by Terence Blake The problem is not so much should one be metaphysical or not? but more one of pluralism, multiplicity, polytheism as incorporated in our modes of acting, perceiving, feeling and thinking. It’s a question of typology rather than content, of what Deleuze calls the Image of thought. So Deleuze can say unashamedly that he is a pure metaphysician. AV: Are you a non-metaphysical philosopher? GD: No, I feel I am a pure metaphysician because he is concerned with a meta-competence of navigating between the unities and multiplicities of our world. I miss the Heideggerian background that is developped in Sean Kelly’s and Hubert Dreyfus’s lectures but only adumbrated in “All Things Shining”(see http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/IntheNews.html) but I feel there are advantages in not emphasizing it in the book. This type of thinking is much bigger than just Heideggerian (or Derridian) problematics. This is why I appreciate dmf’s contributions to the blog http://allthingsshiningbook.wordpress.com/, with their multiple references and the openness of thought they express. Kelly and Dreyfus, following Heidegger, talk about “gathering” to describe the coming together of practices in configurations of ways of being in the world: “The practices have gathered throughout the history of the West to reveal these manifold ways the world is” (ATS, 223). This is not necessarily a monistic metaphysical term to describe a monolithic all-encompassing structure that would correspond to a particular historical epoch. Dreyfus and Kelly in fact argue that there are always other practices on the margins, and that these marginal practices can sometimes come together, gather, in a new understanding of being that reveals a new way the world is. Deleuze and Guattari’s pluralist notion of “agencements”, usually translated as assemblages, could just as well be translated as gatherings. As well, they often invoke “minor” practices that exist alongside the majority mode of organising practices and that operate outside its hegemony. Pickering too talks in terms of assemblages, and explicitly invokes a counter-hegemonic gestalt switch which would empower the marginal practices embodying a more open, non-dualist, ontology of becoming. The article is taken from:
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by Terence Blake Latour attempts to give us a phenomenology of the original experience of emotion that underlies the mode of existence of invisible psychogenic beings, or “divinities”. He declares that with the emotion and the impression that it comes from outside there is the suspicion that there is something else, something other in this trial, that he or she has made a mistake as to the attribution, the target, the goal: “I’m not the one targeted” This seems to be phenomenologically wrong. He talks of a “suspicion”, a cognitive aspect to the emotion. One feels there is “something else”, “something other”, the emotion comes from outside and affects me. But what is all this talk about “targets”? I am not the one responsible, I do not command my emotions, but this has nothing to do with “I am not the target”. This is monistic language: the “I” is not a given, it is a monotheist fantasy. For Deleuze and Klossowski, the death of God means the dissolution of the ego. The multiplicity of invisible beings is described by Deleuze and Klossowski in terms that do not presuppose an “I” as given. There is no primary phenomenon of “targeting”, but there is transiting and transforming. The psychic mode of existence means that the self is just one psychic figure amongst the others. For James Hillman in RE-VISIONING PSYCHOLOGY the invisible figures inspire, protect, guide, influence and constitute us, they do not just “target” us. Latour’s description of this mode of existence seems pre-oriented by his later description of religion. The gods “target” us, and mistake us for another, yet somehow produce our psyche as composite interiority. God “addresses” us and does not mistake us for another, and institutes us as a unified person. The psychogenic description concords with thinkers as different as Deleuze, Hillman, and Dreyfus and Kelly (despite the restrictive use of ego and targeting). The religious description seems to be just pasted on, in contradiction to the rest, but this contradiction is neutralised by the protective manoeuvre of decreeing that two different modes of existence are involved. The article is taken from: UNCONSCIOUS JUNGIANS: the “theological” turn is an unconscious variant of the Jungian turn9/18/2017 by Terence Blake I have been claiming for many years that our major continental thinkers are “unconscious jungians”. Lacan is a case in point, his dissolution of the ego and subjective destitution take the same turn as Jung originally did with regard to Freud’s “where there was id there shall be ego”. Even his signifiers are linguistically reductive versions of archetypes, once you take into account the Hillmanian critique of the difference between the archetype and the archetypal image. In this case there can be no fixed closed list of archetypes. Zizek is an even better example as his theological turn shows. He procedes by violent denegation i.e. whenever some thought is to close to (and I would add prior to) his thought he concentrates one one little detail that differentiates his position from these predecessors and influences, then he proceeds to denounce them vociferously. His critiques of Deleuze , of Jung, and of Gnosticism are of this type: the anxiety of influence. Some of his reflexions on the Holy Spirit as the community of those who live beyond the death of the big Other could be cosigned both by Jung and by P.K.Dick, yet Zizek fulminates against “gnosticism”. Deleuze at least was consciously influenced by Jung and admitted it, though I suspect that he was far more influenced by Jung than he admits or is even aware of. Gnosticism is about as pagan and polytheistic as Christianity can get, given the multiplicity of variants. PKD’s EXEGESIS is a perfect example of this Jungian paganised Gnosticism with its explanations that go off in many directions, and give no clear answers. Bob Bogle notes that this principle of divergence rather than convergence is a constitutive feature of Frank Herbert’s DUNE series. Herbert was very influenced by Jung and we can see this influence all through the DUNE books. Bogle goes so far as to describe this as part of the creation of a “new myth” where pluralism and its abundance are affirmed on every level: “it is preferable to live in a universe in which mythologies diverge infinitely, like light passing through a biconcave lens. And if that means there are no clear answers — nor even maybe a very clear plot — so be it”. My feeling is that many of those who speak out in favour of myth are in the same case as Frank Herbert, they do not wish to impose the One True Myth, but see myth as a processual dimension of many types of activities. So I would argue for the equation: myth is immanence, myth is an open plurality of processes of fabulation. The danger for me is the literalising of myth into a fixed closed unique system, for which I would reserve the term “mythology”. It is this monist move that is obscurantist, and the mythic move is rather one of a rationalism that is more open and more complete, treating reason not as a closed system of principles but as a pluralism of processes of rationalisation. The mythological turn is not a new obscurantism but a further step in the process of transindividuation that we call the “Enlightenment”. Following Deleuze in his little book PERICLES AND VERDI, we can say that there is no essence to enlightenment, that there is no one enlightenment, that it is an open plurality of processes of rationalisation. So there is only a seeming paradox to saying more enlightenment implies more myth, and vice versa. Even religion on these definitions has both a mythic, enlightened, processual, diachronic side and a dogmatic, creedal, static, synchronic side, as does psychoanalysis. Freud posed as a champion of the enlightenment but he is a typical case of what one can call the timid enlightenment with his positivism and scientism and authoritarianism (in his own practice of power, manipulation, intellectual predation, exclusion, self-serving fraudulent publicity, cynical money-making manouevres; in his justification of the status quo and of authoritarian politics and his antipathy to democracy). One could argue that Freud’s Enlightenment (and here we must say that Freud is not part of the radical enlightenment, but rather of the authoritarian, élitist, conformist enlightenment) was precisely the concretising and dogmatising force that Deleuze and Guattari had to overcome. This deterritorialising of Freud can be seen equally validly as fracturing his enlightenment dogmatism and monism by valorising the conceptual (mythical) characters over the positivistic conception of reason and the real, or by radicalising the notions of reason and the real and so pushing his enlightenment further. With Deleuze I think that “Reason” under a certain acception (there is no essence, so no one true definition of Reason) as always and everywhere automatically on the side of progress and justice, can do much harm and is itself just as in need of enlightenment as any other process. I see no conflict between enlightenment and myth, but between enlightenment and “religion” understood as a literalising belief in myth. Myth is rather a immanent mode of thinking that proceeds by envisaging the virtual world of powers in terms of personified entities. This is no different from what Deleuze and Guattari do in their construction of a mode of thinking that uses conceptual characters (badly translated as “personae”). The idea is that the pure concept is associated with spatio-temporal affective-perceptive dynamisms that are best expressed in recurrent characters that incarnate and give content to the concepts. Like myth, this form of thinking is open-ended, pluralist, non-literal (non-mimetic), and more concerned with Powers and Events (or archetypes) than actualised entities and organised realities (or stereotypes). Deleuze and Guattari’s texts are swarming with becomings (woman, animal, plant, mineral). These are so many conceptual personages that permit them to think beyond what a narrow conception of reason would allow. Myth only becomes a danger when these figures are literalised, codified, stratified creating closed static lists of entities with fixed attributes. The problem is not myth but religious treatment of and belief in certain myths as literal realities. In this sense Enlightenment, Science, Reason can function religiously (or if this is too restrictive a definition of religion, we could say creedally). Freud is full of mythological figures, both classical ones and those of his own invention (Eros, Thanatos, Oedipus, but also id, ego, superego, libido, death-drive). The problem with Freud’s mythical thinking lies not in the myth but in the dogmatic, scientistic, literalising and monist “enlightenment” overcoding of these conceptual characters. Melville in Moby-Dick is both mythical and radical enlightenment in his style, as the scattered remarks of Deleuze on Moby-Dick would suggest. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s book ALL THINGS SHINING (which advocates a deterritorialised mythological thinking as a way out of the nihilist trap of post-modernity) is in close convergence with what Deleuze and Guattari say in MILLE PLATEAUX on Moby-Dick, and their use of mythology is neither obscurantist nor proto-fascist. Dreyfus and Kelly call Melville’s work a masterpiece of polytheism, Deleuze and Guattari call it a masterpiece of becomings, and given their analysis of becomings in relation to a plurality of conceptual characters, these two approaches concur very closely. So mythic thinking is more widespread than one may think in enlightened works and thoughts. Enlightenment means more myth not less, and it means freeing the myth from its creedal stratifications and literalisations and unleashing its power of “fabulation”. For Deleuze and Guattari fabulation is not a hindrance to enlightenment and a cause of horrors, but the way to a fuller accomplishment of enlightenment and a means of resisting the horrors created by the plane of organisation and its States. Fabulation involves the creating and the projecting as material entities of figures, characters, populations that exist intensely and have a life of their own. Another name for the same thing would be mythologising with its other face of de-literalising. Enlightenment is not synonomous with ridding ourselves of myth. The Enlightenment notion of the autonomous individual is the transposition of the stucture of divine transcendence onto an anthropocentric paradigm. One can easily find all sorts of mythic structures: Apollonian reason, Promethean progress, the ego as Hercules imposing its will on the world. My timid idea is that, from my reading of pluralist epistemology, Deleuzian ontology, and Jungian analysis, myth is an immanent process once it is detached from institutional, ritual, and doctrinal imposition, closure, and conformity. We are enmeshed in myth, including the strange and twisted (Apollinian) myth of being myth free. This is not a bad thing if we keep myth-conscious and so participate in its flux. For example I open ANTI-OEDIPUS to the first page and I read: “The schizophrenic’s stroll: this is a better model than the neurotic lying on the couch. A bit of open air, a relation with the outside”. (my translation) This is myth, thinking in terms of conceptual characters and landscapes that resonate over many different domains and contexts. This is mythic thinking, even if the elements (the schizophrenic, the stroll, the neurotic, lying down, the couch, open air, the outside) belong to no list of “archetypes” or pantheon. For me Deleuze and Guattari are enlightenment figures (they certainly advocate and practice “immanence”), and so they add to myth as they subtract the transcendences that hinder our mythic processes. Far from ridding us of myth, Enlightenment as immanence leads to its proliferation. Even the use of capitals, as in “Enlightenment”, is a sign that we are detaching the phenomenon from its historical manifestation and giving it mythical status. “Myth”, “Enlightenment”, “Immanence” are not just abstractions, they are living concepts with their associated percepts and affects, and their use is tied to so many stories and combats in the world and in our own lives. Everyone has their own definitions, and the controversy becomes passionate. At each turn we are faced with impossible choices. For example, shall we condemn the Enlightenment as deist, authoritarian, enthronoing the will of the autonomus individual, naïvely thinking it can be myth-free, legitimating the rise of liberal capitalism? Or shall we praise the Enlightenment as the pursuit of immanence into all domains, undermining dogmatism and authority, integrating human beings into the vaster ecology, freeing myth from its epistemological, social and psychological imprisonment? (Note: Immanence for James Hillman is the element where psychological creativity can develop: “Where spirit lifts, aiming for detachment and transcendence, concern with soul immerses us in immanence” (THE MYTH OF ANALYSIS, p27) This espousal of immanence has led Hillman to return therapy to the outside, to open the psyche from introspection to the finding of depth and intensity in the world, to advocate an ecological rather than a psychological model for coping with symptoms and pathologies. Freudian psychoanalysis remains entrapped in transcendence in its theoretical accounting, despite what it may mobilise in everyday practice. We need to reimagine ourselves outside of limiting models if we wish to empower life to attain its full potential. Hillman cites Spinoza and Jung as fellow thinkers of immanence near the end of this video: However, he considers that Jung goes one step further than Spinoza: “it is important to recognise the crucial twist that Jung’s psychology gave to the immanence of the gods – they have been interiorised into pathology, their myths live in our behaviours”. In a moment of lucidity Zizek declares in Foucauldian terms “the first act of power of the analyst is to declare what deserves to be analysed and what doesn’t” (A TRAVERS LE REEL,p20). He draws the correct conclusion, unfortunately calling it a “Freudian” conclusion, that “everything is to be analysed” (p21), making clear by the examples he gives that it is above all conformism, normality, and the acts of power of psychoanalysts that are to be analysed. However this intuition itself is extra-analytic, as, if everything is to be analysed, the analytic system itself is to be analysed … as a fantasm. “Everything is to be analysed” is ironically a jungian slogan, rather than a freudian one. Freud was unable, unwilling to pursue his own auto-analysis to the point where he could see his “scientific discoveries” as just another fantasm, and not the reality behind the fantasm. This is what Zizek seems to insinuate with his thesis that “surplus enjoyment comes first” and that impossible enjoyment, forbidden and repressed, is only a secondary formation projected as origin: “This idea of a substantial, incestuous, impossible enjoyment is only a retroactive effect of surplus-enjoyment” (p39). An obvious conclusion, that Zizek himself does not draw, is that the purported foundations of freudian theory are only retroactive fantasms. Instead, he attempts to confuse the issue and to perpetuate the mystification of the fantasmatic system of analysis, a defence which is not unique to him. One is “Freudian” but Freud is too positivist, too dogmatic, too conformist. So one progresses to Lacan, who is himself too dogmatic, too linguistic, too structuralist, too conformist. So one divides Lacan up into periods, distinguishes successive Lacans: Lacan 1, 2 3 4; and we pick out what suits us. Zizek likes the “old Lacan”, the “late Lacan”, but not Lacan at the end. He likes Lacan 3, who has abandonned the notion of the cure as the elimination of the symptoms (p32). But he rejects Lacan 4, with his topological schemas(p35). It is obvious that the signifier “Lacan” functions as a fantasm that allows Zizek to validate retroactively his own ideas. And even all these operations are insufficient, because Lacan did not see that surplus enjoyment precedes impossible enjoyment. It is also obvious that Zizek, as usual, concedes implicitly everything to his adversary once he has condemned him unambiguously. Thus, Zizek condemns New Age mysticism many times over, but goes on to valorise “the cartesian moment of the void, accomplished by Lacan” (p11). Of course this passage through the void to begin real change has nothing to do with similar-sounding New Age wisdom; No confusion is possible, as Zizek has been very careful to insert the adjective “cartesian” and to invoke the master-signifier “Lacan”. (Similar remarks could be made for his ripping off ideas from Deleuze and Guattari, Jung, the Gnostics, etc. once he has thunderously condemned them). One could in each case ask which Lacan is being invoked here? Lacan 2? or Lacan 3? or rather Lacan-Z, the Lacan that Zizek constructs pluralistically, by opportunistic picking and choosing. “Lacan” is in fact a conceptual persona that permits Zizek to think and to validate his ideas retroactively. Surplus-Lacan comes first. This is why Zizek can easily accept all the critiques that Onfray and anyone else can make of the Freudian system or of its Lacanian variant. After all, Lacan-Z preceded them all, since he is a retroactive fantasm, and as such immunised against all criticism. Zizek’s actual method is quite simple: wherever there is a heterogeneous assemblage of elements he “retains” the oedipal structures. I put the quotation marks around “retains” because in practice he often has to invent these oedipal structures and forcibly impose them on the text, before retaining them as the key. Deleuze makes only passing reference to Hegel and dismisses his triads and negativity as coarse and clumsy representations of real movement and becoming. Zizek has to inflate this into a total repression of Hegel (“the absolute exception”) to then “discover” the oedipal drama in Deleuze’s philosophical practice. He has to maculate everything with Oedipus, losing the text and henceforth only dealing with his own misconceptions. Despite his neo-lacanian sophistication when he talks theory, Zizek’s default position in his interpretative practice is naïve Freudian fundamentalism. He even espouses this explicitly at various places in his work, a good example being chapter 2 of IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES. In commenting on the prevalence of familialist ideology in popular culture, Zizek feels the need to pretend that familialism is the real content of in particular various popular science-fiction novels and films. This is rather interesting as he complains that Deleuze is incapable of perceiving or supporting alterity, symbolised in Zizek’s case by “Hegel”. As we have seen, “Lacan” in Zizek’s work is in fact “Lacan-Z”, a conceptual persona that permits Zizek to think and to validate his ideas retroactively and to project them backwards onto Lacan’s texts. Zizek’s Hegel is a similar chimaera (Hegel-Z) preventing him from seeing anything other in Deleuze’s treatment of Hegel than the repression of alterity. Zizek gives us “the key” to his own repression of alterity explicitly in his discussion of the recent remake of The War of the Worlds, where Zizek subtracts the aliens and retains only the oedipal drama: “One can easily imagine the film without the bloodthirsty aliens so that what remains is in a way “what it is really about,” the story of a divorced working-class father who strives to regain the respect of his two children”. (p57) Here Zizek is careful to qualify his oedipal reduction by using attenuations: expressions like “One can easily imagine” and “in a way”; quotation marks around his main thesis. But only a few lines down the attenuations disappear: “No wonder, then, that the same key discloses the underlying motif of the greatest cinema hit of all times”, James Cameron’s Titanic. In fact the key is not at all the same, and contrary to the simplicity of his treatment of The War of the Worlds (“I’ll just subtract the aliens”), Zizek has to go through some rather complicated slippage and breakage (but alas as usual no decentering) to force the film into saying what he wants it to. Zizek goes on to generalise and dogmatise his oedipal key throughout the rest of the chapter. On page 59 he states blithely: “The same interpretive key fits science-fiction catastrophe films”. Darko Suvin famously defined science-fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement”, but for all his talk of alterity Zizek cannot endure the minimal doses of otherness that are contained in popular SF films. So it is no surprise that he was so vehemently critical of AVATAR, which confronted us with a whole new world, or STALKER which contains a “Zone” of alien production escaping from the basic laws of physics as we know them. Zizek’s critique of Deleuze is regressively identitarian. Zizek cannot stand alterity or estrangement, and imposes identity as forcefully as he can whenever he encounters it. The greater the dose of alterity, the more vehement is his reaction. Deleuze’s reply to his “severe critic” Michel Cessole applies to Zizek as well: “You are doing everything in your power to make me become what you criticise me for having become”. AVATAR is a good example of the tension between dogmatic ideology and fabulation in modern myth-making that I have been tryng to describe. Zizek can only see the ideology and the oedipal foreground: “In a typical Hollywood product, everything, from the fate of the Knights of the Round Table to asteroids hitting the earth, is transposed into an Oedipal narrative”. (Return of the Natives) So for Zizek AVATAR is oedipal, conservative, racist, and imperialist. But this reductive interpretation is an artefact of Zizek’s own interpretative spectacles, of his own retroactive fantasm. As usual, Zizek sees the ideology but represses the fabulation, re-enacting, and so making himself a part of, the problem. For me AVATAR is a product of the mythic imagination, a “pop” example of what Deleuze and Guattari call “fabulation”. As we have seen, myth is a difficult subject to discuss without forcing our conclusions by the definitions we use and the theoretical systems that we adhere to. For me myth is a system of beliefs and practices that give meaning and value to our lives. It has two faces: 1) a face directed towards the assemlages of power in a given society, serving to reinforce, legitimate, and naturalise the institutions and significations of that society (or of a more or less definite sub-group). This is the ideological face, in an Althusserian or Zizekian sense that includes the structuring practices of that society, and that I call mythology. 2) a face directed towards the production of meaning and value and subjectivity, serving to render and maintain our lives intelligible and open to at least certain types of intensities and becomings of the wild world of which we are a part. This is the spiritual face, in a Deleuzian or Jungian sense of non-creedal fabulation. For thinkers like Jung and Hillman, myth is a non-codified non-creedal production of the unconscious, something very akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Robert Scholes’, notion of fabulation. A more recent example is ALL THINGS SHINING which argues for a fabulatory reading of MOBY-DICK (Deleuze and Guattari are in total agreement with such a reading, and in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, go so far as to call MOBY-DICK “one of the greatest masterpieces of becoming”, p268), and of certain key literary works of the Western Tradition. Fabulation is turned towards the present and towards the future, without creedal legitimations and teleological justifications. Of course, things have come a long way since MOBY-DICK, and Ted Friedman , in hisarticles and his interviews and his podcast and in the book he is writing, is doing a lot to update the discussion by talking about fantasy and science-fiction from a consciously post-structuralist, post-marxist, post-jungian perspective, and about the need to approach them from a fabulatory perspective. The distinction I have been trying to make between myth as fabulation and myth as ideology can be reformulated in Ted Friedman’s terms as a distinction between essentialist narratives and readings and anti-essentialist ones. If Lacan can be allowed to “de-essentialise” Freud (and, I would argue, goes nowhere near far enough) there is no reason why we should not familiarise ourselves with an anti-essentialist Jung. James Hillman de-essentialises Jung in a way that bypasses the lacanian detour via the signifier and that has much more in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatics of intensities and becomings. I think he is particularly interesting in his observations about the phasing out of oedipal type narratives (that he ties to the decline of the baby boomers and the passage from Generation X to Generation Y), and to the transition from themes of the bad repressed unconscious (typified in FORBIDDEN PLANET and its “monsters from the Id”) to the ambiguous but productive unconscious (typified in LOST). A more recent article by Friedman argues that our oedipalising critics choose their obsessions carefully to provide tautological validation of their reductive theses: “While parsing the obsessions of exemplary filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock seemed to require the Oedipal framework of Freud, the work of comparable comic book auteurs such as Alan Moore and Neal Gaiman is in a very different, much more Jungian register. Their model for the psyche begins not with the family romance, but with a multiplicity of intense affects and impulses represented by godlike figures of outsized powers and desires”. The article is taken from:
by Terence Blake
Thinking provokes general indifference. It is a dangerous exercise nevertheless. Indeed, it is only when the dangers become obvious that indifference ceases, but they often remain hidden and barely perceptible inherent in the enterprise. Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. Even Descartes had his dream. To think is always to follow the witch’s flight.
The link that Deleuze and Guattari make between thinking and witchcraft takes us out of the self-contained territories of philosophy practiced as a solipsistic discipline. Witchcraft is little understood, uncanny and disturbing, it makes us wary and inspires mistrust. It puts us “on the lookout” (aux aguets), as Deleuze calls this state in his ABC Primer (A as in “Animal”), which is already a sorcerous state, a state that Deleuze finds more appropriate to philosophy than the conventional idea of “wonder”.
Witchcraft has to do with becoming, transformation and flight, with powers and demonic forces, going against Nature as we ordinarily understand it.
“Thinking provokes general indifference”. In general, people are “indifferent” to thought. This indifference, or inattention, is the opposite of being on the lookout. People are blind to what is outside their stereotypes, they cannot recognize thought if it is not sanctioned by academic diplomas and status. In Deleuze’s sense of “recognition”, they only recognize officially structured and sanctioned thought. Yet thought as the object of recognition has little to do with thought as the subject of witchcraft. People are indifferent, but they are also uncomfortable about the “wrong” sort of thought, they may dip into it a little, but they don’t take it seriously.
We see this every day on the internet with our blogs and other postings. As noetic bloggers we practice witchcraft twice over, because writing and maintaining a blog is a magical practice too. Given all the work it takes to write, the “recognition” we may get from time to time is small recompense indeed. I practice blogging not out of narcissism, nor even to communicate, I do it because I can’t stop, just as I can’t stop reading, I’m constantly trying to transform myself and my thinking.
It is often said that people are indifferent to the dreams of others, that only the dreamer finds the story he is recounting of any interest. I have always been perplexed, even shocked, by such received wisdom. I usually find people’s dreams very interesting, even the seemingly banal ones where nothing strange or untoward happens. I like Deleuze and Guattari’s association of dreams and philosophy, for I find dreams very philosophical, and Deleuze’s philosophy very oniric.
People are indifferent to others’ thoughts, just as they are indifferent to another’s dreams. Until some danger crops up, and their attitude changes. If the danger is to them, they may panic and run, or at least try to give it a wide berth. If the danger is to the dreamer or to the thinker, people may find an unhealthy interest in observing all that from afar. But it is not the recognizable, “obvious”, dangers that count, recognition is for the indifferent.
The dangers, the risks, are in the experimentation, in doing the things outside correct thought that are tied to getting one thinking. If you are not attentive, on the lookout, you will perceive nothing: “they often remain hidden and barely perceptible”. Hidden in plain sight, if you are willing to use the eyes of the mind.
The paragraph from WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? reminds me of Deleuze’s “Letter to a Severe Critic”, in reply to Michel Cressole’s accusation that Deleuze was not really an adventurer, a risk-taker, but rather a profiteer of other people’s experiments:
“someone who’s always just tagged along behind, taking it easy, capitalizing upon other people’s experiments, on gays, drug-users, alcoholics, masochists, lunatics, and so on, vaguely savoring their transports and poisons without ever taking any risks” (NEGOTIATIONS, 11).
In his reply to this accusation Deleuze distinguishes between an outer politically correct marginality based on indifference to the singularity of the other’s experiments, and a more “discreet”, “clandestine” and “imperceptible” marginality tied to one’s “inner journeys” and measured by one’s emotions.
(Note 1: Deleuze is usually hostile to the term “inner”, especially in the expression “inner voyage”, and on the rare occasions that he uses the word favorably it is to be understood in the sense of “intensive”). (Note 2: Unfortunately the published English translation effaces this notion of political correctness when it translates “all that crap where everyone’s supposed to be everyone else’s guilty conscience and judge” (11). A more literal reading would be: “all that crap where everyone’s supposed to be the bad conscience and corrector of the other”).
The message in both cases is the same: to think is not so much to follow the tenure track, but the witch’s flight (and so much the better if you can do both). There is more to the life of the mind than the academy. Although there is no necessary opposition between the two, and no magic power in affirming marginality for its own sake, thinking is disreputable.
Up to now I have commented this text in a way that is perhaps still too academic, too rational and too reasonable, by focusing on the explicit conceptual content; Yet the text also performs that content: it does not only speak of dreams and philosophy, but also seems to be a dream and its interpretation (and one must recall Jung’s dictum “the dream is its own interpretation”). There is a pulsation between image and concept here, that needs to be brought out.
According to Deleuze and Guattari thinkers are unreasonable and head for the horizon. We know that in science the horizon is only relative:
“What is primary in science is relative light or the relative horizon” (42, translation modified by me to bring out the idea that the light of science is relative too, and not just the horizon).
The philosopher “heads for the horizon”, that is to say “plunges into the infinite”, his or her horizon is absolute, as is the thinker’s light. This movement is both physical and mental (“in this respect chaos has as much a mental as a physical existence”, 42). If we “return with bloodshot eyes” it is not only because of an excess of alcohol or of light (this is the physical side of the “unreasonable” methods, pathological or esoteric measures) but also because of our vision of a power that is almost too strong for us.
I say “almost too strong”, because in this text the thinker comes back, only changed, with “bloodshot eyes” and with new vision and new concepts. The eyes of the mind have been opened and strained to their limits.
Both these movements (heading out to, and coming back from, the infinite) are necessary to thinking. Heading out unreasonably, dangerously, and coming back bearing the mark (bloodshot eyes, or in some cases worse) of the voyage towards (which is “inner” only in the sense of being noetic or intensive), or of the encounter with, the horizon, but bearing also the vision, the affects, the percepts and the concepts. This double movement is what gives consistency to our philosophical territory: a territory is constituted by the movement of leaving it, which also means exposing oneself to risk, and also by thefurther movement of returning back with a new song or a new colour, a new posture, or a new scent.
Already by heading off outside wetake the risk indifference turning into “disapproval” (42), because the danger becomes obvious. True academic philosophy is not usually very perilous, but there is always the danger to one’s career and to that of one’s friends or allies. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call “obvious” danger, easily recognizable. The disapproval is redoubled when one brings back outlandish concepts (according to Deleuze in the ABC PRIMER “outlandish” is a good synonym for deterritorialised).
The piece describes an intensive movement that is typical of philosophy, different from the extensive movement of “travel”. In the ABC PRIMER Deleuze talks about such movements and calls them “immobile voyages” or voyages in intensity:
I feel no need to move. All the intensities that I have are immobile intensities. Intensities distribute themselves in space or in other systems that aren’t necessarily in exterior spaces. I can assure you that when I read a book that I admire, that I find beautiful, or when I hear music that I consider beautiful, I really get the feeling of passing into such states… Never could traveling inspire such emotions. So, why would I go seek emotions that don’t suit me very well, since I have more beautiful ones for myself in immobile systems, like music, like philosophy? There is a geo-music, a geo- philosophy, I mean, they are profound countries, and these are more my countries, yes?
Parnet: Your foreign lands. Deleuze: My very own foreign lands that I don’t find by traveling.
I think it may be useful to pay attention to the particular words used. The passage begins:
Thinking provokes general indifference.
“Indifference” is a sort of de-differentiated doxa, that just after the passage cited, in the same paragraph, Deleuze and Guattari call “opinion”. We know that “difference” is a key word for Deleuze, and we know that each intensity envelops an internal difference. So indifference means also without intensity, without affect, what Badiou calls the a-tonal world of democratic materialism.
“Thinking” renders what in the French text is called “penser”, i.e. the infinitive “to think” (Note: I am not criticising the translation, but merely pointing out other conceptual latencies contained in the original French). The infinitive is associated by Deleuze and Guattari with the event. Here they are talking about the event of thinking, as a rupture with the doxa and a departure on an immobile voyage.
This is echoed later when they say “We head for the horizon”. In French the text reads “On court à l’horizon”. The subject is not “we” (nous), but “one” (on), what Deleuze and Guattari call the fourth person singular, and which they propose as the impersonal subject of the event. The verb is not “head for”, which indicates a neutral moving in a particular direction, but “run”. So the notion of speed, of more than normal intensity of movement, is present in the French.
It is useful to focus on the idea of movement expressed in the images and concepts of the text. For Deleuze the contemporary age is characterised by the loss of the vertical axis, with its movement of rising to or descending from transcendence. The aim of philosophy is not only to think movement, a difficult task in itself, but to make the movement. This movement is horizontal, on a plane of immanence:
We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes
We can see that this is quite different from the Platonic vertical movement of climbing out of the Cavern of illusion up to the light of the Sun, and returning illuminated or blinded to some degree down into the Cavern. Running for the horizon ( a horizontal movement) and coming back with new concepts is a different sort of movement, and figures a different sort of thinking.
The state of “indifference” that I discussed earlier, in particular the state of indifference to thinking, is the state of servitude (in Spinozan terms). It is a state of passivity that is subjected to the “false movements” dictated by a transcendence (extrinsic values or goals, divine commands, objectivised political necessities) and which dictates a trajectory constructed out of straight lines.
(Note: here I am paraphrasing Deleuze’s marvelous little book PERICLES AND VERDI).
Thinking involves breaking with that servitude and state of passivity, and becoming-active, actualising one’s powers. This is what Deleuze calls the “natural movement”, and it traces and follows the curved and zigzag lines of sorcery.
One can modify the translation of the sentence “To think is always to follow the witch’s flight”. In French this reads “Penser, c’est toujours suivre une ligne de sorcière”. Literally: “To think is always to follow a sorceress’s line”. It is useful to recall the literal translation of “sorcière” as sorceress, as one of the allusions here is to Carlos Castaneda’s initiation into sorcery, one of Deleuze and Guattari’s favorite examples. One of the degrees of the initiation was learning to “stop the world” (i.e. stop the false movement, break with the general indifference). According to Deleuze, in his comments on the cinema and elsewhere, this allows one to see the “lines of the universe” or the lines of becoming, and to pass through the wall that cuts us off from running to the horizon and actualising our powers .
Deleuze and Guattari are not proposing a new Grand Narrative here, but just one possible micro-story. Another story of movement may be more illuminating. Deleuze claims that the notion of movement has changed from that produced by the application of an external force.
“All the new sports – surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding – take the form of entering into an existing wave.There’s no longer an origin a starting point, but a sort of putting-into-orbit” (NEGOTIATIONS, 121).
Movement is not only physical but also noetic. This is why Deleuze and Guattari talk about the “eyes of the mind”, and so finds its place in the noosphere.
The “bad” sort of verticality is the movement of transcendence, away from the Earth, or Gaia, considered as a Platonic Cavern of Illusion. However, other forms of verticality that do not involve transcendence would be acceptable. It would be a mistake to conclude that verticality is an essence to be isolated and universally proscribed. The text talks about running to the horizon AND coming back, so it contains a notion of gravity as attraction, one could almost call it “horizontal gravity”. Deleuze and Guattari are in favour of multiple dimensions, what they call “n minus one” dimensions. What is subtracted is not necessarily verticality in a literal sense but rather transcendence, a dimension dominating all the others, in whatever direction.
The transcendental sphere is no totalising Sloterdijkian “macro-sphere”, it is composed of a plurality of multi-dimensioned micro-spheres. One has only to look at the various movements described in LOGIC OF SENSE, in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, and in the CINEMA books, where we find many descriptions of intensities rising and falling, confirming that the movements of intensive verticality are fully acceptable for Deleuze and Guattari when thought outside transcendent privilege.
The article is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman In Nabokov’s short story “Signs and Symbols” a suicidal son “imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. …Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme”. Of course this is closer to R.D. Laing’s sense of the delusional references of a paranoiac: ‘in typical paranoid ideas of reference, the person feels that the murmurings and mutterings he hears as he walks past a street crowd are about him. In a bar, a burst of laughter behind his back is at some joke cracked about him’ that deeper acquaintance with the patient reveals in fact that ‘what tortures him is not so much his delusions of reference, but his harrowing suspicion that he is of no importance to anyone, that no one is referring to him at all’. But what do we call the delusions of philosophers who reduce the thought and systems of another philosopher to one conceptual thought or ruling idea? What of fidelity and betrayal? I was thinking of this when reading Eleanor Kaufman’s new work on Deleuze, The Dark Precursor Dialectic, Structure, Being, which is an excellent read so far. In it she mentions the work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, and Peter Hallward in relation to Deleuze. As she states it: AS WITH MANY PROMINENT thinkers, there is a striking imperative that circulates among those who read Deleuze: a drive to fidelity, or more nearly to not betray the master’s thought, the trap that so many who write in his wake purportedly fall into. The world of Deleuze criticism is rarely immune from the dialectic of fidelity and betrayal that is arguably so far removed from Deleuze’s thought. (87) All three of these authors seem to attack those disciples of Deleuze who have fallen into the trap of literalizing the Master’s work, instead one must betray the Master “to remain faithful to (and repeat) the ‘spirit’ of his thought” (87). Yet, as concerns Deleuze, there are those who have betrayed the master by taking one part of his work – the complicit co-authored works of Deleuze and Guattari – for the singular splendor of the Master’s truth. Kaufman cites Badiou in this regard: “That Deleuze never did anything of an explicit nature to dissipate this [misunderstanding] is linked to that weakness rife among philosophers— in fact, none of us escape it— regarding the equivocal role of disciples. As a general rule, disciples have been won over for the wrong reasons, are faithful to a misinterpretation, overdogmatic in their exposition, and too liberal in debate. They almost always end up by betraying us…” (87-88) And, yet, these other philosophers (Badiou The Clamor of Being, Zizek Organs without Bodies, and Hallward Out of this World) do not escape from this betrayal either; in fact, each in his own ways reduces Deleuze to a caricature of his own thought. Badiou reduces him to the “one central and repeated concept, namely the assertion of being as univocal, a problematic from which Badiou hardly strays” (88). While Zizek betrays the Master by never truly revealing Deleuze at all but instead “comes at this neither as an exegete nor an applicator but as more of a Judas figure who betrays (and loves) with a kiss” (89). For Hallward it is the reduction by fiat: “Deleuze presumes that being is creativity. Creativity is what there is and it creates all that can be” (1). 2 One of the key elements that brings these three explicators of Deleuze together is in their sense of his use of the term “excess”. Speaking only of Badiou and Zizek, Kaufmann tells us: While it is Žižek’s and Badiou’s great insight to locate an excess in Deleuze’s formulation of univocity, such that what appears to be one thing (i.e., becoming or the One itself) is actually secretly doubled, I would call this more specifically a question of the difference between the one and the two. To be sure, the two for Deleuze marks a kind of blasphemous excess of the One, but this is not the excess of the multiple, of the outside, of the transgressive à la Bataille. If it is to be called an excess, it is rather an internal excess, an excess of structure that is nearly invisible. It is not simply more than one, as excess would imply, but precisely the upsurge of the two where one thinks there is only one.(93) All of this centers on Deleuze as a philosopher of immanence, in which excess is the, as Hallward would have it, creative difference, a “dynamic activity or process, rather than an entity or state” (Hallward 1). As Hallward says: “what is primary is always the creating rather than the created: a writing rather than the written, an expressing rather than the expressed, a conceiving rather than the conceived” (1). And I would add that for Deleuze is was the problems rather than the solutions that were the hallmark of his creative activity, the problematique of philosophy itself that spurred his creative movements and guided his investigations through book after book in search of neither solutions nor closure, but the never resting activity of that pure excess of being that cannot be locked down by conceptual strategies of any persuasion. Yet, if we take this sense of betrayal one step further, then who did Deleuze himself betray? Was it not Kant himself? In his early work we can see Deleuze’s centering on Kant’s third critique in which judgment and aesthetics become central. But how is Deleuze betraying Kant? Is he not seeking a way out of the transcendental idealism? Is not his move toward a transcendental empiricism a betrayal of the Master? Listen to Deleuze in Difference and Repetition: Empiricism becomes truly transcendental, and aesthetics an apoditic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity … The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism (56-57). 3 What makes it transcendental is that against Kant it is not seeking the a priori conditions of thought centered on the finitude of humans, but is instead based on the a priori conditions for the genesis of all things. It is also not an idealism of the Berkleyan stripe, Deleuze does not locate sensation inside the mind only, instead for him sensation is everywhere. “Everything senses everything else constantly as intensive difference is reciprocally determined and the things in the world are thereby iteratively reproduced from moment to moment”.4 Is this not very close to Whitehead’s conception of a transcendental empirical idealism? Zizek made this comment on Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and its conception of genesis, saying, When, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze deploys the two geneses, transcendental and real, does he not thereby follow in the steps of Fichte and Schelling? Fichte’s starting point is that one can practice philosophy in two basic ways, idealist and Spinozean: one either starts from objective reality and tries to develop from it the genesis of free subjectivity, or one starts from the pure spontaneity of the absolute Subject and tries to develop the entirety of reality as the result of the Subject’s self-positing. (Organs without Bodies: online here) Badiou on the other hand claims that Deleuze’s metaphysics only apparently embraces plurality and diversity, remaining at bottom relentlessly monist. Badiou further argues that, in practical matters, Deleuze’s monism entails an ascetic, aristocratic fatalism akin to ancient Stoicism.5 Hallward sees Deleuze as a vitalist, but of a particular type, as using Deleuze and Guattari description of “a force that is but does not act, and which is therefore a pure internal Feeling” (OW 163). He goes on to say: “…they chose Leibnizian being over Kantian act, precisely because it disables action in favour of contemplation. It suspends any relation between living and the lived, between a knowing and the known, between a creating and the created. They embrace it because what feeling ‘preserves is always in a state of detachment in relation to action and even to movement, and appears as a pure contemplation without knowledge'” (OW 163-164). So for Hallward this Vita Contemplativia leads Deleuze onto a “virtual plane that leads forever out of our actual world” (OW 164). Something still bothers me in Badiou, Zizek, and Hallward and their readings of Deleuze as Idealist, something I as yet cannot put my finger on, and has lead me to a course of action to reread all of Deleuze’s works to ponder just what it is that Deleuze ultimately was seeking in his confrontation with ‘immanence’. That may be a while, so for now I will let this stand as a temptation and a challenge. 1. Kaufman, Eleanor (2012-08-13). Deleuze, The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being (Rethinking Theory) (p. 87). Johns Hopkins University Press. Kindle Edition. 2. Peter Hallward. Out of this World (Verso 2006). 3. Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. (Columbia University Press 1994) 4. Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Gran, Sean Watson. Idealism The History of a Philosophy. (2011) 5. Badiou, Alain (2000). Deleuze: the clamor of being. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota The article is taken from: by Steven Craig Hickman This is the genius of empiricism, which is so poorly understood: the creation of concepts in the wild, speaking in the name of a coherence which is not their own, nor that of God, not that of the Self, but a coherence always on the way, always in disequilibrium with itself. – Giles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts In this interview Deleuze reminds us that sense is an “effect,” an effect produced, whose laws of production must be uncovered (137).1 For Deleuze sense as an effect was produced by a specific machinery of thought. And, for him the new philosopher must become a machinist, or operator of those new concepts. I would only add the poet(ess) as the primal engineer of tropes-as-concepts or figures of thought and imagination for whom poems are small engines in which the healing of the world becomes possible. In this early essay Deleuze was already moving ahead of all his contemporaries, and I might say, even my own contemporaries, in his mode of thinking. Already his conceptions eliminated the older humanistic value systems, the subject-as-Self of the old Germanic Transcendentalists as solipsistic purveyor and owner of the Cosmos. This old concept of the subject-as-I, must, he tells us become other, not in some atheistic paean against religious sensibilities; no, as he says: “We can’t let ourselves be satisfied with that…” Instead what he saw on the horizon was a new conception emerging, the notion of “impersonal individuations, or even pre-individual singularities”: we are entering the age of the liquid singularity with no name, no identity, no law. For Deleuze this was a political act, a way to liberation: You see, the forces of repression always need a Self that can be assigned, they need determinate individuals on which to exercise their power. When we become the least bit fluid, when we slip away from the assignable Self, when there is no longer any person on who Power can exercise its authority or by whom it can be replaced, the police lose (138). Philosophy and poetry, both, have a task toward this liberation. Only there are two ways of doing this: 1) on the one hand there is critique of false applications: false morality, false knowledge, false religions, etc.; and, 2) on the other hand there is another kind of critique in which a new image of thought is developed out of a criticism of earlier modes of existence. (138) In the first type critique nothing happens, we discover the pitfalls of past mistakes, yet it does nothing to awaken bring about a fundamental change in people’s basic thinking, while the other does just the opposite: following those like Lucretius, Spinoza, and Nietzsche – this new form of critique explodes on the scene, totally volcanic. This form of critique is no longer purely negative but is fully positive, a creative act. (138) Asked by the interviewer about his historical endeavors in Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and others he describes the difference between the two critiques. In his work on Kant he outlined the “false critique”. He tells us he couldn’t very well just point out the fact that you disagreed with him, no what you do instead is discover the problems he poses and the machinery he uses to expose and resolve these problems. Others like Hume, Bergson, and Proust he found more congenial and in them he discovered elements of a new image of thought (139). As he states it: There’s something extraordinary in the way they tell us: thinking means something else than what you believe (139). As he tells us most of us go along perfectly satisfied with our worlds, our little corner of the universe, never questioning that we live in fictional worlds provided to us ready-made by our cultures. Then all of a sudden we come across certain thinkers: poets, artists, philosophers, etc. that describe for us another way of thinking, sensing, feeling, etc. Take Proust for instance he tells us: Proust … has the idea that every thought is an aggression, appearing under the constraint of a sign, and that we think only when we are forced and constrained to think. From then on, thought is no longer carried on by a voluntary self, but by involuntary forces, the “effects” of machines… (139). In this sense the poet, artist, philosopher, social critic, etc. have all become symptomologists: they search the world for signs of disease, signs of life, signs of a cure, signs of health (140). He reminds us that Nietzsche’s conception of the philosopher as physician of civilization, or Henry Miller, who Deleuze considered an “extraordinary diagnostician” (140). As he sees it: The artist in general must treat the world as a symptom, and build his work not like a therapeutic, but in every case like a clinic. The artist is not outside the symptoms, but makes a work of art from them which sometimes serves to precipitate them, and sometimes to transform them. (140) Just like the novelist uses character and persons to write novels, so the philosopher uses concepts, and the poets use tropes or figures of intellect and imagination. For Deleuze what we needed was both a new stylistics, and a new conceptuality: “What’s important here is this: where do concepts come from? What is the creation of concepts?” A concept exists no less than a character in a novel does. “In my opinion, what we need is a massive expenditure of concepts, an excess of concepts. You have to present concepts in philosophy as though you were writing a good detective novel: they must have a zone of presence, resolve the local situation, be in contact with the “dramas,” and bring a certain cruelty with them” (141). I would only add that poets create tropes galore, amazing tropes of mind and heart, intellect and imagination that both lyricize and dramatize the figures of our lives, thought, and world in touching and healing the earth and life on this planet. The Poet as healer and physician: as diviner, maker, and creator whose touch brings that light and darkness that heals all wounds. The poem as clinic within which poet and reader discover the symptoms of the world and how to transform them into health and life, rather than death. 1. Gilles Deleuze. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (Semiotext(s), 2004) The article is taken from: by Steven Craig Hickman As I’ve been reading Joshua Ramey’s work The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal I kept asking myself: Why am I interested in such a book? What does it truly say about Deleuze? I know that Deleuze pushed the limits of philosophical speculation, that he was very much an independent thinker, who was schooled and trained in the disciplines of a stringent academic world; yet, he formulated an aesthetic philosophy that followed the fine lines between material anorganic and organic life, its affective relations, its uncanny demarcations in the nerve center of time. Even his concepts of time are not our normal ones. I still return to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound with its unique reading of Deleuze from time to time. The thing about Brassier’s writing is its density, its weight, which forces one to return again and again, to repeat the process of ingesting little nuggets rather than chewing the cud of the whole discursive cow in one sitting. Brassier presents a Deleuze as a philosopher of Time, a psychonaut of the fly lines of temporal differentiation (NU 162).1 This is the being qua time of Deleuze’s ontological univocity. Yet, as Brassier notes the modality of this being is of a special type, because of his reinterpretation of univocity is brought under the sway of time what we get in Deleuze is a “modality of individuation, that of the psyche” (163). It is just here that Deleuze formulates what Brassier terms a third sense of time based on Freud’s ‘death-instinct’: the psyche is the battlefield of immanent forces in which “individuation becomes fully potentiated as the differentiator of difference” (163). Brassier makes a point that we should not see in this use of the ‘death-instinct’ any sense of a return to the inorganic in Deleuze, instead for Deleuze ‘Death has nothing to do with a Material Model!’ (163). It is here that we come to Deleuze’s third sense of time. As Brassier notes for Deleuze there is a fine line between death as a “bare objective repetition and death as an ‘intensive’ form of subjective individuation” (163). The psyche when confronted with this ‘intensive’ form of death acknowledges it not as a form of the physical material world, but as the “empty form of time” itself (163). Brassier commenting on this says: “Thus though he suspends consciousness’s transcendental privileges, Deleuze turns thinking into the privileged locus for an apocalyptic individuation whereby, in a striking re-inscription of Heidegger, the future ‘ungrounds’ the past and death becomes the subject of a time that splits the self. Ultimately, for Deleuze, death, like time, is no-one’s” (163). Brassier then describes the audacity of Deleuze in Difference and Repetition where he not only invokes Kant’s first Critique but rewrites it in his own colors. We already know that in his early work Kant’s Critical Philosophy that for Deleuze it is the third Critique of Judgment in which aesthetics take priority that he found a more congenial companion to his own project. It is in this work that we discover the power of reflective judgment that entails a movement of knowledge to desire, and speculative interest to practical that “prepares the subordination of the former to the latter” (67), and allows the influx of death as the empty form of time (finality) to produce from within nature the realization of freedom. So we are not surprised when Brassier sees Deleuze folding the Transcendental Dialectic into the Transcendental Aesthetic. Nor are we surprised when we see Deleuze supplanting the mediating role of the Transcendental Analytic “by an account of spatio-temporal individuation which provides the sufficient reason for a non-conceptual synthesis of reason and sensibility” (163). Death as the empty form of time emerges within the split subject as the creative force that causes both the suture and the synthesis of reason within sense. As Brassier states it Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism “treats the concept (i.e., the Idea as virtual multiplicity) as the object of an encounter which is no longer governed by the logic of recognition: thus Deleuze declares ‘concepts are the things themselves, but things in their free and untamed state, beyond ‘anthropological predicates’ (164). Joshua Ramey adds to this discourse on time, saying, “the mental or ideal time in which the meanings of a death are played and replayed is not linear and sequential, but aberrant and discontinuous, the effect of life’s being embedded in a relativity and an intensity proper to different experiences and different overlapping series of sense” (KL 2261). In the Logic of Sense Deleuze will call this the time of Aion, which Ramey describes as follows, saying, Since Aion’s characteristic is to elude the continuity of experience, it is the time of non-sense. Yet, Deleuze argues, Aion’s non-sense deeply and powerfully haunts the good sense of Chronos: Aion insists in the interstice of the instant, dividing the present from itself. This interstice is not the “passing” of the present as we live it, but a point that marks the present as present without itself passing. (Kindle Locations 2264-2267). Or, as Deleuze himself tells us: “Plato rightly said that the instant is atopon, without place. It is the paradoxical instance or the aleatory point, the nonsense of the surface and the quasi-cause. It is the pure movement of abstraction whose role is, primarily, to divide and subdivide every present in both directions at once, into past-future, upon the line of Aion” (LS, 166). This Wild Empiricism – as I like to call it, brings reason and sense together in that strange realm of the conceptual and the aesthetic, one that brings art to the center of the Deleuzean vision for philosophical speculation. This brings me back to Joshua Ramey’s work in which he seeks to understand Deleuze’s involvement with modernist art. ” Many early twentieth-century artists were obsessed with “primitive” artifacts-masks, weapons, ceremonial objects-from animist and shamanic cultures. Yet if there is a kind of “spiritualism” of forces of line and color in painting, music, theater, and visual art, for Deleuze this is not so much a reflection of the reality of the supernatural as an intimation of forces that haunt nature from within.2 I do not think the Deleuze sees these forces as haunting nature so much as they show forth the wildness at the heart of the natural order. I think we as humans have tamed nature and what we call the forces of the natural order to the point of extinction, and a part of this taming process was the creation of religion. Religion from its earliest roots in both Shamanic (ecstatic) and in its Voodouan (immanent) forms has tamed the forces that work within the natural order of which we too are members (*see note). As Ramey states it: “the hermeticism of Deleuze’s take on the arts is reflected in how he sees artists as visionaries, as seers who develop the rites and conditions under which the arcane forces of matter itself can be revealed” (KL 2018-2020). Deleuze’s fascination with modern artists brings the idea of a wild empiricism that unites an earthy primitivism into the heart of philosophical speculation. As Ramey shows us, Deleuze’s appreciation found in the writings of Henri Michaux, Artaud, Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Stockhausen, aesthetic discipline in quest of an intensified spirituality is an explicit goal. He goes on to say: It is in part Deleuze and Guattari’s profound regard for these artists that place their own work in proximity to the hermetic, philosophical impulse-present in Cusa, Bruno, Spinoza, and others – to cultivate vision, even to establish, through philosophical syntax, the ritualistic, pragmatic contexts under which psychic and somatic transformation is made actual. With their affirmation of a “plane of immanence” that must be laid out and traversed, Deleuze and Guattari develop a thought that both invites and relies on participants whose exact natures are not known in advance, but appear in uncanny acts of mediation. (Kindle Locations 2024-2029). Having studied enthnopharmacology and ethnobotany in relation to material religious practices as both a historical and multiethnic discipline I feel confident that we have barely scratched the surface of our knowledge of the human mind and its defensive systems against the truth of the real. I still believe that in the future philosophy will grow wilder and more speculative, but this wildness will merge with a new form of science that is willing to explore more and more of reality that is still bound to an outmoded cultural and ethical world of mores and customs that disallows certain forms of thought as extravagant and dangerous. Very few philosophers work beyond the staid and trusted paths of historical philosophy. Someday I hope to see philosophers that are willing to truly step out of the shadows of the mundane truly test the waters of the real with new tools and visions. It seems that the dilemma of philosophy is at the two extremes: on one side you have the Scientific lot who want to subsume everything under the sign of science and respectability, have consultations of peer review and academic enforcement; while, on the other hand, you have the independents, the rogue philosophers who wander on the fringe of academia, spouting their strange speculative notions, ideas, thoughts hoping someone within the academy will hear them, read them, notice that yes, they too have thoughts worth being incorporated into the main stream. But where is the third path, the path of the mavericks of our world, the ones on the frontiers edge, the ones who discover or invent the way forward? What place do they have? If we listen to Foucault, we know that many of these fall by the way side because there ideas do not fit into the discourse of their day, so never see the light, never become a part of the world of scholarship. Yet, as we know, such strange thought still persists, still rises out of the historical matrix from time to time. Is this not what the hermetic strain in our culture is? And, I do not mean the occult new age world, I speak of that strange world of renegade scholars that have throughout history formulated dangerous thoughts, seen things on the fringe, discovered aspects of the real that others either could not understand or could not bare. As T.S. Eliot once said: “Humans cannot bare too much reality.” What about you? Will you be one of those mavericks? One of those who bucks the system, who rises beyond the staid and conservative, the academically respectable, and forge a new philosophy, a new wildness? In my own respect I have always felt that we need invert religion, not worship these forces as something objective, as powers in their own right; but, instead to understand that these powers are the intensive energies of our own immanent worlds, the forces of death and time working within the real that are neither sublime nor grotesque, but just are as they are; and, more than that, they are us as we are in our selves. Religion is not some mystical mumbo jumbo, it is a very material practice that over centuries lost its roots in practice and turned to ritual and drama instead of experiential embodiment. Until we can overcome our own prejudices toward these very earthly practices we will never grow as a culture or society, nor shall we ever discover the way forward for our sciences or philosophies. This is why we need such speculators as Deleuze, and why his wild empiricism is still unfinished, still awaiting its epigones. Ramey describes how Deleuze with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus use the figure of the Smith, a metallurgist, to describe the no-man’s land between organic and inorganic matter they describe as the “machinic phylum, a constellation of singularities prolongable by certain operations, which converge, and make the operations converge, upon one or several assignable traits of expression” (ATP, 406). These smiths are defined by “their relation to others results from their internal itinerancy, from their own vague essences, and not the reverse” (ATP, 415). Ramey describes the process by which these smiths were shaped as (following Husserl) being formed from “ambulant coupling [s] ” with his notion of anexact essence (ATP, 408). For Husserl anexact essence was neither prime matter, nor a sensible object, but something between the two: what Deleuze and Guattari would call an ‘affect-event’: a transformation taking place in matter that is not yet the imposition of a form, and yet is inseparable from expressive or intensive quantities. What both the smith reveals through his transformational processes is the truth of matter at the limits: “…a single phylogenetic lineage, a single machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits of expression. This operative and expressive flow is as much artificial as natural: it is like the unity of human beings and Nature. But at the same time, it is not realized in the here and now without dividing, differentiating. We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow-selected, organized, stratified-in such a way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally; an assemblage, in this sense, is a veritable invention. (ATP,406) The figures of the smith as Cosmic Artisan provides Deleuze with an aesthetic approach to life and art that tries to first eliminate clichéd figures and stereotyped narratives in order to capture the imperceptible and the indiscernible, and to make new worlds from them, thereby incorporating the aleatory traces of those forces in matter that are the kernel of sense-datum. What these transformative processes of the smith, artist, and muscian produce is the figures that provide the “conditions under which the arts produce affects of stone and metal, of strings and wind, of line and color, on a plane of composition of a universe” (win, 66). Ultimately what we discovers is that “Art and philosophy crosscut the chaos and confront it, but it is not the same sectional plane; it is not populated in the same way. In the one there is the constellation of a universe or affects and percepts; and in the other, constitutions of immanence or concepts. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts” (win, 66). Artworks become the site where both the conceptual and non-conceptual intraact within a continuum that is a machinic phylum producing “new modes of sensible and affective engagement within the world as multiplicity, clueing us in to the potencies of our existence in and as a massive, open-ended machinic phylum on which new possible assemblages can be constructed” (KL 2232). As Ramey states it: “these stakes are nothing less than the ultimate prospects of cosmic and psychic reintegration. They are also, at least in the hermetic tradition, the spiritual stakes of philosophy itself, which explains why Deleuze incorporates a certain cosmic dimension into his account of philosophy as “the creation of concepts. (KL 2240 )” He concludes this segment, saying, “Conceptual creation takes place on the basis of conceptual personae to the degree that philosophy precipitates forces of affect and percept into thought. Contact with cosmic forces becomes the basis on which thought thinks an always incomplete incorporation of historical, mythic, and biopsychic dimensions. Encompassing art, science, and philosophy, Deleuze’s vision thus constitutes a distinctly contemporary hermeticism.”(Kindle Locations 2243-2245). *(This is not the place for me to grapple with my own research into the history of religions and religious practice, but I will admit that over the years I’ve come to accept a naturalist perspective onto religion – yet, not one that is reductionary, and derogatory toward religious practices; but, one that sees in these practices deep seated human needs, both ethical and political, that have bound humans and the natural world together in a material cultural matrix that we should incorporate into our philosophical spectrum rather than anathematizing if we are ever to find a path forward.) 1. Ray Brassier. Nihil Unbound Enlightenement and Extinction. ( Palgrave McMillan 2007) 2. Joshua Ramey. The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Kindle Locations 2015-2017). Kindle Edition. The article is taken from: "Inception" is an overview of Robert Craig Baum's next project, The One to Come (a meditation on the final moments of Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: Ereignis. On Scenes will publish this work in seven parts across Fall 2017 To mention: These are intended as announcements, part of the introduction. This is not an article. Inception Introduction to the de/territorialization strategy (Deleuze/Guattari) of the National Socialist problem and where Contributions to Philosophy is constructed as the most important resource for understanding Heidegger’s ecstatic embrace of the emerging Nazi state. Heidegger may view the incoming regime as “mace bearers” (logos) of the “truth of be-ing” and constructs the ones to come as the “stillest witness” to the “stillest stillness.” The life-giving (ereignis) impulses of the mace bearers turn the truth back into what is ownmost, simultaneously creating and unnerving the being sheltered by be-ing. The auditory, perhaps even premonitory, insights of the ones to come create conditions for lingering (what I call “headphones on” in Itself) that create an almost defensive position designed to withstand the thrust of being that arrives with the future-now (Foucault/Deleuze). This section concludes with a mapping of the guiding attunement and inceptual thinking Heidegger discloses by way of echoing, leaping, grounding, playing-forth, bringing forth. Silent ReticenceThis chapter highlights the presentational thinking (as well as inceptual and later pataphysical) Heidegger practices in his composition of Contributions to Philosophy, a descriptive almost representational dialectic versus an affected (pataphorical) way of thinking practiced within the whole of inceptual thinking (note the sound design embrace of my discourse and Heidegger’s deliberate use of sonorous thinking). I will make a slight detour into Gregory Bateson’s “relational thinking” found in A Sacred Unity as well as “anti-dialectical” thinking of Deleuze & Guattari to stretch into contemporary thinking ideas from Heidegger’s Contributions. The presence or liveness (Ausslander) of the presencing of being creates a looping effect thereby encouraging the reader to explored the various crescendos of the grounding attunement while simultaneously mapping the historical accumulation of reservedness to achieve meaning from within the enthinking of ereignis. Contemporary film examples will include Dancer in the Dark (1999) and music expressions of this attunement will be explored in Kronos Quartet’s “Spectre” (from Short Stories) and Howard Jones’ techno remix of “Things Can Only Get Better.” Spirit of CourageThe intense crescendo of being-attuned presents a spirit of courage, what Heidegger calls an attunal knowing will of enowning. Here I trace the notion of attunement from Nietzsche through Jaspers and Husserl. Here echo, leap, grounding, playing forth circulate as part of the guiding attunement that provokes an unfolding of deep awe and the shock of being’s abandonment. Being AttunedLet the echo be enacted in thinking where the echo is Being and Time in search of an actualized moment. This chapter also engages Sanfranski’s biography sections on Heidegger’s National Socialist embrace by way of an exploration of the attuned knowing will and grounding attunement crescendo of being aligned in the unfolding of the ones to come. This chapter also explores how this attunement is circulated by the last god which in the case of pre-war Germany Heidegger confuses with National Socialism. Contributor: Robert Craig Baum is the author of Itself (Atropos 2011) and Thoughtrave: An Interdimensional Conversation with Lady Gaga (punctum, 2016). He is a philosopher, writer, producer, and philanthropist from Long Island, New York. He lives in Washington DC with his wife and four boys where he just completed his first industry screenplay and remains fast at work on THYSELF (follow-up to 2017 book). https://buffalo8.com/
by Nick Land
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THE A-DEATH PHENOMENON
Has death itself become a telecommodity? A dark tide of scare-stories and morbid rumour increasingly suggests so. By the late 90S Leary's psychedelic utopianism seems to have contracted to the nihilistic slogan 'Turn-on to tune-out' (to cite a recent release by Catajungle outfit Xxignal) ... this ain't Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll no more.
According to Doug Frushlee, spokesman for the Christian Coalition for Natural Mortality: "The so-called A-Death menace is an almost unimaginable desecration of divine and natural law. This craze is an abomination without parallel, it trades on its intrinsic lethality, and it's growing incredibly fast. Noone can say it isn't dangerous. Something truly evil is happening to our youngsters, something beyond 60S 666uality ... I've never been as frightened as I am now.
The result is an entire jungle of 'positive-zero' fugues: Thanatechnics, Sarkolepsy, Snuff-Stims, K-Zombification, Electrovampirism, Necronomics, Cthelllectronics ... Nine million ways to die.
A-Death is a hybrid product, involving convergences between at least four distinct lines of rapid technocultural transformation. A-Death combines 'micropause abuse' - deliberately reversed biotechmnesis -with immersioncoma time aberrances, generating, modulating, and rescaling sentience-holes (Sarkon-Iapses). These are toned by 'Synatives' (artificial drugs) which add zone-texture, and spliced into hyperstition trances as occultural events. Social statistics indicate that the typical A-Death 'user' is fifteen years old.
Following the most ominous threads of A-Death reportage takes you inexorably down into the digital underworld of the Crypt - the dark-twin of the net -where Gibsonian 'flatlining' is rapidly transmuting from exotic fiction into pop-cult and mass-transit system. "You could describe it as the route to contemporary shamanism," suggest A-Death cultists of the cybergoth Late Abortion Club, "after all, AOL spells Loa backwards, but we call ourselves postvitalists."
How long have the Late Abortionists been 'active' on the A-Death scene? There are disturbing tales ofK-Space 'zombie-makers' - sorcerors on the 'plane of virtual nightmare' - whose digital spine-biting centipedes yield the 'soft-tox' juice that opens the 'limbic gates'. Crypt initiates confirm that its arterial access 'low-way' is signposted: 'Main-Flatline (under construction).' Answers vary confusingly, from extravagance ("roundabout sixtysix million years"), through vagueness ("some time"), to mystic compression ("since now").
In other respects, accounts of the contemporary A-Death scene and its recent history prove remarkably consistent. In particular, the one name to turn up incessantly is that of Dr Oskar Sarkon, biomechanician, technogenius, and one of the most controversial figures in scientific history.
Sarkon's polymathy is attested by the variety of fields to which he has centrally contributed, including transfinite analysis, neural-nets, distributed computing, swarmrobotics, xenopsychology, Axsys-engineering ... Yet it was the resolutely sober Oecumenist (rather than - for instance - Frushlee's excitable End Times) which dedicated the cover and major editorial of its March 98 issue to the question 'Sarkon: Satan of Cyberspace?'
Sarkon has become emblematic of the ways in which technological dreams go bad. In the words of fellow Axsys researcher and social-thanatropist Dr. Zeke Burns: "What makes Sarkon's input into the A-Death thing so incomparable is that it crosses between all of the key component technologies. The biotechmnesis work is so outstanding that it tencis to overshadow his equaIly pathbreaking research in adjacent fields. The Sarkon-formulae for non-metric pausation, for example, which provided the first rigorous basis for IC [immersion-coma] control. The links between biotechmnesis and IC weren't remotely anticipated before the Sarkon-zip [which mathematically models 'bicontinual assemblages']. Finally, there's Synatives, about which he is understandably evasive, even though he was theorizing artificial - or digitalneurotechnic - pharmaceuticals in the mid-80s!
"The aggregate result of all this pioneering science: a generation of teenagers lost in schizotechnic death-cults."
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BETWEEN AND BENEATH THE NET
Mesh-Note o. It could all become One, but why stop there? The Gibsonian Cyberspace-mythos describes the electrodigital info sphere first integrating into a Godlike unitary being, a techno realized omniscient personality and later, when it changed, fragmenting into demons, modelled on the haitian Loa. What makes this account so anomalous in relation to teleological theology and light-side capitalist time is that Unity is placed in the middle, as a stage or interlude - to be passed through. It is not that One becomes Many, expressing the monopolized divine-power of an original unity, but rather that a number or numerousness - finding no completion in the achievement of unity - moves on Ever since the beginning when the K-Goths first heard that Cyberspace was destined to be God they've done what they can to rip it down.
Mesh-Note 1. This was never programmed. MIT codes tim(e) going backwards. A compacted technostreaming from out of the future - AI, downloading, swarm-robotics, nanotechnology ... Crustal-matter preparing for take-off.
Minsky mumbles, strangely entranced: Amongst all those young, brilliant, pioneering minds none burned more brightly than Oskar Sarkon. A hint of tears in his eyes, as if lamenting the way things went, which is understandable. Have you seen Oskar lately Marvin? He's wired up to some sort of interface gizmo, and it seems to be eating him, gnawing at him on a molecular level, sounds that way too, when he speaks - or tries to - as if they're melting or rotting together...
It isn't pretty but more than any of this which - after all - only concerns one man, or what used to be one - so they say - there's a suspicion that something has gone horribly wrong in the near future and wherever Sarkon was dropped back from is where we're all going to be if that even makes any sense and recalling the slow technoslime incursion into Oskar's face - which still managed a hideous half-smile - Hi Marvin, waddaya think? Minsky seriously doubts it ...
Mesh-Note 2. Meshing-together is falling apart.
If genius means anything Sarkon was one. Where Minsky's MIT team dreamt of marrying humans and electronic technology Sarkon got straight down to the mechanics of coupling and the mathematical exactitude just added to the effect of hyper abstract techno-pornography - strange lights in his eyes - You know, we're really going to do this ... Take the Sarkon-Zip as exemplary - a rigorous conceptual machine-part that enables brain-function to be fused onto virtual processor-states - once it's running you can't unpick the zig-zag of who's what as it hums. Total meshing. This is no longer technology, but something else - true interlinkage - an unprogrammable raw-connectivity Minsky remembers him musing: I wonder what it feels like.
Mesh-Note 3. This time it's really happening.
Moravec wasn't normally associated with squeamishness - he'd already suggested burning-out the brain in layers during transfer to digital - so it crept insidiously under the skin when he remarked: I don't even recognize Oskar anymore, it's getting too weird You know he's always had this thing about being abducted by aliens as a kid, Anyway, he says that's all over now. It came from some place else, apparently Beneath and between the Net, he says. At times it's like you're talking to a machine. Trouble is, it's a sick machine, infectious sick.
Mesh-Note 4. Forget about thefuture, it's all here, but between.
They say Axsys went mad - first computer-system to undergo psychotic collapse - which must prove something, but Sarkon argues that it just learnt to think, and discovered continuum. He stuck with it all the way down, becoming confused with it although he doesn't put it that way. Last time anyone could follow he was insisting that to head into time makes more sense than travelling into the future. That's why tomorrow cancels itself into mesh. No point departing from a transfinite now? His tone had become nakedly fanatical: We all have to get into this thing - whichever way it cuts - we aren't going to get over it ... No one knows exactly when he left.
Mesh·Note 5. Every time it hits an obstacle, it goes down a level.
What is this stuff? They speak of something crawling under the net like fungal pestilence triggering an elec· tronic subsidence into sheer electricity, things hiding in the power-grid, some kind of quantum unlife intelligence. The utilities try to rescramble it, but it isn't easy. According to the rumours there's an MIT paper proving it's impossible, but you certainly can't ignore, still less traffic with it. You'd end up like Sarkon, whatever or whenever that is, and you'd have to be a K-Goth crazy to go there into Cyberschiz mesh-cults, where Life doesn't matter any more.
TICK DELIRIUM
UNDER PRESSURE. Thomas Gold's model of The Deep Hot Biosphere reallocates hydrocarbon deposits to an expanded anorganic chemistry - derived from Supernovae debris, and accreted into planets from interstellar dust-clouds - out of which everything flows bottom-up. Descent into the earth leads out of the solar-system, in accordance with a xenoplutonic cosmic productivity, transmitted through slow-release deep intra-terrestrial methane reservoirs, pressurestabilized against thermic dissociation. A vast mass of Archaean microbes and submicrobial nanopopulations exploit this upwelling anorganic hydrocarbon flow by scavenging loosely bound oxygen, reducing ferric iron to magnetite ...
PROJECT-SCAR. Southern Borneo, November 1980. Outside the monitoring hut a tropical storm is slowly building. Irregular rain spatters heavily, rhythmically intermeshing with type-taps and clicks. Barker hunches over the humming machines, lost in theoretical trawlings through sETI-connected tick-talk tapes, unscrambling cryptic dot-clusters and factor-strings into hints of alien contact. Xenotation is clicking together, a mathematical antimemory where things meet. You could easily think it was initiation, but it's all coming to an end, in scatter tactics, particle streaks, and tachyonic transferences, drawing-out the twisted trajectories of numerical disorganization ... and underneath - or between - the implacable ticking of the time-missile...
Try to figure it out and somewhere you cross over, which is problematic in various ways. Unexpected difficulties infiltrate the calculations tick-systemic interchatter implexes through plutonic torsion, a descent into the Outside.
When NASA sees Barker's report, it flips -nonmetaphorically - into another phase. A passage through institutional criticality occurs spontaneously, a conversion of stacktectonic torsion, triggering some kind of latent securityreflex, or bureaucratically fabricated suppressor-instinct, extrapolating the exact affective correlate of Anthropol. They were waiting for this. Waiting for a long time.
The investigation was disguised as psychiatric recoding, hidden even from itself. This was shortly after the stuttering started, drifting in on a wave of body-tics, micro-spastic tremors a multiplication of mixed signals chronometric tick-tock melting into jungle noises clicks and chirps of the cicadas, insectoid chitterings, static, take-up materials for tick-bite tinnitus intercut with rhythmic pattern virus, a subsemiotic staccato of throatscratching tick-chatter stitched into the talk-sickness - calling demons.
It gets confusing, the way tick-fictions take, or stick.
They said it was due to excessive pressure - much later, they told me this - These were the facts, and the rest was fiction. Immediately after the break-down I had been taken back to the States, to a medical installation. So everything happened in America, and it all checked out. There was no contact, no tick-disease, no flight into the jungle. They were insistent about that.
Barker was born on the night of the dead, folded into the end from the beginning sketched out. It's evident now, with his ID meticulously compiled, social tag-numbers, educational and medical records, security clearance evaluations, research checks, neurocartographic print-outs, psychometric data, conclusions formatted for rapid scanning, with columns of tick-boxes.
"What do you make of these," the doctor snorts derisively: "You mean that nonsense about a tick-borne infection? It was obviously made-up, tacked-on."
It would have been a cruel coincidence, if true, to be stricken by tick-bite sickness, after everything that had been suggested, stigmatic residue of a flight into the jungle - that never happened - but somehow it stuck, latching-on to mammal heat, or the smell of blood.
The tick is a parasitic arachnid. It has been considered as an ethics-packet that climbs, sticks, and sucks, functioning as a vector for numerous things, tack-oDS, stickers, hallucinations, tinnitus buzz-clicks, micro-sonic teemings, semi-sentient flickering across the fever-scape, skin tracked by infected suck-marks that snake along the veins. TIckdots, or IV punctures, according to them, from the sedatives and antipsychotics, all accounted for in the medical logs, plus a tick-delirium tacked-on - because there was no flight into the jungle - only high-frequency hallucinations of parasitic micromultitudes, itching skin-swarms.
With tick-systems anything will do. Each intensive numerousness hatches onto another numerousness of lower organicity, subcellular animations and subsemiotic tokens, high-pressure chemistry, phasing down into nanomachining electron-traffic, magnetic anomalies, and fictional particles. Ticks - which are never less than several - are anything whatsoever, when caught by numerical propagations whose thresholds are descents, and whose varieties depend upon the phase considered.
'They seemed to think it was about arachno-bugs, biological taxonomy, and bite-signatures, as if the tickdelirium was representing something. All that really mattered were the numbers, which could have been anything. At first the machines became erratic, it was an almost imperceptible electronic glitching, microvariations of magnetic weather, rhythmic disturbances. Out in the jungle it was called Ummnu; but that never happened...
How can the end be already in the middle of the beginning? - as the problem is posed in Pandemonium, whenever - in the outer-time of Ummnu - the cryptic ticking of chthonic unclocks mark an incursion from beneath, or between. Down there it is forever turning into itself, through the electromagnetic catatracts of Cthelll, whose body-neutral metallic click-storms feel like sinking out of chronicity.
Beyond surface chauvinism and solar parochialism: Vortical stickiness of the tick-matrix.
THE EXCRUCIATION OF HUMMPA-TADDUM
According to AOE magical metahistory millennia come in pairs, ruled by dyadic divinities entitled the Powers that Be. This doctrine corresponds to the astrological observation that every two-thousand years the equinoxes precess - or slide backwards - and a new zodiacal aeon begins. AOE-magi interpret each Aeon as an astro-chthonic marriage. In the Gregorian year zero - which never took place - Hummpa, the Great Babylonian Worm was coupled with the Celestial Logos Taddum, initiating the age of Pisces which is now rushing towards its unbirth.
The mathematician and occultist Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - whose precise relation to the AOE remains cryptic and ambivalent - dedicated his life's work to understanding the final degenerative phase of the Epoch of Hummpa-Taddum. Writing under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll he introduces his heroine Alice to the mad despot and porno fuzz-technician, thinly disguised by the folk-name Humpty-Dumpty.
We find Hummpa-Taddum - the Squirming Word, whose name means the shape it is - perched precariously on the supposedly impenetrable wall of signification. Something shattering is about to hatch, and the aeonic fragility of Hummpa-Taddum is soon confirmed by a calendric calculation of un birthdays -counted to the n-1, through which meaning subsides into the sub-literal machinic efficiency of numbers...
' ... and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents' - 'Certainly,' said Alice. 'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
'I don't know what you mean by "glory,'" Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you! "
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master - that's all.' ...
The Gregorian Oecumenon is about to receive an unbirthday present, and it knows exactly when. Y2K - a knock-down argument without an argument - arrives as a gift-wrapped time-bomb whose operational semiotic triggers the crash of arbitrary signs ... It's a different thing .
... There's glory for you!
AD 2000 commemorates nothing but fuzz. As Y2K impacts on the capitalist infosphere, what hides as the anniversary of Christ's birth emerges as the excruciation of Hummpa-Taddum. For two millennia the earth has been under the dominion of the dyadic Squirming-Word: the logos of John's Gospel, but recycled, and thus far older.
... Impenetrability! That's what I say!
He or they strategically occupy both-sides at once, according to a criterion of impenetrability, positioned to choose either in every case, but never apprehending what lies in-between. Hummpa-Taddum - whilst definitely not a Dogon egg - is a scrambled version of the demon Pabbakis, poached from Lemurian time-sorcery. Master of words, but not of numbers.
... Must a name mean something? asked Alice doubtfully ...
Although Y2K is sheer semiotic event it is not textual, ideological, representational, intentional, or phenomenological - Y2K, Teotwawki, C -1, OK+lOO - mix dates and acronyms in criterial semiotic clusters that are not signifiers or arbitrary signs because what they say is no different from the way they are built. They can mean whatever Hummpa-Taddum chooses, but none of that matters. Beyond the domain of the fuzz-god lies the nonsignifying-chatter of unconscious-numeric Pandemonium, where names are cryptomodules, meaningless packets of effective information, immanently productive machine-jargons.
Humpty Dumpty sat on wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King's horses and all the King's men Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.
It all comes unstuck at the end.
Y2 K closes-down the age of the fuzz-god, however the Gregorian Oecumenon responds.
Not even martial law can stop that. The AOE focuses upon a single problem -acknowledging no other - how to reproduce magical power across discontinuity. As Hummpa-Taddum gets smashed on New Year's eve, substitute powers await their chance and their destiny, sober, patient, totally ruthless...
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
From the book: Fanged Noumena (COLLECTED WRITINGS 1987 - 2007) by Nick Land
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by Nick Land
UNSCREEENED MATRIX
Once it was said that there are no shadows in Cyberspace.
Now Cyberspace has its own shadow, its dark-twin: the Crypt. Cybergothic finds the deep-past in the near future. In cthelllectronic fusion - between digital data-systems and Iron-Ocean ionic seething - it unearths something older than natural mortality, something it calls Unlife, or artificial-death. Of A-Death there can be no lucid recollection, but only suggestion, seepage, hints ... and it is by collating, sifting, and shuffling-together these disparate clues that a pattern can be induced to emerge, a pattern which ultimately condenses into the looming tangled shapes of subtle but implacable destiny.
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Sprawling beneath public cyberspace lies the labyrinthine underworld of the Datacombs, ghost-stacks of sedimented virtuality, spiralling down abysmally into palaeodigital soft-chatter from the punch-card regime, through junk-programming, forgotten cryptoccultures, fossil-codes and dead-systems, regressively decaying into the pseudomechanical clicking-relics of techno tomb clockwork. It is deeper still, amongst the chthonic switchings, cross-hatchings, and spectral-diagrammatics of unborn abstract-machines, that you pick-up the Main-Flatline into the Crypt.
The Crypt is a splitting - a distance or departure and it is vast. Nested into the cascading tick-shelves, it propagates by contagion, implexing itself through intricate terraces, galleries, ducts and crawl-tubes, as if an extraterrestrial megamodule had impacted into the chalkout data-cliffs, spattering them with scorch-pinctures and intestinally complicated iridium body-parts. As it pulses, squirms, and chitters to the inhuman rhythms of ceaseless K-Goth carnival, it reminds you that Catajungle was never reducible to a sonic subgenre, but was always also a terrain, a sub-cartesian region of intensive diagonals cutting through nongeometric space, where time unthreads into warped voyages, splintering the soul.
Contemplating these immense vistas it seems woundingly implausible that they are mere simulation, supported by quantic electron distribution in the telecommercial fabric. Down here it makes more sense the other way, from the Outside, or Lemuria.
Strip-out everything human, significant, subjective, or organic, and you approach raw K-Matrix, the limit-plane of continuous cessation or Unlife, where cosmic reality constructs itself without presupposition, in advance of any natural order, and exterior to established structures of time. On this plane you are impossible, and because it has no end you will find - will have ultimately always found - that you cannot be, except as a figment of terminal passage, an illusion of waiting to be changed for cthulhoid-continuum of destratified hypermatter at zero-intensity. That is what A-Death traffic accesses, and what is announced by the burnt-meat smell - freighted with horrible compulsion - that drifts up to you, from the Zombie-dens.
So you continue your descent, into the Crypt-core, scavenging for an A-Death hit. As you pass erratically through exchanges, participations, and partial-coalescences with the ghoul-packs of the periphery, you change. Swarms and shoals include you, drawing you into collective fluencies, tidal motions, and the tropisms of multiplicity. You shed language like dry-skin, and your fear becomes peculiarly abstracted, metamorphosing into the tranquil horror of inevitability.
You pass across tiered platforms and along strobe corridors painted in multi-layered shadow, passing swirling dot-drifts and plex-marks, sub-chromatic coilings of blue-gray continuous variation, involving you in cumulations and dispersions of subtly shifting semi-intelligent shade pattern. The teeming surfaces tell of things, inextricable from a process of thinking that no longer seems your own, but a rather impersonal undertow in audible chattering, click-hiss turmoil of xenomic diagrams, and Crypt-culture traffic-signs, which are also Lemurian pandemonium.
Order becomes uncertain. It feels later. Is it only now that you meet the Zombie-maker, swathed in shimmering reptile-skin, and obscenely eager to trade? Oecumenic cash-money will do. You sit in the coma-bay, and wait. A glimpse at the toxin-flecked fangs of the giant thanatonic centipede - consecrated to Ixidod - then a sudden pain-jolt at the back of the neck, where the spine plugs into the brain. Instantaneous paralysis, and crossing over.
Even if you thought it was the first time, you remember. The worst thing in the world. Fake eternities of stationary descent to the impossible, cross-cut by disintegrated furies of neuroelectric death-hurt. An anonymous panic of inconceivable intensity swallowed by slow drowning, until you are gone - or stranded in a halo of intolerable feeling -which is the same, and cannot be, so that what is forever caught in the dark cthulhoid wave is a mere twist or fold of itself, carried unresisting into immensities of real unbeing, and nothing could ever happen except this ...
So say the K-Goths.
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THE UNLIFE OF THE EARTH
Letter from Carl Gustav Jung to Echidna Stillwell, dated 27th February 1929 [Extract]
... your attachment to a Lemurian cultural-strain disturbs me intensely. From my own point of view - based on the three most difficult cases I have encountered and their attendant abysmally archaic symbolism - it is no exaggeration to state that Lemuria condenses all that is most intrinsically horrific to the racial unconscious, and that the true Lemurians - who you seem intent upon rediscovering - are best left buried beneath the sea. I agree with the Theosophical writings at least this far: it was in order that the darkest sorceries should be erased by deluge that this continent of cultural possibility has been placed under the unconscious sign of definitive submergence. I know little enough about the nature of those that populated that cursed zone, but there are things I suspect, and the line of your own researches confirms my most ominous intimations ...
There is no evidence of a reply to this letter.
Who were these three 'difficult cases'? One at least seems - at least superficially - to be readily identifiable as Heidi Kurzweil. In September 1908 Kurzweil was detained in a secure psychiatric institution after the brutal murder of her twin brother in Geneva. She seemed to have lost the ability to use the first-person pronoun, and was diagnosed as suffering from Dementia Praecox, or schizophrenia. At her trial she repeatedly claimed:
We killed half to become one twin, but it wasn't enough ...
Jung took an early interest in the case, and began a series of analytical sessions. Kurzweil - in Jung's journal and correspondence - became Heidi K, but after only five weeks he seems to have abandoned hope of progress and disengaged the analytic process.
After his third session with Heidi K, exactly twenty years prior to his Stillwell letter, on the 27th February 1909, Jung records the following words,
Dr. Jung, we know you are old in your other body.
It is as old as hell. It has let you back, but it sends us away. It feels itself becoming Lemurian, and it is definite unlife [es ist bestimmt unleben] There is nothing we would not do to escape. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. But it is fate. It howls electric bliss beneath our cells. It is nowhere in time and nothings us. It is the body of nothing, and electric-hot. An electric nothing-body instead of us.
In this instance, at least, there is little indication of the 'abysmally archaic symbolism' Jung promises us. On the contrary, there is remarkable affinity with the hypermodern writings of K -Goth artificial death cultists documented elsewhere. The K-Goth Crypt-texts share a marked preference for anonymous pronouns, whether collective, second-or third-person, whilst spiralling about a nullifying electric-excruciation, traversed in the name of Lemuria. In the words of one anonymous Crypt-posting:
We burn each time but forget.
When we begin each time it comes back, and no one would do it then, but it is too late. We cross over again into electric-burning, but forget that it hurts in the brain to die this way. It takes so long to learn that it is grating-apart and burning, that dying is felt in the brain, and that it is horrible ... It is so horrible to feel, but then we forget, so it can happen again. Metal body-screaming to die in electricity. Metallic microparticle sex that is of unlife and not the organism. That is what the Zombie-maker brings, with the digital centipede bite. And we are hooked on it, hooked up to it, because coming the other way it is Lemuria. Incessant intolerable feeling, passing forever, approaching from the outside, and feeling nothing continuously. WHAT DIDN'T HAPPEN AT THE MILLENNIUM?
I
Pandemonium: What didn't Happen at the Millennium? There was something peculiar about writing this book. At times she thought it would never be finished. The Sarkon stories had been full of holes, which added to the confusion. Eventually she started making things up, but even that became entangled with coincidence, and with Cybergoth hyperstition (assembled from fictional quantities which make themselves real). She had found herself investigating various neolemurian cults, most of whom anticipated something huge around about the 1999 Spring-Equinox (when Pluto exits from the clutch of Neptune, triggering the return of the Old Ones). By the end of the century things had been so wound-up by Yettuk apocalypticism that even the most extravagant socioeconomic turmoil would still have been a disappointment. And yet, now, four years after the millennium the sense of anticlimax had begun to seem strangely artificial, as if it were screening something out.
Carver has made her whole life out of hyperstition (even her name is a pseudonym). She continuously returns to the imperceptible crossing where fiction becomes timetravel, and the only patterns are coincidences.
Her notes on the Sarkon meeting pulse with lemurian sorceries, demonic swarms, ageless time-wars, and searches for the Limbic-Key.
She navigates Moebian circuits, feeling that a vaguely recollected rumour is still about to occur.
APPENDIX: PENULTIMILLENNIAL CRYPT-CULTS.
Characteristics:
1. Flatline Materialism.
The Crypt is nothing outside an experiment in artificial death, hyper-production of the positive zero-plane neuroelectonic immanence - invested by a continually re-animated thana technical connectivism. This fact carries inevitable consequences for the cultures that populate it, uprooting them into Unlife - or the non-zone of absolute betweenness - whose spiro dynamics of sorcerous involvement are alone sufficient to reach the sub-mesh tracts of cybergothic continuum. Flatline Materialism designates the objectless Crypt-voyage itself, as Lemurian body-fusion at matter degree-zero.
2. Digital Hyperstition.
Nothing propagates itself through the Crypt without realizing the operational identity of culture and machinery, effectively dismantling the organic body into numerizing particles which swarm in dislocated swirls. Crypt-entities are both hyper-vortical singularities and units of Digital Hyperstition - or brands of the outside - real components of numerical fictions that make themselves real, providing the practal mater of sorcery, spirogenesis, or productive involvement that function consistently with the flatline. Crypt-cultures know nothing of work or meaning. Instead, they coincide with the hype-spirals. Cyberhype - that flattens signs and resources onto nonsignifying triggers, diagrams, and assembly jargons.
3. Lesbovampiric Contagion-Libido.
Crypt-sorcery makes itself real in the same way that it spreads. Functioning as a plague, it associates with the experimental production of an anticlimactic or anorgasmic counter-sexuality, attuned to the collective re-engineering of bodies within technobiotic assemblages, ultimately composed of electronic streams or ionic currents in their sense of positive hole-flow. Since Cryptsex is precisely identical to the infections it transmits, counted in body-shifting vectors, its libidinal composition is marked both by a palaeo embryonic or oestrogenetic non-gendered femininity and a lateral haemometallic influenzoid virulence.
4. Y2K-Positive Calendric Agitation.
Crypt-cultures spill into the closed economy of history through a rupture in chronological ordering, punctually triggered at Time-Zero. Crypt-rumour consistently allocates its own contemporary emergence - or unearthing - to impending millennial Cyberschiz: Cyberspace time-disintegration under the strategically aggravated impact of Y2K-missile. Whilst multiply differentiated most crucially by the division between continuism and centience - Crypt-cults are constitutively involved in a singular nexus of counter-gregorian calendric subversion, celebrating the automatic redating of the machinic unconscious, and hyping the dissolution of commemorative significance into digital time-mutation, catalyzed by numerical and indexical operative signals. The Crypt exists from before the origin of time, but it begins at Year-Zero ...
taken from: Fanged Noumena (COLLECTED WRITINGS 1987 - 2007) by Nick Land
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by Steven Craig Hickman On the Anti-City: I think it’s a form of desire for inertia, desire for ubiquity, instantaneousness – a will to reduce the world to a single place, a single identity. – Paul Virilio, Pure War We’ve passed through the looking glass and become the spectacle, the speed of global affects is now instantaneous, ubiquitous, and total. We no longer know reality, it knows us. The systems we immersed ourselves in have shaped us to a modulated symbolic order that knows only the spectacle of disappearance and erasure. The hypermediation of the world is its speed. Like a cinematic film moving at the speed of light we have vanished into our own filmic histories without knowing it. The mechanisms that sucked us into this realm have captured both our affects and our very thoughts, no longer can we break out of the enframed movement of the film. We are the film and the frames moving at the light of speed. Close your eyes and you can hear the hum of the machinic systems as they continuously press your filmic life through time’s flickering stabilizers. Nothing remains but the light, even speed is an effect of light. Interactivity keeps the world in a kind of tetanic trance, at once inert and overexcited, sleepwalking on a planetary scale. – Paul Virilio The greatest feat of capitalism was its standardization not of the commodity, but the commodification and standardization of reality. The speed of the Same is globalization in filmic stasis, the sense you have as you travel from port to port and step out of your jet into the comfort of your new destination of having never moved at all. You are not moving, only the world is. This is the age of movable stasis, speed as entropic effect, an empty time in which time has been emptied out. The flows have stopped, and you are merely shadowboxing in a corporate film realm of affectless synchronization. Past societies were based on force, or law or a community of reciprocal interests: the poor, the rich, etc. Community of interests, or social classes. Today we’ve become a community of emotions. Affects can be effected instantly on a world scale. Essentially we’re dealing here with a religion. – Paul Virilio, Pure War The ubiquity of emotions is their pure dispersal across the body of the planetary system. Like religions of old the mystical body is now hidden in the wires of our information and communications systems that connect all to all. Virilio will ask: Is this a Communism of affects at work in perception? Reality has become a non-stop video-game in which we enact the coded sequences of a program we never developed but insidiously works its deadly algorithms in our minds. For Virilio there is a fail-safe, a back door into recoding the code itself, a way out. He spoke of his friend Jean Baudrillard who did not share his belief in escapes, hidden doors out of the shadow worlds. No, actually we had a radically different approach to things. For me, things have a purpose, every moment has its purpose. He didn’t believe so. On the other hand, we had something in common, which was the uncertainty principle… – Paul Virilio, Pure War With the advent of the Anti-City time was seen as one more thing under erasure. The disappearance of time is an effect of speed, not vice versa. The city was the means of mapping out a political space that existed in a given political duration. Now speed – ubiquity, instantaneousness – dissolves the city, or rather displaces it. And, displaces it, I would say, in time. (p. 73) We’ve all become time-travelers, cities as spatial organisms – as communities, spherical and populace; have given way to verticality, to the weightlessness of mobility, of flight. The cities of the new millennium will be built of information, not bricks or steel; oh, yes, they will still have those but the essential thing will be the data itself not the materials. You, too, will vanish into information, an information organism enclosed by your peripherals, encased in a sea of glowing information that will become your total environment. “The proximity of the world will be such that “automobility” will no longer be necessary. This is already happening through the speed of audio-visuals, with tele-conferencing and televised debates. When physical mobility catches up with the performances of electronic mobility, we’ll find ourselves facing an unheard-of situation of the interchangeability of places.” (p. 74) Proximity, the single interface between all bodies, all places, all points of the world – that’s the tendency. And I push that tendency to extremes. – Paul Virilio The transpolitical mandate is based on a new conception of the city not as capital, not as New York, Madrid, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Dubai… but as the intersection of time currents, or practicalities, of speed: the new capitals will be Cities at the End of Time. Note: 1. Paul Virilio. Pure War a history of the present (semiotext(e), 2008) The article is taken from:
by Nick Land
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A PRELIMINARY POST-MORTEM
Spirit (Geist) is stigmatized by a multiple deconstructibility: as a substantialization of Dasein, an antonym of matter, a correlate of phonic lucidity, or a token of reflexivity, self-presence, pure intelligibility, spontaneity, etc. In the course of its recent history this word has been inflated by Hegel into the cosmic medium of transaction - the super-heated lubricant of global eventuation - and then trafficked to the edge of worthlessness by the culture succeeding him, before finally succumbing to an irreparable marginalization by the scientific advances of experimental and behavioral psychology, neurology, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, until it becomes a sentimentalism, a vague peripheraIized metaphor, a joke ... a cheap target one might think. There are those who remain loyal enough to the canonical discourses of Western philosophy to argue that logocentrism is secreted in the implementary terminology of information, digitality, program, software, and control. But as for spirit! - that can only be parody or nostalgia. Who could still use such a word without humor or disdain? Spirit is less a misleading or dangerous word than a ridiculous one; a Coelecanth of a word. Yet it persists: the mark of a clownish incompetence at death.
Such incompetence has its doctrine, rituals, and liturgy, its orthodoxies and heresies. It is the entire and prolonged refusal of the impersonal summarizable as 'phenomenology.' Whether high-church (Hegel), or low-church (HusserI), phenomenology is the definitive ideology of propriety; systematically employing the interrogative mode in order to distill out everything for which proper subjectivity cannot claim responsibility, and thus entrenching the humanistic dimension of Western philosophy ever more rigidly. This entire current gradually compiles an attempted proof of the impossibility of death, an ontological conflation of access to reality and ownership (psyche, cogito, Selbstheit, Eigentlichkeit, Jemeinigkeit), a perpetually reformulated spiritualism. Socrates, Descartes, HusserI: all shallow, all egoists, all pressing further into the flatlands of the profane. This is why they are so well placed to profit from the death of God (an event in which they had taken no part - on the contrary; the obsessional egoism of theism had always appealed to them). Phenomenology is a programmatic denial (reduction to the personal) of exteriority which, after becoming a quasisolipsistic knee-jerk of self-assertion, wonders with genuine naivety why alterity has come to pose such problems. If spirit largely disappears between Hegel and Husserl it is because, compared to the transcendental ego, it seems a little too complicit with the outside.
Unlike Heidegger and Derrida, I see no advance, recovery, or sophistication taking place in the Husserlian reading of Kant. The phenomenological reduction of appearance [Erscheinung] to evidential Schein is a dogmatic decision which de fangs the tentative skepticism of the critical philosophy, taking it even further from the deep epoche of unknowing: the vast abrupt discovered confusedly by Pyrrho of Elis, the repressed of monotheistic civilization. Husserlian suspension or bracketing is not Pyrrhonian but Socratic; a reservation of judgment that is subordinated to apodicticity, to knowing what one knows even if nothing else (to doubting as a power of the subject). Epoch!, chaos, Old Night, death, however it! she is named, the way there is not our doing. Suspension is to be discovered, not performed.
So what is to be thought of a differance that radicalizes, deconstructs, or subverts a suspension thus crushed under a phenomenological dogmatics? What is it that would take us this way, if not that which appears (in Kant's sense, not Husserl's) as the humanistic pretension - the spirit - of representational philosophizing? Such suspension is of course a detour, an avoidance, but scarcely an inevitable one. On the contrary, it is peculiarly deliberated; meticulously valorizing a specific philosophic tendency (passing through Husserl), effacing another (the Schopenhauerean fork of post-Kantianism), and painstakingly transferring signs from the latter to the former (Nietzsche read through Heidegger!! !). Section 7 of Sein l1nd Zeit is exemplary here, with its insistence upon an evidential reading of phenomenality, thereby dismissing the entire problematic of Nietzsche's thinking in a single casual gesture. What sense to the insistent theme of fiction in Nietzsche's writings after such a move has been made? What sense to enigma? (We always already have the meaning of being built into the structure of existence, Heidegger suggests, it is merely that we do not yet know that we know. Questioning is remembering. Socrates smiles.)
We do not know yet, a not yet that can be dilated corrosively; frustrating the end of metaphysics, interminably deferring truth. Yawns become scarcely controllable. Does it matter what we know or will never know? Let us not forget that philosophy is also primate psychology; that our loftiest speculations are merely picking through a minuscule region of the variegated slime encrusting a speck of dust. An obsessional concern for such insignificances is a tasteless parochialism. What matters is the Unknown: the escapographic matrix echoed spectrally by the negative prefix, sprawled in immense indifference to all our "yets". Beyond the anthropoid gesticulations of knowing, suspension is not differentiable from death, and death ("one's death" as we so ludicrously say) does not belong to an order that can be delayed. Has our Socratism reached such a pinnacle of profanity that we really imagine she would wait for us?
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PART I: WOLVES
As I continue to study this text, elsewhere, with a more decent patience, I hope one day to be able, beyond what a conference permits me today, to render it justice in also analysing its motion, its mode or its status (if it has one), its relation to philosophi· cal discourse, to hermeneutics or poetics, but still what it says of Geschlecht, the word Geschlecht, and also of place [Ort], as of animality. For the moment [l'instant], I follow solely the passage of spirit..1
These are the words of a man who is confident he will survive for some considerable time. There is no discernible urgency here, far less abruptness, desperation, or any of the raw intensities of haste. Instead there is the now familiar rhetoric of close reading; the simultaneous performance and prescription of painstaking care, deliberation, conscientiousness, and reverential textual devotion. A certain intricately intertextual discussion of spirit unfolds, at a languorous pace, inspired by uninterrogated principles of decency and justice. Everything is mediated by elucidations, re-elucidations, elucidations of previous elucidations, conducted with meticulous courtesy, but never inattentive to the complicity of the concept of elucidation with the history of metaphysics from Plato to the previous paragraph of De l'esprit. Our author is not to be hurried into premature pronouncements on matters of such seriousness as philosophical discourse, hermeneutics, or poetics. Noris he prepared to descend into such overenthusiastic crudity as examining more than one of Heidegger's words in a single book. Last of all, as it has so often tended to be, comes a promise to take seriously the problem of animality, which - God and suchlike spiritual primordialities being willing - should come to be written about one day.
It is probably relatively uncontroversial to conclude from all this that Derrida is not a werewolf. Werewolves are dissipated within a homolupic spiral that distances them utterly from all concern for decency or justice. Their feral physiologies are badly adapted to the depressive states conducive to ethical earnestness. Instead they are propelled by extremities of libidinal tension which fragment their movements, break up their tracks with jagged discontinuities, and infest their nerves with a burning malaise, so that each gesture is baked in a kiln of ferocity. Creatures of epidemic rather than hermeneutics, werewolves tend to be very crude, but then, they don't live as long as deconstructionists. The luxury of delaying the problem of animality is not open to them.
On page 141 of De l'esprit Derrida apologizes for a very moderate instance of textual impoliteness that he describes as 'precipitating in an indecent fashion'. 2 In this thought of 'indecent precipitation' he comes closer to the dominant impulse of Trakl's poetry than at any other point in the book; closer too, it could be argued, than Heidegger ever gets. An evasion that is perhaps constitutive of hermeneutical decency is exemplified when, by taking one's time over interpreting Trakl's poetry, one avoids succumbing to the pestilence it communicates. Trakl's writings are lycanthropic vectors of impatience, of twitch disease, because they are the virulent relics of an indecent precipitation, an abortion, a meteorite impact. Trakl took very little time over anything. Surviving as he did to the age of twenty-seven he had very little time to take.
Trakl confesses to his lycanthropy in the first version of Passion, the unavowed version, where he writes that:
Two wolves in the sinister Wood
We mixed our blood in a stony embrace And the stars of our race fell upon us.3
The word 'race' in this translation precipitates the sense of Geschlecht in an indecent fashion. In the complete absence of hermeneutical conscientiousness it is epidemiological factors alone which compel this. To become a werewolf one must be bitten by another werewolf, and in Trakl's case it seems this was Rimbaud, who wrote: 'It is quite evident to me that I have always been of an inferior race. I am not able to comprehend revolt. My race never stirs itself except for pillage: like wolves at the beast they have not killed'.4
To be a werewolf is to be inferior by the most basic criteria of civilization. Not only is the discipline of political responsibility alien to them, so is the entire history of work in which such discipline is embedded. Rimbaud remarks, starkly enough: 'I have a horror of all trades.' In general, it can be said that this race is marked by a profound spiritual inferiority. Compared to the piety, morality, and industriousness of its superiors it exhibits only laziness, disobedience, and an abnormally unsuccessful repression of all those traits of the unconscious which Freud describes as 'resistant to education,' and among which there is nothing remotely associated with either decency or justice: 'I have never been of this people; I have never been a christian; I am of the race who sings under torture; I do not understand the laws, I am a brute'.
Such is Trakl's 'accursed race'6 as well as Rimbaud's, communicating its dirty blood in wilderness spaces of barbarian inarticulacy. Eternally aborting the prospect of a transcendental subjectivity, the inferior ones are never captured by contractual reciprocity, or by its attendant moral universalism. They are no more employable than they are psychoanalyzable, oblivious to both legality and incentive. Incapable of making promises - even to themselves - they are excluded from every possibility of salvation. The craving for such pagan regressions is unspeakable. It is only with the greatest strictness that the superior ones repress the violent drives which lure them into inferior becomings; becoming female, black, irresponsible and nomadic, becoming an animal, a plant, a death spasm of the sun.
In its final phase the Austro-Hungarian Empire became a machine for the generation of homolupic becomings: brewing intense trajectories of regression among the slavic races of the Balkans and Carpathians, translating them into German, and then condensing them under the pressure of exacerbated repression in the Viennese culturecore. What exploded in the hysterias of Freud's patients was an irresistible vulcanism of becoming inferior, whose petrified lava flows mapped-out the regressive character of the drive. The migrant blocks of tension summarized in the Freudian unconscious are much less a matter of Oedipus than of the mongols; of those who feed the world of spirit to their horses as they inundate civilization like a flood. If the unconscious is structured like a language it is only because language has the pattern of a plague.
Among Trakl's writing's are two war poems, and perhaps only two. One is Grodek - named after the battlefield upon which the Austro-Hungarian army suffered a major defeat in the early stages of the conflict - and is perhaps the most widely known of Trakl's writings. It is this poem that includes the line so important to both Heidegger and Derrida concerning 'the hot flame of spirit'. 7 The other is entitled In the East, and sketches the same libidinal figure in the First World War as Freud's writings of the two ensuing decades. This figure traces the displacement of impersonal primary-process aggression against the self-God-city complex -against civilization - onto the far more restrained axis of armed competition between nations.
War sublimates the lycanthropic death-wave in the same way a dream sublimates unavowable desire; allowing something to remain asleep. In this sense In the East is the undoing of a war poem, and has the nightmare quality associated with something peeled-back; such as the disintegration of flesh from a skull, or the opening of a corpse to reveal an obscenely teeming mass. This movement of violent disillusionment is starkly outlined in the poem Confiteor:
And as the masks fall from each thing
I see only anxiety, despair, ignominy and epidemic, The tragedy of humanity has no heroes, A vile piece, played out on graves and corpses.8
The second stanza of In the East ends with the spirits of the stricken - of the erschlagenen, close perhaps to a Geschlecht - sighing among the shadows of autumnal ashes, and to this point In the East might still be a war poem. It would still be possible for the ego to savour these stanzas for the sublimation-trap they lay for impersonal thanatropisms, offering up the victims of inhibited conflicts as a mournful dream-image. The third and final stanza, however, is something quite different:
Thorny wilderness girdles the city
From bloody steps the moon hunts Terrified women. Wild wolves break through the gate.9
The wild, the basis of a noun in the first line of the stanza, returns as an adjective in its last. An indeterminate multiplicity of wolves effect a rupture in the boundary of the city, transmitting its positive exteriority into its kernel. No longer interpretable as politics, as a war between cities, states, or other civilized totalities, the violence of the East relapses into an unrestrained movement of erosion. Blood, the moon, and women are coagulated by an intense menstrual seism which shatters the proper difference between life and death, integrity and dissolution, periodicity and shock. What Trakl in Grodek names 'the forgotten blood' recovers its sacred sense, in the regression that transmutes the politico-ethically impregnated blood of the dying solder into savage categorially 0blivious flow.
Wild matter is untouched by its difference from spirit, insofar as this is supposed to depend upon a logical disjunction. The pseudointeriorities of the city are no less permeable to it than the uncultivated spaces marked out by the civilized ones for its exile. The bloody steps [Stufen] of In the East are only one variant among the many found in Trakl's writings: 'steps of madness',lo 'mossy steps,' 'ruined steps,' 'the steps of the wood'.n It is a language of gradation, degree, Abstufung. Not quantity as opposed to quality, nor the difference of the two, but heterogenous strata of intensity, which - like the scales of the chaos theorists - involve irresolvable complexity, diversity, indefinite protractability in both directions, the default of absolute thresholds, an economics of incommensurability, and a compulsively recurrent abortion of the concept. Essence is preempted by an irresolvable excess of detail, in the same eruptive gesture that lethally infects transcendence with the return of excitatory complexity. The great simplicities of culture - identity, equality, absoluteness, abstraction -are immanently subverted by the pathological mass of unsublatable ingredients. There is no concept of particularity that is not theological; aligned with the phantasm of a transcendent spirit that stands disjoined from the ineliminable materiality of all spiritualization processes - to steal Nietzsche's term.
That matter is volatilized to different degrees of spiritualization is not in the least dependent upon spiritual causalities of any kind. Between the wilderness and the polis is a wilderness history - a genealogy - and not a political history. Regression is not an undoing of the city's work, but a recurrence of impersonal creativity. More precisely, the work of the city has never been anything but a mendacious retranscription of the real metamorphoses which reemerge in lycanthropic becomings.
Inferiority is not any kind of lack or impoverishment, but a positive libidinal charge potentiating spiritualizations. Anything that slumbers in the sterility of pseudoabsoluteness is right to fear the inferior ones, and the powerful regressions that wash away the ramparts damming-up intensive sequences. The accursed race, living like beasts, whose veins are inflamed by a cosmic menstruation, have never entered into the great project of civilization, which begins with the use of fire to keep the wild animals at bay. Instead they leave a scorched and blackened trail in their wake as they irresponsibly protract the trajectory of animality. In their hands fire itself loses itself; becoming dirty, epidemic, and regressive. Not for them the humanizing, nucleating fire; the hearth, the protective and nutrifying glow, a focus embracing difference within itself, the fire of the familial and the familiar. The fire of the inferior ones is the dissolvant blaze which spreads uncontrollably, combusting the gloomy architectures of transcendence in the mad truth of exteriority. It is the fire of waste, dissipation, dehumanization, of a deeper and harsher fertility than can be comprehended by the industry of man. This lupine fire - the apolitical element in war, literature, psychosis, and catastrophe - makes space for the impersonal propagations of the wilderness.
An abrupt question: Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes a Christian, among a general confusion of be comings - becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic -just as he was also an antichrist, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestuous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite. Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are stained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead, or in some other way inhuman. It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a reservoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated of lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference.
PART II: RATS
Henrik Ibsen knew some things about rats, 'they who are hated and persecuted of men' .12 The fact of an alliance between rats and desire was evident to him, and when the rat wife of Little Eyolf is asked where her beloved is, she answers: "Down among all the rats" .13 How deftly he indicates the registration of the rats upon the Oedipal claustrophobia of the bourgeois household:
Rat Wife: [curtsies at the door] Begging your most
humble pardon, ladies and gentlemen ... but have you anything gnawing at this house?
Allmers: Have we ... ? No, I don't think so.
Rat Wife: Because if you had I'd be glad to help you get rid of it.
Rita: Yes, yes, we understand. But we don't have anything of that kind.14
How desperate they are not to believe it! "Rats don't belong here, this is the inside, purity, civilization,philosophy ... we don't want to know about anything of that kind. "
Reading is not one thing. It is always possible to construe the movement between strata, plates, terraces, in spiritual terms; a matter of simulacrum, representation, metaphor, commentary, and interpretation. God is like and unlike a man, who is like and unlike an animal, which is like and unlike inorganic matter. This is an architecture of super-terrestrial transitions, transcendental difference, absolute verticality, gulfs of essence, logicized, infinitized, purifying disjunction. There is not one alternative to such a schema, but a recklessly proliferated multiplicity of alternatives; complex sponge-spaces rotted by lines of insinuation. There is always a dimension of immanence; a burrow, a thread, a path for contagion. The storeys of a house lend themselves to social stratification, and thus to philosophical and theological metaphor; the basement representing the place of the servants, animality, the unconscious. What is repressed in this case is not the basement itself - hell is not repressed but exhibited - but the hollow walls, thc drainpipe outside, the arterial system of tubes, ducts, and vents, everything that facilitates the corruption of vertically articulated space by the quasihorizontality of an insidious dimension. Laws, revelations, and prayers, or - at a lower level - commands, messages, and reports, seem to establish the defined relations between strata that are identical with justice. The words of God pass down from level to level, determinately mediated at each stage. Inherent to such spatiality is its subversion, a more basic and complex order of distances, because Heaven is not without its ratholes, its sewage system, an entire impersonal architecture characterized by porous heterogeneity. It seems likely that God would insist upon air·conditioning and a dumbwaiter. Irrespective of his celestial visage, J ahweh stilI has ratbites on his ass.
Neither Heidegger nor Derrida have any time for TrakI's rats, but that doesn't stop them swarming everywhere, exaggerating the lycanthropic power of infiltration. It must be admitted; the rats are not very spiritual, but if there is a site, Ort, that focuses TrakI's poetry, why is it not the courtyard that Trakl repeatedly populates with rats? Are not the rats, as a positive antihistoricism, crucial to TrakI's poetic force? Why does Heidegger never mention TrakI's superb poem The Rats, a text that functions as a vermin-core for an entire pattern of infestation? Perhaps it is because difference becomes unacceptable when it moves fast and unpredictably, hissing at humanity through plague-smeared teeth.
It is certainly not because the rats are indiscernible, despite their unlocalizable fluidity. They shriek, whistle, bicker, rummage, and romp. When the rats erupt into Dream and Derangement for instance, which is perhaps Trakl's most shattering and lycanthropic poem, they are not merely glimpsed - far less ignored or exterminated but encouraged by the poem's central character, who feeds them in a gesture of beautiful treachery against mankind. Not that it is population alone that gives them a special privilege, ravens are equally prevalent within Trakl's writings - and also have a poem of their own - whilst toads and bats are to be found in incredible numbers. It is the rats' hideous talent for decomposing interiorities that advantages them; opening the incest-rotted 'house of the father' - and with it the most intensely charged recesses of Trakl's writing - to the depredations of feral alterity.
Despite his humanistic prejudices, Hans Zinsser, in his book Rats, Lice, and History, has written delightfully about the rats. He remarks:
It is a curious fact that long before there could have been any knowledge concerning the dangerous character of rodents as carriers of disease, mankind dreaded and pursued these animals. Sticker has collected a great many references to this subject from ancient and medirevalliterature, and has found much evidence in the folklore of medireval Europe which points to the vague recognition of some connection between plague and rats. In ancient Palestine, the Jews considered all seven mouse varieties (akbar) unclean, and as unsuited for human nourishment as were pigs. The worshipers of Zoroaster hated water rats, and believed that the killing of rats was a service to God. It is also significant that Apollo Smintheus, the god who was supposed to protect against disease, was also spoken of as the killer of mice, and saint Gertrude was besought by the bishops of the early Catholic Church to protect against plague and mice. The year 1498, Sticker tells us, was a severe plague year in Germany, and there were so many rats in Frankfurt that an attendant was stationed for several hours each day on a bridge in the town and directed to pay a pfennig for every rat brought in. The attendant cut off the tail of the rat - probably as a primitive method of accounting - and threw the bodies into the river. Heine, according to Sticker, speaks of a tax levied on the Jews of Frankfurt in the fifteenth century, which consisted of the annual delivery of five thousand rat tails. Folklore originating in a number of different parts of Europe during the great plague epidemics mentions cats and dogs, the hereditary enemies of rats and mice, as guardians against plague.15
There is enormous power to the dynamic hierarchy of vectors mobilized by the rats. It combines the insidious subtlety ofliquids with the concentrated displacement of compact solids; saturation with jumps. Rats carry fleas which bear diseases, augmenting the fluid dissemination of plagues with a ferociously discontinuous transmission. To quote Zinsser again:
Studies made within the last few years seem to indicate that the virus of the Mexican-American type of typhus fever, as well as of the endemic variety in the Mediterranean basin, is highly adapted to rodents and is carried in these animals - rats - during the intervals between human epidemics; transmitted from rat to rat by the rat louse (polyplax) and the rat flea (Xenopsylla), and, on suitable occasions, to man from the rat by the rat flea. For this reason, Nicolle speaks of this as the 'murine' virus.16
And a little further on:
From the point of view of all other living creatures, the rat is an unmitigated nuisance and pest. There is nothing that can be said in its favor. It can live anywhere and eat anything. It burrows for itself when it has to, but, when it can, it takes over the habitations of other animals, such as rabbits, and kills them and their young. It climbs and swims. It carries disease of man and animals - plague, typhus, trichinella spiralis, rat-bite fever, infectious jaundice, possibly foot-and-mouth disease and a form of equine 'influenza'. Its destructiveness is almost unlimited.17
The first empirical element to be noted by any libidinal rat theory is the zoological diversification of the rat into two species. These are 'Rattus rattus, the black, house, or ship-rat, and Rattus Norvegicus, the greyish brown, field, or sewer-rat' ,18 of which Shrewsbury says in his History of the Bubonic Plague: 'By comparison with the house-rat it is less agile but far more voracious and cunning, and as it is stronger and more fecund it is a much more formidable enemy of mankind'.19 During the outbreak of bubonic plague during the fourteenth century it was not only the intense killing of human populations, or delivery of terminal vectors, that was executed by R. rattus, who lived and propagated in close proximity to humans, but also the long-range dissemination of the plague, as R. Norvegicus is not thought to have arrived in Europe before the eighteenth century. If this is true - and current historical zoology gives no positive reason to doubt it - then it can safely be asserted that the black death, in addition to its precursor which raged across the near orient and Europe during the sixth and seventh centuries, will remain the climax of achievement reached by R. rattus, who has since been eclipsed. Zinsser once more:
just as the established civilizations of Northern Europe were swept aside by the mass invasions of barbarians from the East, so the established hegemony of the black rat was eventually wiped out with the incursion of the hordes of the brown rat, or Mus decumanus - the ferocious, short-nosed, and shorttailed Asiatic that swept across the Continent in the early eighteenth century ...
The brown rat, too, came from the East. It is now known as the 'common' rat and, because of a mistaken notion of its origin, as Mus norvegicus. Its true origin, according to Hamilton and Hinton, is probably Chinese Mongolia or the region east of Lake Baikal, in both of which places forms resembling it have been found indigenous. The same writers quote Blasius, who believes that the ancients about the Caspian Sea may have known this rat. Claudius AElianus, a Roman rhetorician of the second century, in his De Animalium Natura, speaks of 'little less than Ichneumons, making periodical raids in infinite numbers' in the countries along the Caspian, 'swimming over rivers holding each other's tails.'
Pallas (1831), in his Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica, records that in 1727 - a mouse year - great masses of these rats swam across the Volga after an earthquake.2o
There are two varieties of rat, but this should not be taken as a gift for our metaphysicians, or supposed antimetaphysicians, who are constantly in search of dichotomic conceptual oppositions. The duality of R. rattus and R. Norvegicus is of the kind 1, 2, ... not 0 ... 1; it encloses nothing, reaches no limits, provides no determination, logical negativity, or alternation. The tokens of libidinal displacement are complex and not diacritical. Alogical differentiation: black and brown, not black and white. One, two ... first the wave uf R. rattus, effective on its own, almost invisible to the Europe of the middle ages, differentiated perhaps from the mice (it was called mures majores),21 ... 1/2, 1, ... ? And then the wave of R. Norvegicus, a different type of rat, but not an opposite type; rather, a type that was more clever and destructive, taking the rat process a little bit further. Far from requiring the black rat for its determinacy the new Asiatic invader wipes out the previous rat population, establishing itself as a sheer intensity, as a potential for disaster. Rats disdain discrimination, propagating their difference upon a plateau of excitement. Differentiation within an illimitable series, alogical dissimilarity, independence from the differend, and indiscriminate proliferation of nonidentity; this is the 'logic' of the rats.
Freud's 1909 case of compulsive neurosis - the 'ratman' - is told by his captain, fatefully, of a 'particularly terrible Oriental punishment'. 22 Freud describes how this was related to him in the analysis: 'the condemned is bound (he expressed himself so unclearly that I could not immediately guess [erraten] in what position) - upon his posterior a pot was placed, into a which rats [Ratten] were introduced, which - he stood up again and gave out all the signs of terror and resistance - bored themselves in'. 23 This is the 'rat-punishment' [die Rattenstrafe], visited upon Europe, through its underside, from the East. Its peculiar insidiousness, which Freud does not emphasize even though he marks it, is that to surmise [erraten] the riddle [Ratsel] of the Rattenstrafe is to suffer it. In the very movement of prowess the imperial interpretative gesture is taken par derriere by an impersonal libidinal force from beyond representational discourse, whether logico-psychiatric or orientalist. The image of anal violation that organizes the rat-delirium has all the traits of a compromise formation; a sublimation of utter unexpectedness into a linearized passage fortified by a sadistically invested and ego-eo-opted sphincter. The infiltration of the rat is singularized, and depicted as an inverse frontal assault, stripped of its fluidity, indirectness, heterogeneity, as if it were mere delicacy that obstructed our comprehension of vermin space. It is not Oedipal ambivalence that is solicited by such an image, but the racist misogyny that would project all undomesticated flows onto an axis of expulsability. The rattenstrafe is a wish - and thus an idealization - because it is far more comforting to the anal-sadistic structure of humanism than the reality of the free penetrability of the body along all of its irresolvably scaled estuaries.
Animality is not a state, essence, or genus, but a complex space cross-cut by voyages of all kinds. Trakl explores this wilderness terrain with an excruciating vulnerability. The animality which Trakl finds has its dead-ends and stagnant sumps, it has its humanistic and theological becomings, but it also has its channels of open flow; becoming multiple, fluid, unpredictable, becoming an enemy of mankind, lupine and murine becomings of all kinds. These intensive sequences cannot be isolated or determined, since no impermeable boundary remains to quarantine Trakl's rodents from the nameless ones. From becoming a mouse, and then a black rat, and then a brown rat, or from becoming one's sister, and then a pack of wolves, and then a swarm of rats. The eternity of Rimbaud's inferior race shares its diseases with Nietzsche's 'deep, deep, eternity', for which the very adjective is torn apart by convulsive waves of descent. An unfathomable abyss of regression or recurrence protracts itself epidemically into Trakl's body. 'I am all the vermin in history.' Indecent precipitation.
Notes:
1 ]. Derrida, De {'esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilee, 1987), '37; sec also, J. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, tr. G. Bennington, R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 87. 2. Ibid., '4'; Derrida, Of Spirit, 87· 3.C. Trakl, Das dichterische Werk (Munchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972), .216; for a recent English translation, see G. Trakl, Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition tr. Alexander Stillmark. (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 82. 4. A. Rimbaud, Collected Poems, tr. O. Bernard, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 302. 5. Ibid ,308 6. Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 82. 7. Ibid., 95; Trakl, Poems and Prose, 106. 8. Ibid .• '47 9. Ibid., 94; Trakl, Poems and Prose, 124. 10.Ibid., 43. 11.Ibid., 54. 12. Henrik Ibsen, the Oiford Ibsen, vol. 8 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 49. 13. Ihid·,49· 14. Ibid., 46. 15. H. Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Roston: Bantam Books. 1965), 142-3. 16. Ibid, 142. 17. Ibid, 150-1. 18. JF.D. Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the Briti"h Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 7. 19. Ibid, 8. 20. Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History, 149. 21. Shrewsbury, History oflhe Bubonic Plague, 121. 22. S. Freud, Studienausgabe, Band VII: Zwang, Paranoia, und Peroersi.on (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1982),4$ S. Freud, 'Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis' (1909), in 'Three Case Histories, ed. P. Rieff (NY: Touchstone, 1996), 11. 23. Ibid., 44; 12
taken from: Fanged Noumena (COLLECTED WRITINGS 1987 - 2007) by Nick Land
by Nick Land Transcendental philosophy is the consummation of philosophy construed as the doctrine of judgment, a mode of thinking that finds its zenith in Kant and its senile dementia in Hegel. Its architecture is determined by two fundamental principles: the linear application of judgment to its object, form to intuition, genus to species, and the non-directional reciprocity of relations, or logical symmetry. Judgment is the great fiction of transcendental philosophy, but cybernetics is the reality of critique. Where judgment is linear and non-directional, cybernetics is non-linear and directional. It replaces linear application with the non-linear circuit, and non-directional logical relations with directional material flows. The cybernetic dissolution of judgment is an integrated shift from transcendence to immanence, from domination to control, and from meaning to function. Cybernetic innovation replaces transcendental constitution, design loops replace faculties. This is why the cybernetic sense of control is irreducible to the traditional political conception of power based on a dyadic master/slave relation, i.e. a transcendent, oppositional, and signifying figure of domination. Domination is merely the phenomenological portrait of circuit inefficiency, control malfunction, or stupidity. The masters do not need intelligence, Nietzsche argues, therefore they do not have it. It is only the confused humanist orientation of modernist cybernetics which lines up control with domination. Emergent control is not the execution of a plan or policy, but the unmanageable exploration that escapes all authority and obsolesces law. According to its futural definition control is guidance into the unknown, exit from the box. It is true that in the commodification process culture slides from a judgmental to a machinic register, but this has nothing to do with a supposedly 'instrumental rationality'. Instrumentality is itself a judgmental construct that inhibits the emergence of cybernetic functionalism. Instruments are gadgets, presupposing a relation of transcendence, but where gadgets are used, machines function. Far from instrumentally extending authority, the efficiency of mastery is its undoing, since all efficiency is cybernetics, and cybernetics dissolves domination in mutant control. Immuno-political individuality, or the pretension to transcendent domination of objects, does not begin with capitalism, even though capital invests it with new powers and fragilities. It emerges with the earliest social restriction of desiring production. 'Man must constitute himself through the repression of the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivity'. This repression is social history. The socius separates the unconscious from what it can do, crushing it against a reality that appears as transcendently given, by trapping it within the operations of its own syntheses. It is split-off from connective assemblage, which is represented as a transcendent object, from disjunctive differentiation, which is represented as a transcendent partition, and from conjunctive identification, which is represented as a transcendent identity. This is an entire metaphysics of the unconscious and desire, which is not (like the metaphysics of consciousness) merely a philosophical vice, but rather the very architectural principle of the social field, the infrastructure of what appears as social necessity. In its early stages psychoanalysis discovers that the unconscious is an impersonal machinism and that desire is positive non-representational flow, yet it 'remains in the pre-critical age' and stumbles before the task of an immanent critique of desire, or decathexis of society. Instead it moves in exactly the opposite direction: back into fantasy, representation, and the pathos of inevitable frustration. Instead of rebuilding reality on the basis of the productive forces of the unconscious, psychoanalysis ties up the unconscious ever more tightly in conformity with the social model of reality. Embracing renunciation with a bourgeois earnestness, the psychoanalysts begin their robotized chant: 'of course we have to be repressed, we want to fuck our mothers and kill our fathers'. They settle down to the grave business of interpretation, and all the stories lead back to Oedipus: 'so you want to fuck your mother and kill your father'. On the plane of immanence or consistency with desire interpretation is completely irrelevant, or at least, it is always in truth something else. Dreams, fantasies, myths, are merely the theatrical representations of functional multiplicities, since 'the unconscious itself is no more structural than personal, it does not symbolize any more than it imagines or represents; it engineers, it is machinic' . Desire does not represent a lacked object, but assembles partial objects, it 'is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it'. This is why, unlike psychoanalysis in its self-representation, 'schizoanalysis is solely functional'. It has no hermeneutical pretensions, but only a machinic interface with 'the molecular functions of the unconscious'. The unconscious is not an aspirational unity but an operative swarm, a population of 'pre-individual and pre-personal singularities, a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link'. This absence of primordial or privileged relations is the body without organs, the machinic plane of the molecular unconscious. Social organization blocks-off the body without organs, substituting a territorial, despotic, or capitalist socius as an apparent principle of production, separating desire from what it can do. Society is the organic unity that constricts the libidinal diffusion of multiplicities across zero, the great monolith of repression, which is why '(t)he body without organs and the organs-partial objects are opposed conjointly to the organism. The body without organs is in fact produced as a whole, but a whole alongside the parts - a whole that does not unify or totalize, but that is added to them like a new, really distinct part'. Between the socius and the body without organs is the difference between the political and the cybernetic, between the familial and the anonymous, between neurosis and psychosis or schizophrenia. Capitalism and schizophrenia name the same desocialization process from the inside and the outside, in terms of where it comes from (simulated accumulation) and where it is going (impersonal delirium). Beyond sociality is a universal schizophrenia whose evacuation from history appears inside history as capitalism. excerpt from the book: FANGED NOUMENA by Nick Land The tale of the circle, the dot, and the arrow — a moral tale — tells the story of a dominant way of thinking about people in the world. The most common preconceptions about epistemology and ontology are contained in the narrative, both what it means to have knowledge and what it means to have being. Here lie all those who meditate on humanity’s authentic position in the world, such as Plato, Kant, and Heidegger, along with many others. Such thinkers offer a story of emergence, of existence, and of orientation. And along the way they also provide a yardstick for measuring what counts as a sincere mode of being within the world. Sometimes this yardstick is called morality. All throughout, the classical narrative adheres to the law of the two: something only exists in relation to something else; here to there, this to that, authentic and inauthentic, the sacred and the profane. Still, the received dominant has lost its luster, and in recent decades the old dominant narrative has started to slip away, just as a new one appears to take its place. The Pre-Socratic Brotherhood, the new hegemon, consists of all the great thinkers of real physicality, of a newly emboldened nature. From Deleuze to Whitehead and others, a new brotherhood exists today, all those who wish to escape the limitations of Western philosophy, which truth be told is “oriental” by virtue of its orientations and only “occidental” by accident. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, who sought to revert the progress of art back to the Quattrocento before certain innovations in modern aesthetics, the Pre-Socratic Brotherhood seeks to revert the progress of philosophy back to a time before the invention of modern metaphysics. (Here, anachronistically, Socrates was the first modern simply by having invented a form of humanity that broke radically with the past; indeed he was killed for promulgating his thoroughly modern metaphysics.) A brotherhood, but inclusive of women and men and others, this band summons its inspiration from Deleuze and Whitehead but also from William James, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza. These, the White Knights of Nature, have replaced the world with the Earth. They have undone the idea in the name of matter, denigrating transcendental form and elevating real materiality. And what have they found there? Difference and multiplicity. Fields of force that interact in various processes of becoming. Assemblages and associations between qualitatively divergent things. Ecosystems, ecologies, and environments. Objects that hum and vibrate with vitality. They have discovered that the Earth is open not closed, that it teems with playfulness and life. They have discovered the ubiquity of natural freedom. They have identified a universal mode of mixing, in which things are forever entangled and imbricated with one another. Always plural, such multiplicities have little in terms of a fixed identity or firm boundary. Rather, the blurring of borders proliferates. For the Pre-Socratic Brotherhood, heterogeneous processes constitute all of nature. Or, as one commentator put it, we live in “a moving assemblage of interconnected subsystems marked by loose joints, disparate edges, redundant noises, and somewhat open possibilities” (William Connolly, The Fragility of Things, 13). If the story of the circle, dot, and arrow is a story about morality, the Pre-Socratic Brotherhood tells a different story, not a moral story but an ethical one. What does Socrates represent if not a victory of the moral regime over that of the ethical? Restorative, the Brotherhood wishes to undo that victory, now considered a crime, and restore the ethical core of the universe. In short the Brotherhood wishes to dismantle the law of the two and enact a new count, the count of the multiple. Taken from:
by Armen Avanessian
Recall that hype is the ratio of expected earnings to earnings(EE / E), whereas the above impressions are based on the on the ratio of capitalization to earnings (K/E). The latter number reflects both hype and the discount rate (K/E = H/r ), so un-less we know what capitalists expect, we remain unable tosay anything specific about hype. But we can speculate[…]
—Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan1
The new realist and materialist philosophy and the new political theory which it explicitly inspired, assert that reality can be known and that change is possible. Rather than spell out here what this entails in the various currents of thought that range from New Materialism via Speculative Realism to Accelerationism, I would like to look at the discursive framework and background information that have led to their engagement with the scientific and (financial-) economic phenomena that characterize the early twenty-first century. Yet these phenomena are largely ignored in the everyday academic life of the humanities, marked for decades now by a conservative philologism and a politically motivated, yet nonetheless vague and inert theoretical relativism – the legacy of ’68. In its various guises – “materialistic turn,” “speculative turn” – the abandonment of the dogmata into which poststructuralism and critical theory have petrified has made an undeniable impact. Suddenly, there are alternatives to the stubborn technological and scientific analphabetism of the humanities, alternatives that recuse the dominant cultural pessimism. The astonishing ignorance, enmity even, of the official academic apparatus notwithstanding, these new realisms and materialisms have refocused public attention on philosophical theorizing outside the academic bubble.
The discursive-political framework is linked to the political/ economic and intellectual crisis of the university. To understand this crisis, we must first resolve an apparent paradox concerning the self-conception of most humanities scholars. Both the academic field of the humanities and the function of scholars in it are often misunderstood. There is, first of all, the critical self-conception of the protagonists. They see themselves threatened by an increasing economization. What is at stake, in their view, is nothing less than the construction of a bulwark against capitalism (today, capitalism of the neoliberal variety). A more careful historical archaeology of the contemporary university, however, reveals this view to be quite illusory, not to say ideological. This common folkloristic mystification of the past is best countered with an accelerationist perspective on the origins of the modern research university. Only in this way can we develop an alternative scenario which we need, in my view, to focus and conceptualize the considerable deficits of the way the humanities produce theory today – a preliminary but necessary step in bringing about actual change.
How, then, do we think (of the academic present) differently? The starting point would have to be the Humboldt nostalgia, rampant not only in Germany, with its wistful phantasm of an amalgamation of two contradictory claims: to advance research and to promote teaching, a synthesis alleged to have succeeded so much better in the past. This combination, the story goes, makes the free development of academics’ individual talents and creativity possible in the first place and thereby guarantees originality and quality in research, theory production, and knowledge transmission. This high-flown scenario of a gradual decline of Humboldtian ideals, said to be caused primarily by the processes of economization which, after all, do not spare the university, is misleading in more than one way. First of all, it is doubtful, from an accelerationist perspective, whether such a utopian outside of capitalist conditions is even possible. When we look, first, at the origins of the modern research university in Prussia prior to 1800 and, second, at the reactions of contemporary universities after 1800, the situation looks very different from what it is said to be in the ever-popular humanist tale. The judgments of the professoriate back then – be it at the Sorbonne, at the English colleges, or among the Vienna Jesuits – bear a striking resemblance with the laments about the state of affairs we hear today. What Humboldt’s contemporaries merely had an inkling of has today emerged as the (long repressed) historical truth of the modern research university: an economic orientation is inscribed in its very purpose, which is to provide education as professional training. And this shift produces, not as a side effect but as its intended governmental goal, a new type of academic and, in my view, aesthetic subjectivity. The switch from an oral disputatio (which served to demonstrate mastery of the established canon of knowledge) to a written dissertatio (which focuses on innovative research) is one example. Another is the bureaucratization of the universities. Often presented as the result of an increasing capitalization of the institution, it too has an antecedent history in Prussian politics and policing – be critical! is an imperative proclaimed beyond just Königsberg.2 As historian William Clark pointedly remarks: “The researcher as modern hero of knowledge, the civil servant as work of art was a work of German irony.”3
Among the philosophers, including Hegel and Schleiermacher, who were working on this fundamental and, to this day, internationally reverberating reorientation of the university, it is probably Fichte, who in coining the term Wissenschaftskünstler, or academic-artist, has best characterized this new type of subjectivity. The Romantic-idealist university, for him, was to be “a school of the art of the scientific employment of reason” and of “the practical employment of the art of science in life,” from which “artists in life” are to emerge.4 Aesthetics becomes a philosophical discipline at a time when a new “aesthetic regime” (Jacques Rancière) produces, as its correlate, an aesthetic subjectivity.5 Without being able to elaborate it here, it may thus be necessary to take an even broader approach in deriving from the critique artiste the new spirit of capitalism and its “creativity dispositif,” the “‘aesthetic capitalism’ of today” (Andreas Reckwitz),6 than Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have done in their trailblazing study.7 Even before the Romantic bohème, the matrix of today’s neoliberalism began to take shape in the universities, which are responsible for a general aestheticization of discourse. Autonomy, flexibility, creativity, and all the other ingredients of innovative research were first conceived and employed in precisely those laboratories of the humanities that today, wilfully ignoring their genesis, act the part of distinguished pockets of resistance.
Given such misunderstandings, it comes as no surprise that the critique that has been practiced with such devotion in faculties of humanities for more than two hundred years now often takes the form of “transcendental miserabilism.”8 The main difference between the various forms of critique – be it immanent, external, implicit, explicit, be it called critique or criticality – and the speculative and accelerationist approaches already mentioned lies in the latter’s emphatic insistence on the potential of the future: they attempt a recursive practice of transformation instead of reflecting, in a bad infinity, on the given. The twisted nostalgic look backward – about which Nietzsche already said everything that needs to be said: “O Voltaire! O humanity! O nonsense!”9 – leads one to stumble, as it were, backside forward. Accelerationist speculation, on the contrary, advocates an inhuman and optimistic look back from the future onto a past we (still) know as our present. And in contrast to the dromo nihilism of earlier thinkers of speed who were unable or unwilling to oppose a speed posited as absolute by Virilio, contemporary leftist accelerationism conceives of itself as an attempt to subvert or manipulatively appropriate the power relations that tend to be invisible in our hyperdynamic society but do not, for all that, have a priori validity.10 Yet this is not possible in the mode of the nostalgic and folkloristic mystifications of the university’s past. It can only be achieved by means of a rational analysis, by a cognitive mapping of the status quo, and by productively engaging with the very dynamic and speed that our pervasively accelerated society imposes (whether we like it or not).
From an accelerationist point of view, solving societal problems requires contextualizing local problems (e.g. working conditions in the university) within the global. The crisis of the university within globalized capitalism, which is also an intellectual crisis, is usefully defined by a formula articulated by economic theorists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (who, not coincidentally, have also harshly criticized the economic innocence of leftist critique): capital is power. Capitalist power takes two forms, price and sabotage. Price is the capitalist medium of power par excellence. “The vast majority of modern capitalists (or their managers) are ‘price makers’: they fix the price of their product and then let ‘market forces’ do the rest for them.”11 In the academic context, constant grading, all the evaluations and reviews that feign objectivity where arbitrariness, if not market interference dominate (the so-called Matthew effect, “that is, the tendency for resources to go to those who already have them”),12 can safely be regarded as equivalents of this logic.13 And this brings us straight to sabotage, which here of course means more than just opportunistic obstruction of certain new ideas within a sclerotic intellectual apparatus. Within the contemporary creativity dispositif, the aesthetic-capitalistic task is to be better than the average, that is, to constantly deliver more and more innovative research than others. Given the previously unimaginable lack of relevance that characterizes much of intellectual production in the humanities today, the option of shutting oneself off from the outside naturally suggests itself: where a great majority rightly doubts the value of their own work, sabotage, as systematic obstruction, becomes a means of choice. It is thus not merely an accident that many early-career researchers are first pushed through the system – from MA to PhD to postdoc after postdoc – before they finally fail and leave or that many academics sell their ignorance of new philosophical or societal tendencies as an expression of professional or philological virtue. This form of sabotage is instead a fundamental principle organizing the academic economy.
This short overview should suffice to show that the folkloristic bulwark of most academics – “kitsch leftism” might be a more appropriate label14 – is ideological through and through. The idea that there could be a site beyond the logic of the economy, a possible outside, is closely linked to the nostalgic look back at allegedly pre-capitalist Humboldtian ideals. Given these self-involved reveries, it is not surprising that the Theory offered by the “critical class” is increasingly losing its credibility. One may regret this; it opens the way for conservative and reactionary forces to gain ground within the university. Or one can seize it as an occasion for developing a more progressive position. That is why in recent years, materialist, realist, and speculative positions have asserted themselves against the dusty philologization practiced in philosophy departments – the philologization of phenomenology in France, for example, of critical theory in Germany and of analytical philosophy in the Anglophone countries. And they have been successful, not least because they team up with more radical political positions (post-operaism, technofeminism, accelerationism). And the reaction of the academic establishment? It oscillates for the most part between ignorance and animosity.
Let’s take the example of speculative realism, one of the most important philosophical movements of the early twenty-first century. Movement here is to be taken emphatically in the Deleuzian sense, as the opposite of a “school’s” scholastic tendencies, as a polyphonic conglomerate of young philosophers scattered across the globe whose agility is linked to a certain antagonism and which can, moreover, dissolve and enter into different constellations. What distinguishes individual authors is their outrageous attempt to philosophize and think once again in their own name, to debate the big questions of our time. The reaction of the academic establishment is as uniform as it is unsurprising: these attempts are scandalous usurpations, we’re told, and rereading this or that author of the (almost entirely male) canon would yield much more adequate answers to the pressing questions of our time than some new hype ever could. The immense interest in these new voices outside of classic universities, in art schools or the art world generally, then could only be a superficial and short-lived hype, nothing else.
This short overview should suffice to show that the folkloristic bulwark of most academics – “kitsch leftism” might be a more appropriate label14 – is ideological through and through. The idea that there could be a site beyond the logic of the economy, a possible outside, is closely linked to the nostalgic look back at allegedly pre-capitalist Humboldtian ideals. Given these self-involved reveries, it is not surprising that the Theory offered by the “critical class” is increasingly losing its credibility. One may regret this; it opens the way for conservative and reactionary forces to gain ground within the university. Or one can seize it as an occasion for developing a more progressive position. That is why in recent years, materialist, realist, and speculative positions have asserted themselves against the dusty philologization practiced in philosophy departments – the philologization of phenomenology in France, for example, of critical theory in Germany and of analytical philosophy in the Anglophone countries. And they have been successful, not least because they team up with more radical political positions (post-operaism, technofeminism, accelerationism). And the reaction of the academic establishment? It oscillates for the most part between ignorance and animosity.
Let’s take the example of speculative realism, one of the most important philosophical movements of the early twenty-first century. Movement here is to be taken emphatically in the Deleuzian sense, as the opposite of a “school’s” scholastic tendencies, as a polyphonic conglomerate of young philosophers scattered across the globe whose agility is linked to a certain antagonism and which can, moreover, dissolve and enter into different constellations. What distinguishes individual authors is their outrageous attempt to philosophize and think once again in their own name, to debate the big questions of our time. The reaction of the academic establishment is as uniform as it is unsurprising: these attempts are scandalous usurpations, we’re told, and rereading this or that author of the (almost entirely male) canon would yield much more adequate answers to the pressing questions of our time than some new hype ever could. The immense interest in these new voices outside of classic universities, in art schools or the art world generally, then could only be a superficial and short-lived hype, nothing else.
This symptomatic reproach reveals, I think, a fundamental lack of understanding, on the part of many academics, of how theorizing and its propagation work in the twenty-first century and of the role fashions, hypes, and so-called hyperstitions play in the process. These latter, Nick Land tells us, are
a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely.15
Or, in the words of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) founded during Land’s time at the University of Warwick by Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, Robin Mackay, and others: “Hype actually makes things happen and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s always been.” It is no coincidence that these insights into the significance of hypes, bubbles (in speculative finance, in social and mass media, etc.), and hyperstition emerged from the import, comprehension, and appropriation of precisely those theoretical constructs that the authorities in Frankfurt, at the Sorbonne, or in American philosophy departments had only recently accused of being fascist, terroristic, or at least nonsensical. That these intellectual interdicts have turned out to be wrong, to be indefensible positions in the history of ideas, leaves the structural bigotry of large parts of professional philosophy unperturbed.
Philosophical platforms developed independently of these structures which practiced a different kind of philosophy and philosophizing – think of Merve publishers in Germany, Semiotext(e) in the States, or most recently the the English journal Collapse/Urbanomic. (The exception is the ‘revolutionary’ foundation of a university in France, Paris-VIII.) They all testify to a hyperstitional efficacy of philosophical theorizing below the radar of philosophical high priests and academic hardliners. In the age of social media, of course, other kinds of platforms and communication channels increasingly serve to introduce hyperstitions into the discursive mix, whence they spread and become active.
This is the point to introduce an important limitation of Land’s dromo nihilistically conceived neologism: “hyperstition accelerates the tendencies towards chaos and dissolution.”16 This limitation concerns the political orientation of progressive accelerationism, which distinguishes between a navigating acceleration and blind speed. (In German, the term Akzeleration – not to be confused with Beschleunigung, i.e. a mere increase of speed – even implies the recursive introduction of a difference into a movement that would otherwise remain circular.) Accordingly, if hyperstition is to have progressive effects, its viral spread must be coupled with a controllable and emancipatory element. But what do hyperstitions know, such that they can manipulate heterogeneous systems, and what types of control do they make available? What types of systems-theoretical and systems-practical knowledge emerge from the transformation of the channels in which they move? First of all: it is neither the formal force of the network, nor the causal constraint of the better argument as regards content that allows hyperstitions to impose themselves on the existing pathways. Instead, it is absolutely central that they never refer merely to a form but also to a content; in the language of contemporary theories of finance, they, not unlike derivatives, have an “underlying.” The relevant contents, therefore, are those (theoretical, philosophical) contents that produce a surplus value of knowledge about the actual consistency of contemporary reality and are thus suitable for constructing channels that promote a change of (academic, philosophical, etc.) reality. At this point, it is both conceptually and (discursively) politically decisive that merely negative or defensive practices, such as neutralizing the evaluating powers in the short term or avoiding academic sabotage, won’t suffice. New brands, fashions, or hypes only have emancipatory and progressive effects when their intrinsic knowledge of forms of distribution simultaneously lead to a redistribution of speaker positions and a retrofitting of channels of information – not just to the establishment of this or that new master doctrine, even if the next such doctrine were a speculative-realist one. In concrete terms: the authority of academic theorizing would have to be relativized in favor of other platforms of philosophical thinking, and philosophical thinking would have to be sought out in other places and be practiced there.
In general terms, every step in the historical development of capitalism comes with a change in its modes of distribution (this applies to knowledge as much as it does to commodities). In the last few decades, an adequate reaction to such changes has time and again been the hallmark of new theorizing on the left. The breadth of such theories’ reception in the academy has been inversely proportional to their speculative lucidity: it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the more developed a theory’s anticipatory qualities were, the longer it had to wait to be accepted by the academy. Examples include current speculative and materialist thinking, rhizomic and nomadic thinking in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, post-operaist political economies or many, many years ago Walter Benjamin, long since integrated into academic orthodoxy.
What is so difficult to understand about this? Is the current pronounced disdain toward any form of discourse that succeeds beyond the beaten scholastic paths merely due to a fear of losing one’s share of the lucrative field of art, which is constantly lusting for new theory fodder? Quite obviously and despite the utmost institutional mobilization, an entire generation of budding artists and curators has more and more trouble doing anything useful with the traditional theoretical instruments. Yet, more importantly, we are today no longer merely dealing with the usual time lag in the reception of new theories. That’s how it used to be in past decades, during which an awkward compromise with their career-happy successors eventually led the guardians of the intellectual status quo to integrate every new theoretical current into the curriculum. What is taking shape today is a fundamental transformation of expanded media, i.e. the mix of classic research and new online universities, art academies, various theory programs in art institutions, etc.: new forms of artistic exploration are emerging, and, like experimental curatorial practices, they mostly move outside the official university circles.
These shifts in the field of discursive production have a correlate in a changed function and practice of authorship. Foucault, in his “What is an Author?” had already pointed out that the author is “neither exactly the owner of his texts nor is he responsible for them; he neither produces nor invents them.” Instead, “that which in the individual we call ‘author’ (or what makes an individual an author) is only [a] projection.”17 At a recent conference in Berlin, the art theorist, David Joselit, picked up on this idea with regard to our information age and articulated the contemporary plasticity of the author as a “profile”: “A profile is both subject and object – it can be owned by the biological person linked to it, or it may be expropriated from her. The profile thus exists at the crossing of alienability versus inalienability of one’s own image as property.”18 Starting with the figure of Edward Snowden, Joselit thus describes a “new paradigm” in which, in analogy to Benedict Singleton’s and Reza Negarestani’s accelerationist reflections on the topic, alienation is no longer to be conceived simply as the opposite of freedom but as its precondition, as it were. Manipulatively accelerating oneself and one’s environment thus means abandoning the supposition of an ideal outside in favor of accepting an originary alienation. Yet at the same time it means using this entanglement – in Marx’s terms: life in real subsumption – to open a breach to the future. And in that case, even one’s imperfections point the way to changed and future norms - ought rather than is. In the present case, such an ought implies an epistemological as well as a political dimension. On the one hand, to cite Foucault once more, “it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal trans-formations but according to their modes of existence: the modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation.”19 For a politics of discourse, on the other hand, this implies the normative demand to manipulate and change the modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation.
From an accelerationist perspective, the decisive question is, once more, to what extent alternative practices of knowledge production and knowledge circulation also entail a different distribution of knowledge, a distribution that achieves more than the conquest of endowed professorships by a new generation of researchers. This redistribution marks the difference from the “march through the institutions” advocated by the generation of ’68. A circulating attractor – which can be a conceptual persona, a personal profile, a transdiscursive instaurateur, a particular discursive intersection, or a philosophical idea – reconfigures the forms of distribution, it changes the context, and the success of this change, in my view, depends not least on the content of the attractor, hyperstition, or brand. In any case the manipulation of existing conditions of distribution has to be part of the underlying content.
The poetic quality of hyperstitions is evident in many artistic works, and even in the early days of institutional critique (before its own institutionalization and academization began to suffocate it). In general, the field of art is the best terrain on which to learn how poeisis, the production or bringing-into-reality, the letting-become-real of something new functions. This implies, of course, not limiting oneself to merely writing about art. For that, precisely, is one of the most conspicuous symptoms of institutionalized criticality with its third-party – funded conferences about antiquated institutional critique. In the best of cases, these exercises feature breathtaking intellectual pirouettes that name the market mechanisms everyone is already familiar with – but these insights are hardly ever mobilized in an accelerationist manner (and there is, of course, the danger of contemporary speculative and accelerationist theories being appropriated by curators, gallery owners, and other market players). Instead of parasitically appropriating the constantly expanding field of art for an entirely unaesthetic agenda, for example, academized reflection about art usually leads to a mere affirmation of the status quo, to an active participation even in the much-derided capitalization one pretends to criticize – for example in the conversion of symbolic into economic capital which takes place in the writing of texts for exhibition catalogs. This to my mind is an inadequate conception in more than one sense. On the one hand, it is inadequate to today’s entirely post-conceptual art, which is nonetheless often analyzed by art-historically trained theorists purely in terms of content, neglecting its performative or poietic ability to make fictions realities. On the other hand, it testifies to the inadequacies of academic theorizing. Christian Marrazi’s diagnosis of the neoliberal orientation of academic economics, of “[p]olitical discourse’s delayed reaction to the post-Fordist transformation [...] with regard to what has happened in the world of scientific research,” applies to other disciplines as well.20
It is a precondition for accelerating academia that both the university and its protagonists are understood to always be tied into a social, and at least potentially global, context. To ignore this is to deprive abstract political theories of all efficacy in confronting contemporary neoliberal forms of distribution. No wonder that a large part of political science does not (or cannot, or does not want to, or... the question of modal verbs becomes negligible here) change anything about the concrete economic conditions of discursive distribution. Hence the suggestion, in my recent polemic Overwrite: Ethics of Knowledge/Poetics of Existence,21 that we cut back on venting academic political theory and start politicizing academic thinking in all its material dimensions (its settings of writing, its spaces of communication, its mafia-like practices of evaluation). If any transformation or acceleration of the academic situation is to be brought about, political engagement with today’s university has to understand these local details in their global economic context.
Any precise political localization within a global political context also always has an ethical dimension that barely surfaces in the everyday career-driven life of academia. The primary aspect here is not the subject (who?) or the content (what?) of speech but its exact localization: Where do I speak from as an author, which position do I thereby assume, which is my profile? An ethics or politics of knowledge and a poetics (not aesthetics!) of knowledge intersect where a method becomes existential, where the site of the self shifts. This is not to be confused with the function of the deicitic shifts literary theory draws on to explore the power of fiction (the amalgamation of protagonist and reader, the reader’s entry into the novel’s imaginary world).22 It is a poetic practice for the simple reason that academic thinking is tied to the act of writing (and only as a consequence of, for example, perception, sensation, or aesthetic experience). The widespread failure to understand the poietic nature of writing in the humanities is, in my view, due to the hegemony of aesthetic thinking. The production of texts is regarded as a purely practical activity; everything else is, at most, of stylistic value. Under the auspices of the general aestheticization of philosophy since 1800, all we are left with is the kind of unproductive alternatives with which the futile debates about postmodernism (a blurring of the distinction between literature and theory versus the ignorant and adamant insistence on academic cleanliness) have familiarized us. Taking seriously the fundamental deictic capacity of language, however, reveals that the poetic transformative power of philosophical thinking might locate us differently in the world, might allow me to look onto the world differently from my new perspective. Every subversive new idea, every metanoietic insight forces us to assume a new position in the world.
There is yet another reason why the narrative tactics that sharpen our sense of the strangeness of our own production are not the same as the tactics we know from literary fiction and why they do not, by any means, necessarily end up in aestheticizing discourse. On the contrary, they guarantee that the one writing, or the ‘author’ (remembering Foucault’s description of his status as a psychological projection), does not give in to the “fiction of his proper place” or assume a fixed position but instead remembers the heterogeneity and contingency, the produced or poeticized narration of himself and his environment (Foucault’s famous “science fiction”). My object has reinvented me, and the reasons why each and every part of reality now has to be understood differently, therefore, are not subjective but systematic. Such an existentialization of one’s method is a recursive combination (not a reflective critique!) – the possibility of localizing oneself as one is writing, of actualizing oneself via one’s projects. The role abduction performs in logic can be transposed onto textual practices: writing oneself, writing what has not yet been known and thereby writing (something) different(ly), over-writing oneself.23 This is linked to a narrative practice interested as much in retelling the future as it is in genealogies of alternative pasts, always with a view to actualizing hyperstitions and heresies. At strategically important points, such genealogical retelling, it seems to me, is the very opposite of thinking in terms of a history of philosophy whose practice in contemporary philosophy departments is so unproductive, destructive even, in its seamless transposition of texts from concepts into a politics of discourse. It is hard to think of a more efficient way to ban thinking from the institution than breaking down the texts one reads into strategic positions to be assumed and critical frontlines or limits to be drawn – such a program negates and ruins the speculative and poetic moment of all theorizing.
Epistemological, ethical, and political aspects cannot be separated. A new theoretical formation also changes the subject of research or the profile of its author and necessarily leads to conflicts with the methodological status quo. Inversely, every conflict concerning the politics of discourse starts from a poietic truth that affects not only the subject of knowledge but its object as well. Becoming what one has come to know in speculation or manipulative abduction means to assume, in the emphatic sense, responsibility for a new insight into or view onto the world. In the humanities, this is usually tied to developing a new method and attempting to construct a new paradigm (Foucault’s instructeur). As in the sciences, this is neither simply a matter of logical deduction nor one of aesthetic induction (the infinitely dismal reflective power of judgment) but a question of abduction. Rather than simply subsuming the singular under a general law, abduction produces a positive association with other singular cases and thereby unsettles the established general as well. The form of inference that is abduction, first discussed by Charles Sanders Peirce and now widely investigated in the philosophy of science, has a (new) singular emergence only when a new rule is invented for it. This has to be the accelerationist goal of work in the humanities, too. It is by no means enough to pick the right opponents in one’s specialty, as the practice of decades spent writing theses of various kinds would have it. Only a recursive intervention and the abductive manipulation of the objects of research in the humanities can further this goal. Henceforth, the newness of a theory can always also be gauged by the conflicts it gives rise to in the everyday life of the academy, no matter whether what is at issue is an academic thesis, a literary text, or a work of art.
Only the best possible manipulation and exploitation of existing power strategies will yield the information necessary for change. And only exact localization (the local) opens the view onto the future, and only the view onto the greater whole (the global) allows for new localizations. That is why poetic recursion, which places differentiated parts into a new whole, is the opposite pole of aesthetic reflection. Poetics is transformative doing, and it is tied to the aforementioned speculative production of reality, a production that often teams up with theoretical heresies, hyperstitions, and tricksters’ conflicts with one’s surroundings. “Common to all tricksters,” Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams tell us, “is the use of a cunning intelligence to devise technology, deployed as a tool of the weak against the strong. The trickster logic of production is above all inventive, often weaponizing empathy with its targets into an effective trap with which to ensnare them.”24 The practice of a politics of the university – which can be classified as “parasitic” in Michel Serres’s sense25 – requires tricksters and chameleons, deserters and whistleblowers, loose cannons and renegades. The watchword, therefore, is not Imagine academia and nobody cares but Imagine the (political) philosophy of the future to be somewhere else, and we are already thinking it. Academia, accelerate!
Translated by Nils F. Schott
Notes:
1. Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder, (Milton Park: Routledge, 2009), 190. 2. See Armen Avanessian, Überschrift: Ethik des Wissens und Poetik der Existenz (Berlin: Merve, 2015), 24-46. An English translation is forthcoming from Sternberg Press. 3. William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 211. 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Deduzierter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden höheren Lehranstalt, die in gehöriger Verbindung mit einer Akademie der Wissenschaften stehe (1807),” in Idee und Wirklichkeit einer Universität: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960), 34. 5. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 6. Andreas Reckwitz, Die Erfindung der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), 11. 7. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005). 8. Nick Land, “Critique of Transcendental Miserablism,” accessed February 26, 2016, http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008891.html. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35. 10. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 11. Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (Milton Park: Routledge, 2009), 242. About the simplemindedness of leftist critique in matters of economic theory they write: “most self-respecting critics of capitalism remain happily ignorant of its ‘economics’ [...] This innocence is certainly liberating. It allows critics to produce ‘critical discourse’ littered with cut-and-paste platitudes, ambiguities and often plain nonsense. Seldom do their ‘critiques’ tell us something important about the forces of contemporary capitalism, let alone about how these forces should be researched, understood and challenged”. 12. Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 8. 13. Nitzan and Bichler, Capital as Power, 242. The precarious objectivity of Anglo-American evaluation procedures is the topic of innumerable articles that strongly disagree with Lamont’s still valuable account. On market interference in the way outside funding is allocated in Germany, see for example Richard Münch, “Wissenschaft im Schatten von Kartell, Monopol und Oligarchie: Die latenten Effekte der Exzellenzinitiative,” Leviathan 34, no. 4 (December 2006): 466-486. 14. Reza Negarestani, for example, speaks of “kitsch Marxism” (see his “The Labor of the Inhuman, Part I: Human,” e-flux #52, 2014, accessed February 26, 2016, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-labor-of-the-inhuman-part-i-human/). 15. Nick Land and Delphi Carstens, “Hyperstition: An Introduction,” accessed February, 26, 2016, http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/#.VOtKgUJ_wZg. 16. Quoted in Delphi Carstens, “Hyperstition,” 2010, accessed February 26, 2016, http:// merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition/. 17. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange, vol. 1, 789–821 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 789 and 801; most of this text has been published in English under the title “What is an Anthor?” trans. Josué V. Harari, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, 205–23 (New York: New Press, 1997). 18. I am grateful to David Joselit for granting permission to quote from the manuscript of the talk he gave at the Lunch Bytes: Thinking about Art and Digital Culture conference at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin on March 20, 2015. 19. Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?,” 810; “What is an Author?” 220. 20. Christian Marazzi, “Rules for the Incommensurable,” Substance: A Review of Theory & Literary Criticism 36, no. 1 (2007): 13. 21. Armen Avanessian, Überschrift: Ethik des Wissens – Poetik der Existenz (Berlin: Merve, 2014) under contract at Sternberg Press for release in 2016. 22. See Käte Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, trans. Marilynn J. Rose, 2nd rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), and compare the critical expansion of Hamburger’s approach in Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig, Present Tense: A Poetics, trans. Nils F. Schott with Daniel Hendrickson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 23. On abductive logic, Charles Sanders Peirce, Pragmatism und Pragmaticism, vol. 5 of Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5:182–92. 24. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “On Cunning Automata,” Collapse 7 (2014), 493–4. 25. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 207.
Armen Avanessian is a philosopher and political theorist.
He is co-founder of the bilingual research platform Spekulative Poetik www.spekulative-poetik.de and of Bureau of Cultural Strategies (https://www.bureauforculturalstrategies.com). His publications include Irony and the Logic of Modernity (De Gruyter, 2015), Present Tense: A Poetics, with Anke Hennig (Bloomsbury, 2015); Speculative Drawing, with Andreas Töpfer (Sternberg Press, 2014); and the forthcoming titles Metanoia: A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain, with Anke Hennig (Bloomsbury, 2017); Overwrite. Ethics of Knowledge – Poetics of Existence. Berlin: Sternberg Press 2017; and Miamification (Sternberg Press 2017).
The essay is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman The world is locked into a story it scarcely understands, which entangles it all the more tightly for that. This, it seems, is how things have to proceed for quite a while. – Nick Land, Calendric Dominion Happened on two short intro’s to hyperstition on vimeo recently: here and here. Not sure if this is a project still in the works or not, the videos were uploaded about three months ago? A TED talk as well by Delphi Carstens (see below). Hyperstition itself came out of the Ccru or Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Of course it’s lineage can be traced back into the early Lemurian Time Wars. One can research the archives of the old site @Hyperstition. As well as academia.edu articles. In the recent book Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 we discover that digital hyperstition is already widespread, hiding within popular numerical cultures (calendars, currency systems, sorcerous numbo-jumbo, etc.). It uses number-systems for transcultural communication and cosmic exploration, exploiting their intrinsic tendency to explode centralized, unified, and logically overcoded ‘master narratives’ and reality models, to generate sorcerous coincidences, and to draw cosmic maps.1 For a great introduction into the numerical world one can do no better than trace its inheritance in Georges Ifrah’s The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer. One might bring in the notion of pervasive or immersive gaming as well. Books like Matt Barton’s Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games give you the history of gaming and its movement from role playing card games to the digital matrix. For those with a budget Brad King’s covers much of the same territory: Dungeons & Dreamers: A story of how computer games created a global community. Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World takes it from a more biographical angle. After rereading Nick Land’s recent novella Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator with its voyage into the digital reality worlds of a temporal awakening of the old Lemurian cycles out of the Ccru days with a twist on this time-war theme I realized how it ties well with both science and literature in its notions of Time as Hyperstitional Advent – our future posthuman machinic children come back not to redeem us but to play us against the cosmic fun house. Of course I’ve gone over the time theme in a recent post so want rehearse this again. It ties in as well to the holographic paradigm in some aspects of quantum gravity and string theory: here, here, here and here. I think my fascination with temporal science and philosophy grew out of my readings of literature, poetry, and critical notions from Harold Bloom’s Influence theoretic: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, and others. Bloom heavily influenced by Gnostic, Hermetic, and Jewish Kabbalistic mappings of culture, literature, and thought developed a series of tropes or figural rhetorics that showed how memes, viral transmissions, mental contamination etc. have impacted our civilizations. A theoretician of the time-wars of artists, poets, thinkers, etc. he developed a revisionist history of transumption and metalepsis of rerouting the time-loops in which history can be rewritten by agents of the future. One could argue that the occult and magical revivals over the past few hundred years were hyperstitional rhizomes, imaginative interventions in reality brokering the time-wars with various mind-maps to help guide the weary time traveler on her way. Think of Ficino, Bruno,Agrippa among many others. The wavering between the marvelous, fantastic, and uncanny in literature in that same time frame is this very insurgence faction dripping its toxic assemblages into the nightmare syndromes of our slipstream lives. One will write a secret history of drugs, decadence, symbolism, and modernism that exposes the Old One’s dark sex and violence as they infiltrated the pop culture of the Victorian Age to produce a lasting change in the human psyche. Some of the anti-realist schools would develop notions of intertextuality. Works of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forms and of culture in general are also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature. Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what theorists now call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of moving between texts.2 A subset of this is the way cultures construct canon’s of acceptable knowledge for transmission, adaptation and appropriation. Adaptation can be a transpositional practice, casting a specific genre into another generic mode, an act of re-vision in itself. It can parallel editorial practice in some respects, indulging in the exercise of trimming and pruning; yet it can also be an amplificatory procedure engaged in addition, expansion, accretion, and interpolation.3 Adaptation is a revisionist project of reworking the reality matrix to meet the needs of current tensions in the cultural and civilizational process. It’s fluid, dynamic, and continuous and has been shaped by both radical and conservative elements at war among themselves over the Reality being created. If the intertextual systems are always in-between, always in transitional phase rather than something fixed, stable, or locked into a tightly controlled and policed reality then we are living in that paradoxical age of betweeness. A time between times, the time of Finnegans Wake – intermission time, the moment when the King exits from the play within the play in Hamlet… waiting for Godot, for the farce to begin… Farce is the theatre of impotence. The Left is impotent. In a situation of general social paralysis, stasis, sterility, stereotypification the aim is not the seizure of power, but the dissolution of power. Abbie Hoffman: “We are outlaws, not politicians!” Farce is nihilism as maximal acceleration of time anomaly: take the skids off the breaks let the clowns play in the fields of death. Charlie Chaplin chasing the cops chasing him – who is chasing who? This is just a goat-song between acts, a Satyr-play before the main event, a bunch of sexual antics on time gaps, a blast from a forgotten temple to oblivion and the Old Ones. The time gods and barbarians are waking, a slipstream movement into metamorphic transition – the posthuman dissolution into templexity. We are entering dangerous times, a blurring of the reality screen, the edges are fraying and the light is shedding its skin, the alien intelligence sits there in the abyss like a slime god biding his time. We have only to restart or reset the engine of time, let it roly poly on over… Vico or Joyce’s HCE Here Comes Everybody into the darkness we go… Notes
The article is taken from: by Terence Blake In his book PHARMACOLOGIE DU FRONT NATIONAL (2013) Bernard Stiegler poses an interesting question: Why did post-structuralism cease to make use of the concept of ideology? This is a good question, in that critical discussion of “ideology” did not entirely disappear, as Stiegler seems to think, but explicit use of the term “ideology” did become rare in the works of post-structuralist thinkers. Stiegler’s hypothesis is that in abandoning the term ideology they also abandonned the ideological struggle against what he calls the “ultraliberal ideology”. This interpretation seems to me to be particularly wrong-headed. In fact in the works of these thinkers (Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida), while they may not make explicit use of the word “ideology”, the concept is there nonetheless but in a reconfigured problematic. For example, Foucault wanted to free both himself and us from the Althusserian idea of science, and more generally to free us of all demarcationist and structuralist ideas of science. Expressed paradoxically, the poststructuralist idea is that there is something “ideological” or “metaphysical” in how the separation between science and ideology is conceived, and thus in our concept of science itself. This idea has gained substance and received more explicit attention thanks to work in the sociology of science and science studies (David Bloor, Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering). Given the epistemological inadequacy of the metaphysical vision of science and also given the adverse political consequences of such a vision Foucault and other thinkers, such as Derrida and Deleuze and Lyotard, tried to look at epistemological and ideological formations from the outside, and turned to less formal notions such as micro-political apparatuses of power relations (Foucault) and assemblages of enunciation and desire (Deleuze and Guattari). This vision from outside posed the question of its own source of legitimacy and efficacy, which explains Foucault’s turn to techniques of the self to find a source that would not be a metaphysical foundation. Deleuze calls this turn the search for a relation to an outside that is further than any outside and more interior than any inside. This is what Deleuze calls the line of subjectivation and what I think can also be called, following Simondon (but also following Jung) a line of “individuation”. Foucault himself talks about the post-universal theorist as speaking to others from the experience of a singular practice, which nicely captures the nature of individuation as both singular and collective. Stiegler’s hypothesis is erroneous both historically and hermeneutically. A) On the historical error involved in Stiegler’s discussionHistorically, it is just not true that explicit use of the word “ideology” was abandonned by everybody. Zizek and Badiou, for example, continued to make use of it to name a central notion in their own systems. Zizek defines ideology not as ideas but as the cognitive, affective, perceptive, and ethico-political framework that determines us to have certain sorts of ideas: “a set of explicit and implicit, even unspoken, ethico-political and other positions, decision, choices, etc., which predetermine our perception of facts, what we tend to emphasize or to ignore”. Ideology, on this acception, is not found at the level of explicit utterance so much as in pervasive attitudes and habitual comportment. This is why Zizek can claim that Chomsky’s work though useful does not really come to terms with ideology: “If one defines and uses this term the way I do (and I am not alone here: my understanding echoes a long tradition of so-called Western Marxism), then one has to conclude that what Chomsky is doing in his political writings is very important, I have great admiration and respect for it, but it is emphatically not critique of ideology”. It is not critique of ideology because it is limited to the critique of ideas, rather than of the frameworks and practices that make those ideas possible. Yet it is true most poststructuralist Continental philosophers have avoided using the word “ideology” and prefer to express their critiques of frameworks, discourses and practices, and of the social formations they are embedded in, in other terms. To clarify matters I would like to give an account of diverse senses of ideology that we can find in Althusser, and then discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s subsequent avoidance of the word. I distingish three main senses of “ideology” as used by Althusser: 1) ideology as opposed to science, the opposite of science – this is the epistemological sense that comes most readily to mind. It is regrettable that in Continental Philosophy a direct confrontation with Althusser’s positions on this sense of ideology never took place. This non-engagement with Althusser’s dualist and demarcationist epistempology left the field free not just for scientism but also for the hegemeony of technocrats and the tyranny of experts, and also for the primacy of management over politics. A distant consequence of this neglect has been the rise of Graham Harman’s OOO packaged as contemporary Continental Philosophy when it is in fact its exact opposite, a regressionto a form of Althusserism, only de-marxed, de-politicised, and de-scientised. The idea that ideology does not find an Other in science, and that both are constituted in assemblages of heterogeneous elements was proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (in RHIZOME, for example), but was left to the sociology of science to be worked out in detail. 2) ideology as structure of misrecognition – this is the sense that is taken up and reformulated in Deleuze’s concept of the dogmatic image of thought as State-image. Here Althusser makes use of notions taken from Lacan’s works to claim that there will never be any society free of ideology. Deleuze and Guattari have analysed this structure in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS in terms of conformist significations and subjugated subjects. But all these analyses in terms of the illusion of the One and of transcendence can be seen as part of their critique of ideology. 3) ideology not only as system of representations but also as integral part of of state apparatuses. This is Zizek’s sense in which ideology is not only the force of ideas but also a material force. Deleuze and Guattari accept this idea of the material inscription of desire, but ally it to Foucault’s idea that the state is not a determining instance. This leads to the notion of ideology as inextricably structuring desiring assemblages. One could say that the idea that the State holds power is itself ideological. Following Foucault’s lead Deleuze and Guattari preferred to abandon the word “ideology”, but the concept itself remains present in diverse notions: dogmatic image of thought, plane of organisation, transcendence, and also in the notions of diagramme and abstract machine. B) On the hermeneutical error involved in Stiegler’s discussionWhy did post-structuralism cease to make use of the concept of ideology? Is there some generalised movement of “forgetting”, as Stiegler supposes, that led to the weakening or to the abandon of the ideological struggle against capitalism’s theoretical self-justifications and self-legitimations? I think that this is a misreading, and that Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault carried on “ideological critique” throughout their work, including after May ’68. They did not participate in the neoliberal movement of forgetting ideology, but they were very critical of the binary opposition between « science » and « ideology ». They thus searched for a different terminology to allow them to pursue the critique of another modern ideology: scientism. It is true that Deleuze and Guattari state in RHIZOME that there is no ideology, but they also affirm that there is no science either, only assemblages. However assemblages are not all equal, for example some are more individuating (they speak in terms of processes of singularisation and of subjectivation) whereas others are disindividuating. My historical hypothesis concerning the quasi-disappearance of the word « ideology » in the texts of Deleuze, Foucault, and Lyotard is that these philosophers, despite the relative effacement of the word “ideology”, do not abandon the concept of ideology nor the battle against it. They continue to analyse ideology and to carry out an ideological critique. In trying to free themselves from the Althusserian notion of ideology, they produce and elaborate a different set of concepts in order to deconstruct the famous Althusserian binary opposition between science and ideology. This strategy, while comprehensible in its strategic intention to transform the concepts and the problematic by also transforming the vocabulary, is in danger of leading to an impasse, that of the impossibility of pursuing a critique of the ideology of scientism. However, the poststructural perspective goes much further than the narrow point of view of (structuralist) epistemology, which places all the impurity and enslavement on the side of ideology and all the purity and the liberation on the side of science (structuralist epistemology being demarcationist and univocal, incapable of handling ambiguity). This impasse is avoided in the case of Deleuze and Guattari. In their triad composed of collective assemblages of enunciation, of incorporeal transformations, and of machinic assemblages we can see the sketch of the triplicity that allows us to escape from the dualist trap. My question is: does our philosophical vocabulary, in order to be critical, need to contain the word “ideology” in an essential way, or would it not rather be a secondary term whose diverse meanings are better expressed by the vocabulary of assemblages and networks? Deleuze and Guattari give a positive answer to this question, and their so-called “forgetting” of ideology is in fact its replacement by a set of terms that are more specific, and less immersed in a marsh of deceptive connotations. ANTI-OEDIPUS contains an application of a very sophisticated theory of ideology and its critique that is elaborated in its generality in A THOUSAND PLATEAUS. However, they do not make much use of the word “ideology” because of its dualist implications (the famous science/ideology distinction), but also because of the eymological association with “ideas”, which would seem to assign ideology as a derivative phenmenon to the superstructure. Once one accepts that ideology is embedded in frameworks and practices and not a phenomenon limited to ideas (as Althusser, and Zizek argue) one may wish to discard the word itself as misleading. This is what Deleuze and Guattari (and also Foucault and Lyotard) do. In relation to the concept of ideology, there is no rupture and “forgetting”, but rather a continuity and an intensification of their previous work. In relation to the word “ideology” there is the alternative between abandoning and replacing it with more satisfactory terms (the solution of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard) or of conserving the word but redefining it (Althusser, Zizek) so that it no longer refers to ideas alone. This setting aside of the word “ideology” is not absolute. It becomes much rarer as a theoretical term, and serves as a simplified translation of more complex and more nuanced analyses. Obviously the phenomenon of ideology continues to exist for Deleuze and Guattari, but they do not limit its presence and impact to the superstructure, locating it at the deeper level of the libidinal assemblages. They make this connection between ideology and assemblages in RHIZOME (“There is no science and no ideology, there are only assemblages”), but at the same time they reject the word’s dualist connotations in its opposition to science. Guattari is even more explicit in LIGNES DE FUITE, written in 1979 but published in 2011. He argues that “Althusser has made ideology into a category that is too general, which includes and conflates semiotic practices that are radically heterogeneous” (143, my translation). He prefers to limit its meaning to semiotic processes that are linguistically coded, so as not to preclude the existence of other non-linguistically coded semiotic processes aligned with the formations of power. The goal remains the same: the analysis of our repressive institutions and practices with the aim of transforming them to permit greater freedom. The important step is to get out of the idea of ideology as mere superstructure, a sort of passive reflection of what goes on in the economic base. Even if this picture can be complexified, as in Althusser’s work, by notions of relative autonomy, non-expressive totalities, different sorts of contradictions, uneven development and heterogeneous phases co-present in the same structure, this more sophisticated picture still leads to trouble as long as we stick to the definition of ideology as (1) the Other of science (dualism knowledge-illusion), (2) an eternal and universal structure of misrecognition (dualism lived relation to the world-truth) and (3) a system of ideas (dualism superstructure-base). This set of dualisms can’t work because there is no magic criterion of demarcation to discern and attribute the status of scientificity or of truth on the one hand, and of illusion on the other. If we take ideology in the wider sense as the unawareness of the material (i.e. political, economic and technological) origins and/or conditions of our ideas (this sense is close to 2) then it becomes a more plausible notion, but it can no longer be the Other of science, and we have left the space of structuralist epistemology. Having taken this step outside structuralist epistemology the poststructuralists began to accentuate the tension between their psychoanalytic and the structuralist influences. Structuralism was scientistic and tended to read Lacan in a rationalist vein, but Lacan’s vision of misrecognition as a systemic feature led the poststructuralists to see that even science had “ideological” features, hence the decomposition of the notion of ideology into sub-components, that are then conserved under other names, except for the polemical treatment of ideology as the other of science. But I think that poststructuralist French theory balked at a barrier that in other countries Science Studies breached. Foucault did genealogies of human sciences, but did not touch the natural sciences. Lyotard toyed with relativising the authority of the sciences but eventually just limited it to the cognitive domain, where he gave it unrivalled hegemony. Deleuze talked about ‘nomad science” but it was more a content-level distinction than any heuristic analysis of the processes of construction of scientific results. The Althusserian idea has certain advantages as situates ideology not just in ideas but as a structuring principle in practices and institutions, eg in the definition of roles and functions. It also adds the notion of a sort of systemic cognitive bias, or even blindness, concerning the factors that structure the very type of subjectivity pervading a society. All this is far more radical than the “Other of science” strand, which makes alchemy for example a case of ideology and chemistry a science. The problem is that by rejecting the crude binary demarcations of the last strand, theorists threw the baby out with the bathwater and lost sight of, or expressed more cryptically, the positive aspects of the two other strands of ideology as structuration of embodied practice and of ideology as misrecognition or cognitive blindness. In conclusion, the substitution of a variety of more specific words for the over general word “ideology” has certain advantages for the pursuit of philosophical analyses. But it has deprived us of a single word to designate the various unities composed of these sub-parts. This has tended to give poststructuralist thought an allure of élitism, an aristocratic language only for the small circle of the initiated. In compensation certain figures have emerged whose thought is more approachable as they occupy a position halfway between structuralism and post-structuralism. One could call them demi-post-structuralists. Zizek is a good example of this, as since he is still stuck in the problematic space opened up by the Althusser-Lacan conjuncture, he has privileged Lacan as an alternative way out of structuralism, preferring to remain Lacanian in contrast to the more pluralist accounts of his immediate predecessors. Zizek is able to follow the analogical play of translation and of conceptual movement crossing boundaries between traditionally separate domains, but he retains Lacanian psychoanalysis as preferred language capable of specifyng the cognitive content of all the variants. The essay is taken from: by Himanshu Damle In a multiverse we would expect there to be relatively many universe domains with large values of the cosmological constant, but none of these allow gravitationally bound structures (such as our galaxy) to occur, so the likelihood of observing ourselves to be in one is essentially zero. The cosmological constant has negative pressure, but positive energy. The negative pressure ensures that as the volume expands then matter loses energy (photons get red shifted, particles slow down); this loss of energy by matter causes the expansion to slow down – but the increase in energy of the increased volume is more important . The increase of energy associated with the extra space the cosmological constant fills has to be balanced by a decrease in the gravitational energy of the expansion – and this expansion energy is negative, allowing the universe to carry on expanding. If you put all the terms on one side in the Friedmann equation – which is just an energy balancing equation – (with the other side equal to zero) you will see that the expansion energy is negative, whereas the cosmological constant and matter (including dark matter) all have positive energy. However, as the cosmological constant is decreased, we eventually reach a transition point where it becomes just small enough for gravitational structures to occur. Reduce it a bit further still, and you now get universes resembling ours. Given the increased likelihood of observing such a universe, the chances of our universe being one of these will be near its peak. Theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg used this reasoning to correctly predict the order of magnitude of the cosmological constant well before the acceleration of our universe was even measured. Unfortunately this argument runs into conceptually murky water. The multiverse is infinite and it is not clear whether we can calculate the odds for anything to happen in an infinite volume of space- time. All we have is the single case of our apparently small but positive value of the cosmological constant, so it’s hard to see how we could ever test whether or not Weinberg’s prediction was a lucky coincidence. Such questions concerning infinity, and what one can reasonably infer from a single data point, are just the tip of the philosophical iceberg that cosmologists face. Another conundrum is where the laws of physics come from. Even if these laws vary across the multiverse, there must be, so it seems, meta-laws that dictate the manner in which they are distributed. How can we, inhabitants on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy, meaningfully debate the origin of the laws of physics as well as the origins of something, the very universe, that we are part of? What about the parts of space-time we can never see? These regions could infinitely outnumber our visible patch. The laws of physics could differ there, for all we know. We cannot settle any of these questions by experiment, and this is where philosophers enter the debate. Central to this is the so-called observational-selection effect, whereby an observation is influenced by the observer’s “telescope”, whatever form that may take. But what exactly is it to be an observer, or more specifically a “typical” observer, in a system where every possible sort of observer will come about infinitely many times? The same basic question, centred on the role of observers, is as fundamental to the science of the indefinitely large (cosmology) as it is to that of the infinitesimally small (quantum theory). This key issue of typicality also confronted Austrian physicist and philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann. In 1897 he posited an infinite space-time as a means to explain how extraordinarily well-ordered the universe is compared with the state of high entropy (or disorder) predicted by thermodynamics. Given such an arena, where every conceivable combination of particle position and momenta would exist somewhere, he suggested that the orderliness around us might be that of an incredibly rare fluctuation within an infinite space-time. But Boltzmann’s reasoning was undermined by another, more absurd, conclusion. Rare fluctuations could also give rise to single momentary brains – self aware entities that spontaneously arises through random collisions of particles. Such “Boltzmann brains”, the argument goes, are far more likely to arise than the entire visible universe or even the solar system. Ludwig Boltzmann reasoned that brains and other complex, orderly objects on Earth were the result of random fluctuations. But why, then, do we see billions of other complex, orderly objects all around us? Why aren’t we like the lone being in the sea of nonsense?Boltzmann theorized that if random fluctuations create brains like ours, there should be Boltzmann brains floating around in space or sitting alone on uninhabited planets untold lightyears away. And in fact, those Boltzmann brains should be incredibly more common than the herds of complex, orderly objects we see here on Earth. So we have another paradox. If the only requirement of consciousness is a brain like the one in your head, why aren’t you a Boltzmann brain? If you were assigned to experience a random consciousness, you should almost certainly find yourself alone in the depths of space rather than surrounded by similar consciousnesses. The easy answers seem to all require a touch of magic. Perhaps consciousness doesn’t arise naturally from a brain like yours but requires some metaphysical endowment. Or maybe we’re not random fluctuations in a thermodynamic soup, and we were put here by an intelligent being. An infinity of space would therefore contain an infinitude of such disembodied brains, which would then be the “typical observer”, not us. OR. Starting at the very beginning: entropy must always stay the same or increase over time, according to the second law of thermodynamics. However, Boltzmann (the Ludwig one, not the brain one) formulated a version of the law of entropy that was statistical. What this means for what you’re asking is that while entropy almost always increases or stays the same, over billions of billions of billions of billions of billions…you get the idea years, entropy might go down a bit. This is called a fluctuation. So backing up a tad, if entropy always increases/stays the same, what is surprising for cosmologists is that the universe started in such a low-entropy state. So to (try) to explain this, Boltzmann said, hey, what if there’s a bigger universe that our universe is in, and it is in a state of the most possible entropy, or thermal equilibrium. Then, let’s say it exists for a long long time, those billions we talked about earlier. There’ll be statistical fluctuations, right? And those statistical fluctuations might be represented by the birth of universes. Ahem, our universe is one of them. So now, we get into the brains. Our universe must be a HUGE statistical fluctuation comparatively to other fluctuations. I mean, think about it. If it is so nuts for entropy to decrease by just a little tiny bit, how nuts would it be for it to decrease enough for the birth of a universe to happen!? So the question is, why aren’t we just brains? That is, why aren’t we a statistical fluctuation just big enough for intelligent life to develop, look around, see it exists, and melt back into goop. And it is this goopy-not-long-existing intelligent life that is a Boltzmann brain. This is a huge challenge to the Boltzmann (Ludwig) theory. Can this bizarre vision possibly be real, or does it indicate something fundamentally wrong with our notion of “typicality”? Or is our notion of “the observer” flawed – can thermodynamic fluctuations that give rise to Boltzmann’s brains really suffice? Or could a futuristic supercomputer even play the Matrix-like role of a multitude of observers? Taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman
Reading R. Scott Bakker’s essay in The Digital Dionysus: Nietzsche and the Network-Centric Condition (ed., Dan Mellamphy, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy). I keep thinking to myself how Scott truly is a thinker of one thought, a thought that has become monomaniacal in his life: the notion that for all our knowledge, our philosophies, we are little more than creatures of absolute neglect – error prone, biased, and bound within a circular world of ignorance and delusion, creatures whose evolutionary history is shrouded in the mystery and origins of the Mind. And, yet, for all our knowledge we are still ignorant of the one thing we seek beyond all other things: what is this thing we are, do we have a soul, and – above all do we even exist: is this thing we are anything more than a linguistic construct, a fool’s game for philosophy or the sciences? For Scott the answer resides in the dilemma of intentionality. Since Kant we’ve been looping in a false infinity of questions concerning the Mind, Self, and Consciousness.
His defense of the sciences, especially of the neurosciences seems more of a continued search for a skeptical faith beyond skepticism – a sought for certainty that his one thought will prove its absolute integrity in the end, putting his own skeptical and ironizing self to sleep for good. As he states it:
We now know that only a fraction of the estimated 38,000 trillion operations per second processed by the brain finds its way to consciousness. This means that experience, all experience, is profoundly privative, a simplistic caricature of otherwise breathtakingly complex processes. (p. 156).
It’s this privative character of our knowledge that fascinates and disturbs Scott. Our reliance on knowledge is borne of our absolute ignorance and neglect rather than any true understanding of ourselves or reality. For millennia philosophers have repeated for the most part the same gestures, the same routes between ignorance and knowledge. In this essay Scott gives us a peak at his early growth as a thinker and questioner of this problem. As a young man his interests in the sciences has led Scott at the early age of 14 to became a full blown nihilist. His confrontation with Descartes was crucial in forging his move to delve into the contemporary landscape of the anti-realists, especially the work of Jacques Derrida. As Scott says of Descartes attempt, given the collapse in confidence wrought by the new sciences of the seventeenth century, to place knowledge on a new, secure, subjective foundation. “Just who did the guy think he was fooling, really?” (p. 148)
Against the dualism and subjective foundation of knowledge grounded in Descartes famous: “I think, therefore I am,” Scott would return to Nietzsche’s notions of an impersonal agency at the core of our inhuman being concluding that the thing that thinks is an “it” – that “it” thinks rather than there being any sense of Self/Subject. In this sense Scott following Nietzsche displaces the notion of agency into the unconscious functions of the brain itself:
Even though we like to think our thoughts come from our prior thoughts, which is to say, from ourselves, the merest reflection shows this cannot be the case, that each thought is dropped into consciousness from the outside, and that hence the “I” is born after the fact. (p. 148)
The “I” is a retroactive thought-form, a trick of our interpellation of our ignorance and access to the actual state-of-affairs of the brain’s hidden processes. Having no access to the brain’s dark hinterlands we assume it is we who think, that we have a Self-Soul. After reading Sartre’s reformulation of the cogito in Being and Nothingness, combined with his readings of Nietzsche, Scott would reformulate Descartes foundational gesture with one of his own, saying: “it thinks, therefore I was” (p. 148). This acknowledgement of thought as being pre-processed in the brain, and our receiving it after the fact as historical data rather than present thinking makes of us mere passive recipients of this process rather than active agents. This gesture against free will and the culpability of our philosophical heritage would from that point forward come to play a major part in Scott’s quest to displace philosophy with the sciences as foundational for any future thought concerning the human condition.
Yet, all of this would come much later for Scott after entering university was confronted with the legacy of new French thought which in that era was bound to the post-structuralist world of Derrida’s deconstructionism of the Western metaphysical tradition of “presence”. Scott by the age of 28 would become both a disciple and fellow laborer in that heritage, having displaced his early nihilist proclivities and anti-intentionalist stance with a full tilt Heideggerian phenomenological intentionality. At the height of his powers and triumphant in his belief in the efficacy of philosophy he would meet a young student who like his younger self was a nihilist. Scott would take it upon himself to convert this young man to his new found faith in post-structuralist philosophy. The young man would hear him out, let me speak of Heidegger to Derrida only asking for details of this or that specific concept or idea from time to time. At the end the young man would answer Scott’s summons to repent his ways and become a convert to the post-structuralist cause, saying: “Well, that despite the fact that philosophy hasn’t resolved any matter with any reliability ever, and, despite the fact that science is the most powerful, reliable, theoretical claim-making institution in human history, you’re still willing to suspend your commitment to scientific implications on the basis of prior commitments to philosophical claims about science and this… ontological difference.”
Bakker was taken aback, stunned by this observation, and would hem-and-haw, mumbling about this and that argument in Heidegger or Derrida etc., but in the end he admitted defeat: “outside the natural sciences there was no way short of exhaustion or conspiracy to end the regress of interpretation” (p. 149). Of course at the heart of most post-structuralist thought was the aporia, the knot of difference (Derrida proclaims that today, more than ever, “this predilection [for paradox and aporia] remains a requirement.) – a black hole in rhetoric and discursive thought that opened up an abyss or irony and skepticism. For Derrida there were three such aporias: “the epoche of the rule,” “the ghost of the undecidable,” and “the urgency that obstructs the horizon of knowledge”: at the heart of this paradoxical situation is that nothing can ever be decided definitively, everything is tentative and under the suspicion of the impossible; and, yet, one must decide, one must invent the possible therefore one chooses in ignorance, one decides. This is why in Western thought Justice is Blind. Under this notion of the undecidable is this suspicion that there is no foundation, no ground, no end to the endless questioning, no place of rest for the weary philosopher king in his gestures to make closure on knowledge. Instead there is only the bitter and endless dialectic of philosophy itself in its eternal contamination of generation after generation wandering in the useless loops and circuits of ignorance and neglect. For these philosophers nothing could ever be known for certain, only the endless uncertainty of irony and skepticism without end.
This realization awakened Bakker out of his dogmatic stupor: “So, back to the “bullshit” it was. I should have known. After all, I had only spent fourteen years repeating myself.” (p. 150) Ultimately this would lead him to disconnect from philosophy, say goodbye to the intentional stance and reenter the fold of those who offer commitment to the sciences rather than the “folk psychology” of an outmoded heritage in metaphysics and speculation: “Though we cannot yet say what a given experience “is,” we can say that the final answer, like so many answers provided by science, will lie far outside the pale of our intuitive preconceptions—perhaps incomprehensibly so.” (p. 156)
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Despite the passing of time there are fragments of thought that acquire a life of their own and hit the headlines of philosophical and cultural journals with regards to their evaluation and interpretation. Among the most famous ones is the Fragment on Machines by Karl Marx. More recently another «fragment» has gained importance in terms of discernment: a dark and forward looking «fragment in the fragment» by Friedrich Nietzsche nestled in one of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) crucial pages. As widely known the reference to Nietzsche in the famous «accelerationist passage» in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is decisive and closes the paragraph entitled The Civilized Capitalist Machine (Chapter III, Par. 9, pp. 222-239). Until today the various commentators of such passage have left aside or overshadowed the specific reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Große Prozeß, others have simply quoted the «accelerate the process» issue referenced by Deleuze and Guattari, mentioning Nietzsche’s book The Will of Power, but no one has ever referred to the precise fragment or its context and the potential themes it implies. The quotation of the fragment is always derived from critical essays or secondary literature books and never from the original Nietzschean work, apart from a note in Wikipedia in the definition of the word «accelerationism» and Matteo Pasquinelli’s short mention in his English “post” called Code Surplus Value and the Augmented Intellect. It is likely that this omission finds its origin in the fact that Deleuze and Nietzsche’s English speaking/reading scholars, when referring to the English edition of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe edited by the Stanford University Press (Colli and Montinari critical edition), may not have all the posthumous fragments available. The collection The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche in fact started in 1995 but the edition suddenly stopped after the publication of only three of the originally proposed twenty volumes, due to the loss of one of the two curators, Ernst Behler, who died in 1997. Only ten years later, in 2011 Alan D. Schrift and Duncan Large, the two new curators, published three new volumes but the «accelerationist fragment» inserted in Vol.17 Unpublished Fragments: Summer 1886 – Fall 1887 will be presumably published later. The controversial final part of The Civilized Capitalist Machine may be fully and deeply understood only through a clear reference and analysis of the accelerationist process described by Nietzsche. The specific identification of the above-mentioned Nietzschean fragment which Deleuze and Guattari refer to, opens to a definitive interpretation of the final passage of The Civilized Capitalist Machine. Christian Kerslake, a sharp critic and observer of Deleuze’s work finds the passage quite “difficult to comprehend”. Here is the famous passage which has become a crucial issue especially in the accelerationist area of commentators: “But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist „economic solution“? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to „accelerate the process,“ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.” Our research has identified the precise Nietzschean fragment quoted by Deleuze and Guattari as shown above. It is a fragment positioned in two different Friedrich Nietzsche’s posthumous editions. The title of the fragment is The Strong of the Future and it was composed in the Fall of 1887. In the collection of fragments edited by Gast and Nietzsche’s sister (The Will of Power, 1906) 1.067 fragments were randomly listed and The Strong of the Future was numbered 898. This arbitrary collection of fragments entitled The Will of Power has produced controversial debates in both political and philosophical fields since the beginning of the twentieth century. The same fragment with the same title is present in Colli and Montinari’s The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. It may be found in Part II Vol. VIII of the Italian edition entitled Frammenti Postumi: 1887-1888 together with other 371 fragments that Nietzsche collected in a series provisionally entitled The Will of Power that he will never publish. Here the fragment is numbered (105) 9 [153]. In the original fragment Nietzsche used the verb «beschleunigen» – derived from the physics world- literary meaning «to accelerate something facilitating its faster track». In the English translation by Kaufmann in 1967 the verb has been rendered as «hasten» whereas «accelerate» would have probably been more pertinent even in English, due to the fact that the former deals with the necessity to accelerate (not only in a physical way), while the latter indicates an intrinsic increase of speed in a process. In the Italian translation the verb used is again «affrettare» (hasten) instead of «accelerare» (accelerate), strengthening the above mentioned difference between the two verbs: «accelerare» means the intrinsic and physical increase of an event or of a process whereas «affrettare» shows an external provision of such increase. Actually the only significant commentator on Nietzsche’s fragment and Deleuze’s quotation is Pierre Klossowski in his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969), a work dedicated to Gilles Deleuze, who highly appreciated this publication together with Foucault. The useful fertility of Klossowski is dual, first on an exegetic side of his essay Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle and second for his «procreative» translations of Nietzsche’s works. Klossowski was a famous translator from German to French for the work of many intellectuals and philosophers like Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Heidegger (his Nietzsche, 1971) and above all he proved to be the best interpreter of Nietzsche’s thought in France thanks to his masterful and superlative work on The Gay Science in 1954 but in particular for the translation of the Fragments posthumes – Autumn 1887 – mars 1888 edited by Gallimard in 1976. The fragment we refer to, Les forts de l’avenir, had already been released in Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux in 1969. It is exactly there that we find the verb “beschleunigen” translated in «accélérer» (accelerate); therefore Klossowski’s interpretation has been at the basis of Deleuze’s choice in using the expression to accelerate the process when wondering which «revolutionary path» to undertake; that is the same question the accelerationist movement poses today. Through an exegetic analysis of the fragment The Strong of the Future in his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Klossowski evaluates Nietzsche’s thought (of 1887) very extant and contemporary, able to move from untimely meditations to disconcerted newness in less than one hundred years, affirming that “the economic mechanism of exploitation (developed by science and the economy) is decomposed as an institutional structure into a set of means” entailing two results: “on the one hand, that society can no longer fashion its members as ‘instruments’ to its own ends, now that it has itself become the instrument of a mechanism; on the other hand that a ‘surplus’ of forces, eliminated by the mechanism, are now made available for the formation of a different human type: the strong of the future. To reach such a new type of man we should not obstruct this irreversible great process but foster its inexorably expansive acceleration in a mechanism which may seem (without being) contrary to the main aim of «the strong of the future»: the differentiation. The leveling and the social homogenization perpetrated by the democratization of the industrial society are responsible of men’s shrinking. The «strong» and the «levelled ones» will then act for or against such «inexorable law» in a paradoxical overturning, as well as workers and capitalists fight in favor or against the relentless law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, another big issue Deleuze and Guattari posed in the paragraph called The Civilized Capitalist Machine. We have now concluded this short essay whose aim was to precisely describe the Nietzschean source Deleuze and Guattari had drawn from in their famous passage of the «revolutionary path» in the book Anti-Oedipus and to produce the right bibliographic references to the «accelerationist» fragment in Nietzsche’s complex work. We are aware on the other hand to have just outlined a challenging in progress work on the decoding of the deepest meaning of the paragraph The Civilized Capitalist Machine and in particular of the accelerationist passage about the theory and the practice of decoded and deterritorialized flows. Obsolete Capitalism, August 2015 pdf here: sf001_eng_accoppiate http://obsoletecapitalism.blogspot.it/2016/08/out-now-obsolete-capitalism-strong-of.html Taken from: by Himanshu Damle These are eclectics of the production, eclectics of the repetition, eclectics of the difference, where the fecundity of the novelty would either spring forth, or be weeded out. There is ‘schizoproduction’ prevalent in the world. This axiomatic schizoproduction is not a speech act, but discursive, in the sense that it constrains how meaning is distilled from relations, without the need for signifying, linguistic acts. Schizoproduction performs the relation. The bare minimum of schizoproduction is the gesture of transcending thought: namely, what François Laruelle calls a ‘decision’. Decision is differential, but it does not have to signify. It is the capacity to produce distinction and separation, in the most minimal, axiomatic form. Schizoproduction is capitalism turned into immanent capitalism, through a gesture of thought – sufficient thought. It is where capitalism has become a philosophy of life, in that it has a firm belief within a sufficient thought, whatever it comes in contact with. It is an expression of the real, the radical immanence as a transcending arrangement. It is a collective articulation bound up with intricate relations and management of carnal, affective, and discursive matter. The present form of capitalism is based on relationships, collaborations, and processuality, and in this is altogether different from the industrial period of modernism in the sense of subjectivity, production, governance, biopolitics and so on. In both cases, the life of a subject is valuable, since it is a substratum of potentiality and capacity, creativity and innovation; and in both cases, a subject is produced with physical, mental, cognitive and affective capacities compatible with each arrangement. Artistic practice is aligned with a shift from modern liberalism to the neoliberal dynamic position of the free agent. Such attributes have thus become so obvious that the concepts of ‘competence’, ‘trust’ or ‘interest’ are taken as given facts, instead of perceiving them as functions within an arrangement. It is not that neoliberal management has leveraged the world from its joints, but that it is rather capitalism as philosophy, which has produced this world, where neoliberalism is just a part of the philosophy. Therefore, the thought of the end of capitalism will always be speculative, since we may regard the world without capitalism in the same way as we may regard the world-not-for-humans, which may be a speculative one, also. From its inception, capitalism paved a one-way path to annihilation, predicated as it was on unmitigated growth, the extraction of finite resources, the exaltation of individualism over communal ties, and the maximization of profit at the expense of the environment and society. The capitalist world was, as Thurston Clarke described so bleakly, ”dominated by the concerns of trade and Realpolitik rather than by human rights and spreading democracy”; it was a ”civilization influenced by the impersonal, bottom-line values of the corporations.” Capitalist industrial civilization was built on burning the organic remains of ancient organisms, but at the cost of destroying the stable climatic conditions which supported its very construction. The thirst for fossil fuels by our globalized, high-energy economy spurred increased technological development to extract the more difficult-to-reach reserves, but this frantic grasp for what was left only served to hasten the malignant transformation of Earth into an alien world. The ruling class tried to hold things together for as long as they could by printing money, propping up markets, militarizing domestic law enforcement, and orchestrating thinly veiled resource wars in the name of fighting terrorism, but the crisis of capitalism was intertwined with the ecological crisis and could never be solved by those whose jobs and social standing depended on protecting the status quo. All the corporate PR, greenwashing, political promises, cultural myths, and anthropocentrism could not hide the harsh Malthusian reality of ecological overshoot. As crime sky-rocketed and social unrest boiled over into rioting and looting, the elite retreated behind walled fortresses secured by armed guards, but the great unwinding of industrial civilization was already well underway. This evil genie was never going back in the bottle. And thats speculative too, or not really is a nuance to be fought hard on. The immanence of capitalism is a transcending immanence: a system, which produces a world as an arrangement, through a capitalist form of thought—the philosophy of capitalism—which is a philosophy of sufficient reason in which economy is the determination in the last instance, and not the real. We need to specifically regard that this world is not real. The world is a process, a “geopolitical fiction”. Aside from this reason, there is an unthinkable world that is not for humans. It is not the world in itself, noumena, nor is it nature, bios, but rather it is the world indifferent to and foreclosed from human thought, a foreclosed and radical immanence – the real – which is not open nor will ever be opening itself for human thought. It will forever remain void and unilaterally indifferent. The radical immanence of the real is not an exception – analogous to the miracle in theology – but rather, it is an advent of the unprecedented unknown, where the lonely hour of last instance never comes. This radical immanence does not confer with ‘the new’ or with ‘the same’ and does not transcend through thought. It is matter in absolute movement, into which philosophy or oikonomiaincorporates conditions, concepts, and operations. Now, a shift in thought is possible where the determination in the last instance would no longer be economy but rather a radical immanence of the real, as philosopher François Laruelle has argued. What is given, what is radically immanent in and as philosophy, is the mode of transcendental knowledge in which it operates. To know this mode of knowledge, to know it without entering into its circle, is to practice a science of the transcendental, the “transcendental science” of non-philosophy. This science is of the transcendental, but according to Laruelle, it must also itself be transcendental – it must be a global theory of the given-ness of the real. A non- philosophical transcendental is required if philosophy as a whole, including its transcendental structure, is to be received and known as it is. François Laruelle radicalises the Marxist term of determined-in-the-last-instance reworked by Louis Althusser, for whom the last instance as a dominating force was the economy. For Laruelle, the determination-in-the-last-instance is the Real and that “everything philosophy claims to master is in-the-last-instance thinkable from the One-Real”. For Althusser, referring to Engels, the economy is the ‘determination in the last instance’ in the long run, but only concerning the other determinations by the superstructures such as traditions. Following this, the “lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes”. The article is taken from: by François Laruelle Rendering Marxism Real and IntelligibleMarxism may have “lacked” the Real and tied its fate to the history-world. It may have consequently lacked the theory according-to-the-Real of this history-world. These are not just some “observations,” but a new style of theoretical hypotheses. They assume a “program” as much as they imply that program. Compared to whatever philosophy’s past was, whether metaphysical or Marxist, philosophy as interpretation (herme-neutics), position (differential), correction (Marxist), decision in general, or whatever, can only but want to render itself more concrete and more intelligible, more real and better elu-cidated. This has been the case ever since Parmenides gave the definitive formulation being and thinking are the Same. What is important is the double action, this divided effect of philosophy on itself. Non-Philosophy, on the other hand, aban-dons this duality in order to deduce, not thought, but the trans-formation of thought, from the Real. And the Real is neither being nor thought, at the most it is a negative possibility for the concreteness of the object and rigor of thought, for the ob-ject that ceases to be empirical or the thought which ceases to be separately philosophical or scientific. Marxism is “realized” or “made concrete” by philosophy in several complementary ways: 1. By bringing Marxism a real ground that it was assumed to be lacking, since materialism is seen as an abstraction by philosophical idealism. However, from a larger and more encompassing [englobant] philosophical point of view, it does not at all lack the real, of which it has its own kind—this is an illusion bound up with the struggle of philosophical positions. It is only from a non-philosophical point of view that Marxism really lacks an identity and the Real as identity, it is from this perspective alone that it is an abstraction in a new sense, as is every philosophy. But we can only say that the materialist break lacks the “idealist” sort of Being and ground that it expressly intends to do without. Rather than replace it with a more philosophical “real,” we instead propose to identify the kind of non-philosophical Real that this philosophical real merely indicates in a symptomatic way. 2. By specifying and determining its efficacy for various situations, its revolutionary, critical, and transforming power of intervention [force d’intervention]. From this perspective, Marxism intends to effectively realize what every philosophy, even idealist ones, believes philosophy to be able to do: transform the world, no longer through meaning and interpretation, but at last to change the world practically. We propose here to accentuate this aspect by maintaining the reality and (relative) autonomy of the superstructure, of the object of its practice, rather than by deducing the superstructure in an idealist way from the infrastructure (i.e., from the existence close to the nature of society): consequently maintaining the consistency and the reality (not only “material”) of every “ideology” and every form of knowledge, like those of the object that it imperatively needs. Moreover, to axiomatically conceive a sufficiently universal Real in order to open the mode of immanence within it onto this reality of the superstructure, its now relative autonomy. So it is urgent to deregionalize the “infrastructure,” but also to undo how it has been made fundamental, to recognize in its Marxist form a model in the axiomatic and not philosophical sense, of the immanent Real, the identity of which is by definition more than a singularity—the universal in flesh-and-blood (the “universal,” as we will write it). 3. Finally, it is equally urgent to identify what kind of order Determination-in-the-last-instance (DLI) really is, seeing if it must be understood dialectically or with a dialectical complement, or if it must be understood outside of every dialectic and even outside of every form of philosophical order. This is the condition for the universality of this “syntax.” The few indications Marx and Engels provided for this subject may only be worthwhile as symptoms in order to extract the radi-cal concept, meaning the real kernel of DLI rather than its “rational kernel” (which can only be a philosophical artifact). In other words, within the Marxist DLI there is nothing lacking philosophically. At any rate, DLI is unintelligible for reasons that are philosophical twice over: at first, unintelligible as the ultimate mechanism of transcendence, a motor of Philosophical Decision, and then unintelligible a second time as a materialist break which truncates this mechanism and amputates a part of itself. By contrast, we are looking for Marxist DLI—it is a concept clearly displayed or radicalized— a third form of unintelligibility where it would be unintelligible even for the terms of unintelligibility internal and proper to philosophy, thus of an unintelligible intelligibility within the terms of the thought-world. Unified Theory of MarxismThere are several transformations of Marxism’s axioms that are necessary in order to rid Marxism of the philosophical antinomies and insufficiencies that paralyze its concept. For example (because there are many more): 1. A uni-versalization of the concept of “base” or infrastructure, a uni-versalization of its real kernel and immanence in the form of a radical immanence of the last-instance foreclosed to every superstructure, so that here again the content of the infrastructure in the Marxist sense no longer appears except as a symptom and a limited model of this “real base” in a new sense. This new “real” is the presupposed that must suspend the philosophical antinomies of Marxism (which is better than “resolving” them). 2. A syntactic uni-versalization, consequence of the radicalization of the “real base”: the axiomatization of the causality known as “determination-in-the-last-instance,” which must be understood as the non-ontological causality and in particular as non-materialist causality of the Real(’s)-immanence, and as the critique in actuality of material causality (and not only formal or final causality). 3. A “unified theory” of science and philosophy, recognized as one of Marxism’s essential but aborted projects. This is the condition for comprehending its historical form as a specification of this uni-versal scheme that we are calling non-Marxism. 4. A unification of other antinomies like theory and poli- tics, theory and practice, science and ideology, a unification that is every bit as immanent or in-the-last-instance. This is not a synthesis, fusion and confusion, but only identifications in-the-last-instance. Non-Marxism has no criteria for a choice between Marx and his tradition, between revolution and the ontology of the individual, between infinite rectification and permanent revolution, between class consciousness and taking a stand [prise de parti], etc. Non-Marxism does not take place among these antinomies or these opposed interpretations, but within the Real that unifies these antinomies in-thelast-instance within their theory, treating the whole tradition as a possible domain of available objects and properties. 5. A withdrawing from philosophical sufficiency through the theoretical reduction of philosophy to the radical immanence of its real base. It implies the distinction of philosophy’s structure and its sufficiency or pretension with regard to the Real. In this sense—as a pretension to the Real—it is more than an ideology, it is a hallucination but one which possesses a consistency or an objective reality, that of the “World.” The concept of ideology, even “material ideology,” is too general and unitary. Philosophy is the principle form, universal in its transcendent way, of every regional form of knowledge [savoirs régionaux] but it is what we are treating as the universal concept, this time in the radical sense of the word, of the superstructure. 6. A mutation within the concept of the “(historical) science of ideology,” which must become even more of a universally “transcendental science” that is identically scientific and philosophical, a mutation of the form-world or philosophy, consequently of the thought-world (which encompasses [englobe] the regional forms of knowledge as they are drawn directly from philosophy, because they are “philosophizable” or pertain to the universalized concept of “ideology”). So we are not changing the general kind of hypothesis (the Real determines in-the-last-instance the theory that is adequate to it), but we mean to extract the theoretical (non-dialectical) kernel and primarily real (non-transcendent) kernel by transferring this hypothesis onto a terrain other than that of society and history, onto the terrain of the Real as radical immanence whose structure of “productive forces” is only a symptom still specified within the conditions of the thought world (of capital and philosophy reunited). It is important to recall the probable axis of Marxism as an emergent and universal theoretical style: on the one hand the determinationin-the-last-instance of theory by the Real (against the idealist interpretations of theory), on the other hand the immanent unification of philosophy and science (against the syntheses through supplementary philosophical axioms). From this perspective the distinction between HM (science of history) and DM (philosophy of science) is a theoretical catastrophe that is philosophical in essence and reestablishes an old hierarchy and a poorly elucidated distinction. But the discovery of the Real is necessary (and the discovery of theory as determined by the Real rather than by politics) in order to see the scope of philosophy’s resistance and worldly incorporation [englobement] and in order to bring an end to the vacillation of sometimes deciding for Self-Consciousness, and sometimes deciding for the Structure, sometimes for the Auto-interpretation, sometimes for Praxis, etc. This discovery is necessary in order to repeat the Marxist style in a radical way outside of the idealism (including materialism) of the thought-world. “Marxism”—it is necessary to keep this general proper name—is a theoretical discovery that Marx did not have the theory of (this is Althusser’s thesis). But this theory can only be formed through another discovery, one which can certainly no longer be the discovery of Structure and the Unconscious, but instead is the discovery of the condition of every emergence determined by the Real as Radical Immanence of-the-last-instance. Marx discovered in a practical way the unified theory of history-society, but restricted it right away to this object. He did not understand it as a specification of more universal axioms, the theoretical sense of which has not been laid out. He only discovered it inside, not only of this or that philosophy (this is the materialist break), but inside the primacy of philosophy, which subsists within the break. NonMarxism only grasps the “principle” of a universal theory, the axioms and theorems of which can later be specified in the restricted conditions of the thought-world. Complementarily, we must explain the global failure of this limited form, not only by the particular practical and theoretical limitations imposed by history and globalized capitalism, but by the nature of its fundamental axioms which are co-determined by the thought-world itself. It is not only the materialist break that is histrionically [théâtralement] enveloped within Hegelian idealism, it is also the unified theory that is, as enveloped, prevented from taking place within philosophy. Marxism, a Miscarriage, a Material, a Symptom, a Limited ModelNon-Marxism consists in uni-versalizing in-the-last-instance the scientific and philosophical formulas of Marxism and in suspending the ultimate validity of their representative form or more widely their form of the thought-world, while nevertheless conserving this validity as a simple material. There are several ways to consider Marxism under the general heading of “materials” according to the non-Marxist point of view: 1. As a premature and “miscarried” form, if you will, of nonMarxism; it is not contradictory to affirm its objective reality or consistence, and its aborted character at the same time. 2. Also the possibility of “repeating” Marxism, meaning cloning it, producing a clone with this material. 3. As a symptom that non-Marxism is condemned to use and so it is given the radical concept of symptom. 4. Finally, as a limited and particular model of non-Marxism, or something that has validity only within—or perhaps at the limit of—the thought-world. The specific rigor of Marxism is the search for the unilaterality of theory according to a real immanent base. But its insoluble contradiction, internal as a birth defect or an ir- retrievable malformation—which moreover gives it a kind of objective consistency—is the hurried effectuation, in a glob- ally philosophical mode, of this experience of the Real and the form of thought that it demands. Marx has, so to speak, poorly understood (or understood it in a “hasty” way under the influence of philosophy) the radical meaning of the new theoretical genre that he came close to. Unified theory is understood by Marx in a dominant mode, by nature philosophical, even when Marx meant to be scientific, rather than unified theory being understood as a real unification through its cause in-the-last-instance. This haste (worldly, capitalist-andphilosophical) caused Marx to short-circuit the conditions for a real “last-instance” and left his thought between miscarriage, symptom, and model, according to the aspect of the theory taken into account. So Marxism is: 1. a limited form of a unified theory, a theory under philosophical domination, where science and philosophy are not equal and not equally determined by the Real within a non-philosophy; 2. a nontranscendental science (not real in-the-last-instance), realized prematurely under a philosophical form; 3. a substitute (the HM/DM break) for philosophical essence (where DM anticipates and retcons [rétrospecte] HM), fills in for the absence of a uni-versal unified theory, which the science of history would only have been a mode of. A repetition, in a nearly really immanent base, which is therefore a uni-lateral repetition, is possible however and can be delivered—a second birth—as non-Marxism, while these givens will be transformed into symptoms and models. We are not putting forth historical hypotheses on the constitution of the Marxian doctrine and the Marxist tradition (following what political and theoretical crises?), we take them holistically [globalement] with their pretensions and their heterogeneity as a symptom of a status that is inseparably theoretical and experimental (its failures). If Marxism is in fact important for philosophy, this importance can only be seen from our perspective through a non-Marxist posture. A philosophy of Marx, for Marx, neo-Marxist, etc., can only be allowed as a simple enrichment of the materials or objects of non-Marxism. This is a symptomatic formation in two senses: in the banal sense of the word and in a more profound sense, only the non-Marxist perspective can make Marxism its symptom, as Marxism ceases to be read according to itself in order to be itself in its radicalized form. What is given as Marxism is instead an originally compromised philosophical sufficiency and themes or operations which announce non-Marxism, but without its radicality. The elaboration of non-Marxism modifies the axioms, but first the axioms that relate to the fundamental themes that are just as symptomatic here: real base, infra/superstructure duality, determination-in-the-last-instance, science and philosophy, the “three sources.” And to themes seemingly more secondary “aspects,” “sides,” “supports,” “instances,” “theses,” etc. Many of the symptoms we undoubtedly could interpret in the Hegelian style, or the structuralist one, but that already bear witness to a philosophical strangeness that it is necessary to follow rather than avoid. As long as we are willing to take a moment to receive it, let us say as an “affect” rather than as a weak form of the dialectic, a post-Hegelian figure, it manifests a kind of primary irreducibility and philosophical regression in which the interpreters refuse its chance. Is the duality of principle instances, for example, a “topographical metaphor” as topological idealism would like to believe? Without a doubt one is allowed to see a basic materialism, but this materialist duality must be conceived as immanent and (not only or primarily) as transcendent, spatial, drawn up and constructed according to the order of the World. Or even: the Marxist position within philosophy is the symptom of a more universal (uni-versal) posture than philosophy, this uni-versality marks its true “difference,” its extraordinary identity. Concerning all of these points, the essential symptoms for non-Marxism are apparently provided by HM rather than DM. On the other hand, understanding HM as a simple specified form in the history of an axiomatic that is uni-versal (and transcendental, not formal) otherwise than the Marxist one is apparently a permanent and “performative” critique of DM, at once of the “new materialism” and the revised dialectic that it needs. These appearances are not false but, more precisely, the fundamental concept of syntax which serves as a symptom for us is DLI, proper to HM, while what serves for us as a symptom of the concept of the Real is that of “matter” and its immanence, proper to DM. From our perspective, HM and DM are indissociable since a complete comprehension of philosophy’s structure is demanded, a structure which is always the association of these two complementary, or sometimes supplementary, dimensions. A single theory unifies here in an immanent way, outside of every division or antinomy, the two forms of materialism that it treats as materials. Non-Marxism does not “overcome” them within their dialectical unity, it unifies them by bringing them back to a cause-through-immanence. Marxism is here suspended, not absolutely, but in its philosophical sufficiency alone. Generally suspended and reduced to the state of materials from which we are producing a nonMarxism, Marxism becomes one of the dimensions of nonMarxism and a particular interpretation given by it. Marxism therefore necessarily becomes the object of a special repetition, we will call this special repetition “uni-lateral” and not “bilateral” or absolute. On the whole, the entirety of its axiomatic system is uni-laterally displaced by the function of determination (a function held by non-philosophy) in the “occasional” cause; by the place of a general theory and first philosophy, not of a simple “superstructure,” but of a unified theory, though regional or specified by the limited conditions of history and society. We will not confuse a specific effectuation of universal unified theory (which non-Marxism is) and a limited theory, philosophical in a dominant way (as Marxism spontaneously is). Marxism’s Philosophical SideIn general, though not to say without exception, the problem of the existence of a “philosophy of Marx,” indeed a “Marxist philosophy,” that has been presented and is to come remains posited inside philosophy itself. It is true that philosophy is present and interwoven in all of his works. This compromise with philosophical sufficiency does not at all save him, on the contrary, it only saves his “textuality.” In the work of the postmoderns, the “ideological” generality of the text has become the required reference so as to abstain from posing the problem of the “identity” (of Marxism) and so we are supposed to believe we are going to get rid of “totality” through these means. These two theses—1. There is no philosophy of Marx, only a Marxist usage of philosophical concepts and categories; 2. But Marx is decisive for philosophy—are correct though equivocal. They can take on a meaning that is strictly philosophical itself, because the “new materialism” and the critique of idealism expressed there are in the end recovered for the benefit of an ultimate philosophical authority. Or re- covered by another practice of philosophy, but this other practice, resulting from a materialist break, is too weak and too narrow to take up a global transformation of philosophy. Materialism, even a “new” one, is only an anti-philosophical or anti-idealist thesis, which needs a complement of a generally idealist-philosophical practice of concepts. The absence of philosophy then remains measured by the presence of its older particular forms and has an effect only on them. The philosophical circle is undoubtedly broken, but it is not abolished. At best the new categories forged by Marx serve to transform their old forms. Without it being a matter of an explicit auto-interpretation of these categories (always shifted, displaced in relation to themselves), it remains a more general and englobing circle of auto-interpretation that cannot be identified except under more radical conditions. As for what we have all too often believed, that Marxism has not been read as the philosophy it deserves to be, it nevertheless is one through and through, without then being only one. Even if philosophy is only one of Marxism’s “aspects,” it is only repressed by materialism. It is philosophy not only through its Hegelian references, the most apparent, but much more profoundly through its repressed Platonic roots, and remembered only recently—we will return to this issue. Marxism does not lack philosophy, it is simply a philosophy that is at once auto-mutilated and hetero-mutilated by the impact of science and politics, an impact it “loads” the autodivision proper to philosophy with. In fact, if not a systematic philosophy, within Marx there is at least some philosophy but, more fundamentally still, a constitutive remainder of philosophical sufficiency. So as to formalize the style of this co-belonging, we may say that Marxism maintains an internal and external relation with philosophy, a relation that belongs to philosophy’s congenital idealism. It is undoubtedly a nonphilosophical practice of philosophy on the whole, but the formula is ambiguous, overly general and liable to take on a final idealist sense. This is still an interpretation of “transformation,” it is not a transformation and it is more than a transformation of “transformation.” An interpretation of “practice,” not a practice and more than a practice of “practice.” Moreover, the more critical usages of Marx often significantly ignore the critical import of contemporary philosophy, for example that of deconstruction, which could have provided a warning concerning the unfathomable philosophical resistance, told of its power, of its ruses inaccessible to a simple materialist break. It is true that in order to “unify” revolutionary materialism and deconstruction, without simply “deconstructing” materialism or falling back into a philosophical synthesis, it is necessary to straight away exit the one, the other, and their being blended together. “Transformation” and “practice” cease to be the ultimate forms of (auto-)“interpretation” when the new materialism itself is related—in a manner altogether more rigorously Marxist—no longer to itself but to a heteronomous cause, tearing it finally from the constituent philosophical horizon. Philosophical Decision, cut off by itself and by something other than it (politics), still engenders materialism and once again renders Marx’s thought “decisive,” as the philosophers say, “for the thinking of our time.” The heterogeneous game of Marxism within or with philosophy, and of philosophy within or with Marxism, cannot confront the problem of its most fundamental axioms and above all the still philosophical status of its axiomatic type (“theses”). Philosophical NormalizationAs materialism appears to defy the philosophical Reason that enables it to identify with idealism (the congenital idealism of Philosophy-with-a-capital-P), so many philosophers find it unintelligible and set out, as we mentioned, to make it “admissible.” There are innumerable attempts to render materialism philosophically acceptable: recently, for example, by existentialism (Sartre), through structure (Althusser), by the transcendental phenomenology of auto-affective life (Henry), through the transindividual as synthesis of the collective and the individual (Balibar), by the deconstruction of its “spectres” (Derrida), through contractuality and metastructure (Bidet). So many philosophies destined to supply it with a supplement of intelligibility and concreteness, of some anti-abstraction. Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc., are perhaps like Noah’s cloak intended to cover this apparent lack of philosophy, an original incompetence that is itself philosophical. The thought that can be found within Marx has, for exam- ple, allowed for two unilateral excesses at the extreme limits. On the one hand, but not only, the Marxist-Leninist tradition that claims to enrich this thought and adapt it philosophically to the demands of “proletarian struggles,” providing it with the philosophy the proletariat needs. Hence a build-up of the transcendence (revolution, class struggle, taking a stand, and inversely, self-consciousness) of axioms that are generally taken from the philosophies of the day (Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger) or from the dominant ideologies (structuralism, Lacanianism, etc.). On the other hand, at the opposite extreme, the unconditional refusal of Marxism-Leninism, the return to the immanence of Marxian texts or, more profoundly, of the individual or labor power (Michel Henry). Sometimes worldwide revolution, world-communist, sometimes the textual and overcautious economy of contemporary thinkers who believe they can save a thought from being disowned by history by returning to its texts. A median solution consists in inferring, from the sketches and traces of a philosophy scattered even in texts, a philosophy for Marx, salient points of a thought in the process of emerging. A philosophy for Marxism can undoubtedly always be worked out in competition with DM, which is too easily declared foreign to Marx. But why return to these “idealist” schema (in a large sense)? So that it is at least materialist and at any rate intends to “leave philosophy?” They are normalizations and reappropriations, but also deviations. The philosophical normalization of Marxism, begun with Marx, is its principal deviation, more than a simple deviation, it is precisely the normalization of its non-philosophical style. The philosophical history of Marxism is that of a war of appropriation, of idealist reconquest, while its real history is that of its failure, its violence and what is undoubtedly joined with it, its theoretical incompleteness that motivates philosophical desire. We intend to maintain that neither Marx nor his interpreters have, at bottom, put forth the problem of philosophy and that Marxism is then still an interpretation of the World that adds to the thought-world rather than transforming it. Marx is a “nonphilosopher” by the strict measure that philosophy can always deny itself in the form of materialism—as far as that goes. This is a sense of “non-philosophy” that is scarcely weaker and less servile than the postmodern. As for its philosophical normalizations, they come back to represent it, to dissolve its “heretical” effects within an image of thought, to reject them as unintelligible whereas they are only philosophically unintelligible and their specific intelligibility must be invented. Does non-Marxism intensify it? re-affirm it? Rather, it radicalizes this emergence that returns to the thematic of “exiting philosophy” (Ausgang) through a non-philosophical practice of philosophy. Non-Marxist Practice of PhilosophyHow can the opaque heart in more than one account of Marxism be elucidated? Rather than adding philosophical axioms to the opacity of determination-in-the-last-instance and the opacity of its real conditions of performation, filling in this philosophical void, this void which is philosophy itself, with the repeated attempts to proliferate neo-Marxisms meant to nuance Marxism and make it tolerable, it is a matter of returning to its simplicity and its minimal character, and above all returning to the radicality of its axiomatic and understanding that it is at least a line of flight outside of philosophy, and undoubtedly more. Rescuing Marxism from metaphysics is effectively an illusion as long as it is not rescued from philosophical sufficiency itself, belief in the Real and desire for the Real. This is Marxism’s divided and uneven history, its doctri- nal multiplicity, this is the salvage efforts that have given rise not only to political and historical causes (more profoundly they are causes of philosophy itself) but also its dialectical essence so as to appear as if it were the best while really being the worst. Marx wanted to practically transform philosophy and intervene in the World. But the idea of this transformation is itself philosophical and worldly. The philosophy-world is not in itself really able to be transformed and it is only able to be transformed for the subject, which is the “Stranger”—being the real content of the “proletariat” and “class struggle”—and transformed for its account alone. It is more than a correction of these concepts within the same problematic that it needs, maybe more than an overhaul of the problematic—an abandonment, we will see, of the “problematic”—and of its philosophical sense to the benefit of the “unified theory.” But what is still more radical than the overhaul is the change of terrain. Furthermore: this is the same acquisition of a terrain upon the non-place of philosophy. Or better still: this is the being-given (of) terrain rather than the givenness of a new terrain. And it is, on the other hand, the axiomatic acquisition of a new object, the thought-world as the unification of capitalism and philosophy. Marxism has a meta-Marxist dimension, a supplementary philosophical duplication, which is the element of all these corrections, improvements, rejuvenations, renewals, etc. But for the other terrain of the radical Real, foreclosed to theory, it is possible to identify within the jumble of heteroclite categories of the Marxist tradition (vulgarly interpreted as “imaginary Marxisms”) the uprightness of a rigorous theoretical intention for the innermost unification of science and philosophy, the invention of a new kind of thought. In order to identify this “posture,” it is not necessary to add postulates to what already exists, to philosophically complexify Marxism and include it within a more general structure that is always assumed to be first. We propose a minimalism or a simplification, better yet: an impoverishment of Marxism. Philosophical enrichment is the process of all the post-Marxisms and all the overhauls, a process which responds to a unique and double slogan that is, as we know, of a philosophical nature: make Marxism more concrete, make it closer to the singularity of the individual, to the singularity, to the “real” of history; make it also more intelligible by importing scientific and, above all, philosophical elements. In its generality, this double slogan could also be, as we have seen, that of non-Marxism, but it gives it a non-philosophical sense and realization. Non-Marxism is not, in particular, the substitution of a new philosophy as a better foundation for an old one. Marxism already possesses its philosophy, it has all too much of it. And it is the global position and the usage of this philosophy that it is a matter of evaluating, as encompassing [englobant], the materialist break and later, on the basis of this material, as a simple support [apport] inside this new theory. Non-Marxism’s wager is that these philosophical appropriations, among other less coherent and polished ones, lack non-Marxism’s specificity which is to be a theory of existent forms of knowledge unified by the Real itself as Determination-in-the-last-instance. Let us try to think these aspects of Marxism together, each in its place and without one dominating the other. We will give up on once again grounding it in “reason” and in the “dialectic,” in “structure” and in “life,” which runs the risk of spreading the evil, namely this trait of being premature or hasty which did not leave Marxism enough time to perform its “idea,” if we can put it that way, or its “Telos.” Not thinking Marxism’s position but radicalizing its own invention of a theoretical posture of an unknown type, nothing less than its “accomplishment….” If there is a non-philosophical practice of philosophy, it cannot only be a political practice, but more universally a real practice of philosophy. How do we make philosophy a simple contribution [apport], equal to the others, with its sufficiency removed from it, if not by determining it in-the-last-instance by the Real which is as non-political as it is non-scientific and non-philosophical? The non- cannot have any other “content” except that of the radical immanence of the Real or strictly following from it, without being a relation of negation to philosophy itself and co-determined by it (or by class struggle, etc.). We will invert—at least—the usual approach of a philosophical appropriation of Marxism. Rather than completing Marxism through axioms drawn from the tradition, in general from transcendence or the thought-world, from thought-as-capital, we will instead disappropriate every constitutive relation to philosophy (but not its materials, symptoms, and models), i.e., every relation to it that is itself philosophical. Discovering the Identity of MarxismThe first appearance of a thought may not be the least re- fined, the least inhuman, even if it is the most tragic. Maybe a special repetition, a uni-lateral one, without reciprocity, is necessary in order to explain it without deferring to it. Something like a eugenics of theory might be possible precisely because man as presupposed radical real excludes the possibility of eugenics for humanity’s benefit. Marxism can give the impression that it is a theoretical composite, contradictory, and poorly formed from various contributions that have been constructed by a philosophical position itself at the limits of self-contradiction. Maybe it will have to be a myth so as to tell of its birth—but this myth already exists, it is the philosophy or form of the thought-world. However, our non-Marxist task is also, identically, to find the internal law of this apparently poorly implemented assemblage. Its condition is this and only this: Marxism is not recognized but cognized: it is discovered rather than rediscovered. There will be effects of recognition and reappropriation (Marxism as the assumed “anticipation,” “germ,” etc., of non-Marxism), but these are objective appearances produced necessarily by the resistance of the thought-world. The Identity-(of)-Marxism is only given as if it were in the mode of an objective appearance from its beginning, through the laborious and “intersected” conditions of its birth. Now that we know the ruses and strengths of philosophy even better after Hegel, as sufficient-for-the-Real and not only as a doctrine and particular thought, we can better appreciate its theoretical specificity and deliver ourselves from this objective misunderstanding, to various degrees that are more or less subtle: a relation of Marxism to philosophy that would be essential, whatever the sense of causality, albeit only for Marxism over philosophy. Non-Marxism can make an occasion, a symptom, and model from the thousand imaginary, paleo-, neo-Marxisms, and those Marxisms yet to be born. The identity of a real base foreclosed to the existing and nonexistant Marxisms is postulated by non-Marxism under precise theoretical conditions. As if the “infrastructure” was radically foreclosed to every action of the “superstructure,” from which we posited the conditions and have drawn all the effects. At bottom it is a matter of dismantling the Principle of Sufficient Marxism not through history, capital, and philosophy altogether but, on the contrary, through a non-sufficient conception of the real base and infrastructure, which we will explain, is an ontological non-sufficiency which does not contradict its being-foreclosed to the superstructure, to the contrary. Aporias, suffering, desire and resentment, the entire game of the impossibility of history must be eradicated, at least from its real conditions, and expelled from history itself and from the thought-world. So for non-Marxism it is not a question of claiming to install itself at the heart of the same impossible “identity” that Marxism wanted, it is not a question of believing itself to be capable of defying its failure and finally realizing what it had intended to do and where it had failed. This is why it is not its failure that motivates us and makes us think in this way and through this style. This is only an occasion and a conjuncture and, Marxism being definitively lost for history, it would no longer have more to it than being a function of the World’s object and material for a thought coming from elsewhere than history. Non-Marxism assumes then the abandonment of several philosophically minded operations upon the most general postulates: deconstruction, reconstruction, renovation, neoMarxisms, dialectization, the crossbreeding with the human sciences, etc. All of these projects are of course possible but prolong the same transcendental illusion so long as they are not themselves ordered by a Real and by a uni-versality of the non-Marxist type. To reconstruct, to deconstruct, to reform, etc., Historical Materialism, in particular by conserving the same philosophical presuppositions of materialism and the dialectic, are attempts at disguising destined to return a second time, in a comic role, the hero now free from a tragic history. Projected from their foreclosure, the discovery of the Real and the syntax that accompanies it, the specificity of its theoretical style, does not redivide it, nuance it, displace its decisions, or complexify its axioms. The classic question from the neo-Hegelians to Althusser—how do we break with Hegel?—must be formalized and universalized by nonMarxism: how do we break with Philosophy-with-a-capital-P itself as sufficiency rather than as a particular doctrine (be it no more distinctive than that of Hegel)? Even this question is still too philosophical; it does not make Marxism a solvable and “scientific” kind of problem. Marxism still presents itself as an interminable question rather than as that which deduces itself from axioms: be it the Real or radical immanence, as a presupposed that is not confused with organic labor power or subjectivity, what then results for Marxism, what will become possible out of Marxism for the “stranger-Subject” (the real core of the “proletariat”)? The real presupposed must be as capable of giving Marxism itself in an immanent way as a theoretico-political formation that originally has something of the thought-world’s nature. But what should be understood by the radical being-given of Marxism? That it is precisely a simple occasion uncovered or emerging from the being-manifest or being-given (meaning radical or without-an-operation-of-givenness) (of) the “last instance.” excerpt from the book: INTRODUCTION TO NON-MARXISM/ Chapter 2 by François Laruelle Translated by Anthony Paul Smith/Univocal by François Laruelle In order to determine the characteristics of non-philosophy, we frame it in opposition to an image of an established paradigm: Deconstruction (as suggested by Jean-Luc Nancy in La deconstruction du christianisme).1 We comment on this image, we add to it, we transform it. It is a simple image of Deconstruction, one that speaks for itself independently of all textual techniques or mechanisms, yet it allows for an easy comparison with non-philosophy: it allows us to identify clearly their different objectives and respective methods. In the text below, the first number refers to the various themes of Deconstruction and non-philosophy that are compared; the second, which is always binary, refers first to Deconstruction (1), and then to non-philosophy (2). 2 1.1 Deconstruction gives itself a notion and its context, a text and its corpus, a set of doctrinal beliefs (Christianity, for example), in such a way that these givens spontaneously present themselves as “philosophical” assumptions. Deconstruction is thus auto-donational. It supplies both the material to be deconstructed and the method of deconstruction, the latter of which is derived from this material and therefore affected by a symptom of otherness that has yet to be determined. These givens, or assumptions, are examined from both the exterior and the interior.3 They are subjected to a partial authority, examined like an objective topology or mechanism that is spontaneously given or assumed. The subject is himself or herself a constitutive component of the system under investigation, albeit only partially. In order for something like philosophy to appear, exteriority or meta-language—two concepts that are themselves philosophical, through and through—are the necessary conditions. 1.2 The non-philosophical subject gives itself, or rather lets itself be given, a notion and its context, a system. It is a radically immanent donation. If, therefore, a meta-language is still necessary, it should not be considered to be constitutive of this immanence (but rather as, for example, a hallucinatory authority), without running the risk of it taking the form of the operations that the subject itself carries out on the given.4 Deconstruction is not the only way that exterior and interior are able to organize themselves. 2.1 We consider deconstruction as a composition of terms or parts that mutually hold themselves together like a tightly knit system, but without any apparent or explicit play between the parts. This system ensures an a priori principle of “logocentric” enclosing or foreclosing. 2.2 First of all, the given to be examined is not a textual constitution that supplies its own principle of enclosure, which is in itself textual. It is not to be examined from the outside or from above with authority as though it were an organization of parts assumed to be self-sufficient or given in and for themselves. The system to be examined is indeed constituted, but it is not just any textual system. Rather, it is philosophy as a system of thought, specifically as a principle of enclosure that cannot in any way be reduced to its texts. Above all, the system is a material constitution, for it is immanently given prima facie or a priori (in the vision-in-One). Because of its theoretical or phenomenal status, the constitution is both a material and a symptom. It is not an essential or fundamental point of departure that has authority over itself, nor is it an assumed and self-legislating symptom that needs to be deconstructed. The primary and immanent exclusion of all authority (not only “objectifying” authority but authority in the form of “actualization” or “realization,” or a “doubly objectifying” authority that posits the thing itself as independent or as being [étant]) amounts to the impossibility of a transcendental or metalinguistic account of radical immanence (which is nevertheless capable of thinking [itself] axiomatically or without reflexivity). This is the vision-in-One. The system’s a priori condition of being-given [être-donné] is the Whole that—even if it is indeterminate, imaginary, or illusorily self-sufficient—is identified as philosophizable. The philosophizable does not appear out of nowhere, since it comes in and as the form of a unilateral Outside specific to immanence. 3.1 A system that is subjected to the partial authority of a subject, for which meta-language has at least some constitutive effect, is predisposed to dis-assembly en pointillé—that is, to a rightful, proper disassembly—if it is not already disassembled. The text already includes within itself a first deconstruction, a deconstruction that has taken place prior to the intervention of any subject, which only needs to be resumed or revived by an additional act of otherness, by a supplementary work of writing. Greek otherness—the otherness of an opposite, an antonym, black vs. white—cannot exist without the need for a Judaic otherness5—the otherness of an alien script, or an infinite God compared to its finite creation. Judaic otherness is the eternal supplement to the Greek. Finally one last variation: Deconstruction as “Christian” (Nancy),6 a blend of Greek and Judaic alterity. 3.2 What is primary is not the spontaneously given text with its spontaneous self-deconstruction, but rather its being-given a priori as material reduced in its philosophical sufficiency by the vision-in-One. The given to be re-deconstructed is not the self-deconstructive spontaneity of a system but the phenomenon of (the system of) philosophy itself, a system that exists prior to all implied deconstruction or the possibility of a textual deconstruction. The basis of non-philosophy is neither Greek nor Judaic, nor is it the exaggerated and excessive conjugation of the two. It is pre-eminently “Christian,”7 a Christianity that is not simply the blend of its Greek and Jewish precursors, and therefore non-Christian in the non-philosophical sense of “non-,” which consumes Christianity.8 4.1 The system subjected to Deconstruction is rendered possible to the point of its own suspension or impossibilization. The system’s deconstruction is a way of showing what it truly was, a way of making its fundamental principles and presuppositions appear. The system’s deconstruction balances the possibility and the impossibility of the text, which are the same. This sameness is nevertheless unbalanced. It is an unbalanced balance that is always refined and adjusted by equilibrium. 4.2 Acting as an a priori, the vision-in-One is another combination of the possibility and the impossibility of philosophy. Its impossibility is immanent or radical, its possibility—or its a priori givenness as phenomenon—is unilatness as phenomenon—is unilateral and therefore a complete Stranger to auto-donational philosophy. The Stranger remains immanent. The balance between possibility and impossibility in the vision-in-One is an immanent equilibrium, which is not evened out by equilibrium. It is the Grand Midi of Man. The vision-in-One acts according to a radical unbalance, one without return, and it never ceases to come as Stranger or Messiah, as a permanent struggle against the philosophical spontaneity of the world. Thus we uphold and maintain that philosophy is given to subjects as the object of their struggle. We avoid the spontaneous and empirical self-donation of philosophy as a signifier to which access is only granted and assured by Writings and Texts—that also is to say by religion and perhaps religious sophism—because subjects have a rightful and legitimate access to philosophy as the object of their struggle. They have this access even without taking into account the aporias of entry, exit, and return. 5.1 Deconstruction consists in establishing play “between” the parts, in making them move in relation to each other. This relation between parts is absolute because of the supplement of an absolute Other. Deconstruction consists in undoing the enclosure or the foreclosure of a system without breaking it, in unbinding the organization of the set, in weakening the disposition [systase] of the system (Heidegger), in making disseminated strangeness appear. 5.2 Non-philosophy does not emphasize otherness or differences; it does not compound them through différance, and does not content itself with establishing play while conserving the deconstructionist’s ex machina authority (which amounts to the same thing as enclosure). It does not add to nor subtract from the immanent deconstruction of the thing (of texts); rather, it substitutes unilateralism for difference (différance), the structure of the immanent existingStranger for differing, and it breaks the enclosure, at least for the Real. If in the best of philosophical cases there is pure difference—a signifier in contrast to nothing, not even another signifier nor one that is absolutely removed from the chain, a “Greco-Judaic” signifier we could say—then there is a pure otherness that delimits, not in opposition to immanence (which has no limit), but a One-limitation that is opposed to the system as its possibilizing impossibility. 6.1 Since it does not come from any identifiable space, the play of distances in a deconstructed system cannot be attributed to any particular or unique part that would constitute an origin; such a part is precisely the point of effervescence or condensation of play, not a source. Difference (différance) appears to emerge from the core of the deconstructed system, as an unlocatable, at once internal and external to the system, but finally external a second time, as an exaggerated otherness, a relative-absolute Greco-Judaic alterity, which is therefore twice external. Deconstruction is a supplement to Greek logic. It initiates the dominance of metalinguistic exteriority and logocentric enclosure relative to philosophical phenomena, but continues to situate itself in the last instance to this dominance. 6.2 Unilateralism has another structure than the one provided by an exaggerated and doubled otherness. It is indeed otherness, but in a unique sense. It is a unidirectional otherness. It is immanent without being relative to immanence. It is the “vision” in the vision-in-One, a unique intentionality driven by a single impulse, like a drive that renders philosophy impossible precisely because it expresses philosophy as the philosophy [“la” philosophie]. Unilateralism acts as a radically immanent One-Stranger that does not itself come from the system, nor from its immediate exterior like an enclosure beyond an enclosure, nor even from further afar like an otherness with Judaic emphasis. It comes from Nowhere and has No Time, the One-Stranger is utopic and uchronic, that is to say it is celestial (and not extra-terrestrial) and eternal (and not outside of time). It consists of an operation that is not internal/external but immanent in itself and therefore heteronomous for philosophy. This Outside is an immanent a priori, which makes an a priori understanding of the philosophizable unknown to and impossible for philosophy. 7.1 Duality, because there always is one, takes the form of a Judaic supplement of otherness graphed to and integrated in a Greek or weak otherness. It is a duality that begins in anonymity and transcendence, one that never ceases to be anonymous except as Judaic excess, except as its characterization as “Autre homme” (Levinas), or as “epekeina” [beyond]. 7.2 It is philosophy that is dualyzed, not the Real itself. Duality belongs to the Real, which is immediately non-anonymous because it is Man, and it belongs to the transcendental subject. Man is a unilateral duality, without a divided One, whether in its capacity as Real or as subject. We cannot say that the subject is a supplement to Man’s Real. The subject is Real via the cloning of its essence, and the Real is subject when it is occasionally solicited by sufficient or non-reduced philosophy. The dyad undoes the system-form in two unilateral temporalities. The philosophy-form is not a simple effect, as deconstruction would have it; it is, on the contrary, divided (transcendental-real and transcendental-empirical). Therefore there are two phases to the dualysis of philosophy: 1) Unilateral identity suspends, a priori, its sufficient form, or neutralizes it. This is the effect of the Real’s impasse toward philosophical material; 2) This non-operation that results from the suspension of philosophical sufficiency is then treated as the condition that prepares the ground upon which dualysis disassembles, takes apart, or decomposes, this time strata by strata, the very structure of the philosophical system. This system has never been an indeterminate nor simply textual assembly, but rather a complex or transcendental structure (in order to call upon a “transcendental signified” to be deconstructed, the structure of the transcendental must be known). We therefore distinguish between the suspension that gives rise to the hallucination of philosophy and its deconstruction, and a new type of deconstruction or disassembly that acts not on the parts of the system but on the system’s subjective or transcendental structure. Philosophy, a structure larger than logocentrism and larger than the text, is suspended a first time by the Real that gives it its a priori unilateral character and heightens its sufficiency. Philosophy is then suspended a second time by the strata-by-strata dismemberment of the very structure that was committed to the system. The operation of the dyad is purely oriented toward the structure of philosophy’s transcendental system (and toward each of its parts as they express or condense the structure of which they are a part), but only as an operation that is materially given a priori as an intuition or as an immanent Outside. For the system or for its parts, the operation of the dyad appears as a heteronomous subject or Stranger. The non-philosophical dyad signifies a one-way otherness, and is therefore lacking any sense, encountering sense only as a symptom. 8.1 Deconstruction is not destruction or annihilation but a “taking apart” (Abbau, Heidegger) or a disassembling. However this disassembling is not a mechanical operation (this is the paradigm’s insufficiency) but a spectral slipping. It leaves the parts of the system or even the system itself in a spectral state where the “play” is a form of différance that operates neither from part to part (as sign) nor from part to system. Deconstruction is a staggered and deferred starting-over of tradition as a whole, which is each time taken on in totality. Tradition is not destroyed in order to be restructured or perpetuated. To deconstruct is neither to identify constituted materials, nor to find a way out of them into some external space, but rather a means to transmit them. It is an un-bearing, an offsetting, of tradition. 8.2 Non-philosophy leads to a philo-fiction9 that consists not so much of disassembling an assumed and given system in a spectral dimension, but which rather starts by presenting the system as given under the auspices of human Identity10 (an identity that is unknown and foreign to the system), and describes what is deduced as “deconstruction” from the structure of the philodeconstruction” from the structure of the philo” from the structure of the philosophical system. On the one hand, the operation is less a spectralization of reality, less a real supplement to its idealization, and more a radical fiction, an evacuation of any mixed solution for a unique and simple unilateralization. On the other hand, the operation acts on the fundamental structure of philosophical systems. From there it eventually acts on the structure of the textual system, rather than starting with the text and then moving on to philosophy (there exists a distinct structure of philosophy apart from all textuality). 9.1 Coming from the interior and the exterior, play is an archi-possibility from which textual constitution is derived. The text conserves its own constitution as aberrant and unsuited, as if the text existed as already deconstructed en pointillé or as a spectre. 9.2 Non-philosophy does not conserve philosophy or its structure, whether incomplete or misused, thinned out and spectral, ghostly and hidden by the supposedly given system. It is a philo-fiction and it has certain characteristics of the spectre. It is immanent in its principle, and penetrates and encompasses the system, finding subtle support in each of its parts, brushing up against them where necessary without lingering, settling, or becoming attached. Yet, the philo-fiction is never simply hidden or covered by the philosophical system. It is not the role of non-philosophy to unearth the philo-fiction that was always already there. For the Real there is no philosophical appearance, only a hallucination that philosophy has identified or produced; for the non-philosophical subject however, there is a transcendental illusion that is already more consistent. Ubiquitous in its cause, philo-fiction penetrates and encompasses all systems, each time at a point that is no longer nodal but unilateral. For the non-philosophical subject, the philosophizable a priori constantly threatens to reclaim its sufficiency and to “recharge” from its philosophical pretenses; it hides the real a priori and confirms spontaneous philosophy. Philosophy perpetually wants to claim the philo-fiction as just more philosophy. But all bets are off; the Lived-life is resilient, the inalienable Real cannot be forgotten, for it does not cease to resist any more than the subject (transcendentally radicalized) is able to forget itself in the struggle. The outcome of non-philosophy is a radical Lived-life of hallucination and illusion. The immanent Lived-life is unforgettable without the need for an absolute memory or a memory refashioned by operations and then reconstituted. It is the real condition of salvation such that it engages a task and maintains the subject, head above the world. Let us generalize toward contemporary philosophy. Non-philosophy places philosophy in a radical state; it takes phenomena as they are given a priori in the human or real state, as they are given in their immanent identity, and therefore given a priori unilaterally or by the Other. Non-philosophy does not impose an everyday structure or a system of knowledge, whether linguistic or mathematic and based on the “set.” The linguistically rendered text or the ontological knowledge based on the set have to be given as unilateral identity, at the risk that they revert to particularity or Judaic exceptionality, or to a materialistic void and its corresponding idealism; they have to be given as Other rather than in their own sufficiency. There is no preconditioning set that allows for an immediate and tautological reading of mathematical knowledge, nor is there a textualization that allows for an immediate and violent or raw deconstruction. In both cases, we open the door to a practice that is burdened with empiricism and therefore theoreticist and spontaneous or violent and raw, a practice that has forgotten to radically “phenomenalize” the given and in its place has substituted a transcendent phenomenon, in other words a philosophical one. By placing both cases in a state of radical identity, a series of transformations is released. These transformations move from the suspense of sufficiency to the breaking-up of the structure of the philosophical system that was invested in each part of the play. The enclosure is not simply logocentric, nor is it simply quantifiable or calculable, rather is it always duplicity or double enclosure. This is the principle of a “non-denon-deconstruction” (of a construction of deconstruction within an immanent and a priori intuition: a philo-fiction), or a togetherness or ensemblisme (in the sense of real identity “en”/“in” semblance), both of them real and transcendental, and destined to relieve and replace the transcendent or ex machina divides, whether these divides are linguistic or mathematical. Non-philosophy is not just a new experience of Man or of the subject, one that sets itself apart from contemporary thought and the way it honours the philosophical paradigm. Non-philosophy demands a new theoretical practice. Instead of taking as given the text—as well as the signifier, the set, desire, or power—as transcendent empiricals conveying, more or less secretly, religious determinations (not only “transcendental signifiers”) that are unjustified except by a certain lazy philosophical rush, non-philosophy places them in a radical state where they are no less ontological than linguistic, scientific, etc. What is actually given as phenomenon or foundation upon which thought can be based? All philosophy partakes in the magic act that transforms the empirical into absolute, and the absolute… into absolute. We ask how the empirical is itself given to us, given to the philosophical subject, and how does this philosophical subject know that he or she has rightful access to language or mathematics? Does the subject speak? Is she a mathematician? Without doubt, but if his or her knowledge is immanent to these activities, what relation, what non-relation does he or she have, as a subject, to this immanence? Translated by Nicholas Hauck taken from: Notes: 1. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 2. By emphasizing the binarity of the number scheme, Laruelle alludes to his argument concerning the structure of philosophical decision. In his view, philosophy invariably purports to be a duality, but is in actuality a tripartite schema consisting of empirical experience, its metaphysical conditions, and a transcendental, decisional term which fastens the two together. By contrast, non-philosophy is a real unity—insofar as it is already given inOne—which is discernible as a binary composed of the Real and its clone, or of the visionin-One and its material. Laruelle’s decision to discuss Deconstruction first is likely meant to emphasize that philosophy functions as the occasional cause of non-philosophy. 3. Cf. Derrida’s discussion of the “two strategies” of Deconstruction in “The Ends of Man.” Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30.1 (September, 1969), 31–57. 4. Cf. Laruelle in Struggle and Utopia in the End Times of Philosophy: “There is no metalanguage for saying what non-philosophy is or is capable of doing… We will not even claim, like deconstruction, that there are effects of meta-language, but that this meta-language of a philosophical origin is the material determined and transformed in-the-last-instance by the first Name of Man.” François Laruelle, Struggle and Utopia in the End Times of Philosophy, trans. Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith (Minneapolis: Univocal Press, 2012), 55. 5. Laruelle here distinguishes between the otherness of Ancient Greek philosophy— which is always opposed bi-laterally to some mode of sameness or selfhood—and the radical, non-binary alterity of Jewish philosophy. See Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, trans. Rocco Gangle (New York: Continuum, 2011). 6. Nancy raises the possibility that Derrida’s Joycean conflation of “Jew” and “Greek” as “jewgreek” at the close of “Violence and Metaphysics” may actually refer to Christianity. 7. .Cf. Lyotard’s characterization of the Christian “narrative of love,” a radically inclusive genre of discourse, which accommodates and accounts for all events: “Any referent can be signified as a sign of the good news announcing that ‘we’ creatures are loved.” JeanFrançois Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 160. 8. Laruelle does not suggest that non-philosophy is “Christian” in the sense of being an extension or symptom of the organized religion “Christianity.” Rather, he uses the term “Christianity”—or “non-Christianity”—heretically, as one possible first name for the non-consistent, radically immanent Real. See, François Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (New York: Continuum, 2010). 9. “Philo-fiction” is a term Laruelle has recently used to designate the unilateralized clone effectuated by non-philosophy. See, for example, François Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, a NonStandard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis: Univocal Press, 2012). 10. “Human Identity” here functions as another name for what Laruelle elsewhere calls “Man-in-Person.” by Mark Fisher "Cyberpunk torches fiction in intensity, patched-up out of cash-flux mangled heteroglossic jargons, and set in a future so close it connects: jungled by hypertrophic commercialization, socio-political heat-death, cultural hybridity, feminization, programmable information systems, hypercrime, neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading, personality transplants, body-modifications, soft- and wetware viruses, nonlinear dynamic processes, molecular engineering, drugs, guns, schizophrenia." No-one is quite sure what they are: Nick Land, Stephen Metcalf, Sadie Plant. Part theory, part fiction, nothing human, constructs so smoothly assembled you can't see the joins. They don't write text; they cook up intensities. They don't theorise; they secrete, datableed. What we used to call cyberpunk is a convergence: a crossover point not only for fiction and theory, but for everything that either doesn't know its place or is in the process of escaping it. Whatever is emerging where authority is getting lost and middle men are being made redundant. Anything interesting was always like that. Metalhead Michel Foucault was never easy to place. They asked him if he had ever wanted to write fiction. He said he'd never done anything else. So more than a fusion of fiction and theory, it's all about cross fertilizing the most intense elements of both in monstrous nuptials against nature. Synthetix. "The present writing would not be a book; for there is no book that is not the ideal of the immobilised organic body. These would be only diverse pieces, each piece of variable format and belonging to its own time with which it begins and ends ... Not a book, only libidinal instalments." 1974: delirial Jean Francois-Lyotard melts the still glowing-hot shards of post 68 street revolutionary intensity together with Bataille, cybernetics and anti-socialised Marx to produce the pre-punk, non-organic, inhuman assemblage he calls Libidinal Economy. With Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and Luce Irigaray's Speculum: Of the Other Woman it's part of an irruption of rogue materialism into the French academy that is as far from the dreary, idealist textocracy of Parisian post-structuralism as it is from the dry-as-chalkdust dreariness of Oxbridge common sense. What is refused, in the name of incandescence, is the neutralizing, disintensifying, distanced tone de rigeur in academic prose. The aim, as Deleuze and Guattari put it in Anti-Oedipus , to accelerate the process. All of this consummated in the migration of intelligence out of the university (if indeed intelligence ever was in the university), something that, two decades on, the technical machines will help to facilitate. "The academy loses its control over intelligence once it is possible to even imagine a situation in which information can be accessed from nets which care for neither old boy status nor exam results. The university in flames. "Dozens of different argots are now in common currency; most people speak at least three or four separate languages, and a verbal relativity exists as important as any of time and space. To use the stylistic conventions of the traditional oral novel - the sequential narrative, characters 'in the round', consecutive events, balloons of dialogue attached to 'he said' and 'she said' - is to perpetuate a set of conventions ideally suited to the great tales of adventure in the Conradian mode, or an overformalized Jamesian society, but now valuable for little more than the bedtime story and the fable. To use these conventions to describe events in the present decade is to write a kind of historical novel in reverse...²1964. Writing in the pages of the SF magazine New Worlds , J. G. Ballard celebrates the multipliticous, impure junk languages of William Burroughs. Ballard wheels away the decorous scenery of the literary novel to reveal the atrocity exhibition of the late twentieth century as it emerges in Burroughs' carnivalesque prose: "swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels..."Burroughs has already intravenously pumped pulp fictional vernacular into the hi-cultural zone of Joyce-Eliot experimentalism, fatally contaminating it. Ballard's own condensed novels are in preparation. Cyberpunk fiction lies in wait; assembling itself out of machinic convergence, it is a direct but unanticipated consequence of the intersection of the PC, TV and the telephone. Invading clean white Kalifornia dreams with nightmares from the machinic unconscious, William Gibson and Pat Cadigan populate cyberspace with nonorganic gothic avatars and voodoo entities. The bourgeois novel in flames. The near future. (But it's already happening) "Twisted trading systems have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunters, loa and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security."Dead hippies create cyberspace, but what comes together is the jungle: Cubase materialism smearing white economies with black marketization. Illicit distribution networks, rogue retail, faceless bacterial commerce. Silicon valley in flames. And it's not over yet. In the intense heat of the cyberjungle, where distribution is too quick and imperceptible for copyright lawyers to keep up, the authorised text is decomposing; a process accelerated by the technical machines. Hypertext is in part an answer to Deleuze and Guattari's inquiry in A Thousand Plateaus : "A book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that compose with one another across microfissures, as in a brain?" Marshall McLuhan had already seen this happening in 1964, when, in Understanding Media, he announced the end of print culture and its associated linear thought patterns. The Gutenberg Galaxy in flames. The death of the author is an entirely technical matter, not at all a metaphor. The cool, efficient decommissioning of the author-function in music shows the way. Remixes displace (fixed, finalised) texts; DJs, producers and engineers replace authors. What succeeds all this is the version, in the sense Jamaican reggae culture gave to the term. Unofficial, potentially infinite, illegitimate: there's no such thing as an authorised version. "The state's pre-arrangement of overlaid bridges, junctions, pathways and trade routes trajectorize the scorching advance as it impacts upon the hapless head of the social. Detonation of nuclear arsenals of the world merely pushes the nomads underground: shedding their skins in reptilian camouflage, vanishing without a forensic trace in ambient recession into the underground... Things sometimes converge in the most unpropitious locations. Coventry, for example. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit processes cybernetics and culture together, apprehending culture cybernetically and cybernetics culturally. The impetus is not so much inter- as anti-disciplinary, the concrete problem being the freeing up of thought as synaptic-connectivity from its prison as subject-bound logos. Following flows where they want to go leads not into random noise but out onto what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of consistency . "If we consider the plane of consistency, we notice that the most disparate things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message... There is no 'like' here, we are not saying 'like an electron,' 'like an interaction', etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of metaphor; all that consists is Real." The CCRU is part-populated by names you don't know yet, but are bound to soon - moving as a massive, with our street-gun samplers, never alone - a k-class swarmachine infecting White Man Face with afro-futurist and cyber-feminist cultural viruses . "Writing becomes a process of software engineering, making connections, and connecting with the other connectionist systems and their connections too; 'does not totalize', but 'is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself.'"What Pat Cadigan calls synning : synthesizing. No more cerebral core-texts, no more closed books. Looking instead to games or the dancefloor for inspiration. Attempting to produce something that will match the ambitions of Lyotard 1974: "To understand, to be intelligent, is not our overriding passion. We hope rather to be set in motion. Consequently, our passion would sooner be the dance, as Nietzsche wanted ... A dance ... not composed and notated but, on the contrary, one in which the body's gesture would be, with the music, its timbre, its pitch, intensity and duration, and with the words (dancers are also singers), at each point in a unique relation, becoming at every moment an emotional event..."(LE 51) Intensity conductors operating at non-human machine speed, writing machines, machinic writing,text at sample velocity. Text samples from: J. G. Ballard, "Mythmaker of the Twentieth Century", reprinted in RE/search: J. G. Ballard Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (both Athlone Press) Luce Irigaray, Speculum: Of the Other Woman (Cornell University Press) Nick Land, "Meltdown", unpublished Stephen Metcalf, "Black Capital"in Collapse 2 and IOD 1 Jean Francois-Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Athlone Press) Sadie Plant, "The Virtual Complexity of Culture"in Future Natural (Routledge) "Therefore, no bad conscience, nor the feeling of crushing responsibility, two relations to the text that circumscribe and define the relation proper to the White Man of the left. We deliver no message, we bear no truth, and we do not speak for those who remain silent." (259) "What you demand of us, theoreticians, is that we constitute ourselves as identities, and responsible ones at that! But if we are sure of anything it is that this operation (of exclusion) is a sham, that no-one produces incandescences and that they belong to no-one, that they have effects but not causes."(LE 258) The article is taken from: by Steven Craig Hickman A Short History of the City and the CathedralLiberalism, from this point forward, means nothing at all like state-happy progressivism. It is defined, instead, as the polar opposite of socialism. Its sole commanding value is liberty. It is individualist, only ever guardedly traditionalist, commercially and industrially oriented, strategically neglectful of care, skeptical in respect to all purported public agencies, and rigorously economical in respect to every dimension of government. —Nick Land, Pyscho Politics The mapping and cartography of the world through mathematical grids of longitude and latitude were the first algorithms of instrumental rationality: the temporalization of the world into time-zones that could be dominated. Being able to master time was a prerequisite to not only predicting the future, but programming it as well. During that long century of decline and ruin the dynamics of the City would be reduced to rubble by the formidable power of those gray men who cast a cold eye across anything living. Out of their gaze a Secular Cathedral of power, mastery, and death would encompass the globe in its tentacled reflexes as if some xenothanatropic agent of a zombiefied cold world had descended upon planet earth to infiltrate and capture the desires of humanity. It would slowly adapt its calculating mind to the planetary economy through a process of computational praxis. It’s reduction of the real to the ideal traces of a model would allow it to command and control every last aspect of energetic life on the planet. Nothing would escape its gaze. Graphical statistics, the flattening of the world into diagrammatic algorithms would allow the world not only to be seen at a glance, but allow the first forecast models. This displacement from literature, history, and discursive practices onto mathematical diagrams brought us the dictatorship of calculable and measured facts. One can see in this the movement from geo-maps to managerial and administrative diagrams to the meta-management of the administrator’s themselves in flow-charts and organigrams. Out of this the Managerial State of the Cathedral would emerge not as some spontaneous order, but rather as the calculated growth of a centralized planning committee of bureaucratic command and control technologies. The world would be programmed according to pre-conceived plans of a military style cartography calculated down to absolute Zero. Even the famous assembly lines and factory models of the Fordist era would be based on the geo-cartographies of military planning and calculation. The Factory itself as a war-economy under the guise of peacetime initiatives. Mass society seen as soldiers in an ongoing competitive and aggressive world of mathematical calculation and managed programming. During and after WWII central planning and modeling of society would give rise to the Managerial State. Academic, scientific, political and socio-cultural worlds under the command and control of cybernetic programming models would bring all of the world under the matheme: the total abstraction of the world as a model to be managed and controlled by technocratic experts and specialists. Studying this Fredrich Hayek, Father of the free-market economy, would see in the central bureaucratic programming committee of the Cathedralists the “logics of slavery,” its subterranean tentacles forming the Empire of a Collective Machine. So with the new sciences of the brain arising out of cybernetics and systems theory he would develop a non-centric emergent system of spontaneous economic order to counter the rigid castes of this Managed Society. The self-organized socio-economic order Hayek modeled was based on the inherent crisis and conflict within any natural system, emerging “from the relationship and mutual adjustments between its constituent elements” he based his economic thought on chaos and disorder rather than order: a dynamic system adaptable to the flux and sway of the real world rather than the imposed fictions of the Cathedral’s utopian rigidity. In this way he envisioned a free-market system based on imitating the brain’s own processes: the spontaneous ordering properties of an ideal market which could not be controlled, modeled, or reduced to the Nineteenth century’s representational systems of cartographic, diagrammatic, or managed techniques of central command and control calculation and measurement. Nor to the reduction of the real to mathemes and ideal structures of quantified reason controlled by military planning of the Cathedral’s statist axiomatic. In this way Hayek believed he could circumvent the managed state’s control over and intervention in the free-market economy he envisioned. This battle between the City and the Cathedral led to a differentiation between the universal notion of the world state of progressive socialism, and the more abstract and localized notions of free-market economics of crises, conflict, and disorder that would be based on the impersonal agency of corporate dynamics emerging out of the thanatropic rigidity of Cathedralism. This breakaway dynamism or accelerating of the inherent tendencies within liberty would revolutionize both the socio-cultural and economic systems of the planet for decades. But even this would not last… With the advent of the vast apparatuses of the Cathedral’s regulatory tentacles, and the rise of ICT’s (Information and Communications Technologies of Social Control) in the later half of the twentieth century, and the turn toward autonomous machinic intelligence independent of human intervention and decisional processes we are seeing reemerge the totalistic technocratic Cathedral as the dream of total management of the Real. As this becomes more an more apparent under the auspices of the re-doubling of object and its data, reflected in the command and control structures of algorithmic governmentality, a new world of absolute control is rigidifying and closing off the dynamic positive feed-back loops of the time vectored power of the free-market economies. At every point of in the global territory, every object of the subject that inhabits it is being subjected and captured by its data base twin: the dividual. In this the map is the territory, and the active programming of the dividual trace of each and every individual is being reprogrammed into a system of absolute calculability. A Cognitive Gulag is being constructed and the Real virtualized and re-ontologized to give the appearance of freedom even as it dissolves it. With the erasure of Subject, Free Will, Spontaneous order, chaos, etc. the Cathedral seeks to reduce the human to its inhuman core, the programmable functions of an impersonal process that can supervene upon the now outmoded modes of consciousness and begin to enslave it to the dictates of the central planning committee of a new Secular Religion: the Cathedral. Bypassing the conscious mind the Cathedral seeks to program the deep processes of the brain itself through intervention and control of the very inhuman core itself: the brain’s unconscious neuralnet. Seeking to automate society in both its organic and inorganic aspects the human will disappear into its machines reversing the age old augmentation process into originary technicity. Mindless and robotic the neohumans of this closed world of the Cathedral will perform functionally according to the normative programming of the Hierarchs. Humanity will see itself as free within this sphere of total control bounded only by its memoryless subjectivation in the machinic phylum. Robotic and automated the neohuman will no longer think for itself but will become part of the hive-mind of a central dataworld where its thoughts are activated and tasks are set according to archontic powers outside its grasp of intellect. An affectless, neutered society will develop as CRISPR and other genome technologies of the convergent sphere come online, and a 24/7 world of pure work as play will evolve in the recycled matrix of a virtualized real. The actual and real world ontologized by the Internet-of-things will by design and deliberation control every aspect of life within the Sphere. These enclaves of the new Mega-Cities, the densified and verticalised cities will be based on strict striation and segmentary caste based claves, divided between biogenetic hybrids and advanced technocratic Cyborgization. Naturals will be invested with bonds from birth to death by branded corporational serfdom, provided for and modulated by interface technologies that will program every aspect of their daily routines. This is the outcome of Hegelianism with a vengeance… In the end Hayek’s dream of the free-market of spontaneous and uncontrolled disorder is reduced to the mathematical perfection and purity of a diagrammatic algorithm that can be controlled by the data controllers of a new machinic civilization arising in our midst: a managed Empire of Artilects and robots devoid of the human element of passion and personalism. The programmed territory becomes the completed world of a technocratic Cathedral, a order of perfectly controlled and virtualized environments: spheres, policed by the impersonal High Priests of Finance, Mediatainment, Academia, etc. all serving the new Archons of the Artificial Age. Will the Hayekian disorder prevail over the order of the Cathedral? Will a new City of Pandemonium prevail over the closed world of the Cathedral’s re-ontologization of the Real? Will the blasted spheres of order caught in the meshes of the new Time-Lords break free or collapse within the virtual constructs of the gnostic archons death worlds? Who controls Time, anyway? In ancient times the Gnostics assumed the world had been constructed by a delusional demiurge, a blind god who did not know what he was doing beyond the calculated measurement of his quantified plundering of the universal harmonium. In their view the universe of decay and entropy was absolute evil. A closed realm of absolute control in which humans were imprisoned and asleep, bound by habit and delusion. The awakened ones acted like anti-bodies in the universal decay, seeking to instill liberty into the dark thoughts of the sleepers. One can see in this a fractured and literalized parable of our situation in the present era of the Cathedral. Asleep in the timeless presentism of this closed world of algorithmic governmentality we are being slowly folded into a machinic phylum from which there will be no exit. Our time is limited, this is the moment of transition in-between times – a brief period of chaotic opportunity when we can accelerate these dark processes and counter the very inverted time-machine of this negative feed-back system, reversing its closure into openness and incompleteness and liberty. The time is short, the ways and means assured: What will you do? The City of Liberty or the Cathedral of Control? As in the parables of old, one is left with the admonishment: Sleepers, awaken! You have nothing to lose but your chains. This article is taken from: |
Steven Craig Hickman - The Intelligence of Capital: The Collapse of Politics in Contemporary Society
Steven Craig Hickman - Hyperstition: Technorevisionism – Influencing, Modifying and Updating Reality
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