherwise unpleasant (often for good reason). Thus it would be easy to assimilate into the tradition of hermeneutics a figure like Heidegger, with his complicated withdrawal of Being. For where else would he fit?

​Indeed it is common to categorize Heidegger there. But is it not also possible to show that Heidegger is a philosopher of immanence? Is it not also possible to show that he speaks as much to illumination as to withdrawal? That he speaks as much to the intuitive and proximate as to the detached and distanced? 

For instance, consider his treatment of gelichtet, a word stemming from the noun for "light:' In the chapter on the "there" in Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of Dasein as lumen (one of two Latin words meaning "light") and defines Dasein in terms of the "clearing" (gelichtet) or "illumination" of Being: 

No one can deny the cryptological tendencies in Heidegger. No one can deny that, for Heidegger, Being likes to hide itself. But this is far outweighed by the fact that Dasein can indeed be experienced as an authentic disclosedness of Being, by the fact that phenomenology preaches-without irony or pathos-that one may strive "toward the things themselves" and actually arrive at them. 

​Recall that hermeneutics is the science of suspicion, the science of the insincere. But Heidegger, like Socrates before him, is the consummate philosopher of sincerity. The phenomenological subject is the one who has an authentic and sincere relationship with Being. Because of this, we should not be too quick to consign Heidegger to the history of hermeneutics. Hermes's natural habitat is teeming with deception; his economies are economies in the absence of trust. But Heidegger lives in a different world. His world is a world of authentic presence, of questing after truth. 

Thus running in parallel to the Hermes-Heidegger, the Heidegger who touches on the tradition of interpretation and exchange in the face of the withdrawal of Being, there is also an Iris-Heidegger, the Heidegger who touches on the tradition of illumination and iridescence along the pathway of seeking. Heidegger's is not simply a Hermes narrative, but also an Iris arc.

When Heidegger evokes the lumen naturale of mankind he is making reference to one of two kinds of light. The light of mankind is a terrestrial light. When bodies with their anima (their vital force) are vigorous and alive, they are illuminated with the light of the lumen naturale. Lumen is the light of life, the light of this world, the light that sparkles from the eyes of consciousness.

​But there is a second type of light. Being carries its own light that is not the light of man. This light is a cosmological light, a divine light, the light of the phenomena, light as grace, or, as Laruelle says, the kind of light that does not originate from a star. 

​So just as there are two Heideggers, there are also two lights. One light is the light of transparent bodies, clear and mobile. It is the light of this world, experienced through passage and illumination. The other light is the light of opaque bodies. It is the light of color, a holy light, experienced only through the dull emanation of things. 

Dioptrics and catoptrics. If there exists a natural lightness, is there not also a natural darkness? And if there are two kinds of light are there not also two kinds of dark? 

​Such questions lie at the heart of Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, a hallucinatory mix of theory and fiction that views the Earth as a quasi-living, demonic creature, oil the blood in its veins. Oil petroleum is black, of course, in color if not also in its moral decrepitude. But oil is also light, because it is a transmutation of the light of the sun. Oil is the geological product of sunlight, first via photosynthesis into vegetable matter, and second via the decomposition of vegetable matter over time. In this sense, oil is, as Negarestani calls it, the "black corpse of the sun".

​But before looking more closely at the two kinds of darkness, let us examine the two kinds of lightness a bit further. Negarestani writes about fog and light. He writes about the "mist mare:' But what is mist? He writes of Pazuzu, the wind, the dust enforcer. But what is dust? 

Of course, dust and fog have certain obfuscatory qualities. They strangle the light and interfere with one's ability to see. But at the same time they have their own form of luminosity. Fog glows with a certain ambience. It transforms a space of absolute coordinates into a proximal zone governed by thresholds of intelligibility. (Fog is thus first and foremost a category of existence-there can be no ontological fog; that would be something else.) Fog is a dioptric phenomenon, even if ironically it acts to impede vision. It is a question of light passing through materials, and likewise a question of the light of mankind passing through (or being impeded from passing through) a proximal space. This means that fog is part of the luminaria. Fog gives off no light of its own, even if it has its own luminosity by virtue of filtering and passing along a light originating from elsewhere. 

The term dioptric has been broached, and in order to continue it will be necessary to define this term in some detail, along with the related term catoptric. These two terms are part of the science of optics, and hence the being of light, but they describe the dealings of light in two very different ways.

Dioptrics refers to light when it is refracted, that is to say, when light passes through transparent materials such as glass or water. As a branch of optical science, dioptrics is concerned principally with lenses. Yet things not specifically conceived as lenses can also act as such. Some of the best examples are the tiny water droplets contained in clouds, spherical in shape, that allow light passing through them to refract twice, once as the light enters the droplet and again as it leaves. Prisms also offer a fine illustration of dioptric phenomena; like a water droplet, a prism splits light into color bands because different wavelengths of light refract differently. A dioptric device can therefore divide white light into colored light, just as it can merge colored light into white light again, given the right conditions. 

Catoptrics refers to light when it is reflected, that is to say, when light bounces off objects in the world. Whereas dioptrics is concerned with lenses, catoptrics is concerned principally with mirrors. All sorts of objects can act as mirrors proper-polished glass or metal, the surface of water. But catoptrics also includes the duller quasi-mirror effects of plain objects, which reflect light and allow themselves to be visible to the eye. Just as the prism can produce what Goethe called "physical color;' there is also a color capacity in catoptric phenomena, because some objects reflect certain colors and absorb others (Goethe's "chemical color"). So if, in general, dioptric phenomena are the phenomena of prisms and lenses, catoptric phenomena are the phenomena of mirrors, screens, walls, and opaque surfaces.

In short, the former is a question of transparency, while the latter is a question of opacity. Dioptrics is a perspective (seeing through), while catoptrics is a speculum or aspect (reflecting, looking at).

Recall the god of so many aspects, so many epithets. He is Hermes, messenger to Zeus. And yet his counterpart Iris, messenger to Hera, has relatively few epithets; her business is that of shining through. In this way Hermes is the aspect god, the god of catoptrics, and Iris is the perspective goddiess, the goddess of dioptrics. The effects of refraction "remain within" 'a transparent physical object such as a glass lens, and hence are to be considered a phenomenon of immanence. By contrast ​the effects of reflection are to obscure the source object, to leverage the very opacity of the object for some other end, and hence they are to be considered a phenomenon of hermeneutics. 

These same principles can be stated in different terms. Both dioptrics and catoptrics have a special relationship to depth; however, the distinction between the two could not be more stark. Reflection is semiotically deep, that is, it is deep in the domain of meaning, whereas refraction is experientially deep, that is, it is deep in the domain of subjective experience. Saying "semiotically deep" means that opaque reflection creates a depth model wherein two opposing layers, one manifest and one latent, work together to create meaning. This is the same depth model that exists in Freud or Marx. Saying "experientially deep" means that transparent refraction creates a depth model wherein a real sense of volumetric space is created and presented to a viewing subject. This is the same depth model that exists in Heidegger (or even in others like Kant). There are veils covering the soul, but there are also telescopes for viewing the heavens-the one is an aspect, the other a perspective. 

​Yet beyond exhibiting depth in two contrasting ways, catoptrics and dioptrics are also equally distinct in how they deal with flatness. Being semiotically deep, catoptric reflection is at the same time ontically flat. That is to say, reflection is manifest in two-dimensional surfaces and other flat things arranged in the world. The very existence of the reflected image is a flat existence. 

Dioptric refraction, however, being experientially deep, is at the same time ontologically flat. That is to say, refraction is immanent to materials; there is no transcendent or metaphysical cause that operates across or after the being of the phenomenon. This is why whatever is immanent also must be flat. This variety of flatness is best understood as a flatness of identity, a selfsame quality vis-a-vis the being of the thing. Dioptric refraction, as iridescent immanence, "remains within" itself. 

These claims, being somewhat abstract, should be explained a little further. We have asserted that dioptrics is experiential. What this means is that dioptrics is on the side of the subject. Dioptrics is always a question of crafting a clear or real subjective experience. This is why the concept of dioptric illumination is so closely associated with the modern period, why we refer to "the Enlightenment" -which the French ren der with even less subtlety as les Lumieres. But it is also why this same ​modern trajectory ends up at Kantianism, at romanticism, and eventually at Heidegger and phenomenology, because the question of subjective experience must always remain at the heart of the modern experience.

By contrast, we said previously that catoptrics is semiotic. What this means is that catoptrics is on the side of matter, on the side of the pharmakon. Catoptrics is always a question of meaning. Although subjects might be involved, the process is never primarily subjective. Rather the process is primarily a question of what Stiegler terms hypomnesis, the act of externalizing the subject-or to be more precise, the subject's memory - into material supports. This too is a modern trajectory, but it ends up at a different place: not in the illumination of the subject, but in the obscurantism of the culture industries, in spectacle, in ideology, and in the tradition of critique that terminates in structuralism and post-structuralism. 

Jesuit mathematician Francois d'Aguilon, in two propositions from his early seventeenth-century opus on optics Opticorum Libri Sex, offers two additional points concerning the difference between dioptric transparency and catoptric opacity. The two points appear in propositions number 31 and 32 of book 1: 

The distinction between two kinds of light made by d'Aguilon is the same distinction made since ancient times: in Latin lux and lumen; in Greek phos (φως) and phoster (φοστερ); or in Hebrew or (אור) and maor (מאור). 

Recall the echo that occurs between Genesis 1:3 and 1:14, when God creates light, and then creates it a second time (see Francisco de Holanda, Fiant luminaria in firmamento celi, the frontispiece of this chapter). The echo nicely captures the difference between the two kinds of light. The first time light comes into the world it comes as lux. This lux means light, but it is a special kind of light, the light of being, the light of God, a cosmological light. The second time light comes, it comes as lumen (or rather as luminaria, the things that show lumen). This lumen also means light, but only in a very specific way. Lumen means sun, moon, and stars-the bodies that give light in as much as they can shine through with the divine light. 

Although the English language differentiates between light and luminosity, English often loses the subtlety between the two kinds of light. D'.Aguilon assigns the first term to opaque bodies, and thus, by association we may be certain that he speaks of catoptric phenomenon. The second he assigns to transparent bodies, and thus to dioptric phenomenon. In other words, lux is catoptric and lumen is dioptric. 

There is a precedence here too. For just as the Renaissance preceded the Baroque, lux in Genesis 1:3 precedes lumen in Genesis 1:14, and catoptrics precedes dioptrics. Descartes would confirm this same sentiment in a 1638 letter written a few years after d'.Aguilon: "Light, that is, lux, is a movement or an action in the luminous body, and tends to cause some movement in transparent bodies, namely lumen. Thus lux is before lumen. (The firstness of Iris arrives, then, as a kind of counterintuitive miracle, scrapping all precedence, erasing diachrony for synchrony.) 

In this way God, bearing the lux light of the cosmological fiat, is absolute in His opacity. God is the absolute source of light, but at the same tir:ne the one who is absolutely inaccessible. Opacity is the quality that we can assign to His being. Yet, the light of lumen-illumination, luminosity-is absolute in its transparency, as it travels through the actually existing world. Thus transparency is the quality that we can assign to His existing. 

This is the second point that can be gained from d'.Aguilon's two propositions, that lumen or dioptrics is always an action of existence, an active motion of looking-throughness, while lux or catoptrics is always a fact of being (a property).

The black corpse of the sun. Now we are in a better position to consider the kinds of darkness and their relationship to the light. To summarize, illumination (lumen) refers to the action of transparent bodies in their luminosity and radiant iridescence. These bodies are the sun, the moon and stars, fire and mankind. Not white so much as bright. It is the light of life and consciousness. It is multiple, never singular. It is a perspective, and therefore allied with dioptrics and Iris.

By contrast, light (lux) refers to the property of an opaque body in its fact of being. This is the light of God, the light of being, a cosmological light, but also the light of daytime (as opposed to sunlight). It is an aspect, and therefore allied with catoptrics and Hermes. It is singular, never multiple. It is white only in so much as it is the whiteness of pure opacity. Lux is the plenum. It is the obscure. It is grace. 

Now on to the darkness. Here too are two modalities, all the more different because of their near identity. Darkness may be gloom, murkiness, shadow, or shade. It may be dusk, night, or twilight. Bodies may be dark. One might speak of "dark" materials, in as much as they are asleep, unconsciousness, dead, or cold. Likewise, habit or cliche may be understood as a kind of darkness of experience, an inability to revivify the normal routine of living.

Hence the darkening, or obscuritas, described in Revelation 9:2-obscuratus est sol et aer de fumo putei, "The sun was darkened, and the air, by the smoke of the pit:' The sun is obscured by smoke, and hence the earthbound shadows of an obscuring darkness. As the sun and moon and stars are progressively snuffed out, they are obscurare. It is not yet a question of ontological darkness, but rather the darkness of the world. It is the nihil privativum discussed in Schopenhauer, the "privative nothing" that is dark by virtue of depriving the light.

But there is another kind of darkness, the tenebrae, the shadows of black being separated from the lux of heaven in Genesis (2, 4, 5, and 18). No longer simply dark, the question now is that of a profound blackness.

Such is the generic darkness of the abyss, the void and vacuum, the darkness of catastrophe and cataclysm. It is a cosmological blackness, the black of Satan, the black of absolute evil, the black of nonbeing. It is what Thacker describes as "cosmic pessimism . . . hermeticism of the abyss."

​The shadows of black being are a hermeneutic blackness. Not simply a world gone dark, such blackness is a world without us. Not simply a question of dying or growing cold, such blackness means the leaving of being. In contrast to the "privative nothing" comes Schopenhauer's nihil negativum ("negative nothing"), nothing as absolute foreclosure. In this sense, the shadows of black being are not part of any ontology, but rather constitute an encryption or crypto-ontology. These are the shadows of the kruptos ( Κρούτσο), the hidden parts that form the inward nature of things.

And hence in Revelation, beyond the sun being obscured and made dark, there is also a secondary darkness. The kingdom of heaven is ​threatened secondarily by the blackness of the tenebrae, for ultimately factum est regnum eius tenebrosum, "His kingdom was full of darkness" (Revelation 16:10 ). 

Return now to Negarestani and the petroleum that fuels contemporary society. Is this oil, as putrification, the product of lux or lumen? Is oil black or dark? As Negarestani writes, oil is "Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice:' Sun is captured in photosynthesis, then via decay is putrified into a liquid fossil form. So as sun juice, oil is the darkening of sunlight. Oil is thus literally dead; oil is death. And as transubstantiated sunlight, oil is lumen, or at least some product thereof. 

But there is also a blackness to oil. "Oil is the Black Corpse of the Sun:' he writes. Now no longer simply solar, oil's tellurian core wells up, the insurgent enemy of solar capitalism. This is oil at its blackest. This is oil as the "Devil's Excrement:' oil as the conspirator-not as lux but as the tenebra or shadow of black being-who annihilates societies by "tear[ing] them apart slowly. And so, just as it was possible to speak of the shadows of black being as a crypto-ontology, Negarestani can speak of a crypto-ontology for oil. In such a crypto-ontology, oil is understood not simply as dark but as radical blackness, held in escrow by a cosmic pessimism, with its kruptos or hidden parts absolutely foreclosed to us, but also to being itself. 

Blackness is a crypto-ontology absolutely foreclosed to being. Only through this final definition-black as kruptos foreclosed to being-can we begin to understand what Laruelle means by the black universe. Only by way of a withdrawal from the system of light and color can we begin to see the generic real of blackness. 

Channel that great saint of radical blackness, Toussaint Louverture, and return to the Haitian Constitution of 1804, which stated that all citizens will be called black regardless of color. Such blanket totality of black, such cataclysm of human color, renders color invalid and denies the endless dynamics of black-as-white or white-as-black. Black is no longer the limit case, no longer the case of the slave, the poor, the indentured or debt-ridden worker. Black is the foundation of a new uchromia, a new color utopia rooted in the generic black universe. 

"Our uchromia: to learn to think from the point of view of Black as what determines color in the last instance rather than what limits it."

As Laruelle would say, color always has a position. Color always has a stance. The color palette or the color spectrum provide a complex field of difference and alternation. The primary colors reside in their determining positions, while other colors compliment each other as contrasts. Hence the color posture: purple complimenting yellow, red complimenting green, the primary colors' posture vis-a-vis the palette, and ultimately the posture of color itself governing the continuum of light and dark, as colors take turns emerging into a luminous and supersaturated visibility, or receding into a sunless gloom.

Laruelle uses photography as a way to explain these never-ending quests into and out of things. "Platonism is perhaps born of the absence of a photo;' he writes, proposing a provocative anachronism. "From this we get the model and the copy, and their common derivative in the simulacrum. And Leibniz and Kant alike-the intelligible depth of the phenomenon as much as its trenchant distinction-find their possibility in this repression of photography."

​According to Laruelle, photography has long been held captive, forced to choose between two unappetizing options, 

Photography is an ideal candidate for Laruelle's intervention, because photography requires that light penetrate an aperture and write itself on a sensitive surface, resulting in prints that, in turn, reflect light back to viewers. "Philosophy remains an optics;' he writes. "Transcendental no doubt, but specular: intuitiveness is its unavoidable structure. The eye is first an external empirical sense; then it is divided and doubled, the introduction of the other gaze constituting an a priori optical or specular field; then the gazes knot themselves together, form a chiasmus, and constitute a transcendental speculative field".

Which is precisely what Laruelle seeks to avoid. Using the language of optics invoked previously, Laruelle exhibits a unilateralized dioptrics, in that he rejects absolutely the reduplication and extension of the eye in favor of an immanent transparency of identity. But he simultaneously exhibits a unilateralized catoptrics, in that he assigns a pure opacity to the one, a pure density, a pure imperviousness. 

"The multiplication of the eye into a recursive spiral does not suppress it;' he reminds us, "for the eye is the intuition that now gives the other eye; the gaze that opens upon the other gaze-such is the kernel of all transcendental aesthetics:' Is this not the great phenomenological gambit, that physiognomy is destiny, that our eyes and senses orient ourselves into a world, toward phenomena that orient and reveal themselves back to us? 

The philosopher says, Humanity was endowed with the faculty of sight, so humanity must devote itself to seeing, and seeing well. But Laruelle says, The decision is never between looking and seeing or between listening and hearing. That is no decision at all. The true decision, the decision already made implicitly by philosophy, is to see and hear in the first place. We decide each time we open our eyes. 

In other words, photography is always understood as color photography, black-and-white photography even, but never black photography proper. Rather than these other color photographies evident in phenomenology, psychoanalysis, or philosophy at large, Laruelle writes that we need photography (now recast as non-photography) as science photography or identity photography. 

But what would "identity photography" mean? Identity photography is black photography. And thus identity photography is the only kind of photography that could inscribe the black universe. Laruelle calls such photography a "hyperphenomenology of the real"; it follows a logic of auto-impression, not expression. Not a cliche snapshot, but an immanent identity of the Real. "One does not photograph the World, the City, History;' Laruelle claims. One photographs "the identity (of) the real-in-the-last-instance:' In this sense, although color always carries itself in terms of a "posture" or "stance," black is immanent to itself and thus can only be an in-stance, an instance, or as Laruelle says, the last instance. 

"Simplify color!" he cries. "See black, think white! See black rather than believe 'unconscious: And think white rather than believe 'conscious:" Don't see, be a seer. Stop seeing and start visioning. Be a visionary.

Watchers and lookers are the ones who see white, who see the thing that they know they will always see. But the one who sees black is the true clairvoyant. The black seer is the oracular prophet, what we call "a medium". And hence to understand media-and indeed to "do" media theory-is to start visioning purely in the black universe. Never to see visions, never to hallucinate (for that is what philosophers do), rather to see vision. This is what Laruelle means when he says that vision "abandons perception and sees-in-the-night." This is what he means when he deploys that thorny non-philosophical term of art "vision-in-One". 

The blackness of the person. Laruelle's black is not simply a theory of the universe, but also a theory of the subject, what he calls the "human'' or the "person:' At the same time the black universe allows for a mystical justice that is irreducible to either Christian morality on the one hand or liberal ecumenicalism on the other. "All philosophical speculation is communication, and communication is always speculative;' he writes, in a re-articulation of the media principle from Thesis I. The media principle is so troublesome because it limits the discussion to one of two scenarios: either to speculate for or on behalf of the other, or to speculate for or about the self The subject is either reflective or introspective. The subject is either too nosy about others or too vain about itself. These are the two great maxims of philosophy: the first maxim, "to see for itself by seeing in the place of the other;' and the second maxim, the ancient law of"an-eye-for-an-eye." This is why metaphysics is described by Laruelle in terms of vengeance. Either "an eye for an eye;' the symmetrical, retributive justice of the Old Testament, or what he calls "Eye-for-the-Other, as hostage-of-the-Other-eye;' the universalization of liberal relativism where we promise to see for the other, or even, in our infinite wisdom, to step back and let the other try to see for itself. Either way, the eye is held hostage, vision is vengeance, and vengeance is ours. 

Instead, the black universe allows for a mystical subject (capable of mystical justice) because it eliminates speculation. No more eye-for-an eye, and no more eye-for-the-other. No more exchange of looks, no more patriarchal gaze, and no more commerce in vision. Instead the black universe allows for an absolutely determined and unidirectional vision, a kind of visionary vision that looks without looking.

To be clear, Laruelle does not take the usual exit; he does not escape the quandary of self-other relations by singing the praises of a universalized multiplicity of voices. In fact he takes a different step, unexpected and rather unfashionable in today's progressive theory landscape. Laruelle pursues an absolutely determined and unidirectional vision, all and everywhere, destiny and determination from before the first to after the last instance.

​To summarize before ending-there are two kinds of light, the tux with its purely opaque source and the luminaria that reflect tux into this profane world. And likewise there are two kinds of dark, the darkening ( obscuritas) of the luminaria as they sputter out and die, and the tenebrae themselves, the shadows of black being. 

But all of this, from black to white and from dark to light, is still a part of the standard model. If black is merely the absence of white, and dark the absence of light, then we remain locked in a world of relation, reflection, continua, and convertibility, black-as-white and dark-as-light. Such is the philosophical decision in a nutshell, to decide to frame the world in terms of digital color.

Laruelle, by contrast, entreats us to withdraw from the system of color and enter into a purely radical and unilaterally black universe. This is a universe in which black is never defined in terms of light, nor ultimately exchangeable with or made visible by illumination. Just like in the introduction and the secret of Hermes that has never been divulged to any living human, the black of the universe has never been seen before by anyone. It is only through a kind of negative intuition that we dare to call it a color at all.

This is the condition of the Laruellean person, and ultimately the condition for a new kind of black justice: unilaterally determined by the real, but never by mundane reality; faithful to the conditions of a generic humanity, but never debased to the banal conditions of the world. 

If you open your eyes partway you see white, but if you open them all the way you see black. Do not let the philosophers draw you out of the cavern and into the light, only to be dazzled by the first rays of the sun. But at the same time, do not douse the light and dig deeper into the abyss, in an attempt to spiral lower, darker, into your gloomy soul. Laruelle's human is one who opens its eyes in the night, not to look or speculate but to know.

We are this night. "The night is this human, the human who does not speculate about man. Who am I, me who is? I am neither this reason nor this way of thinking, neither this question nor this speculation. I am this night ..." 

excerpt from the book:  Laruelle (Against the Digital) by  ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY 

by Terence Blake

We have seen in many posts on this blog (e.g. here) that François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy represents a significant advance over the naive absolutism that characterises “sufficient” philosophies, including Graham Harman’s idealist object-oriented philosophy and the diverse forms of scientism.

By adopting a “quantum” model of thinking Laruelle is able to jettison, at least partially, his long-standing scientism. This scientistic prejudice continued as a grave flaw in phase II and phase III of his non-philosophy, and that persists ambiguously in his phase IV and phase V.

Laruelle himself began to see his thought as evolving through different “phases”, and later in Phase V or non-standard philosophy, based on quantum thought, declared that these preceding phases were themselves to be conceived in quantum terms as so many “waves”. The latest wave, non-standard philosophy, was thus considered to be the most inclusive as it allowed Laruelle to conceive his philosophical evolution in quantum terms and as the least scientistic, as his use of the quantum model was open and generic rather than closed and scientific.

However, this “wave” view is not enough to guarantee that Laruelle has escaped from all sufficiency and absolutism. Each of these waves, including the last, is highly exclusive of alternative and rival views. Each wave posits the Real as pure immanence in such a way as to demarcate itself from “sufficient” philosophies. Thus each wave is absolute even if it is constituted, if we grant credence to Laruelle’s often grandiloquent claims, on different principles, notably on a principle of non-sufficiency (as against standard philosophy’s putative structuration by the principle of sufficiency).

Laruelle’s retroactive re-conceptualisation of these phases as “waves” attempts to nullify the closed nature of the universal structure of sufficiency that he purportedly uncovered as constitutive of philosophy as a thought-form. In particular it introduces, in principle, a degree of the quantum porosity and uncertainty that he appropriates in his most recent phase.

Yet this fifth phase of non-standard philosophy, despite its porousness as “wave” and its ambiguous inclusiveness (extended to selected philosophical, scientific, religious, and artistic experimentations), is itself highly exclusive and demarcationist, as Laruelle’s ANTI-BADIOU demonstrates.

It is interesting to compare Laruelle’s grandiose claims and exalted self-image with Ken Wilber’s “integral” research programme. Like Laruelle, Wilber divides his own work into five “phases”, and he indicates the presence of waves characterising noetic development. His difference with Laruelle is that for him waves are no guarantee against sufficiency and closure, but contain their own specific danger of “wave absolutism”, stigmatising other waves in the name of an exclusionary Real.

The Article is taken from:

​by François Laruelle

I.
​
In the foundations of color, vision sees the
Universe; in the foundations of the Universe, it
sees man; in the foundations of man, it sees
vision.

The Earth, the World, the Universe have to do
with man: the Earth a little, the World a lot, the
Universe passionately. The Universe is the inner
passion for the Remote.

​Man works the Earth, lives in the World, thinks
according to the Universe.

The Earth is man’s ground, the World his
neighbor, the Universe his secret.

The Earth is the strait through which passes the
light of the World; it is the tongue made of sand
and water upon which, standing, man strides
against the World.

The World is everything too vast and too narrow
for the Earth, and again too narrow
for the Universe.

Man gropes around the World and the World
floats in the Universe unable to touch its borders.

Into the World of narrow-minded thoughts, man 
​brings the emotion of the Universe.

The Universe, an object greater than the World,
is not the object of thought, but rather its how or
its according to. 

The Universe is an opaque and solitary thought,
which has already leapt through man's shut eyes
​as the space of a dream without dreaming.

The Universe is not reflected in another universe,
and yet the Remote is accessible to us at each of
​its points. 

The World is the endless confusion of man and
Universe, the Universe treated as man's object.

The forgetting of the essence of the Universe is
less noticeable than the forgetting of the World.

The forgetting of man as One(-of-)the-Universe
and the Universe as One-through-man is less
noticeable than the forgetting of being-in-the-
​World. 

II.
In the beginning there is Black--man and
Universe, rather than philosopher and World.

Surrounding the philosopher everything becomes
World and light. Surrounding man everything
becomes Universe and opacity.

Man, who carries away the Universe with him,
is condemned, without knowing why, to the World
and to the Earth, and neither the World nor the
Earth can tell him why. He is answered only by
​the Universe, being black and mute. 

Black is not in the object or the World, it is what
man sees in man, and the way in which man sees
​man. 

Black is not merely what man sees in man, it is
the only “color” inseparable from the hyper-
​intelligible expanse of the Universe.

Solitude of the man-without-horizon who sees
​Black in Black. 

The Universe is deaf and blind, we can only love
it and assist it. Man is the being who assists the
​Universe. 

Only with eyes closed can we unfold the future,
​and with eyes opened can we conceive to enter it. 

Light strikes the Earth with repeated blows,
divides the World infinitely, solicits in vain the
​invisible Universe. 

The Universe was “in” the World and the World
​did not see it. 

Black prior to light is the substance of the
Universe, what escaped from the World before
​the World was born into the World. 

Black is the without-Ground which fixes light in
the remote where man observes it. Here lies the
​crazy and catatonic light of the World. 

Man approaches the World only by way of
transcendental darkness, into which he never
​entered and from which he will never leave. 

A phenomenal blackness entirely fills the essence
of man. Because of it, the most ancient stars of
the paleo-cosmos together with the most
venerable stones of the archeo-earth, appear to
man as being outside the World, and the World
​itself appears as outside-World. 

The black universe is the opacity of the real or the
​“color” that renders it invisible. 

​No light has ever seen the black universe. 

Black is anterior to the absence of light, whether
this absence be the shadows that extinguish it,
whether it be it nothingness or its positive
opposite. The black universe is not a negative
​light. 

Black is the Radical of color, what never was a
color nor the attribute of a color, the emotion
​seizing man when affected by a color. 

As opposed to the black objectified in the
spectrum, Black is already manifested, before any
​process of manifestation. This is vision-in-Black. 

Black is entirely interior to itself and to man. 

Black is without opposite: even light, which tries
to turn it into its opposite, fails in the
face of the rigor of its secret. Only the secret sees into
​the secret, like Black in Black. 

The essence of color is not colored: it’s the black
​universe.

Metaphysical white is a simple discoloration, the
prismatic or indifferent unity of colors.
Phenomenal blackness is indifferent to color
because it represents their ultimate degree of
reality, that which prevents their final dissolution
​into the mixtures of light. 

Philosophy and sometimes painting treat black
and white as contraries, colors as opposites; they
mix them, under the authority of light as the
​supreme mix.

The human science of color is founded on the
blackness known as the “universe.” They
cognitively unify man, the Universe, and color
theory--and their potencies in Black, which is
their common reality, but in the last instance
​only. 

A human science of color makes the black
universe the requisite that is real or immanent to
their physics. Black is the posture itself of science
​and of its “relation” to color. 

IV.
Science is a way of thinking in black and white
which studies the light of the Cosmos and
the color of the World: black, by way of its posture
or its inherence to the real; white, by way of its
representation of the real. A way of thinking
where white is no longer the opposite of black,
but rather its positively discolored reflection.

Science is the mode of thought in which black
determines in the last instance white.

The black universe transforms colors without
mixing them. It simplifies color in order to bring
out the whiteness of understanding in its essence
of non-pictorial reflection. 

Our uchromia: to learn to think from the point
of view of Black as what determines color in the
​ last instance rather than what limits it. 

Philosophical technology has been withdrawn
mimetically from the World, in order to reflect
and reproduce it. Such technology is inadequate
for thinking the Universe. 

We are still postulating that reality is given to us
through the paradigm of the World. We
perpetuate the inhuman amphibology that
confuses the World and the Universe. We believe
that reality is horizon and light, aperture and
flash, whereas it resembles more the posture of
an opaque non-relation (to) light. When
exploring the uni-versal dimension of the
cosmic, we remain prisoners of cosmo-logical
difference. Our philosophers are children who
​are afraid of the Dark. 

Philosophy is thinking by way of a generalized
“black box”; it is the effort to fit black into light
and to push it back to the rear of the caverns.
Yet, the cosmo-logical generalization of black
does not save it from its status as attribute, quite
the contrary. Black alone is subject and may
render manifest the philosophical interlocking of
​concepts. 

Do not think technology first: rocket and the lift
off of the rocket. Look instead, like in the depths
of a closed eye, into the opacity of knowledge
where, forming one with it, the rocket passes
through infinite distances. Think according to
the knowledge that steers the rocket as if in a
dream, heavier and more transparent than the
boundless night it penetrates with a silent
​thunderclap. Think science first. 

Stop sending your ships through the narrow
cosmo-logical corridor. Stop making them climb
the extreme walls of the world. Let them jump
over the cosmic barrier and enter into the
hyperspace of the Universe. Cease having them
compete with light, for your rockets too can
realize the more-than-psychic, postural mutation,
and shift from light to black universe which is no
longer a color; from cosmic color to postural and
subjective black. Let your rockets become subject
of the Universe and be present at every point of
​the Remote. 

​Simplify color! See black, think white! 

See black rather than believe “unconscious.” And
​think white rather than believe “conscious.”

See black! Not that all your suns have fallen--
they have since reappeared, only slightly
dimmer--but Black is the “color” that falls
​eternally from the Universe onto your Earth.

taken from: 

by Terence Blake

We are living through a very interesting period in the realm of Continental Philosophy, containing aspects of continuing progress and of intellectual regression. The regression proclaims itself to be a decisive progress beyond the merely negative and critical philosophies of the recent past. Yet the philosophies of Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard cannot be summed up in the image of pure critique. Their critical dissolution of the dogmatic residues contained in even the most innovative philosophies they had encountered did not leave us in a powerless void of negativity and paralysis. Beyond the critique of the new figures of transcendence and ontotheology they gave concrete sketches of how to see the world in terms of a very different sort of ontology based on immanence – a diachronic ontology. This diachronic ontology is pursued today by such diverse figures as Bernard Stiegler, Bruno Latour, and François Laruelle.

​The recent promotion of philosophical successors to this constellation of thinkers of immanence, such as Badiou and Zizek, has not led to any real progress but to a labour of travestying the past (one has only to look at Badiou’s DELEUZE and Zizek’s ORGANS WITHOUT BODIES) and to a return to such intellectual deadends as Lacanian psychoanalysis. But even these contemporary regressive philosophers remain in dialogue, however one-sided and unjust, with their illustrious predecessors, and strive to confront them at the level of conceptual richness that characterised their work. The next step in the regression was to keep up the general aura of having “gone beyond” the older supposedly negative thinkers but to radically simplify the conceptual level, presenting easy summary presentations of the new thought while conveniently forgetting the conceptual paths followed. This has been the principle contribution of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and of the related movement of Speculative Realism.

Both Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Alexander Galloway agree that it is Badiou’s philsophy that expresses in its purest and most general form the new paradigm that articulmates explicitly what is elsewhere just blithely presupposed as a form of thought too evident to even be aware of. They indicate that the next step in consolidating the regression that Badiou’s philosophy, however innovative, does not initiate but rather registers and legitimates, corresponds to the far less ambitious productions of the object-oriented ontologists. I say far less “ambitious” in the sense of conceptual ambition, because their ambition is of a different order. They are the marketised version of the Badiou-Zizek constellation, and so the extremely politicised tone of the Continentals has been discreetly dissolved to leave a more demagogic packaging for the stale ideas that Harman’s OOO trumpets ambitiously as the new construction required after so much critique. OOO/SR promulgates a dumbed down de-marxised version of the set-theoretic universe explicated by Badiou.

It is normal that in this context François Laruelle’s philosophy is at last coming into its own. It could not fully succeed while the work of Deleuze and Derrida were in progress, as his critiques of that work were only half-true, based on giving it an ultimately uncharitable reading as remaining within the norms of sufficient philosophy, but other readings are possible. Laruelle pursued over the decades his unwavering commitment to immanence, and this project shines forth now against the background of the regression that Badiou-Zizek-Meillassoux and the OOOxians represent. In all my commentaries on Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy I do not critique or denigrate but only propose concepts to illuminate his path and to suggest ways out of the inevitable impasses it encounters on its way to immanence. Nor am I external to Laruelle’s project (rather I am a fellow traveller on the path of pluralism). That’s the whole point of discussing his work..

I do not scorn Laruelle’s own conceptual creations when I say that sometimes they amount to impasses when viewed in the light of his later evolution. Creations can often lead to impasses that actively inspire new creations, there is no shame in that. Laruelle has never ceased advancing, nor have I. I thank Laruelle for his work, and read it with great passion.

I try to give a useful perspective on that work, to situate it within the context of French philosophy of the last 50 years. I am trying to articulate my own sense of recent philosophical history, as I am dis-satisfied by much that has been written about it (particularly by the object-oriented ontologists, the speculative realists, and the „new“ realists). I feel that whatever the polemics I engage in, this is a positive task, and I am pursuing a useful objective in doing so. I write without the sanction of Laruelle or of the handful of Laruelle scholars and partisans who discuss his work in Engllish. Nor have I had any meaningful dialogue with the small group of translators who are busy making his work available to the Anglophone world. This solitude is not necessarily a handicap, as I express a singular point of view, owing little or nothing to the currently recognised „authorities“ on this subject. Laruelle is no one’s property, or non-philosophy means nothing at all.

From a pluralist point of view, there is no intellectual center of the world, and so there are many important ways of philosophising. We can use this sort of decentred pluralism as a criterion for evaluating the worth of various philosophical positions. Badiou, for example, fails to convince us fully because despite his avowed theory of multiples his own practice is not always pluralist. A telling example is his relation to psychoanalysis and his inability to pluralise the unconscious. For Badiou Paris is the center, so Lacan is the center for the theory of the psyche. If he manages to “correct” Lacan a little, he has made, in his own eyes, a world-historical contribution. Using this decentred pluralism as a pragmatic criterion I think that Laruelle is far more satisfying intellectually than Badiou. His book on Badiou (ANTI-BADIOU) leaves no doubt about that. However the criterion of pluralism leads us to conclude that Laruelle’s thought must be generalised and de-centered even further. One superiority of Laruelle’s path of thought has been his capacity to criticise his own ideas and to progress beyond them.

Badiou has never truly criticised his lacanism and his maoism, and his “communist hypothesis” has just added epicycles on epicycles to an uninterrupted process of self-justification, where it should be obvious that some form of auto-critique is necessary. Badiou has never really broken with standard philosophy nor with scientism, maintaining the magisterial position in philosophy and regarding the “matheme” as the paradigm of knowledge. In contrast, Laruelle has analysed and critiqued his own former philosophism and scientism.

Laruelle has evolved over time, but coming as he does from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, like Badiou, he has taken a long time to free himself from the limitations of his formative context and intellectual epoch. Deleuze and Feyerabend have both declared that the academic philosopher is a “bureaucrat of thought” and Laruelle agrees. So he has had to fight hard against this bureaucratic side of his intellectual character. The non-philosopher is not a bureaucrat but a heretic and gnostic, i.e. he sees the shadow and the unconscious side in all things, including in himself. From this point of view Badiou represents a regression to an older model of the totalising philosopher, but Laruelle is trying to be something else.

There was a very interesting analysis of the notion of “critique” in France in the wake of May 1968. Creative philosophers like Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault analysed the critical position itself, revealing the limits of its negativity i.e. its founding itself on notions of lack and negation and againstness, and of its “derivativity” i.e. its basic dependence on the problematics of those it criticised. Marxist dialectics, Lacanian analysis, Althusserism, deconstruction, were found to be fundamentally flawed approaches. The alternative that emerged was in each case a pluralism (of intensities, language games, force relations, assemblages, epistemes, dispositifs, modes of existence, processes of subjectivation.There was no attempt to eliminate negativity and critique, (this would have been too evident a pragmatic contradiction in those long lost times before OOO replaced argument with impudent bluff and hypocritical denial of the obvious) but only to dissipate its primacy.

Laruelle went through a long phase of apparent “critique” in his Philosophy I phase, but only a naive reader blinded by Lacanism could fail to see the Nietzschean and Heideggerian positive terrain that underlies these investigations. Laruelle himself came to criticise this phase, not because of its supposed negativity, but because of its tendentious positivity. This positivity was still limited to the confines of the denegation of immanence constitutive of philosophy. Laruelle came to call this conformist conception of positivity “sufficiency”, and began to think outside of its confines. Laruelle’s name, during the decade of his Philosophy II, for the non-philosophical positivity beyond critique was “science”. Later, he came to see that this primacy accorded to science was yet another ruse of philosphical sufficiency and he broke with what he himself calls his “scientism”. He now affirms that the non-philosophical pairing of philosophy and science is just one possible way of doing non-standard philosophy, and that other pairings, e.g. philosophy and religion, philosophy and photography, are equally possible.

A consequent philosophical pluralism has its own internal dynamic that leads from pluralism as a particular position inside philosophy (e.g. Paul Feyerabend’s methodological pluralism), to a pluralising of philosophy itself as an ontological realm and a cognitive régime laying claim to completeness and universality (e.g. Feyerabend’s evolution from Machian “way of research” to his later ontological pluralism. In both cases, the target of Feyerabend’s critiques is is totalisation, the vision of “philosophy as a discourse that covers everything … an all-encompassing synthetic view of the world and what it all means”). This is the source of the move of putting philosophy in relation to a non-philosophical outside („non-philosophical“ not meaning a negation of philosophy but a wider practice, as in non-Euclidean geometries).

Laruelle has written on this sort of non-philosophical move at length, but he cannot claim exclusive ownership (nor even chronological priority) of this idea, nor is he necessarily the best exemplar of the practice of such a non-philosophy. But at least his work is a gesture in the right direction, both explaining and exhibiting its necessity and desirability. Laruelle’s work is no exception and Laruelle can have the operator “non-” applied to himself with as much justice as he applies it to the domain of philosophy. A non-laruellian non-philosophy is a reasonable and desirable extension and revision of philosophical pluralism. Feyerabend and Deleuze are good examples of such a non-laruellian non-philosophy.

In his preface to THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY, published in French in 1981, situates his thought in relation to the philosophical context. He talks of working towards a possible encounter between pluralism, in danger of being conflated with relativism, and a thought of the Absolute, away from idealist entrapment in the relative and the constructed. Such an encounter would permit the extraction of a non-relativist “essence of Multiplicities”. The formula for this non-relativist pluralism is the reconciling of the “thought of the multiple and of becoming, of dispersion and of dissemination” at work in the “contemporary hopes of an overflowing of Greco-Occidental Representation” with a “thought of the Absolute … a thought of the One, but of the One without unity, beyond the Idea, the Logos, even of Being”. This project, while quite logical and necessary in its attempt at deepening and radicalising the poststructuralist´research-programmes of the 70s, may seem very abstract. Yet Laruelle insists that its “methods, goals, and results are only apparently merely theoretical”. Not only is it suffused by “diverse emotions” but

This disappointment is one of the strongest driving forces in non-philosophy, but it is bearable and fruitful only by “letting oneself be convinced by the Absolute, by allowing oneself to be seized and enchanted, by not resisting the non-power of this emotion”. (Note: all translations from LE PRINCIPE DE MINORITÉ are my own).

Laruelle’s THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY is the first book in his Philosophy II phase. It expresses a disappointment in the philosophies of difference and Laruelle’s enchantment by “the Absolute as such”. This disappointment led him to

This renunciation implied the sacrifice of those figures that had guided not just the work and the hopes of his predecessors and contemporaries, but his own philosophical research as well:

These philosophical deities could take us only so far, and when we wanted to go farther they abandoned us to our own resources, or rather to “the irruption, into the general thematic, of the Absolute” (6). This irruption of a new element, the Absolute or the One without unity, to take the “step beyond” Being, not into emptiness, but into a “beyond filled by the Principle of minority” (6). The philosophy of Difference could give us only relative multiplicities, contained within the hypostases of Being, of the Idea, and of the State. Laruelle’s disappointment told him it was useless to

Laruelle considers that the promise of this philosophy has not been kept. What was this promise?

Far from breaking up Representation and taking the step beyond presence, and freeing the multiplicities from their relative limits, the philosophy of Difference was satisfied with

Laruelle looks at the “new” philosophy of Difference and at the hopes that it inspired, and sees it to be “so disappointing, so violent, so voluntarist and activist, as if incapable of keeping its promise” (7). He concludes that it is not as new as it pretends: it contains the same old violence as the philosophy of Representation, the same false promises, the same enslavement of multiplicities. This “emotion” already contains within it the “step beyond”, as it involves not just disappointment and renunciation but acceptance:

It seems that the very magnitude of our desire to go beyond the horizon of presence, and the very degree of our obsession were what held us back. We could not “break through” Representation by means of the resources provided by our tutelary figures nor by our own dedication and resolve. The Absolute is not won through to by active and wilful negation, but is attained more passively and patiently, by letting go, allowing oneself to be convinced, letting oneself be enchanted, not resisting:

Thus THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY (one could also translate this title as THE MINORITY PRINCIPLE, on the analogy with the pleasure-principle and the reality-principle) is a book which inaugurated a whole new phase in Laruelle’s philosophical practice. We are very lucky to have such a text as Laruelle is careful at the outset to specify the “emotion” that presided over the rupture not only with the philosophies of his contemporaries, but also with his own previous thought. The book came out in 1981, and the immediately preceding book, BEYOND THE POWER PRINCIPLE, was published 6 years before, in 1975. He came to call this new stage in his philosophical development “PHILOSOPHY II”. Measured in terms of his published books, his Philosophy II extended over a period of 14 years from THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY (1981) to the book that inaugurated a new phase (PHILOSOPHY III) in his thought, THEORY OF STRANGERS, published in 1995. The last book in his Philosophy II phase was THEORY OF IDENTITIES (1992).

The emotion described by Laruelle, what Deleuze would call a philosophical affect, is a composite of disappointment with the “contemporary problematic of Difference”, whose hopes he shared in what he will retroactively call his Philosophy I, and of being convinced, seized, enchanted and overwhelmed, by the “Absolute”. Laruelle combines both intellectual and affective predicates in thedescription of this emotion: conviction and enchantment, “breaking up Representation” and “irruption of the Absolute”, “born from … the encounter of a disappointment and of an as yet unknown demand” (7).

We have seen that this quasi-religious language of the Absolute corresponds to a concept of “the One without Unity”. This concept comes from the conviction that the philosophy of Difference has come to a dead end, that it has given all that it is capable of giving, and that this is not enough. Multiplicities remain imprisoned in the philosophies of Difference, and so remain merely relative. This is what Laruelle “continuous multiplicities”, which he declares to be “identical to the modern concept of Difference” (6). He distinguishes this relative concept, the “contemporary, Grecocontemporary concept of multiplicities” (5), from the

This absolute concept of multiplicities is born from an encounter, both intellectual and emotional. But also from a sort of “immediate experience”.

“Deleuze’s fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One…We can therefore first state that one must carefully identify a metaphysics of the One in the work of Deleuze” (Badiou, DELEUZE, 11).

Badiou’s DELEUZE, THE CLAMOR OF BEING was published in French in 1997. He isolates what he calls a “metaphysics of the One” in Deleuze’s work, without referencing, and seemingly being unaware of, Laruelle’s critique of the philosophies of difference, begun in 1981 in his THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY. As we have seen, Laruelle advances a similar critique to that elaborated by Badiou, diagnosing a continued adhesion to a metaphysics of the One as being the source of Deleuze’s supposed failure to break through Representation.

Laruelle’s solution is to produce a new concept of the One that is not bound by Badiou’s opposition between “liberating the multiple” or “submitting to a renewed concept of the One”. His solution is to propose and explore the consequences of a renewed concept of the One, a concept that would not be metaphysical, one elaborated with the explicit goal of liberating the multiple. In the preface to THE PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY Laruelle declares that this is goal is the driving intellectual and emotional force behind his concept of “the One without unity”.

This concept of multiplicities without difference is reiterated and expounded more clearly in the next book that Laruelle published, A BIOGRAPHY OF THE ORDINARY MAN. This came out in 1985, and it is the second book in what Laruelle began to call his Philosophy II. It is a more systematic work than the PRINCIPLE OF MINORITY, and is written in the form of a “manual” containing a series of 140 concise “theorems”, each accompanied by a more lengthy commentary. The first theorem is

It is important to note that after his DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION and LOGIC OF SENSE Deleuze too let drop the problematic of difference, to turn to developing a theory and practice of free multiplicities. Laruelle’s concept of the One without unity is a far more adequate description of Deleuze’s position than Badiou’s reading of it as embodying a metaphysics of the One as opposed to a problematic of non-unitary multiplicities. Deleuze’s LETTER TO A SEVERE CRITIC (1973) contains a very useful description, that is also an auto-critique, of the impasse that a representational philosophy of difference leads to, and of the consequent need to break with the mere representation of difference in favour of a performative enunciation and enactment of free multiplicities. In general, whenever Laruelle refers to Deleuze as entangled in the principle of philosophical sufficiency he has in mind the Deleuze of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, and simply ignores Deleuze’s subsequent critique of his position. There is an uncanny „out of time“ effect, that can be seen again in Laruelle’s PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE, published in 1986. Deleuze’s passage from the system of difference to the practice of multiplicities thanks to his encounter with Guattari is simply passed over in silence. When Laruelle responds to Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of his work in their final collaboration WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, published in 1991, he treats it as a book of the same type as DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION. However, WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY is not just a work by Deleuze, as Laruelle’s response,“A Reply to Deleuze” seems to imply. It was written in collaboration with Guattari, a non-philosopher, who Deleuze explicitly honours for taking him outside philosophy. Laruelle gives a one-sided “philosophical” reading of the book and comes to the predictable conclusion that it is still philosophy, i.e. “philosophy” in his sense, which has next to nothing to do with Deleuze and Guattari’s sense as expounded in the book Laruelle is purportedly replying to.

He does not rebut their critique of the scientism of his non-philosophy, nor to their argument that „non-philosophy“ is not the invention of Laruelle, nor is it limited to his writings. Later, in 1995, in PRINCIPLES OF NON-PHILOSOPHY, Laruelle accepts this criticism, admitting that during his Philosophy II phase (from 1981 to 1995) he had been still under the sway of scientism, and more generally of the principle of sufficient philosophy.

These considerations show why Laruelle, despite his considerable merits, is systematically wrong when he assigns Deleuze to the realm of philosophical sufficiency ( “representation”, in Deleuze’sterms). Despite his deep and intense non-philosophical voyage Laruelle is incapable of reading Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? in terms of the relation with the outside, because he has not measured what the collaboration of Deleuze and Guattari brought to both of them.

The article is taken from:

Photo: ​Richard Giblett

​by Oliver Harris

​From the very outset, Burroughs fully understood the affective value of cutting up for the cutter; but it took him some time to understand the value of the resulting texts for someone else. This delay had farreaching consequences for his novel-length texts, and from the wholesale revisions he made to The Soft Machine it is evident that Burroughs had only then learned what Kurt Schwitters, referring to his comparable collage methods, had discovered four decades earlier: ‘I cannot write 500 pages of Merz’ (Schwitters and Hausmann 1962:5). Or to be more exact, Burroughs learned the equal truth of the corollary; that it was barely possible for anyone to read such a text. While developing entirely new functions in his trilogy, he therefore also sought to approximate key features of the physical experience of cutting up—such as the uncanny sensation of recognition—in the temporal experience of reading: ‘When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forward in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one—the déjà vu phenomenon can so be produced to order’ (3M 96). But the very length and complexity of his cut-up novels that enabled them to achieve astonishing affects also meant that they could not model the material process of their making for their readers to apply—and this failure had consequences for the politics of method at work in those texts.15 

Significantly, the first edition of The Soft Machine lacked any polemical or methodological instructions. The injunction to cut is a refrain that runs much more explicitly throughout the other texts in the trilogy, but it is displaced in two significant ways. On the one hand, it is tied to the representational science fiction narrative of the Nova conspiracy, and on the other, it is shifted polemically away from textual applications to media higher up the technological scale—particularly tape recorders in The Ticket that Exploded. ​While the second move accurately reflects Burroughs’s own multimedia development of cut-up methods, in a sense it also compensates for the effects of the first, which risked turning the technique from a practical method into an essentially rhetorical element located within a purely fictional narrative.16 

In Minutes to Go, where there is no narrative scenario, the exemplary function of Burroughs’s texts is the key to determining their politics. While the input is clearly calculated rather than arbitrary— Rimbaud had specific aesthetic and visionary associations; the newspaper articles focused on cancer, genetic research and viruses— the content is secondary, in the sense that its choice is already determined by the method. Burroughs chose strategically the material for his chance procedures, so that they might mechanically generate results that were indeterminate and yet desired. Thus his focus on recent DNA research, which now appears uncannily prescient: ‘As to the distant future say 100 years Dr. Stanley sees the entire code being cracked “We will be able to write out the message that is you”’ (MTG 61). This prophecy, in which the determinism of the genetic code coincides with the determinism of language, confirms the political value of the random factor introduced by cut-up methods. Since these methods materially short-circuited any pre-codified expression, this thesis must itself appear in cryptic form, as a code message arrived at by chance; hence the open question posed in the title of one of Burroughs’s texts: ‘VIRUSES WERE BY ACCIDENT?’ (MTG 15).

In Minutes to Go Burroughs minimized direct political reference, and in his correspondence he expressed an anxiety that anyone should mistake the politics of his texts. In another letter to Hazelwood concerning publication of The Exterminator as a sequel to Minutes to Go, Burroughs was emphatic:

Important to indicate that these pamphlets are to be considered abstract literature observation and mapping of psychic areas. Not political propaganda or if so entirely by accident. I do not subscribe to any of the sentiments expressed necessarily […] Do these plots really exist? How in the fuck should I know? Just a writer is all. Just an artisan. Not running for office.17

The question, ‘Do these plots really exist?’, anticipates by a quarter of a century the skepticism expressed in The Western Lands (‘It seemed real at the time’); in other words, even at the time Burroughs felt the need for a certain equivocation. Given the urgency of these plots and the urgency with which Burroughs promoted cut-up methods, this might seem paradoxical. But the final phrasing (‘Not running for office’) indicates Burroughs’s immediate recognition of the inappropriateness and danger of his own temptation to adopt a didactic and polemical mode of address. This recognition is emphasized in Burroughs’s call to arms in Minutes to Go—‘ANYONE CAN RECORD WORDS—CUT UP/ your own hustling myself’ (MTG 60)— where the last phrase, taken from the ending of Naked Lunch, insists on the association between practicing the method and resisting authority—especially the authority of the master presumed to know and offer the truth. This recognition would also be structured into the stunning overture to Nova Express, where Burroughs’s didacticism—‘I order total resistance’—has to cancel itself out—‘I offer you nothing. I am not a politician’—and has to be framed rhetorically as a letter delivered by his fictional persona, Inspector Lee (NE 6). The secret meaning of the couplet cited in The Exterminator now becomes clear: the emphasis in ‘Where I come I kill both friend and foe’ declares the dogmatic ego, no matter what its intentions, always fatal. 

Burroughs’s position was not produced by the cut-up project out of nowhere, of course. In the early 1950s he had already precisely deconstructed the prophet and the agent—the two key personae he would conflate in the figure of Hassan i Sabbah, the presiding genius of the cut-up project: recall the ‘Wisdom-of-the-East routine’ in Queer (where the holy man’s answer is also ‘How in the fuck should I know?’ [82]), or the entire ‘Prophet’s Hour’ routine in Naked Lunch (102–6); and recall the conspiracy scenario of agents and counter-agents sketched in his letters to Ginsberg (‘But it is difficult to know what side anyone is working on, especially yourself’ [LWB 269]), which returns in Naked Lunch as ‘all Agents defect and all Resistors sell out’ (186). Such critiques of unilateral authority and undivided agency underwrote the case Burroughs made to Ginsberg in April 1958, more than a year before he took up cut-up methods, that ‘the answer is not in Politics’:

The main thing, as Bill says, is that any government, or person, who tries to put down a story saying that they are Right (& the enemy wrong)—is already putting down a big Maya con. Any attempt to force people to agree with you, or propagandize an opinion, is already an invasion of ego. (Ginsberg and Orlovsky 1980:158)

The politics of Minutes to Go turn on the claim to be modeling and advocating precisely such an available technique, offering a liberating means for individual production rather than selling a product for mass consumption. Perhaps, then, we should take seriously Burroughs’s invocations of the Communist Manifesto noted by Timothy S. Murphy—or to be precise, not the calls in Naked Lunch (‘Paregoric Babies of the World Unite’ [NL xlv]) or in The Western Lands (‘You have nothing to lose but your dirty rotten vampires’ [WL 7]), but, because of its alliance with an available technology, his call in the 1967 edition of The Ticket that Exploded: ‘Carry Corders of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your prerecordings’ (TE2 167). Here, Burroughs seems to come surprisingly close to literalizing Hardt and Negri’s position that the ‘real revolutionary practice refers to the level of production. Truth will not make us free, but taking control of the production of truth will’ (2000:156). Indeed, the cut-up method appears to fulfill their concomitant claim for the true nature of revolutionary political militancy, namely that it is ‘not representational but constituent activity’ linked ‘to the formation of cooperative apparatuses of production and community’ (2000:423). 

This ambition to dissolve the gap between the writer as sole active producer of meaning/truth and the reader as passive consumer is based, therefore, on strictly material and pragmatic grounds. Rather than functioning analogously, as in the Tel Quel model whereby the texte reflexively offers ‘the materialism of an open play of the signifier’ as a critique of authorial expression (Hutcheon 1980:127), cutup methods fulfilled absolutely literally the terms of Walter Benjamin’s critique of the productive relations of literature, made in ‘The Author as Producer’:

​The crucial point, therefore, is that a writer’s production must have the character of a model: it must be able to instruct other writers in their production and, secondly, it must be able to place an improved apparatus at their disposal. This apparatus will be the better, the more consumers it brings in contact with the production process—in short, the more readers or spectators it turns into collaborators. (1934:98)

The promise of the cut-up method, promoted freely according to the ‘Open Bank’ policy announced in Minutes to Go (MTG 43), is therefore material and literal—as Gysin put it in the title text: ‘the writing machine is for everybody/ do it yourself’ (MTG 5). 

​But in what sense, if any, did it work? 

Timothy S. Murphy is surely right to observe that ‘the most compelling measure of success of the Nova trilogy’ turns on effects that last ‘only for a moment’ and only for ‘a small group of readers’ (1997:139). However, this assumes that Burroughs’s constant, urgent promotion of cut-up methods as a mass tool is of no relevance, that it belongs in a separate dimension outside the textual economy of the trilogy. On the other hand, when this dimension is taken into account for Burroughs’s cut-up novels (as distinct from his mass of short, exemplary or polemical magazine texts), the result is a worrying literalism, whereby the trilogy’s science fiction scenario models a revolutionary success that can be duplicated by readers recruited to cut-up methods by these novels: ‘Burroughs’s readers are clearly cast’, as Robin Lydenberg puts it, ‘as revolutionary cadets in training’, so that Nova Express is ‘an advanced seminar review of what the reader should have learned’ from the two previous novels (1987:96). In which case, where are all the cut-up revolutionaries? 

In the first full-length critical study of Burroughs, French critic Philippe Mikriammos commented on the success of cut-up methods by observing that the number who had experimented with them is ‘beyond any doubt, far greater than those who applied the method of Tzara’ (1975:63; my translation). True enough—but then Tzara’s promotion was a one-off stunt, while Burroughs campaigned fulltime with messianic zeal for an entire decade, and never entirely stopped for another quarter of a century. How many have experimented? It is, surely, impossible to estimate. What we do know is something much more limited; namely, the number and range of published works based on cut-up methods. Success has been judged most often, therefore, by citing the method’s fertile creative influence on a roll call of artists experimenting in various media, from Kathy Acker to John Zorn. This is a genuine measure of achievement, surely unmatched by any other writer. On the other hand, none of these figures took up the practice for long enough or in such a way as to become identified with it. In this regard, consider the fate of the cut-up community that formed in the so-called Beat Hotel. In his introduction to Harold Norse’s collection of cut-up texts, titled Beat Hotel, the German cut-up artist Carl Weissner stated: ‘All the other practitioners quickly faded away. But Harold Norse […] has remained one of the “Old Masters”’ (1983:xii). With due respect to Norse and Weissner, everyone who took up the practice faded away—except Burroughs. 

Challenging Burroughs about ‘the advisability of using the cut-up method in fiction’, Paul Bowles recalled that Burroughs had replied that ‘“in the hands of a master” it became a viable technique’ (1972:349). Since there was only ever one master, since only Burroughs could make it work—consistently, productively—then we have to wonder not so much about the success of the method, but whether, as a creative practice available to others, it ever properly constituted one. Equally, the notion of an ‘Old Cut-Up Master’ is revealing, because it so flatly contradicts the politics of the ‘Open Bank’ policy. And where did Burroughs end up, a decade after Minutes to Go? With Electronic Revolution, another text that promoted a technology available to all. 

In Minutes to Go, the cut-up method had been publicized in anticipation of further technological development: ‘be your own agent until we deliver/the machine in commercially reasonable quantities’ (MTG 5). After six years of intensive experiments, Burroughs in effect gave up on the cut-up writing machine and reinvested his key claims for the methods in a different technology: ‘As usual’, he noted in ‘A Tape Recorder Experiment’, ‘the tip off came from those who wish to monopolize and control the techniques by which so called “reality” is formed and directed’ (1966:20). In ‘The Invisible Generation’ (1966), this became another call to arms: ‘any number can play anyone with a tape recorder controlling the sound track can influence and create events’ (now in TE2 207). As before, the therapeutic claims for an individual practice—‘such exercises bring you liberation from old association locks’ (now in TE2 206)—coincided with the potential for producing a critical mass to achieve collective political action: ‘put a thousand young recorders with riot recordings into the street’ (now in TE2 210). In Electronic Revolution, the goal once again is to break the monopoly of the production of reality through the mass recruitment of cut-up guerillas, only now Burroughs concludes by envisaging a thousand-fold scaling-up of the scrambling exercises in ‘The Invisible Generation’: ‘Any number can play. Millions of people carrying out this basic operation could nullify the control system’ (ER 18).

​Aside from the belated publication of The Third Mind in 1978, the cut-up project reached its terminal point with Electronic Revolution, and what that text ended up projecting was not a literary readership of millions, but millions in the streets wielding portable tape recorders, practicing non-literary cut-up methods for political ends. This was the Burroughs hailed by Timothy Leary as ‘the Nostradamus/Prophet of the electronic future’ (1987). In which case, it is tempting to conclude by invoking the ‘Political Manifesto’ of Hardt and Negri. Inspired by Spinoza’s materialist teleology, according to which ‘the prophet produces its own people’ (2000:65), they deduce that powerlessness can be turned into power by usurping the tools of the existing system: ‘Don’t the necessary weapons reside precisely within the creative and prophetic power of the multitude? […] The kind of arms in question may be contained in the potential of the multitude to sabotage and destroy with its own productive force the parasitical order of postmodern command’ (2000:65–6). Hardt and Negri’s terminology and analysis is foreshadowed by Burroughs’s Nova mythology, with its colonizing virus enemy that can be sabotaged precisely by taking literally the equation of power structures (the global order) with symbolic interpellation (the order of language), and reordering both at once: ‘I had only to mix the order of recordings and the order of images and the changed order would be picked up and fed back into the machine’ (SM2 92); ‘The counter move is very simple—This is machine strategy and the machine can be redirected’ (NE 74).

But for three pragmatic political reasons, we have to hesitate. Firstly, the mechanical simplicity of cut-up methods, which was so essential to their promotion, determines in the trilogy a political analysis and mode of action that is too simplistic: Burroughs’s proleptic declaration of victory—the ‘control machine has been disconnected by partisan activity’ (TE2 59)—too optimistically conflates success in the novels with the success of them. Secondly, there is Burroughs’s revealing parenthetical aside in Electronic Revolution, when he looks back at the experiments advocated five years earlier in ‘The Invisible Generation’: ‘(I wonder if anybody but CIA agents read this article or thought of putting these techniques into actual operation)’ (ER 15). In other words, not millions, not thousands, maybe no partisans at all—only Burroughs. Thirdly, the cut-up project evolved a theory of power that fully embodied Burroughs’s libertarian values—via Hassan i Sabbah’s last words: ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted’—but that can only gesture toward positive social justice. Thus, while ‘partisans are everywhere, of all races and nations’, as he put it in a 1964 interview, Burroughs undercut the potential formation of a collectivity through his definition of terms: ‘A partisan may simply be defined as any individual who is aware of the enemy’ (Mottram 1965:12; emphasis added). Even the strident ‘pay it all back’ demand of Hassan i Sabbah at the start of Nova Express has to be followed by a ‘word of warning’: ‘To speak is to lie’ (NE 7). 

The upshot, to recall the terms of Burroughs’s own retrospective assessment in The Western Lands, is that the question of the reality of his deadly struggle is still overwhelmingly phrased negatively in terms of doing damage: ‘And now the question as to whether scrambling techniques could be used to spread helpful and pleasant messages. Perhaps. On the other hand, the scrambled words and tape act like a virus in that they force something on the subject against his will’ (ER 35). In other words, using cut-up methods to fight the virus of power means fighting fire with fire. A hybrid of art and science, the technique that Gysin called ‘Machine Age knife-magic’ (3M 51) was meant to be strong black magic, a radical tool for occult assassins wanting to throw a deadly hex.18 

This is an essentially terroristic logic, one amply developed in the cut-up trilogy and embodied from the outset in the figure of Hassan i Sabbah, who not only appeared in ​Minutes to Go but whose imprimatur Burroughs intended to put on the titles of its planned sequels (‘Minutes to Go from Alamout’ and ‘Exterminator? Watch Hassan i Sabbah’).19 In ‘Comments on the Night Before Thinking’ (1961), Burroughs identified—and identified with—Hassan i Sabbah as ‘strictly a counter puncher’, an ‘Assassin of Ugly Spirits’ who made no attempt to ‘extend political power’: ‘[H]e reached out with his phantom knife and a general a prime minister a sultan died’ (1961a:32). But in the 1967 edition of The Ticket that Exploded Burroughs went beyond this apparently clear political identification, defining his ideal terrorist organization as

an equivocal group of assassins called ‘The White Hunters’. Were they white supremacists or an anti-white movement far ahead of the Black Muslims? The extreme right or far left of the Chinese? Representatives of Hassan i Sabbah or the White Goddess? No one knew and in this uncertainty lay the particular terror they inspired. (TE2 9) 

This equivocation—is he siding with friends or foes, agents or counteragents?—is fundamental to Burroughs’s political identity. If it makes sense to call upon the framework of political philosophy, and the particular terms of Hardt and Negri’s manifesto—and that is a big if: ‘Just a writer is all’—then what Malcolm Bull says of Empire would apply to Burroughs’s project also: ‘You may be able to threaten the world with a Stanley knife, but you cannot build a new society with one’ (2001:6).

Inaugurating the cut-up project, Minutes to Go signaled a preoccupation with time—and not only in its title or in the recurrence of the word across numerous texts. This insistence on temporality begs the question of the urgency invoked by the text’s title. Of course, we could take this as calling upon the conventional avant-garde association between formal rupture and historical crisis, but the obvious context—the international resurgence of collage-based practices in the 1950s and 1960s—relates cut-up methods to the détournement of materials taken from a rapidly expanding consumer culture and global media industry, and in no way does this account for Minutes to Go’s injunction to read the method as a practical response to conditions of emergency. Alternatively, we might take the title to imply a countdown to nuclear doomsday, in line with a Cold War reading of the Nova conspiracy. But this context is conjured only by Gregory Corso’s poem, beginning ‘Bomb decade’ (MTG 32), and the effect is strikingly anomalous. No, the missing dimension is not historical but biblical time. Burroughs’s invocation of the Gospel according to St. John--‘In THEE beginning was THE word’ (MTG 59)—points toward a literal rendition of the apocalypse promised in the book’s title: a revelation of the future, the end of this world.

This context enables us first of all to understand the evangelical character of Burroughs’s promotion of cut-up practices; getting others to see what he had seen was indeed a kind of ‘missionary work’. Secondly, it allows us to interpret one of the key claims for cutting up texts: ‘this is the terminal method for/ finding the truth’ (MTG 5). In other words, we might see the activity as performing a version of biblical exegesis in the tradition of Christian eschatology: as a pre-millennial faith determines that history is written before it happens and all signs point toward the end of the world, so too the true meaning of contemporary events can be read through a literal interpretation of the prophetic Word. Burroughs’s observation that Minutes to Go ‘has turned out to be a prophetic book’ (Job 73) only confirms its original intention. Although the internal evidence is minimal—one of Gysin’s phrases declares, ‘We have seen the future’ (MTG 7); another cites ‘“AFTER THE GREAT AWAKENING”’ (MTG 9)—Naked Lunch had already established Burroughs’s mock selfidentification, both generally—‘This is Revelation and Prophecy’ (NL 208)—and specifically: ‘“Yes sir, boys, the shit really hit the fan in ’63,” said the tiresome old prophet can bore the piss out of you in any space-time direction’ (NL 204–5).

While the sources of Burroughs’s apocalyptic cut-up vision were diverse—from Spengler’s Decline of the West to Gysin’s knowledge of occult traditions—the point remains that this vision was far from anomalous.20 In fact, we can locate it within the cultural history studied by, among others, Paul Boyer in Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Here we find both local resonances—prophecy believers are, Boyer notes, very careful readers of the newspapers—and large ones. His conjunction of ancient belief and modern technology reads, for example, like a synoptic account of the Nova conspiracy: ‘In an age of computers, space travel, and genetic engineering, a genre of visionary writing […] shaped countless believers’ views of what lay ahead for humankind’ (1992:21). Above all, there is Boyer’s observation that a culture of biblical apocalypticism has informed American politics, especially from the Cold War onwards. In this light, the most striking resonance properly concerns the future—that is, the present post-Cold War world, in which George W. Bush’s American foreign policy has been drafted in theological terms as a global struggle between the forces of good and an axis of evil. Since the world stands, as I write (Present Time: 15 March 2003), on the brink of a war that would be as religious as it was geopolitical—sustained by an eschatological vision almost as much as by the doctrine of ‘full spectrum dominance’21—the prophetic force of Burroughs’s fiction can only seem grimly accurate. As he put it in Naked Lunch (referring to the ill-omened last days in the Mayan calendar): ‘The Ouab Days are upon us’ (NL 211). 

From this point, and with uncanny precision, it would be possible to read the Nova conspiracy as a historical analysis disguised as prophetic fiction, to see in the Biologic Courts a version of the United Nations, in the Nova Mob an Imperial America, and in Hassan i Sabbah an avatar of Osama bin Laden, even down to conflating the assassin’s ‘phantom knife’, the cut-up artist’s ‘Stanley blade’, and the box cutters used by the 9/11 hijackers. Such a ‘retroactively’ prophetic reading would apply to Burroughs’s ‘Word’ the hermeneutic principles of religious fundamentalists who, for example, read Saddam Hussein as the Antichrist and the harbinger of Armageddon in both Gulf War I and Gulf War II.22 It would also take literally Burroughs’s status as a prophet—a status that critics usually acknowledge, but as if it had no bearing on their criticism. But an absolute literalism is entirely appropriate, for what Burroughs meant by a ‘precise intersection point’ does indeed work on this basis. Partly inspired by his reading of J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927), Burroughs’s obsessive activity of collecting cut-up ‘coincidences’ always assumed an element of apparently reductive literalism, such as finding the precise repetition of a name or a number. To read Burroughs in what he called ‘pre-sent’ time requires taking literally both the ‘intersection point’, defined as ‘a decoding operation, you might say, relating the text to external coordinates’ (3M 136), and his suggestion that some of his texts ‘have a long germination period seeds you might say’ (3M 122). Inverting our expectations of chronology and causality, this notion of the text as a seed projects its historical referent into the future. When this projection is recognized, our reading is necessarily predetermined as prophetic. 

​The specific seed I have in mind is found, with variations, in a number of Burroughs’s cut-up texts, but appeared for the first time in ‘Operation Soft Machine/Cut’, a two-page piece published in the fall of 1961. Needless to say, this ‘seed’ has been the answer from which I started, in expectation that it would reveal to me my own question. 

The first text to use a three-column newspaper layout, ‘Operation Soft Machine/Cut’ presents in a condensed, often cryptic and elliptical form, material mostly made familiar in the trilogy of novels (the piece is billed as ‘from a work in progress’), while it recycles key elements from Minutes to Go—including its title, repeated as a refrain throughout. Starting ‘IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD. And the word is the virus instrument’, the text introduces the basic Nova conspiracy plot with an equivocation (‘Suspending disbelief that such an invasion deal has taken place HOW CAN it be re-written’ [Burroughs 1961b:76]) and identifies itself as a manual for resistance: ‘THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS FOR ANTI*TRAK AGENTS: Exercise in phantom positions of GUERRILLA WAR’ (76). This is followed by Mao’s famous ‘sixteen character’ formulation of military principles (‘Enemy advance we retreat. Enemy retreat WE ADVANCE. ENEMY ENCAMP we agitate. Enemy tire WE ATTACK’ [1961b:76]) and an unusually politicized economic context in which ‘THE OUAB DAYS’ are associated with ‘the dollar blight’. There are then sections on the dangers of the autonomous computing machine (citing Wiener’s cybernetics theory), the manipulations of the society of the spectacle (‘Word and image machine of world press and Follywood controlling and downgrading’ [1961b:77]), and an account of liberation through détournement (‘The dummy revolt flashed round the world when they took it to Cut City and talked out of turn and threw the word and image back’ [1961b:77]). Finally, there is an early version of Hassan i Sabbah’s opening speech in Nova Express and a closing, apocalyptic vision of ‘[a]gents who operate outside the lines saying most awful things totally un-top secret to top annihilating all’ (1961b:77). 

​This, then, is the context for the text’s point of intersection with present time:

THESE ARE BATTLE
INSTRUCTIONS:
Shift linguals/vibrate
tourists/free door ways/ cut
word lines/shift tangle cut all words lines/ ‘I said the
Chief of Police skinned alive in Bagdad [sic] not Washington D.C.’
// CUT CUT ‘Cholera epidemic in
Stockholm’ // ‘Scotland Yard assassinates the Prime Minister
in a Rightist coup’ // ‘Switzer/
land freezes all foreign assets’
// ‘Mindless idiot you have
  liquidated the Commissar’ // (1961b:77)

In a first approach to these lines, we can read them as terroristic applications of the cut-up principle of détournement: counter-subversive orders to assassinate and destabilize are turned back against those who issued the commands by a simple reordering of them. Phrased as reports of cut-up operations that worked, these bulletins do not sabotage the media’s representation of past events, but scramble the control machine’s orders for the future.

​In a second approach, we should note how these lines return in other texts, because Burroughs updated them in a specific way. In the ‘Gongs of Violence’ chapter in the revised editions of The Soft Machine, they recur with minor changes followed by a significant additional line that identifies the focus of attention: ‘machine guns in Bagdad [sic] rising from the typewriter’ (SM2 161; SM3 153). Variants of this new line occur in several texts from 1964 and 1965 (‘Who Is the Walks Beside You Written 3rd?’ and ‘Old Photographer’ in The Burroughs File; ‘Introductions’, ‘In Present Time’, and ‘Formats: The Grid’ in The Third Mind). ‘Old Photographer’ is especially significant, not only because the line generates four new versions (including ‘empty oil drums in Baghdad’), but also because it is here that Burroughs developed his notion of the text as a ‘seed’ (BF 125). And so, while it is very likely that newspaper reports were his source material, it is very unlikely that Burroughs intended such phrases to function as cryptic historical references to events that had already occurred in Baghdad, such as the downfall of the monarchy in 1958, Iraq’s claim to sovereignty of Kuwait in 1961, or the Ba’th Party rebellion in 1963. They function instead as proleptic ‘references’ to the future, awaiting their point of intersection in the present. Primed by Burroughs’s thesis, and writing at a time when Washington is claiming it must attack Baghdad to prevent Baghdad from attacking Washington, I find in the report of an assassination intended for ‘Bagdad [sic] not Washington D.C.’ an intersection point that has an extraordinarily seductive potency. But what seduces me is not the uncanny illusion of prophecy—as if Burroughs knew more than he possibly could. The coincidence is not literally prophetic, but rather prophetically literal, a profoundly affective experience of intersection through which (in both senses of the word) I ‘realize’ Burroughs’s experiment with time.

In a third approach, we should note how Burroughs’s original lines recur in Nova Express, where they open the section ‘Will Hollywood Never Learn?’. Here, their immediate context plays on Burroughs’s equation of Time magazine with a machine for controlling the future rather than reporting the present (‘Insane orders and counter orders issue from berserk Time Machine’ [NE 62]), but they ​are also set up much earlier in the text by the Intolerable Kid: ‘I’ll by God show them how ugly the Ugly American can be […] They are skinning the chief of police alive in some jerkwater place. Want to sit in?’ (NE 12). This allusion to the Ugly American—the imperial fantasy identity of Burroughs’s persona in Queer, a novel set in ‘jerkwater’ colonial South American locales (Q 53, 105)23—crucially establishes a specific national frame of reference. Although the Nova conspiracy appears to subsume the Cold War conflict between America and Russia—and so to anticipate the kind of transnational global order of Empire mapped by Hardt and Negri—the specific context identifies the proper interpretation of the reordered war commands: the cut-up principle of cybernetic feedback coincides with what the CIA termed blowback—that is, the backfire of America’s imperial overreach. Rather than viewing contemporary terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda as alien throwbacks to a barbarian age, we can see them dialectically as the inner ‘truth’ of modern American policies of control, returned to sender as part of a self-feeding correspondence. In this sense, Burroughs’s power of prophecy, like his embrace of the Ugly American cold warrior identity, is better understood as an insight realized by the continuation of historical factors: ‘World politics in the twenty-first century’, wrote Chalmers Johnson, ‘will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century— that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post Cold War world’ (2000:238). 

Finally, the original passage from ‘Operation Soft Machine/Cut’ encrypts a narrative into which we can insert Burroughs himself. In ‘I said the Chief of Police skinned alive in Bagdad [sic] not Washington D.C.’, we might identify the speaker as a senior CIA officer, the addressee as a covert operation assassin, and the scrambling of orders the work of Anti-Trak agents acting on Burroughs’s guerilla battle instructions. As is well known, during World War II, Burroughs went to Washington to join the OSS, the forerunner tothe CIA, but was turned down. ‘God knows what would have happened’, he later mused; ‘I could have wound up head of the CIA and I probably wouldn’t have written what I wrote’ (Lotringer 1981:539). Since what Burroughs did go on to write formed a kind of fantasy version of the career he did not enter, we are left with a paradoxical reading in which he both gives the orders to assassinate and cuts them up. Which side was Burroughs on? The only unequivocal answer is his warning against authority and agency that goes beyond the dialectic of ‘sides’: ‘Where I come I kill both friend and foe.’ This was the anti-political maxim of the cut-up project, Burroughs’s program for the cutting up of politics.

1. I say ‘supposed’ advisedly: Burroughs and Gysin—above all Gysin—were well aware that a new movement required a foundation story, and their often-repeated anecdotes should be seen as a creation myth rather than as a necessarily factual account.
​2. In The Job, Burroughs’s ‘most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups […] they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event’ (28). 

3. ‘“Professor killed, accident U.S.” This is an old cut-up from Minutes to Go (1960), waiting all these years for the place in the Big Picture jigsaw puzzle where it would precisely fit’ (WL 182).
4. For the most notable exception, see Murphy 1997:139–40, 144–5.
5. For a more detailed textual account, see my forthcoming article, ‘“Burroughs is a poet too, really”: the Poetics of Minutes to Go’ in The Edinburgh Review (forthcoming, 2004).
​6. This chapter references multiple versions of two volumes from Burroughs’s Nova/cut-up trilogy—The Soft Machine and the Ticket that Exploded. For specifics on the different editions, please see the Abbreviations page of this collection. 

7. The generally preferred term appears to have changed over time: whereas Lydenberg (1987) and Miles (1992) use ‘cut-up trilogy’, Murphy (1997) and Russell (2001) use ‘Nova trilogy’.
8. Letter to Jeff Nuttall, 20 August 1964 (Fales Library, New York University).
9. Most of the material published in Electronic Revolution also appeared in The Job.
10. Letter to Dave Hazelwood, 27 May 1960 (Bancroft Library, UCLA at Berkeley). After the actual date, Burroughs added ‘No Time’. This was one of several ways in which he marked the temporality of his correspondence throughout the 1960s, the most common form appearing in The Yage Letters, where his letter of 21 June 1960 is followed by ‘Present Time’ and ‘Pre-Sent Time’ (1963:59). Such epistolary dating practices formed an important parallel to the deconstruction of the time of writing and reading carried out by Burroughs’s formal cut-up experiments.
11. Letter to Allen Ginsberg, 10 November 1960 (Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, Ginsberg Collection).
12. Letter to Bill [Dobson?], 11 June 1960 (Department of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; The Ginsberg Circle: Burroughs-Hardiment Collection [MS 63 C: c:1]).
​13. For the origin of this line, see LWB 298. 14. Letter to Dave Hazelwood, 26 July 1960 (Bancroft Library, UCLA at Berkeley).

15. Although his interest is aesthetic rather than political, Géfin has also addressed the ‘problematics of reading cutups without actual cutup experience’: ‘[T]he reader cannot be expected to duplicate the original collage experience […] by being exposed to the results of that primary experience’ (1987:95).
16. The problem of maintaining a consistent hold on the relationships between theory and method and between the practical and the rhetorical is revealingly illustrated by the self-contradictions in Todd Tietchen’s (otherwise very productive) article. For example, on the one hand, he relates cut-up methods to the détournement strategies of the Situationists and to the postmodern activism of ‘Guerilla Semiotics’ and ‘Culture Jamming’, and on the other he notes: ‘Historically speaking, cut-ups belong to the movement towards self-reflexive fiction that dominated much of American writing during the 1960s’ (2001:124). Equally revealing (see note 7) is the fact that Tietchen refers to the ‘Nova books’.
17. Letter to David Hazelwood, 24 June 1960 (Department of Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; The Ginsberg Circle: Burroughs-Hardiment Collection [MS 63 C: c:3]).
18. The legacy of this occult political dimension is clearest in the work of Hakim Bey, in such texts as T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1991). 19. Letter to Bill [Dobson?], 11 June 1960, and Letter to Dave Hazelwood, 27 May 1960.
​20. For other accounts of Burroughs’s relation to apocalypticism, see Frank Kermode (1967), Richard Dellamora (1995), Edward J. Ahearn (1996), and Peter von Ziegesar (1997).

21. As former President Jimmy Carter noted in March 2003, the only religious leaders to support the attack on Iraq as a ‘just war’ were ‘a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology’ (9 March 2003, <www.bushwatch.com>).
22. ‘The Persian Gulf War of 1991’, notes Boyer, ‘triggered a wave of prophecy interest focused on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and his plans for rebuilding ancient Babylon, whose end-time destruction is foretold in the Book of Revelation’ (1992:280); in March 2003, the Bush Watch website featured numerous articles on the same theme, one quoting the head of the Jerusalem Prayer Team, who believed that ‘a war with Iraq could be a “dress rehearsal for Armageddon”—the fulfillment of biblical prophecy’ (16 March 2003, <www.bushwatch.com>).
23. On Burroughs, Queer and the Ugly American, see Harris (2003), chapter 3.

Ahearn, E. J. (1996) Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Benjamin, W. (1934) Understanding Brecht, Bostock, A. trans. (London: Verso, 1977).
​Bowles, P. (1972) Without Stopping (New York: Ecco, 1984).

Boyer, P. (1992) Time Shall be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Bull, M. (2001) ‘You can’t build a new society with a Stanley knife’, London Review of Books, 4 October, pp.3-7.
Burroughs, W. S. (1961a) ‘Comments on the Night Before Thinking’, Evergreen Review (5)20, September, pp. 31–6.
—— (Fall 1961b) ‘Operation Soft Machine/Cut’, Outsider 1, pp. 74–7.
—— (1966) ‘A Tape Recorder Experiment’, Klactoveedsedsteen 3, May, pp. 20–1.
Burroughs, W. S., and Gysin, B. (1960) The Exterminator (San Francisco: The Auerhahn Press).
​—— (1973) A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive (London: Covent Garden). Compiled by Miles Associates.

Davidson, M. (1997) Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Dellamora, R. ed. (1995) Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
Dunne, J. W. (1927) An Experiment with Time (New York: Macmillan).
Géfin, L. (1987) ‘Collage, Theory, Reception, and the Cutups of William Burroughs’, Literature and the Other Arts 13, pp. 91–100.
Ginsberg, A., and Orlovsky, P. (1980) Strait Hearts’ Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters 1947–1980, Leyland, W. ed. (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine).
​Gysin, B., and Wilson, T. (1982) Here to Go: Planet R-101 (San Francisco: Re/Search). 

​Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000) Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Harris, O. (2003) William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press).
Hutcheon, L. (1980) Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (New York: Methuen).
Johnson, C. (2000) Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (London: Time Warner, 2002).
Kermode, F. (1967) The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press).
Latham, R. (1993) ‘Collage as Critique and Invention in the Fiction of William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (5)3, pp. 46–57.
Leary, T. (1987) ‘Cyberpunks’, <http://www.textfiles.com.drugs/leary002.txt>, 29 January 2003.
Lotringer, S. (1981) ‘Exterminating’, IN Lotringer, S. ed., Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960–1997 (USA: Semiotext[e], 2001), pp. 526–44.
Lydenberg, R. (1987) Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
Maynard, J., and Miles, B. (1978) William S. Burroughs, A Bibliography 1953–73 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia).
Mikriammos, P. (1975) William S. Burroughs: la vie et l’oeuvre (Paris: Seghers).
Miles, Barry (1976) ‘Introduction’, IN Burroughs, W. S., Le métro blanc, Beach M., and Pélieu-Washburn, C. trans. (Paris: Bourgois/Seuil).
—— (1992) William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, rev. and updated edition (UK: Virgin, 2002).

Mottram, R. (1965) Recontre avec William Burroughs, IN Hibbard, A. ed., Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), pp. 11–15.
Murphy, T. S. (1997) Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Richter, H. (1964) Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Britt, D. trans. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965).
Russell, J. (2001) Queer Burroughs (New York: Palgrave).
Schwitters, K., and Hausmann, R. (1962) PIN (London: Gabberbocchus).
Tietchen, T. (2001) ‘Language out of Language: Excavating the Roots of Culture Jamming and Postmodern Activism from William S. Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy’, Discourse 23.3, Fall 2001, pp. 107–29.
Weissner, C. (1983) ‘Preface’, IN Norse, H., Beat Hotel (San Diego: Atticus), pp. x–xii.
​Ziegesar, P. Von (1997) ‘After Armageddon: Apocalyptic Art since the Seventies’, IN Strozier, C. B., and Flynn, M. eds, The Year 2000: Essays on the End (New York: New York University Press).

excerpt from the book: Retaking the Universe (William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization)

by Oliver Harris

​Certain things you must take literally if you want to understand.

—William S. Burroughs (3M 133)

The first line of the ‘First Cut-Ups’ published in Minutes to Go (1960) was, according to Brion Gysin, ‘a readymade phrase that simply dropped onto the table; several layers of printed material were laid one on top of the other and cut through with the Stanley blade’, and when he put these pieces together, Gysin laughed out loud ‘because the answers were so apt and so extraordinary’ (Gysin and Wilson 1982:56). Answers presume questions; but in this material practice the order of causality and chronology has to be reversed. Magically, the cut-up text answered Gysin precisely by revealing to him his own question—that is to say: What will be the effect of the cut-up project? Four decades later, the reply he received at the supposed moment of the project’s inception,1 courtesy of his Stanley blade, may still stand: ‘It is impossible to estimate the damage’ (MTG 6).

Although the temptation to generalize is a basic error—to speak of ‘the cut-up’ is to falsify the great range of cut-up procedures, the enormous variety of texts they produced, and the multiplicity of purposes they served, all of which varied over time—this original cut-up is, in its equivocal potency, exemplary. On the one hand, it prophesizes the very powers of prophecy that Burroughs would almost immediately claim for the method;2 on the other, it predicts the very impossibility of predicting the exact outcome of individual cut-up operations or of definitively measuring the efficacy of the project as a whole. Simultaneously, it promises that the method works—in unspecified destructive ways—and yet creates that meaning only in hindsight and only as an open question. When Burroughs looked back on that ‘hectic, portentous time in Paris, in 1959’ toward the end of his last major novel, The Western Lands, he would ponder both the ‘prophetic’ significance of Minutes to Go’s cryptic phrases and the ‘damage’ he thought he was doing, concluding skeptically that it ‘reads like sci-fi’: ‘We all thought we were interplanetary agents involved in a deadly struggle… battles… codes…ambushes. It seemed real at the time. From here, who knows?’ (WL 252).3 From first to last, there is a standoff between claims for the methods’ prophetic and performative power, an equivocation about the productivity of cut-ups as tools of war in ‘a deadly struggle’ that may or may not have existed. 

This paradox has posed an intractable problem for critics. With very few exceptions,4 they have recycled Burroughs’s claims at face value and sidestepped evaluating not only their internal coherence and consistency but also their validity. Did cut-up methods reveal the future, because events are ‘pre-recorded’, or did they produce events, because the function of writing is to ‘make it happen’? Were they revolutionary weapons or a private delusional fantasy, a kind of therapy or a form of pathology? Did they work? From here, who knows?

Inevitably, the one claim that critics have never taken literally is Burroughs’s original and overriding insistence: that cut-up methods were ‘for everyone’ and ‘experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about’ (3M 31). For critics to take Burroughs’s advice—put most bluntly to Allen Ginsberg: ‘Don’t theorize. Try it’ (YL 59)—would this not mean abandoning criticism altogether in favor of practice? Perhaps so. But, short of this, what it must mean is putting the cutup project back onto its material base, and this in turn demands an accurate chronology of its development and promotion. For this reason, the first task is to revise the standard critical verdict on Minutes to Go, the launching manual and manifesto of the method.5 

At first sight—and criticism has never given it a second look— Minutes to Go seems largely irrelevant to what would follow; an exceptional, minor text of crude experimentalism that Burroughs put behind him as he worked on his trilogy of novels, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express.6 The fundamental problem with this account is that it effectively reverses the historical priorities by abstracting form and content from method. As a result, even the very best critical analyses have been based on a false understanding of how Burroughs’s methods developed over time. Robin Lydenberg, for example, begins by claiming that ‘The Soft ​Machine provides a relatively accessible introduction to Burroughs’s writing experiments during the 1960s’ on the basis of its ‘tentative and restrained use of the cut-up’ (1987:56); but her claim precisely inverts the true situation, because the edition she analyses is the second, which shows the massive revisions Burroughs was forced to make in order to undo the originally unrestrained use of cut-up methods that made the first edition of his first cut-up novel so inaccessible. 

Equally, it is no coincidence that these novels are generally identified as ‘the Nova trilogy’—which emphasizes the apocalyptic urgency of their allegorical political scenario—rather than ‘the cutup trilogy’—which would recognize the primacy of the material methods by which, so visibly and uniquely, they were created.7 But this primacy is more than formal, since the methods determined the political scenario, too. The essential historical question, ‘To what political analysis were cut-up methods an answer?’, has therefore to be turned around and rephrased: ‘What political analysis did the methods themselves produce?’ Most obviously, we can see this in the way the Nova conspiracy appropriates the method to ‘set cut-up terrorists against a totalizing discursive apparatus’ (Latham 1993:48), even as these narrative agents of interplanetary resistance generalize the fantasy scenario of the cut-up writer engaged in his ‘deadly struggle’. But Burroughs’s politics of method was not simply subsumed by form and content, since its point of departure was not only the material acts that resulted in his texts, but also the material acts that they in turn were intended to produce. This prospective function, which has multiple and disparate dimensions, requires that a historical approach to cut-up methods means situating Burroughs’s texts not just in relation to a past or present reality, but also with reference to the future. Burroughs’s cut-up politics came from his scissors in a number of different ways, but in each we see the determining significance of method motivated materially as well as historically by the predictive urgency announced at the outset in the very title of Minutes to Go.

Although Burroughs’s trilogy presents extraordinary problems, criticism has found ways to read it: by isolating themes, reconstructing scenarios, analyzing formal structures, and so on. But none of these interpretive strategies work for his short texts in Minutes to Go, and this is because their frame of reference is essentially quite different. To begin with, rather than understanding these texts as failures— one-off exercises which Burroughs quickly abandoned—it is more accurate to say that they demonstrated the provisional and productive character of results proper to an experimental method. This is the key point about Minutes to Go: that the very first examples of the practice were used to publicize it; Burroughs did not try to perfect the method first. Of course, the process itself was future-oriented, in the sense that cutting up pre-existent texts reverses the sequence that is axiomatic to mimesis, so that the sign creates its referent; production replaces reproduction, and meaning becomes contingent, a coded message awaiting the ‘intersection point’ that will decipher it. This is one reason why Burroughs constantly went back to Minutes to Go, recycling its most enigmatic phrases—such as ‘Will Hollywood Never Learn?’—in new contexts to discover new significances.

Constant revision in the light of experience was inherent in the method, and this process explains the fate of Burroughs’s trilogy. The fact that it was realized in six editions over a seven-year period has always been read as a calculated refusal of linear structure and textual closure. But, rather than embodying any theoretical position, Burroughs updated his trilogy into present time—‘That was in 1962’, he comments in one place (TE2 9)—because he was led by his own methods of textual production to apply to novel-length works an experimental logic initially devised for, and in certain respects better suited to, the publication of short pieces in pamphlet or magazine form.

Indeed, a narrow focus on the trilogy has made it easy to overlook the fact that parts of all these novels first appeared in a range of alternative or underground journals, and that this process continued as Burroughs revised his texts. By the time the first edition of The Ticket that Exploded was published in December 1962, Burroughs had already published some 50 magazine contributions, a figure rising to 100 by the time Nova Express appeared in November 1964 and to 200 by the time the final edition of The Soft Machine was published in July 1968. In this light, the three novels may even be seen as aberrations, extraordinary exceptions to the cut-up project rather than its necessary fulfillment.

What I’m suggesting is our need to rewrite the literary history of the cut-up project to counterbalance the effects of that most pragmatic of constraints; namely, the commercial availability of textual materials. Critical attention to the cut-up trilogy inevitably reflects that availability, while doubly reinforcing Burroughs’s reception as a novelist (even though the term ‘cut-up novel’ is virtually an oxymoron). For to approach Burroughs as the author of The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded and Nova Express relegates to the margins his enormous investment of energy not only in multimedia applications, but also the far broader field of textual experiment. The true scale of that field can only be gauged by referring to the 60 pages of periodical contributions listed in Maynard and Miles’s bibliography and the several hundred more unpublished short cutup texts listed in the Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive. Only a tiny fraction of the published texts have been made generally accessible—in The Third Mind and The Burroughs File—but, even then, their true significance is inevitably obscured: to read Burroughs’s experimental layout texts collected and reprinted in book form is an entirely different experience to reading them in the context of their original magazine publications.

There is, I would argue, a complex politics to this mode of production and publication that derives directly from Burroughs’s material practice. Since Burroughs’s priority did not lie in the finished text or in texts with traditional ‘finish’, he was able to exploit the particular advantages structured into magazine dissemination. As Barry Miles observed: ‘Burroughs could present to the reading public his cut/up experiences immediately. Naturally, this provoked a highly intimate encounter with his colleagues’ (1976:10; my translation). Miles was thinking specifically of Burroughs’s regular newspaper layout columns in the small-circulation, mimeographed pamphlet, My Own Mag, and in August 1964 Burroughs wrote to its editor, the poet Jeff Nuttall, clarifying the precise political ambition of his contributions; he had, he noted, ‘always yearned nostalgically for the old pamphlet days when writers fought in the street’.8 In fact, Burroughs’s nostalgia could be seen as unrecognized prescience, since the proliferating mass of little magazines was, by the mid1960s, already forming an expanding underground network of alternative communication. Burroughs would develop the radical political potentials of this network explicitly in Electronic Revolution (1971), where he identified the underground press as ‘the only effective counter to a growing power and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media’, concluding that ‘the underground press could perform this function much more effectively by the use of cut/up techniques’ (ER 24).9 Burroughs’s hopes for the underground press were to generalize the incendiary intentions he had had for his first cut-up pamphlets, as indicated in a summer 1960 letter to Dave Hazelwood concerning The Exterminator, the sequel to Minutes to Go: ‘I think you realize how explosive the material is […] Are you willing and able to publish—To put it in the street? Please answer at once. Minutes to go believe me.’

Burroughs’s remarkable commitment to small press publications throughout the cut-up decade meant trading against his work’s commercial value; as he told Ginsberg in 1960, his best bets were ‘no-paying far-out magazines like Yugen and Kulchur’.11 In terms of the experimental opportunities it afforded Burroughs, this commitment constitutes a ‘textual politics’ as defined by Michael Davidson— the ‘seizing of one’s means of literary production’ (1997:179)—and locates Burroughs’s practice in a broader contemporary cultural context. For example, Charles Olson grasped the importance of such magazines as Diane DiPrima and Leroi Jones’s Floating Bear (which published six cut-up texts by Burroughs in 1961–62): the immediacy of communication relative to book publication narrowed significantly the gap between producer and consumer. This narrowing enabled avant-garde and underground small press magazines to operate through localized, specific networks of dissemination, and over time Burroughs learned to exploit the narrowed distances between both the time of composition and reception and between the writer and a specialized audience. 

The nearly two-dozen contributions Burroughs made to My Own Mag between 1964 and 1966 are especially important in this context, because it was here that he introduced his own newspaper, The Moving Times. Specifically focused on temporal experiments using text arranged in columns, The Moving Times was a precursor to his pamphlets, Time and Apo-33 (1965), and a logical conclusion to Minutes to Go, where eleven of Burroughs’s 16 texts had cut up newspaper articles. Editing his own experimental magazine enabled Burroughs not only to address his readers directly, but also to invite their involvement in such experimental projects as writing in ‘present time’ through collecting ‘intersection points’: ‘Try writing tomorrow’s news today. Fill three columns with your future time guesses. Read cross column […] Notice that there are many hints of the so-called future’ (BF 150). 

Burroughs solicited both correspondence and creative collaborations from his readership and it was, as Maynard and Miles noted, through The Moving Times that he began his substantial cut-up collaborations with Claude Pélieu and Carl Weissner (1978:128). The new channels offered by the alternative press therefore confirmed the importance of the mode of publication to Burroughs’s development and promotion of cut-up methods—and, hence, their instrumental value for the political goal of recruiting other practitioners. One three-column text, ‘Who Is the Walks Beside You Written 3rd?’, ends with a general call to take back ownership of the production of reality from those who publish the official text: ‘It is time to do our own publishing’ (BF 76). In this respect, we might revise Timothy S. Murphy’s formulation for the general ‘context of political engagement’ into which Burroughs sent his ‘literary interventions’: ‘Such a context could be called an audience, a community of addressees’ (1997:145). Burroughs’s mass of small press cut-up contributions, specifically those using newspaper formats, materially constituted precisely such a context; the resulting community was not projected on the basis of reception alone, however, but on recruitment to future acts of production—acts that in turn promised to produce the future.

Burroughs’s nostalgia for ‘the old pamphlet days’ of street-fighting writers may also be seen as a reference back to the historical avantgarde, specifically the era of Dada. Burroughs’s early identification of cut-up techniques with the prior example set by Tristan Tzara’s performance of ‘Pour faire un poème dadaiste’—the recipe for making a poem by drawing out of a hat words cut from a newspaper—is of course well known, but to this we must add recognition of the importance of the specific context in which Tzara published; that is to say, the manifesto. In 1918, Richard Huelsenbeck attributed the principle of active, provocative campaigning to Tzara, proclaiming: ‘The manifesto as a literary medium answered our need for directness. We had no time to lose; we wanted to incite our opponents to resistance, and, if necessary, to create new opponents for ourselves’ (cited by Richter 1964:103). Primed by knowledge of such historical precedents, in June 1960, as he worked on a pamphlet to follow Minutes to Go, Burroughs was therefore confident he could predict its reception: ‘Expect a spot of bother. Well there has been plenty of that already. You can not win allies without making enemies.’12 The manifesto as a medium encouraged Burroughs to take the military metaphor of the avant-garde quite literally, and Minutes to Go represents a political mobilization of friends—‘FUNCTION WITH ​​BURROUGHS EVERY MAN/ AN AGENT’ (59)—and an identification of enemies—‘CANCER MEN… THESE INDIVIDUALS/ARE MARKED FOE’ (12)—while The Exterminator goes one better: ‘“Let petty kings the name of party know/ Where I come I kill both friend and foe”’ (Burroughs and Gysin 1960:v).13

Burroughs’s call to arms is contextualized by the urgency of Tzara’s manifesto form (‘We had no time to lose’), but the distinctive feature of Minutes to Go—and one of the reasons for its neglect—is the absence in Burroughs’s texts of anything remotely resembling a direct aesthetic or political statement. This is because, while his texts were heterogeneous in form and content—several reworked newspaper articles into prose or stanzas, some fragmented the words of a Rimbaud poem, and so on—all of them gave priority to the material process of cutting up over its products. In doing so, they identified the value of the method for the practitioner, rather than the reader. The inference is that cut-up methods should be understood as artistic only in the specific sense of a liberating life praxis. Certainly, Gysin’s injunction, ‘Make your whole life a poem’ (MTG 43), directly resurrects the Surrealist maxims of Breton and Lautréamont (which Burroughs would repeat, typically attributing them to Tzara): that poetry should be practiced and that it should be made by all. Leaving the polemical task entirely to Gysin, Burroughs allowed the method to become his message. As one cryptic phrase has it: ‘Allies wait on knives’ (MTG 21). 

In this respect, another of his letters to Hazelwood in the summer of 1960 is especially revealing:

I find that people read MINUTES TO GO without ever using the cut up method themselves. But when they once do it themselves they see. Any missionary work you do among your acquaintance in showing people how the cut up system works will pay off in sales. People must be led to take a pair of scissors and cut a page of type.14

Although he uses economic terms for his publisher’s benefit (‘pay off in sales’), this cannot conceal the true nature of Burroughs’s selfinterest here, which is defined by his recognition that, for his texts to work, people ‘must be led’ to practice the methods by which he himself had made them. In fact, there are two sides to this motive. On the one hand, Burroughs knew he needed to promote the method in order to ensure an understanding of his work, which could be guaranteed most effectively by creating an audience of ​producers—an audience, in effect, made in his own image. On the other hand, his early experience of cut-up methods turned emphatically on the seductive pleasure and private insights they yield so enigmatically to the practitioner. A strictly physical dimension was integral to the act—across the entire range of aesthetic, magical, and therapeutic functions Burroughs claimed for it. The key word in his claim for the uncanny, prophetic potency of the method—‘Cut-ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter’ (3M 32)—is emphatically the last.

excerpt from the book: Retaking the Universe (William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization)

​Georges Bataille

The Communist Party of Philadelphia holds a rally on May Day, 1935, across the street from City Hall. 

Comrades:
I will speak on the question of the Popular Front.
However, I do not want to equivocate.
​We are not politicians.

We will not try to add new maneuvers to the already complex and often divergent maneuvers of the politicians.

When we speak to those who want to hear us, we do not essentially address their political finesse. The reactions we hope for from them are calcula.tlOns of positions, nor are they new political alliances. What we hope for is of a different nature.

​We see that the human masses are at the disposition of blind forces which condemn them to inexplicable hecatombs, and which, while making them wait, give them a morally empty and materially miserable life.

​What we have before our eyes is the horror of human impotence.

We want to confront this horror directly. We address ourselves to the direct and violent drives which, in the minds of those who hear us, can contribute to ​the surge of power that will liberate men from the absurd swindlers who lead them.

​We know that such drives have little to do with the phraseology invented to maintain political positions. The will to be done with impotence implies, even in our eyes, scorn for this phrasemongering; the taste for verbal agitation has never passed for a mark of power.

​On this point, we want to express ourselves in a precise way.

​Derided humanity has already known surges of power. These chaotic but implacable power surges dominate history and are known as Revolutions. On many occasions entire populations have gone into the street and nothing has been able to resist their force. It is an incontestable fact that if men have found themselves in the streets, armed, in a mass uprising, carrying with them the tumult of the total power of the people, it has never been the consequence of a narrow and speciously defined political alliance.

​What drives the crowds to the street is the emotion directly aroused by striking events in the atmosphere of a storm, it is the contagious emotion that, from house to house, from suburb to suburb, suddenly turns a hesitating man into a frenzied being.

​It is evident that if, in general, insurrections had had to wait for learned disputes between committees and the political offices of parties, then there never would have been an insurrection.

​Still, as astonishing as this may seem, one frequently notes, among militant revolutionaries, a complete lack of confidence in the spontaneous reactions of the masses.

​The need to organize parties has resulted in unusual habits among the socalled revolutionary agitators, who confuse the entry of the Revolution into the street with their political platforms, with their well-groomed programs, with their maneuvers in the halls of Congress.

​Amazingly, a distrust of the same order prevails against intellectuals. The distrust of intellectuals only apparently contradicts the one that underestimates the spontaneous movements of the masses.

​As much as they can, certain professional revolutionary activists would like to eliminate, from the human tragedy that the Revolution necessarily is, all its emotional resources, the brutal convulsion of the masses, the atmosphere charged with hope, the rages and enthusiasms expressed in periods of crisis by those who write.

We are as far as we can be from the belief that a movement can do without its leaders, as far as we can be from the belief that this leadership can do without the resources of human knowledge contributed by the most recent advances of human understanding. But first of all we must protest against everything that is ​born in the poisoned atmosphere of professional congresses and committees, all of which are at the mercy of hallway maneuvers.

​We do not think it possible to raise a political question without having a debate. And for us having the debate means having it in the street, it means having it where emotion can seize men and push them to the limit, without meeting the eternal obstacles that result from the defense of old political positions.

​If we are to speak of the Popular Front, we must first identify what holds us firmly together, what links our origins to the emotions that constitute it, namely, the existence of the Popular Front in the street.

Comrades, we must say of the Popular Front that it was born on the Cours de Vincennes on the day of February 12, 1934, when for the first time the masses of workers gathered to demonstrate the strength of their opposition to fascism.

Most of us, comrades, were in the street that day and can recall the emotion that overcame us when the Communist marchers, coming out of the rue des Pyrenees, turned into the Cours de Vincennes and took up the entire width of the street: this massive group was preceded by a line of a hundred workers, shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm, marching with unprecedented slowness and singing the lntemationale. Many among you, no doubt, can remember the huge old bald worker, with a reddish face and heavy white moustache, who walked slowly, one step at a time, in front of that moving human wall, holding high a red flag.

It was no longer a procession, nor anything poorly political; it was the curse of the working people, and not only in its rage, IN ITS IMPOVERISHED MAJESTY, which advanced, made greater by a kind of rending solemnity-by the menace of slaughter still suspended at that moment over all of the crowd.

Comrades, at that moment, on the Cours de Vincennes, the Communist masses marched in front of the Socialist masses, and a little later merged with them through an identical cry for unity of action. This was the period, however, when, in L 'Humanite, professional politicians indulged in precise definitions of the situation: according to Marty, in an article whose delirium moreover must nevertheless be acknowledged, they had shot not fascists but workers on the Place de la Concorde. For the entire editorial board of L 'Humanite, Daladier's government then became a government of executioners, and unity of action continued to be impossible with the Socialist traitors. On this question, the Central Committee of the party published, a few days after February 12, statements that clearly indicated their refusal.

This is how revolutionary activity can be expressed in the street with force and at the same time with an incomparable instinctive certainty, when from the poisoned atmosphere of committees and editorial offices nothing comes but political directives testifying to a scandalous blindness.

​Political wrangling was again superseded by the reality of the street at the time of the definitive formation of the Popular Front.

​The Popular Front was conceived by its founders as a defensive organization, reuniting all the forces hostile to fascism. It is impossible not to see that its birth coincided with the salvation of Stalin by the French Army. The grave, and perhaps even tragic, situation of the Soviets engaged them in a Franco-Russian political alliance, which then linked their interests to social conservatism in France. Clearly, from the moment that Soviet security depends on the French military forces, the Soviets cannot at the same time work to undermine these forces. In the spirit of its Communist founders, the Popular Front's goal was, without a doubt, the maintenance of a nonfascist, but strong, France, thus at the disposal of socially conservative elements.

​In a certain sense, the Popular Front meant nothing more than the revolutionaries' abandonment of the anticapitalist offensive; the move to the defense of antifascism; the move to the simple defense of democracy; the abandonment, at the same time, of revolutionary defeatism.

​Now comrades, what can we think of this abandonment of the anticapitalist offensive, at precisely the time when a great number of people, independently oftheir political tendencies, agreed upon the disastrous character of the capitalist system? From the revolutionary point of view, the abandonment of the anticapitalist offensive in the midst of the present crisis would represent the most scandalous possible weakness; isn't it incredible to leave to the worst slaves of capitalism, to the fascistic Croix de feu lackeys of the de Wendels, the rallying cry awaited by the anxious, disconcerted masses, the rallying cry to fight against a capitalism despised by the vast majority of men?

The default of the politicians thus would abandon the real world, the world oftragic sufferings and hopes, to the degrading verbal comedy of barracks-room thugs.

​And at the same time, while dread mounts from day to day before the imminence of the physical extermination of men and human wealth, wouldn't it be incredible to anticipate a new conflict by giving the idea of antifascism a value on the level of military struggle, when we know, meanwhile, that stupid imperialism precisely engendered this fascism that we mean to fight while marching in the ranks assigned to us by generals and industrial magnates.

​Comrades, if human reality, or to be more precise, human reality in the street-personally, it is in tying to it all the hope that stirs me that I use this term "street," which opposes life, real life, to the schemes as well as to the isolation of the absurdly involuted individual-if human reality did not in every possible way go beyond the mediocre conceptions and betrayals of conniving politicians, then the Popular Front would not have, for any of us, the profound meaning that it has acquired in the circumstances that we have lived and that we continue to live.

​Even today, while many people-rightly or wrongly-are claiming that the popular Front is falling apart at the top, that, beyond an antifascist defense it will be incapable ofsetting forth a plan for concerted action essential to the exercise of power, we continue to see growing among the masses who make up its strength, who were in the street yesterday, who will invade the street tomorrow, the agitation of the people's omnipotence.

​Badly formed political conceptions have set these people in motion, but the Popular Front does not depend on the will of its founders to work exactly for their goals: the Popular Front is above all now a movement, an agitation, a crucible in which formerly separated political forces meld with an often tumultuous effervescence.

​Now that the various social strata that constitute it have become conscious of the strength they represent when reunited, this strength, going to their heads, will attract them to each other and will break the chains meant to hold them.

​Therefore, when our comrades of the revolutionary Socialist left call for the transformation of the defense against fascism into an anticapitalist offensive, of the Popular Front into the Popular Front of combat, they are only expressing the dynamic movement inherent in the makeup of forces in motion. Today it is not advisable for anyone to be opposed to the rise of the all-powerful populace.

​We must not be unaware, however, that difficulties must be overcome, before the offensive can be realized, without which the party will find itself in the hands of those who are still criminally talking of the "lost victory."

​We do not believe that organized parties should disappear, but we do not believe either that the masses can attain the power to put an end to domination by capitalist lackeys unless a movement appears that can escape the sterilizing control of these parties.

​We must above all recognize as critical the period following the formation of a government that, without being the direct expression of the Popular Front, could nevertheless be brought to power by the parliamentarians who belonged to this Front.

From time to time the spokesmen of the Popular Front themselves are led to make statements that show an extreme uneasiness on this point. Concerning a Popular Front government, Pierre Jerome, secretary-general of the Vigilance Committee, a few weeks ago expressed the fear that he could not cover budgetary expenditures with foreseen income: "In that case," Pierre Jerome states, "we will see our enemies furnished with the best weapon they could hope for. To be sure, if panic sets in, we ourselves should not faint with fear ... " Jerome in any case sees a way out of this great difficulty: "In the end, all we need do is make the rich pay... "

​In fact, nothing is more likely in the near future than a repeat of the disastrous events that sooner or later followed the electoral victories of the so-called Left of 1924 and 1932.

​Without being able to have confidence in more or less arbitrary details, one can foresee, at one time or another, a serious crisis of the entire Left, a crisis that will not fail to seriously affect the Popular Front itself. 

To tell the truth, those of us who see the Popular Front as a reality in motion have nothing to become excessively alarmed about in such a crisis. We must only foresee it, knowing full well that no development of forces and no great social transformation can take place without a crisis, knowing as well above all that the forces destined to prevail are those that not only overcome their crises, but are capable of profiting by them.

​The Popular Front means for us the awareness the people first attained, in the days of February, of their strength in the face of Fascist thugs and lackeys. We do not believe that this awareness will allow itself to be shaken on the day miserable directors betray their own impotence.

These conditions are, on the contrary, in our opinion, necessary so that the masses, who have no desire for the reactionary solutions leading to poverty and war, this time can become aware of the inherent necessities of power. It is possible that a crisis is indispensable for the transformation-as indicated from the outset by the menacing attitude of the masses in the street-of the defensive Popular Front into the Popular Front of combat, and, of course, of combat for the anticapitalist dictatorship of the people.
​
It is clear from now on that, in order to have confidence in its own resources, the Popular Front must first lose the confidence it currently has in its principal leaders.

​I do not think it necessary here to insist upon our reasons for having the greatest distrust and even the greatest contempt for given professional political parliamentarians, who tomorrow risk being entrusted with the position of leadership.

​What interests us above all-the analysis of the economic bases of society having been accomplished, its results having proven, moreover, to be limitedare the emotions that give the human masses the surges of power that tear them away from the domination of those who only know how to lead them on to poverty and to the slaughterhouse.

​But we would not want to suggest that we blindly abandon ourselves to the spontaneous reactions of the street.

​We are led to make an essential distinction between the reactions that agitate men in the street and the phrasemongering of politicians, and all the teachings of the present period at the very least show that this distinction credits the men who have nothing going for them but their passions, to the detriment of those corrupted and often emptied of human content by the strategic task.

But we find no reason to renounce the decisive intervention ofjudgment and of the methodical understanding of the facts. We only wish to apply intelligence less to so-called political situations and to the logical deductions that ensue, than to the immediate comprehension oflife. Even independently ofthe tragic events ​now taking place, we believe that there is more to learn in the streets of great cities, for example, than in political newspapers or books. For us a significant reality is the state of prostration and boredom expressed inside a bus by a dozen human faces, all of them complete strangers. For anyone not already hardened by the emptiness of life, there IS in this world, which seems to have at its disposal limitless resources, a confusion remedied only by a kind of lazily accepted general imbecility. Even poverty seems at the very least less incurable than this stupid distress. A beggar whose broken voice cries out a song one can barely hear in the rear of a courtyard seems at times to have lost less in the game of life than the human matter arranged in buses and trains during rush hour.

​Someone told me the other day, correctly, that the source of the Croix de Feu's might was very simple: the Croix de Feu, in general, are people who are bored. The minimum of contagious passion animating the Croix de Feu, the low budget exaltation-to tell the truth, an exaltation good for workroomsmaintained by this pillar of human boredom (family barracks) known as the Count Colonel de la Rocque, is somehow enough to maintain a vague gleam of life in empty brains, but no taste for what is burning or colorful in life grips them, and the sinister job of the Croix de Feu becomes their whole life.

​The opium of the people in the present world is perhaps not so much religion as it is accepted boredom. Such a world is at the mercy, it must be known, of those who provide at least the semblance of an escape from boredom. Human life aspires to the passions, and again encounters its exigencies.

​It can appear out of place and even absolutely absurd to those who worry about which platforms must serve as the basis for future actions, when we respond by saying that the world in which they bustle about is doomed to boredom. 

​This remark, however, has a very simple meaning: in the Communist opposition, I have personally known a great number of people for whom the definition of platforms has had an essential value. Their activity resulted only in stunning boredom, which they saw precisely as the mark of revolutionary seriousness.

​We want to say that we oppose these preoccupations.

​We believe that strength will belong not to those for whom action is a demand for morose and disagreeable work, but to those who, on the contrary, will deliver the world from its exhausting boredom.

​We want to give precise answers to questions that demand precise answers, but we maintain that what is essential lies elsewhere.

​We must contribute to the masses' awareness oftheir own power; we are sure that strength results less from strategy than from collective exaltation, and exaltation can come only from words that touch not the reason but the passions of the masses.

We want to hope that soon the masses will know how to gather and find ​together, in this reunion, the burning heat that attracts men from all sides and that will become the basis for an implacable popular domination.

​We ask all those who, along with us, mean to pursue an action parallel to the one we see open before us how they hope to achieve the dictatorship of the working masses, how, first of all, they hope to realize the transformation of the defensive Popular Front into a Popular Front of combat.

​As for us, we want to pose the question in a precise way. It seems to me personally that the only way to pose the question is the following: it is not really a question of knowing first of all what must be done, but what result must be envisioned. We know that the question of the takeover of power is now being posed. We know that, in all likelihood, the democratic regime, which struggles amidst mortal contradictions, cannot be saved.

​The succession is open. We have many reasons to think that the Croix de Feu provide no response to the necessities resulting from the current situationneither in their social content, the tenor of their program, nor in the personality of their chief. Their effective value seems to us in this respect to be situated far below that of the Italian Fascists or the German National Socialists.

​The Popular Front in its present form is not, nor does it present itself, as an organized force within sight of taking power. It must thus be transformed, according to the plan of the socialist revolutionary Left, into a Popular Front of combat.

​As for us, we say that this presupposes a renewal of political forms, a renewal possible in the present circumstances, when it seems that all revolutionary forces are called upon to fuse in an incandescent crucible. We are assured that insurrection is impossible for our adversaries. We believe that of the two hostile forces that will engage in the struggle for power, the fascists and the people, the force that gets the upper hand will be the one that shows itself most capable of dominating events and imposing an implacable power on its adversaries. What we demand is a coherent, disciplined organization, its entire will straining with enthusiasm toward popular power; this is the sense of responsibility that must devolve on those who tomorrow must be the masters, who must subordinate the system of production to human interests, who must impose silence, in their own country and at the same time throughout the world, on the nationalists' criminal and puerile passions.

After February 16.
500,000 workers, defied by little cockroaches, invaded the streets and caused an immense uproar. Comrades, who has the right to lay down the law?
This ALL-POWERFUL multitude, thus HUMAN OCEAN...
Only this ocean of men in revolt can save the world from the nightmare of impotence and carnage in which it sinks!

excerpt from the book: Visions of Excess Selected Writings, 1927-1939 Georges Bataille