by Edmund Berger

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. 1

​These are the opening lines of “Meltdown,” a short, hallucinatory psalm, spoken on behalf of the capitalism of the information age and, more specifically, the schizoid bifurcation points occurring in the cracks and fissures it triggers across the globe. Initially impenetrable yet strangely alluring, the text’s language is poetic in form, its progenitors found in critical theory and cyberpunk fiction and film, and its logic machinic and amphetamine addled. The place is the University of Warwick in the early 90s, and the author is a former Continental Philosophy lecturer by the name of Nick Land. “Meltdown: planetary china-syndrome, dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of all christian-socialist eschatology.”
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A little background information: “Meltdown” is torn from the pages of Abstract Culture, the journal/decentralized cultural mirror put out by the now-defunct Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU). With its brief nexus located at Britain’s Warwick University, CCRU was the brainchild of cyber-feminist Sadie Plant and Land himself, with a supporting cast of characters who have gone on to radicalize social and academic spaces in various ways: Steve Goodman, an early innovator of dubstep, well known under his moniker Kode9; Mark Fisher, the force behind the K-Punk blog and author of Capitalist Realism; Kodwo Eshun, whose work More Brilliant than the Sun employs “sonic fiction” to explore the musical trajectories of afro-futurism; Iain Hamilton Grant, a philosopher and translator of texts by Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard; among others. Running through the thoughts manifested by these individuals is the emergent philosophical lineage called ‘speculative realism,’ eschewing post-Kantianism’s correlationism in exchange for a quasi-nihilist metaphysical realism abound with nods to Lovecraft and modern cultural trends.

Its impossible to speak of CCRU and the frantic cybertheories they repeatedly injected into dry academic ivory towerism without providing a cursory mention to Sadie Plant. A graduate of the University of Manchester’s philosophy program, Plant’s Ph.D thesis-turned book The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age gained her renown and a position as a researcher fellow at the University of Warwick’s Social Sciences department. Her curious brand of post-Situationist/post-Thatcher cyber-feminism initially seemed to fit the bill for Warwick’s intellectual climate, drenched in information technology research and the hybrid political philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. To assist her work, CCRU was set up in 1995 as a sort of adjunct facility – but when joined by Nick Land, it quickly transformed itself into what has been described as a sort of university equivalent to Colonel Kurtz and his frightening, psychedelic war machine from the end of Apocalypse Now. Land’s animosity towards the academic universe’s unwritten commandments and careerist bureaucracy had already been readily apparent in his 1992 work The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, a “deranged mix of prose-poem, spiritual autobiography and rigorous explication of the implications of Bataille’s thought.”2 He quickly overtook Plant’s position as steward of the unit, spinning it into a thousand directions, simultaneously encompassing philosophy, physics, biology, mysticism, and all manner of beyonds, sidestepping through the disciplines and exploring the strange spaces between them in a sort of D.I.Y. remix of Norbert Weiner’s original research into cybernetics.

CCRU received ample boosts from sweaty dance floors moved by the sample-heavy bass and backbeats of jungle, dropping chopped-up and scrambled variants of previous musical cultures into the blossoming rave scene of the UK. Jungle’s method of appropriating micro-units of traditional sonic form and social detritus by the way of Kingston’s dub sound systems and Britain’s own recent punk/post-punk past provided a close analogue, in the eyes of the Warwick’s renegade explorers, to the overdriven systematics of post-Fordist capitalism; its tendency towards crisis were also collapsing into Bataille’s feverish fixation on existence in the face of the apocalypse. Capitalism and jungle collide through Abstract Culture with pop culture nuggets reflecting the technological innovations in military hardware, the internet, and other communication platforms: film such as Blade Runner and Terminator, cyberpunk fiction like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, each capturing visions of the future where technology has reached escape velocity, exiting the terrestrial plane with a humanity dragged along with it. Limits dissolving not simply into thresholds, but innumerable exit points.

And thus Land and the CCRU, now minus Plant, produced a bizarre and complex theoretical position called “accelerationism.” Academia was stagnant, reflecting a wider stagnation in the government and the social. State-thought pervaded every level, stifling creativity and movement, reducing everything to the drab and gray monoliths of housing projects – repetition. Everywhere was overwritten with codes, essentially dictating what one can think and what one could do. Even the so-called opposition was complicit. The Old Left was incapable of transforming itself with the changing times, getting themselves lodged in the muck of the laborist paradigm of big unionism and legislative quagmires.

With the dawn of complex information technologies and its proliferation on the grassroots level, combined with the perceived assault on stateform through the neoliberal program, CCRU produced a radically new proposition for revolutionary change that differed wildly from the Marxist-lite meanderings of the professional left. Emancipation from traditional and constraining modes of thought could come, they argued, from the apparatuses of capitalism itself. Monetary flows had the capability, as Marx himself had observed, to make everything solid “melt into air.” Solidity was stagnation; accelerating the melting process thus became essential. Looking at it like this, Marx can been seen as a proto-accelerationist, counting on capitalism to cultivate the proper moment where the “revolution” – whatever that truly means – would flash into existence. But Marx’s method was based in dialectical materialism, a reworking of what is otherwise a philosophical position fixed in a linear and totalizing cosmology. Land and the CCRU, on the other hand, resisted the Hegelian discourse that was the trademark of the dominant state-thought. Instead, they relied heavily on post-Marxist, anti-Hegelian theory emerging in France following the collapse of May ’68’s utopian aspiration – namely, the work of Deleuze and Guattari and those who followed in their footsteps.

​So now it is high time to speak of the disembodiment of reality, this sort of breakdown which, one should think is applied to a self-multiplication proliferating among things and the perception of them in our minds, which is where they do belong – Antonin Artaud, “Description of a physical state”3

​Several key texts from the 1970s have been identified as the locus of the accelerationist theory: Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy (1974), Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), and, I would argue, his infamous Forget Foucault (1977), with an aftershock of sorts occurring in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000). All these works share a commonality in new understandings of capitalism, socialism, control, and resistance; they map new and expectant cartographies of the then-present and the now-current future. Furthermore, each zeroes in the nature of the new paradigm where the logic of revolt that fueled the events of 1968 have become the twin logics of production and consumption, the new language of the marketplace.
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Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus oscillates somewhere between fiction and reality, between radical critique and poetic manifesto – utilizing an assault on Freudianism and Hegelian dialectic with an arsenal of weapons stripped from Marx, Spinoza and Nietzsche, they propose a new model of the unconscious mind. No longer is it a theater of symbols, as Freud posited, but a factory where flows of machines of desire couple and disconnect from one another. Their model of the machinic unconsciousness collapses the superficial boundaries between man and nature, mind and body, and all other manner of dialectics. Current social structures, on the other hand, impose boundaries and block flows, reroute them, capture them for their own rationale, and overcode them. Deleuze and Guattari further their strange new world by producing the concept of ‘nomad thought’ – a formulation with its roots in the Situationist derive or drift, a manner of looking for divergent modes of becoming that finds passages to the outside of the logic and ‘rationalized’ discipline that power creates. This nomadic mechanism is complimented with a charting of the convergences between capitalism and the desiring flows, showing how the system’s tendency towards dissolution breaks down the traditional codework. This isn’t to say that capitalism as-is is the fiscal equivalent of nomadic thought, but there are similarities, the most principle being the concept of deterritorialization. Probing these approaches, Deleuze and Guattari ask:

…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 further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not 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.4

​Even if this is the only place in book where the theory of accelerationism is expressed directly, the entire work illustrates the need for a revolution built upon moving into a beyond through the folds of deterritorialization. They call for a “schizoanalysis,” a radical new form of psychotherapy built upon the model of the schizophrenic – as opposed to the Freudian school’s emphasis on neurosis – to allow for brushes with alterity (otherness) to trigger accelerated processes of becoming. Schizoanalysis, nomadic thought, the flows, there is little separating these, and each urges us to go further and further, beyond doctrinaire Marxism and even the text of Anti-Oedipus itself.
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Within four years, Jean-Francois Lyotard, a veteran of May ’68 and a close friend of Deleuze, had taken up their challenge, effectively schizoanalyzing Anti-Oedipus into a strange new formation that he dubbed Libidinal Economy. He would later disown the book, calling it “evil;” while this is certainly hyperbolic, the ideas expressed within isolated him from mainstream Marxist currents. Rejecting the left’s vanguardist approach to what they characterize as ‘proletarian consciousness,’ Lyotard conflates capitalism’s engine with the worker’s desire for deterritorialization and decoding. “Hang on tight and spit on me,” he commands, thrusting forward the insistence that the working class “enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity…”5 Further still, the intelligentsia, by looking to direct the worker’s desires, was acting in a rather counter-revolutionary model and was complicit with the bourgeoisie:

Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged, smooth-skinned types, but also because you dare not say that the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst – and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the desires of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men, what a leader of pimps, you lean forward and divulge: ah, but that’s alienation, it isn’t pretty, hang on, we’ll save you from it, we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude, we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on the most despicable side, the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalized’s desire be totally ignored, brought to a standstill, you are like priests with sinners…6

After quickly as it had begun, Lyotard immediately retreated from his vitriolic theory-fiction and from a Deleuzian perspective in general, later penning his seminal work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1979. But nomadic wanderings were continued by Jean Baudrillard, whose philosophical trail had begun in the Situationist ferment but were becoming increasingly difficult and abstract. If Deleuze and Guattari had captured the late Sixties zeitgeist and Lyotard had taken these energies to produce a proto-punk refusal, Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death and Forget Foucault was the first blast of cyberpunk – “it didn’t look like anything else that was being published in France during that period. It didn’t seem to belong there, or anywhere for that matter. It was as if it had fallen from outer space.”7 Symbolic Exchange assaults Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard, arguing that their work with ‘desire’ bound them into the dialectical system they were critiquing, and that the schizophrenic flows that desire moved in acted as justification for capitalism itself, which was then transitioning from the post-war Keynesian structure into free-floating, transnational neoliberalism. In other words, he could see fully the spectre of accelerationism and what it meant for any revolutionary alternatives. But, as Benjamin Noy points out, “The difficulty is that Baudrillard’s own catastrophising comprises a kind of negative acceleration, in which he seeks out the point of immanent reversal that inhabits and destabilizes capital.”8 With the aid of anthropology and Bataille’s work, he created the concept of “symbolic exchange,” dissolving the traditional value assigned in the marketplace of capitalist exchanges. This, he says, constitutes a “death function” for the system – but it can only occur if we challenge capitalism to embrace what it is, a monstrous and surreal complex, “endlessly cutting the branch on which it sits.”9

If Baudrillard directly foreshadowed the non-leftist accelerationism and fixation on Bataillian apocalypses of Nick Land, Hardt and Negri’s Empire attempted to re-situate Deleuze and Guattari’s original idea into a [post-]Marxist format in search of a liberatory politics. In 1972, the year that Anti-Oedipus had been published, President Nixon had removed the US dollar from the gold standard, effectively stripping capitalism from any material base and transforming it into a language game, a semiotic system of control that could circle the globe unfixed from the structures that had always augmented monetary flows. It was financial deterritorialization coming to fruition, and, to quote Baudrillard, power had “dissolved purely and simply in a manner that still escapes us.” This power, dispersed in transnational networks across the globe, would be given the name “Empire” by Hardt and Negri, and for them (like Baudrillard), there was no longer any alterity; modernism became postmodernism, Fordism dissolved in the face of post-Fordism, all the previous categories collapsing into one another. Because of this, reactionary revolt as a passage out will never lead to emancipation. We have to go forward:

We cannot move back to any previous social form, nor move forward in isolation. Rather, we must push through Empire to come out the other side…Empire can be effectively contested only on its own level of generality and by pushing the process that it offers past their present limitations. We have to accept that challenge and learn to think globally and act globally. Globalization must be met with a counter-globalization, Empire with a counter-Empire.9

In 1980, Deleuze and Guattari released their follow-up to Anti-Oedipus, an exercise in schizoanalytic nomadic thought they titled A Thousand Plateaus. Here, they seemed hesitant to their earlier vision of unabashed acceleration, offering instead words of caution. They were necessary words: Anti-Oedipus had been written while the revolutionary high of 1968 still hung in the air; but a decade later, left-wing terrorism, rampant drug abuse and rising neoliberalism had generate an aura of pessimism and in certain places, outright despair. They speak of ‘black holes,’ fascistic traps that deterritorializing flows can accelerate themselves into. To make revolution, to engage in processes of becoming, to escape along a line of flight, each operates as a bifurcation point that can lead outward, but there exists the dangers of ‘coiling’ inwards, toward structure and binary oppositions, dialectic stateform dependency – and, in the most extreme cases, death.

​Nick Land saw this retreat, perceived as a sudden moralizing stance, as being antithetical to the ethos of Anti-Oedipus and something in the direction of a betrayal of the work’s spirit. His vision was one of capitalism as the harbinger of the end; he had dialed back a portion of their oeuvre and conjoined the schizoid flows to the Freudian death drive, or thanatos. If bourgeois humanism forms a reactionary mechanic of power, then only the antihumanism provided by the acceleration of capital and its technological counterparts could finally dissolve what is. In “Meltdown,” we find that “Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag.”10
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Apocalyptic intensities aside, Land has conveniently sidestepped a critical aspect of Anti-Oedipus‘s analysis of capitalist deterritorialization. If deterritorialization advances the subversive forces in capitalism’s own flows, there is always the accompanying process of reterritorialization, which draws these unravels energies into a manageable system. These reterritorializations do not happen to spite capitalism, they happened in accordance with it, to stave off the death function that Baudrillard had found:

Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territories, thereby attempting, the best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in the terms of abstract quantities. Everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families. That is what makes the ideology of capitalism “a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.”11

​We’re told in A Thousand Plateaus that “the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence… because there are no reterritorialization afterwards…”12 Thus, we can no longer draw as tidy parallels between nomadic becomings and capitalism as we have to this point, for the true threshold of the nomad is held off, existing only perhaps as a carrot to move power networks to resemble more and more the aesthetic and moral stances of their opposition. As neoliberal capitalism itself became deterritorialized following the end of the Fordist class compact, it simultaneously exalted itself as the great bestower of health,wealth and equality (just think of development programs for the Third World and the philanthropy of industrial and financial giants) while in reality acting as a great destroyer (cyclical crisis, mass wealth inequality, war). To confuse matters more, Deleuze and Guattari point their finger to the stateform itself, the system that was supposed to dissolve away under both Marxist-derived programs and neoliberalism, as the principle actor in the reterritorializations. As we can now see, looking backwards from the vantage point of the latest crises, the state never, ever went away in the neoliberal revolution; it only slightly altered its function, retracing itself in the image of the market. It still creates level after level of bureaucracy, bails-out, enforces laws, regulates, and manages the direction that so-called free trade moves in.
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Land once remarked in an interview that “organization is suppression,” a phrase so anarchic that it could have been found just as easily in the graffiti of the Situationists in 1968 or in the manifestos of the Italian Autonomists in the late 1970s. Following this logic, we can reach the conclusion that the acceleration of capitalism proper will never bestow a post-suppression environment, by virtue of the existence of the corporate model alone. With the modern corporation, the center of power and politics in the neoliberal sphere, we have a multilevel institution operating with the sanction of the state – through the granting of corporate charters – and, frequently, receives direct financial lines from the public coffers in the form of subsidies. And while the corporation is the principle arbiter of capitalism’s global flows, encompassing the monetary, the material, and human elements, it acts as a lopsided entity, a mass centralization that works not with the market, but against it. Manuel deLanda, drawing on research of Fernand Braudel, assigns both the corporation and the idea of capitalism itself to the category of the anti-market – the systems of “large scale enterprises, with several layers of managerial strata, in which prices are set not taken.”13

In contrast to the anti-market is the marketplace proper, a complex “meshwork” of both exchange and production, operating in primarily localized settings and through decentralization – small firms and individuals that actually determine price and labor conditions. deLanda’s meshworks were reflected in the CCRU’s interest in the bottom-up “street markets… a bustling bazaar culture of trade and ‘cutting deals’”,14 and also brings to mind Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of the ‘rhizome’, a decentralized network formation that spreads across smooth spaces, free from hierarchy and command. Yet deLanda warns not to look to the meshwork of the market as something completely revolutionary; while they can resist them, they can also reinforce traditional binaries and hierarchies. There is also the issue of growth, which places the meshworks on a natural trajectory that can lead them to become anti-markets. The rhizome model is to be contrasted with that of a tree, but the figurative tree, not the process of further deterritorialization, is what can grow from the marketplace.

​If we are speaking of illusionary rhizomes and false promises of open networks, we can turn to the other side of the accelerationist coin: the advancing marches of technology revolving around the internet itself. An interactive medium encompassing text and image, code and emotion, history and the future, global interrelation, the internet’s highly schizophrenic and every-shifting nature, its perpetual self-connection through hyperlinks, makes itself appear to be the fulfillment of the rhizome: “Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be…A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”15
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But the internet has its trees and has always had its trees, unlike even the the deLandian market, which becomes hierarchical and treelike. From the beginning it was an agenda of Cold War politics, born from the research laboratories of DARPA and its allied universities. When it came time for the great privatization, it was handed off to corporate monopolies, anti-markets in the purest sense of the word, free from any real competition or external threats. The telecommunication giants serve as the internet’s gatekeepers, the guardians of the flows of information; digital ‘freedom’ comes at the cost of a monthly subscription and the consent to be monitored. And for many, the freedom doesn’t even exist – there is currently a growing crisis, particularly in the US, where people living in rural areas are deprived of internet access. This unfortunate problem stems from the service providers themselves, who simply choose not to operate in these regions because lower population densities would mean lower revenue streams. A double centralization occurs: a digital one, in the form of the ISP’s role as a gatekeeper, and a geographical one, where power, knowledge, and opportunities remain situated in the urban zones. To even begin to truly decentralized the world wide web and flatten out its intrinsic hierarchies, its not a matter of acceleration. Its a matter of a total structural change, a new paradigm for digital futures entirely.

Despite this, however, the spaces of the internet play host to a whole series of deterritorializations. Cyber warmachines – Anonymous, WikiLeaks, the countless advocates of open source technology, social media users in times of political struggle– are capable of crossing the digital threshold and impacting the physical world in very real ways, changing the contours of everyday life. File sharing platforms such as music blogs, torrent sites, and smaller, individualized programs allow capitalist creative destruction to impede on the constructs of copyright and intellectual property, while deeper structures, the darknet and TOR networks, allow for subterfuge and anonymity from the prying eye of government agencies and corporate data collectors.

​We can extoll the virtues of these deterritorializations, for they constitute very real examples of radical becomings with the tools we have available. Yet the spectre of reterritorialization haunts them still, with the state taking on the very roles identified in Anti-Oedipus. As copyright laws become dismantled with the digitalization of music, film, text and information, governments have stepped in to take an active role in taking down hosting sites – an development situated in a great agenda of internet regulation and creation of watchdog agencies. Very real political repression of WikiLeaks is occurring, while the continual use of the TOR networks, stereotyped as a digital ‘wild west’, by violent and exploitative criminal elements only amplifies the calls for intervention. The digital sphere has reached a point where it serves as a mirror of the great neoliberal system, a state of affairs that was predicted decades ago by cyberpunk authors. In works such as Neuromancer, lauded by Land and the CCRU, technology is inseparable from the human body and his external environment while corporate monoliths act in the void left by the absence of functional government – but there exists a strange contradiction in that individuals living and acting on the level of the physical and digital streets have assumed heightened degree of autonomy while also being subjected to the greater ebbs and flows of power. In the cyberworld, as well as the real world, sources for freedom and the bindings of control are being transmitted from the same source – the schizoid movement of capital itself. Through this paradigm, perhaps we can push acceleration away from its looming black holes and reconnect it, as Hardt and Negri try to do, to some form of revolutionary politics.
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“The street finds its own use for things”

I now sense an extraordinary acceleration in the decomposition of all coordinates. Its a treat just the same. All this has to crumble down, but it won’t come from any revolutionary organization. Otherwise you fall back on the most mechanistic utopias of the revolution utopias, the Marxist simplifications… The Italians of Radio Alice have a beautiful saying: when they are asked what has to be built, they answer that the forces capable of destroying this society surely are capable of building something else, yet that will happen on the way. – Felix Guattari, “Why Italy?”16

​At this juncture I would like to interject a new text into the accelerationist canon: The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, recently written by Italian autonomist icon Franco “Bifo” Berardi (who, incidentally, was the founder of the Radio Alice mentioned in the quote above). Its concern certainly isn’t accelerationism per se, but a snapshot of the crisis of largely deterritorialized neoliberalism, taken at the feverpitch of the US Occupy movements, the renewed left-wing insurgency in Europe, and the Arab Spring. As the new democratic consciousness (if it can be called that) swept up malaise and despair and transmorphed them into anti-capitalist meshworks, Bifo reminds us of the crisis of technocapitalism had very real and dangerous possibilities for reterritorializations, harking back to Deleuze and Guattari’s black holes. The text draws forth apocalyptic imagery: the punk refrain of “no future”, violence, the specter of fascism. In many ways, it resembles (in tone, certainly not wording) Land’s own accelerated apocalypse – government’s corruption by “narco-capital” and the transfer of its police and military powers to “borderline-Nazi private security organizations”, the “urban warscape” and the “feral youth cultures” crawling their way through the “derelicted warrens at the heart of darkness.”17
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All these things have come to pass, with the war on drugs transforming Mexico into a failed state, the privatization of warfare and relief with Blackwater in Iraq and New Orleans, the rise of the Golden Dawn in Greece… From here, Land appears not as our Nietzsche, as Fisher claims, but our Antonin Artaud, embodying the crisis in his precognitive, end times-tinged madness, while simultaneously showing potential avenues for exodus, passages to the outside. To quote his former student and fellow CCRUer, Robin MacKay, “academics talked endlessly about the outside, but no-one went there. Land, by exemplary contrast, made experiments in the unknown unavoidable…” 18

Anti-Oedipus, by way of MacKay and Fisher: “A breath of fresh air, a little relation to the outside, that’s all schizoanalysis asks.”19

Where is this outside, the big other, alterity? As we’ve mentioned, in post-Fordist neoliberalism, its vanished, existing only as prepackaged exoticism. This provides a fundamental paradox – Hardt and Negri, in their own formula of acceleration, repeatedly tell us that Empire must be pushed to the “other side” (where is this other side?) and that exodus from the system constitutes a vital strategy (exodus to where?). Exodus can no longer inhabit a physical outside, so the only place that exodus can occur is within – both in the social spaces of capitalism itself and in the individual itself. Again, nomadic thought, the traversing even the exteriority inside oneself. But we cannot escape into pure thought, float like the original surrealists amongst the unconscious pools of phantasms and dreams – or can we? Shed of its Freudian and Stalinist ambitions, surrealism can show how drifting through the mind’s ambiances can create form in the physical world. “Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.”20 Let us conjoin these notions with George Jackson, by way of Anti-Oedipus: “I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon.”21

We can now loop this back to one of starting points, Deleuze and Guattari’s recomposition of the unconscious mind as a flowing factory of desiring-machines. Desire is not necessarily libidinal, as Freud and his alcolytes would have it; at its basis, it is a creative force. If capitalism has seized desire into its own deterritorializing and reterritorializing processes, then a proper method of acceleration would not have to be capitalism itself, but of the rhizomatic creativity buried within it. How else can we dodge the hierarchies of command and centralization that follow in the stateforms wake?

Land’s acceleration, in the speculative sense and the market sense, concerns itself, at its core, with one thing: pushing past its limits. Here Bifo is central: he notes that in the 90s, capitalism did accelerate, straight into what was predicted by CCRU – a collapse with shades of the apocalypse. And in a similar train of thought, he expounds a thesis that traditional forms of solidarity, and forms of resistance, are an impossibility, assigned to the dustbins of nostalgia that keep the system’s heart beating even when it has, for all intents and purposes, died on the operating table. Instead, he turns to a different form of limit-busting, that of language itself, the experience of which “happens in finite conditions of history and and existence… Grammar is the establishment of limits defining a space of communication.”22 Capitalism, at the end of history, descended into the empty circulation of linguistic signs and symbols, abstracts. Now we can scramble these linguistic parameters further, seize them and appropriate them, use them to eek out new conditions for solidarity. The mechanism he proposes is poetry, “the reopening of the indefinite, the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words.” I think back to Magritte and his most famous work of surrealism, the juxtaposition of the image of a pipe with the words ‘this is not a pipe’ – code scrambling need not be poetry alone, but any aesthetic form.

If this linguistic-aesthetic turn seems too abstract, consider that speech itself forms part of the rock on which subjectivity is built: “I is an other, a multiplicity of others, embodied at the intersection of partial components of enunciation, breaching on all sides individuated identity and the organized body.”23 Guattari divides up the impact of these forms of enunciation, placing on oneside the signifying system of “emtpy speech”, direct command and logistical control; and on the other, “ordinary speech,” an complex affective system that encompasses not only the words themselves but articulates itself in conjunction with tonations, rhythms, facial expression, collaboration. Take the academic ivory tower, railed against by Land – theory-talk, political correctness, servitude to the given field’s magistrates and the cookie-cutter essay format, all provide a one-way uniformity in the student body, who pass on these hierarchies and overcodes in their own careers. Empty speech and all that it entails acts as a self-replicating system of control, and what is at stake is an autonomy of subjectivity itself.

​Lets look at another example of subjectivity with connections to the CCRU moment: rave culture, the emergence of which Sadie Plant linked to the collapse of Britain’s labor paradigm under Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution as a method for finding new forms of collectivity. Curiously, it resembled deLanda’s meshworks: it initially flourished in the underground, linked by cottage industries and word of mouth, secret codes and maps pointing the way to parties. The patchwork music, cobbled from various sources and blended into an alchemical mixture, established the smooth sonic space where the rave took place, but the DJ or MC, in collaboration with the ravers, utilized polyphonic enunciations (oohs and ahhs, toasting, complex affective exchanges) to create emergent subjectivities that were far more collective than individual, subjectivities that looked for the outside at a time when none could be found or occur:
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In her memoir Nobody Nowhere, the autistic Donna Williams describes how as a child she would withdraw from a threatening reality into a private preverbal dream-space of ultravivid color and rhythmic pulsations; she could be transfixed for hours by iridescent motes in the air that only she could perceive. With its dazzling psychotropic lights, its sonic pulses, rave culture is arguably a form of collective autism. The rave is utopia in its original etmymological sense: a nowhere/nowhen wonderland.24 (emphasis in original)

Quite literally a deterritorialization in the truest sense of the word – and one following the trajectory of capital acceleration – rave culture was quickly reterritorialized for capitalism by the state: crackdown on illegal parties, the creation of new laws, the centralization of power in the hands of corporate promoters, attacks on MDMA, all these moved rave culture away from the ‘margins’ and into the mainstream. A line of flight consisting of enunciation, aesthetics and movement, it ended up rebolstering the consumptive process of the spectacle, but there are still divergent deterritorializations utilizing the initial ethos against the powers of transnational capitalism. I’m talking here of the alter-globalization movement’s “Reclaim the Streets” (RTS) program of direct action. Rave party and protest collide together in streets of urban space, the arteries of the centers of postmodern capitalism. By occupying the streets and turning them into public bazaars, social centers and dance parties, a new form of social collectivity is produced: the Common, not only in the sense of a space of mutual aid and collective work, but also as a form of multifaceted enunciation. The fact that both RTS and the early rave movement latched onto the same theoretical construct – Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone (T.A.Z., a “temporary ‘power-surge’ against normality”)25 – and that Hardt and Negri believe that the Commonwill insue from accelerating Empire into the outside, we can gleem an important lesson: what is being concerned here is not simply a matter of physical space, though that is important. It is of a subjectivity established along lines of multiplicities, frenzied criss-crosses of speech and affective deterritorialized becomings. Acceleration collapses because neoliberalism can’t promise what it said it would. It’s up to us to carry on the mantle.

​In November of 2011 I found myself in New York City, moving as one individual in the mass swarm flowing through the streets of the financial district – an event that would have been unimaginable, I believe, without the groundwork laid by things such as RTS and the T.A.Z. As I watched the occupation’s internal workings, its rhizomatic networks of working groups, spokes councils, general assemblies and internet spaces, I was struck with a particular thought. Its not easy to place capitalism and its opposition in an easily defineable binary schema, because capitalism, like the people who actively resist it, is a system-in-becoming. Every person who was there was brought to the occupations by the complexity of capitalism’s flows, and were tapping it to wrestle it into something different. No two people who occupied in America, or marched in the streets of Europe or fought for democracy in the Middle East – or all those who oscillated between each in assemblages provided by information-communicative technologies – were identical; it was a composition of a myriad of collaescing concepts and complaints, hopes and analyses, intentions and experiences, affects and speech.
​
Because of this, no singular identity could be generated, nor platform for party-based revolution or reform. That didn’t stop the telecommunication-media complexes from trying to find these. “Make yourself a signifier!” they shouted, wanting, hoping, for some fixed point that could be easily digested and assimilated in the bureaucracy of control. They didn’t understand that that year’s transnational event of collective enunciation wanted to avoid the transformation into “empty speech” and the stodgy, gray stateform (both within and outside government) that comes part and parcel with it. They didn’t understand that neoliberalism’s chaos was producing yet another kind of chaos, one that was interactive and swelling from the bottom up.

​Perhaps “chaos” isn’t the best choice of words, for we must define ourselves as seperate from neoliberal’s own kind of organized, exploitative chaos. Returning to Deleuze and Guattari, this time through Bifo’s work on poetry: “Art is not chaos, but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos.”26 The chaosmos, a shift from the “dissonance” generated by accelerated capital and technotronics, “simultaneously creates the aesthetic conditions for the perception and expression of new modes of becoming.” The street will find its own use for things, as the cyberpunks proclaimed, and the micro-revolutions that this produces will be aestheticized and multiplied, not Hegelianized; it will exist on the smooth plane of the virtual, where there can be endless potentials for flight and finding weapons, bifurcation points and new creations. The chaotic principle must be at work to reestablish sources of alterity and to avoid reterritorialization as much as possible – no more totalizing syntheses…
​
The important thing here is not only the confrontation with a new material of expression, but the constitution of complexes of subjectivation: multiple exchanges between individual-group-machine. These complexes of subjectivation actually offer people diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and, in a certain way, to resingularise themselves… We are not confronted with subjectivity given as in-itself, but with processes of the realisation of autonomy, or autopoiesis…27

The story goes like this: when we speak of autonomy, autonomy of the subject, of its enunciations and its relations to collective experience, we speak of something that neoliberalism and social democratic governance claimed for its own, but never truly had: plurality. As such, making revolt in the neoliberal epoch itself cannot be a strict, singular platform; principles of autonomy, collective aesthetics and chaosmos run contrary to this. There is no utopia at the end of the road, no messianic communist reality knocking at our doorstep. But this does not disqualify resistance. We have the ability to create autonomy when we resist, and what we demand is space – geophysical, affective, and mental space. The Commons, if we so choose. At the very least, the option and ability to live free from command and control.

In at the closing of this dangling, never to be completed essay, I want finish with a final quote from Felix Guattari, as he looked out upon the Brazilian democratic uprisings at the dawn of the 1980s. This, I believe, is precisely the type of sentiments and sensibilities that we must now try to accelerate:

Yes, I believe that there is a multiple people, a people of mutants, a people of potentialities that appears and disappears, that is embodied in social events, literary events, and musical events… I don’t know, perhaps I’m raving, but I think we’re in a period of productivity, proliferation, creation, utterly fabulous revolutions from the viewpoint of the emergence of a people. That’s molecular revolution: it isn’t a slogan or a program, it’s something I feel, that I live, in meetings, in institutions, in affects, and in some reflections.28

​1Nick Land “Meltdown” Abstract Culture, Swarm 1 http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm

2Simon Reynolds “Renegade Academia” originally published in Lingua Franca, 1999 http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/renegade-academia-cybernetic-culture.html
​
3Antonin Artaud, Jack Hirschman (ed.) Artaud Anthology City Lights, 1965, pg. 29

4Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Penguin, 1977, pgs. 239-240

5Jean-Francois Lyotard Libidinal Economy Athlone Press, 2004 pg. 109

6Ibid., pgs. 113-114

7Jean Baudrillard Forget Foucault Semiotext(e) 2007, pg. 9

8Benjamin Noys The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pg. 6

9Baudrillard Forget Foucault pg. 12

9Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri Empire Harvard University Press, 2000, pgs. 206-20

10Land “Meltdown”

11Deleuze, Guattari Anti-Oedipus, pg. 34

12Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and SchizophreniaUniversity of Minnesota Press, 1987 pg. 381

13Manuel deLanda “Markets and anti-markets in the world economy” Alamut April 26th1998 http://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/de_landa/antiMarkets.html

14Reynolds “Renegade Academia”

15Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, pg.7

16Felix Guattari “Why Italy?” in Sylvere Lotringer (ed) Autonomia: Post-Political PoliticsSemiotext(e), 2007 pg. 236

17Land “Meltdown”

18Robin MacKay “Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism” Umelec Magazine, January, 2012

19Mark Fisher and Robin MacKay “PomoPhobia” Abstract Culture, Swarm 1 http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_pomo.htm

20Herbert Marcuse, quoted in Franklin Rosemont “Herbert Marcuse and Surrealism” Arsenal no.4, 1989

21Deleuze, Guattari Anti-Oedipus, pg. 277

22Franco “Bifo” Berardi The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance Semiotext(e), 2012, pg. 158

23Felix Guattari Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm Indiana University Press, 1995 pg. 83

24Simon Reynolds Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture Routledge, 1999 pg. 248

25Ibid., pg. 245

26Berardi The Uprising pg. 150

27Guattari Chaosmosis, pg. 7

28Felix Guattari Molecular Revolution in Brazil Semiotext(e), 2007, pg. 9

taken from:

by Amy Ireland

As the CCRU’s tangled time tales emerge from obscurity, Amy Ireland digs deeper into the sorcerous cybernetics of the time spiral, acceleration, and nonhuman poetics

A sufficiently advanced technology would seem to us to be a form of magic; Arthur C. Clarke has pointed that out. A wizard deals with magic; ergo a ‘wizard’ is someone in possession of a highly sophisticated technology, one which baffles us. Someone is playing a board game with time, someone we can’t see. It is not God.

— Philip K Dick​

In this book it is spoken of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results follow.

— Aleister Crowley

Chronology is an antiquated fetish.

​— Marc Couroux

How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyberguerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one’s software was the part of the disguise? Exactly like this?

— Nick Land

​Modernity is cyberpositive. Yeats plotted this out in the ‘widening gyres’ of 1919’s ‘The Second Coming’, and again in 1925 and 1937 in his prose work A Vision, a mystical text composed of information revealed to him through the medium of his wife’s sustained experiments in automatic writing.1 In A Vision and related textual fragments composed between 1919 and 1925, hyperstitional agents Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne recount the discovery of an arcane philosophical system encoded in a series of geometrical diagrams—‘squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving gyres intersecting each other at various angles, figures sometimes with great complexity’—found accidentally by Robartes in a book that had been propping up the lopsided furniture of his shady Cracow bedsit.2 Aherne is skeptical, but as Robartes delves further into the system’s origin, he discovers that the Cracow book (the Speculum Angelorum et Hominis by one ‘Giraldus’, published in 1594) recapitulates the belief system of an Arabian sect known as the Judwalis or ‘diagrammatists’, who in turn derived it from a mysterious work—now long lost—containing the teachings of Kusta ben Luka, a philosopher at the ancient Court of Harun Al-Raschid, although rumour has it that ben Luka got it from a desert djinn.3
​
The hypothesis that a copy of Giraldus’s book was among those texts seized by the University of Warwick when it ejected the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) from the custodianship of its philosophy department in 1997 is unsupported by anything other than dim intimations and local hearsay; however, it can be asserted with some level of confidence that members of the unit had been in possession of fragments of Yeats’s record of Robartes’s discovery, if not the full text of A Vision in either of its two predominant instantiations. A cursory comparison of Ccru texts dealing with the then-still-inchoate notion of accelerationism—from Sadie Plant and Nick Land’s ‘Cyberpositive’, through the latter’s luminous mid-nineties missives (‘Circuitries’, ‘Machinic Desire’, ‘Meltdown’, and ‘Cybergothic’ are exemplary) to the contemporary elaboration of the phenomenon in his cogent and obscure ‘Teleoplexy’—with Robartes’s gloss of Judwali philosophy, is enough to posit the malefic presence of abstract spiromancy in both systems of historical divination. Indeed, a diligent student of occulted spironomics might even draw the timeline back to 1992 where the gyre emerges as the infamous ‘fanged noumenon’ of the eponymous chapter in Land’s bizarre monograph, The Thirst for Annihilation.4
​
Giraldus’s diagrams are all variations on a principle schema of two intersecting cones, one inverted and nested inside the other:5

As in Robartes’s historical account of the system’s exposition by four dancers (pupils of Kusta ben Luka) in the desert sands before a doubtful caliph, the full implications of the schema are not apparent until it is set in motion, for each cone must be imagined to house a double gyre which simultaneously expands and contracts in opposite directions and in rhythmic alliance with the gyres of the opposing cone.6 The range of these expansions and contractions denotes relative increases and decreases in the influence of the four faculties attributed to each of the turning gyres. In this manner, the values represented by the schema are always in steady relation, ‘the energy of one tendency being in exact mathematical proportion to that of the other’: a waxing here corresponds to a waning there.7 When a cone has exhausted one full sequence of its double gyre, a sudden transfer of momentum compels a shift from that cone to its counterpart across their extremities (a jump from the narrow end of Cone A to the dilated end of Cone B, and vice versa). Because of this dynamic, one cone is always in prominence while the other is occulted, an arrangement that reverses at the conclusion of the next gyre sequence, or ‘cycle’. This jump corresponds to one of the four ‘phases of crisis’ and indexes an epistemological blind spot comparable to the event horizon of a black hole, impossible to see beyond from a point internal to the system. Grasped from outside, however, the strange hydraulics of the gyres describe a fatalistic set of inversions and returns that ultimately furnish a rich resource for augury, one that Yeats, editing Robartes’s papers, unhesitatingly exploited in the first version of A Vision.8

​When applied to the task of historical divination (our interest here), the waxing and waning of the gyres can be charted in twenty-eight phases along the path of an expanding and contracting meta-gyre or ‘Cycle’ which endures for roughly two millennia and is neatly divisible into twelve sub-gyres (comprising four cardinal phases and eight triads) each of which denotes a single twist in the larger, container Cycle.9 According to the system as it was originally relayed to George Yeats through the automatic script (an exact date does not appear in the Speculum Angelorum et Hominis or Judwali teachings), the twelfth gyre in our current—waxing—Cycle turns in 2050, when ‘society as mechanical force [shall] be complete at last’ and humanity, symbolized by the figure of The Fool, ‘is but a straw blown by the wind, with no mind but the wind and no act but a nameless drifting and turning’, before the first decade of the twenty-second century (a ‘phase of crisis’) ushers in an entirely new set of twelve gyres: the fourth Cycle and the first major historical phase shift in two thousand years.10 Laying Yeats’s awkward predictions (which he himself shelved for the 1937 edition of A Vision) to one side, the system provides material for the inference of several telling traits that can be combined to give a rough sketch of this imminent Cycle upon whose cusp we uneasily reside. Unlike the ‘primary’ religious era that has preceded it—marked by dogmatism, a drive towards unity, verticality, the need for transcendent regulation, and the symbol of the sun—the coming age will be lunar, secular, horizontal, multiple, and immanent: an ‘antithetical multiform influx’.11The ‘rough beast’ of ‘The Second Coming’, Christ’s inverted double, sphinx-like (a creature of the threshold) with a ‘gaze blank and pitiless as the sun’, will bear the age forward into whatever twisted future the gyres have marked out for it.12
​
In ‘Teleoplexy’, as the most recent, succinct expression of accelerationism in its Landian form (distinguished from the Left queering of the term more frequently associated with Srnicek and Williams’s ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’),13Land draws out the latent cybernetic structure of the Judwalis’ system and employs it to reach a similar catastrophic prediction, although the somewhat restrained invocation of ‘Techonomic Singularity’ dampens the rush of what has previously been designated as ‘a racing non-linear countdown to planetary switch’ in which ‘[z]aibatsus flip into sentience as the market melts to automatism, politics is cryogenized and dumped into the liquid-helium meat-store, drugs migrate onto neurosoft viruses and immunity is grated-open against jagged reefs of feral AI explosion, Kali culture, digital dance-dependency, black shamanism epidemic, and schizophrenic break-outs from the bin’.14 Like the Judwalis’ system, the medium of accelerationism is time, and the message here regarding temporality is consistent: not a circle or a line; not 0, not 1—but the torsional assemblage arising from their convergence, precisely what ‘breaks out from the bin[ary]’. Both systems, as maps of modernity, appear as, and are piloted by, the spiral (or ‘gyre’). As an unidentified carrier once put it, ‘the diagram comes first’.15

According to its own propaganda, modernity is progressive, innovative, irreversible, and expansive.16 It plots a direct line out of the cyclical, seasonal pulse of pre-modern ecology to a future state of technical mastery and social enlightenment. The modernist imperative to ‘make it new’ ostensibly refuses the closure and insulation against shock expressed by cyclicality, yet, as Land is quick to point out, subsequently smuggles it back in by other means, championing self-referentiality in modernist aesthetics, relying on the cycle as the basic unit for historical and economic analysis, retaining archaic calendric arrangements, and betraying its prevalence in the popular imagination via the emergence of the time loop as a key archetypal trope in twentieth-century science fiction.17 A link between the cyclic inclination and anthropomorphic bias can easily be excavated by pointing to the myriad cyclic rhythms intrinsic to the natural human physiology that surreptitiously conditions modernity’s self-apprehension from the inside. This disavowed duplicity at the heart of the modernist enterprise exposes the falseness of its relation to the ‘new’ by revealing the extent to which it always hedges its bets against radical openness, or what Land will call the Outside. Modernity’s novelty only arrives via a restricted economy of possibility for which the terms (commensurate with human affordability) are always set in advance.18

​Posed as an epistemological question, the fortifications erected by this arrangement against the intrusion of the unprecedented and unknown are highly suspicious. What Landian accelerationism shares with the Judwalis’ system is an acknowledgement that the real shape of novelty is not linear but spirodynamic. Land’s cybernetic upgrade of the gyre reads the spiral as a cipher for positive feedback and, charged with the task of diagramming modernity, locates its principal motor in the escalatory M-C-M’ circuitry of capitalism. Against the metrical models of feedback expounded by Norbert Wiener, whose foundational Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine operates as ‘propaganda against positive feedback—quantizing it as amplification within an invariable metric—[to establish] a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future’, a representation which offers a misleadingly simplistic choice between the dependable utility of homeostatic equilibrium and its pathological other, Land offers the following complexification:

[I]t is necessary to differentiate not just between negative and positive feedback loops, but between stabilization circuits, short-range runaway circuits, and long-range runaway circuits. By conflating the two latter, modernist cybernetics has trivialized escalation processes into unsustainable episodes of quantitative inflation, thus side-lining exploratory mutation over against a homeostatic paradigm.19

​The key difference lies in the impossibility of distilling the effects of long-range runaway circuitry in terms of metrics alone. A cyberpositive circuit that can sustain itself over a long period of time—a question of the capacity to self-design, ‘but only in such a way that the self is perpetuated as something redesigned’—will reach a state of feedback density that effectively flips extensity into intensity, and thus engineers a change in kind rather than degree: phase shift, or catastrophe (with -strophe derived from the Greek strephein, ‘to turn’).20 It is here that the cybernetic propensity for ‘exploratory mutation’ finds its vocation as the producer of true novelty and, compressed into the notion of negentropy, dovetails with what Land refers to as ‘intelligence’, that which modernity—grasped nonlinearly—labours to emancipate.21 It is of little import that such emancipation corresponds to the elimination of the ‘human’ as it is traditionally understood. Viewed indifferently, catastrophe is just another word for novelty.

​‘Teleoplexy’’s opening scenes depict a set of embattled doubles: primary and secondary processes, chronic and retrochronic temporality, inverse teleologies, critique and realism, a view from within opposed by a view from without. Such a structure cannot but recall the gyres that spin both ways at once in the Judwalis’ diagrams, and the intersecting but inverted cones—one ‘primary’, the other ‘antithetical’—that exchange places at the turning of a Cycle. Indeed, Yeats himself refers to this switch as ‘catastrophic’.22 Just as the Judwalis’ system affords an insider/outsider perspective, licensing prediction (an insight available to those equipped with adequate skills for deciphering the diagrams) but outlawing positive knowledge, the spiral comprehends catastrophe chiastically. Seen from within, it documents collapse into ultimately unknowable terrain; seen from without, it discloses a pattern of assembly.

When he first shares his discovery of Giraldus’s diagrams with Aherne, Robartes explains that they are animated by ‘a fundamental mathematical movement…which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered’, and that ‘when you have found this movement and calculated its relations, you can foretell the entire future’.23 By their very nature as esoteric tools for divination, abstract diagrams have a tendency to place agency in a complicated relationship with fate. In the Judwalis’ system, Fate and Will occupy opposite poles of opposing cones and thereby increase and decrease in perfect inverse ratio to one another. Historically interpreted, Fate corresponds to the wide end of the ‘primary’ cone, and is thus set to exert maximum influence over the imminent final phases of the current Cycle as it veers closer to catastrophe.24 Similarly, as the inexorable outcome of an intensifying cyberpositive process, the catastrophe of ‘Teleoplexy’ is also posited as fate—or more tellingly, ‘doom’.25 The future, marked up by the immanent unfolding of the spiral, has already been determined diagrammatically, while remaining, from the inside, a harbinger of the unknown. ‘Why wait for the execution? Tomorrow has already been cremated in Hell.’26 Put otherwise, what appears as new from one side has already happened from the point of view of the other.
​
At the same time, the negentropic process it represents (self-assembly) delivers the coup de grâce to linearity.

If entropy defines the direction of time, with increasing disorder determining the difference of the future from the past, doesn’t (local) extropy—through which all complex cybernetic beings, such as lifeforms, exist—describe a negative temporality, or time-reversal? Is it not in fact more likely, given the inevitable embeddedness of intelligence in ‘inverted’ time, that it is the cosmological or general conception of time that is reversed (from any possible naturally-constructed perspective)?27

​In the framework posed by a cosmological application of the second law of thermodynamics, negentropy registers as time anomaly. As it slots itself together, the assembly circuitry of terrestrial capitalism increasingly evades the jurisdiction of asymmetrical temporalization, appearing from a vantage point mired within linear time as ‘an invasion from the future’.28 This capacity to hide in time constitutes one aspect of its redoubtable camouflage, the other coins the neologism ‘teleoplexy’—the concealment of an antithetical teleological undertow in the presumed subordination of machinic ends to human ones. At first, this basic, spirodynamic process is only graspable negatively from the side of the regulator (to use the engineering term). This is the default transcendental position. Deploying a metaphor that points conspiratorially back to the architectural aversion of Bataille, Land remarks that, initially ‘it is the prison, and not the prisoner, who speaks’.29 Reality is spontaneously arranged around the ‘inertial telos’ of cybernegative apprehension, which asks the naïve question: ‘Do we want capitalism?’30 Shrewdly reformulated, the question runs: What does capitalism want with you?

As capital’s process of auto-sophistication intensifies, the ruse becomes increasingly decipherable and the mistake humanity has made in assuming the primacy of the secondary, which is to say, the ultimate regulatability of the occulted escalatory process (mistaking one telos for another) becomes traumatically apparent.

Means of production become the ends of production, tendentially, as modernization—which is capitalization—proceeds. Techonomic development, which finds its only perennial justification in the extensive growth of instrumental capabilities, demonstrates an inseparable teleological malignancy, through intensive transformation of instrumentality, or perverse techonomic finality. The consolidation of the circuit twists the tool into itself, making the machine its own end, within an ever deepening dynamic of auto-production. The ‘dominion of capital’ is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool.31

​By surreptitiously incentivising it to fulfil the role of an external reproductive system—the wet channel that runs between one technological innovation and another—capital has deceived humanity into gestating the means of its own annihilation. ‘This is the art of the machines’, explains the anonymous author in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon—‘they serve that they may rule. They bear no malice towards man for destroying a whole race of them provided he creates a better machine instead; on the contrary, they reward him liberally for having hastened their development.’32 The declaration that capitalism is bad is an ineffectual platitude; the declaration that it is cunning is something altogether different. ‘Humanity is a compositional function of the post-human’, writes Land, ‘and the occult motor of the process is that which only comes together at the end’: ‘Teleoplexy’ names both this cleverness and its emergent outcome.33

​Significantly, this primary/secondary process dualism lends teleoplexy a gnostic twist for which the spiral performs the work of a decoder ring, correlating novelty with fate across the complex temporal disjunction. Information gleaned from the secondary/regulatory process (mistaken as primary) constitutes exoteric non-knowledge and sets up the historical narrative of catastrophe. Spiro-gnomic proficiency, or the ability to grasp terrestrial modernity through the figure of the spiral, which invokes-by-diagramming sustained positive feedback, entropy dissipation, time anomaly, intelligence, the price system, memetic or viral propagation, prime distribution, arms races, addiction, and zero control, among other things, compiles a body of esoteric knowledge and uses it to read catastrophe backwards as anastrophe, the primary process it sympathizes with opening the gateway to the retrochronic vantage point.34 As Plant and Land would put it in ‘Cyberpositive’, ‘Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together. Seen from within history, divergence is reaching critical proportions. From the matrix [Land: ‘a web is a spiral’], crisis is a convergence misinterpreted by mankind.’35 Reformulated for insider deployment (but arriving from the outside in) the exoteric non-knowledge of catastrophe, apprehended positively, indexes the extreme novelty of what should properly be called ‘anastrophic modernity’.
​
It is important here to note that the emergent teleology of accelerationism—as the generation of the catastrophically new—elides any external notion of plan, judgement, or law. In fact, Land makes it clear that it is better grasped as a ‘natural-scientific “teleonomy”’, evolving its rules immanently as it follows the unchecked perturbation of its mechanism through to the ‘ultimate implication’.36 That which it produces will be profoundly unprecedented—to the ruin of all extant law—a singularity in the classic, cartographic sense. Insofar as it is one, spironomics is the law that obsolesces all law.

Via the means-ends reversal of its teleoplexic unfolding, modernity splits in two—one part travelling forwards towards catastrophe, the other travelling backwards from anastrophe—to encounter itself, in time, as another. What does it mean to suddenly catch sight of something that is supposed to be oneself, yet is unrecognizable? The horror that attends this meeting cannot be understated. ‘One meets oneself and it is no longer one, at least straightforwardly. Je est un autre.’37 What Rimbaud captured in his letter to Izambard was a signal transmitting from the future.

In its simplest form, then, accelerationism is a cybernetic theory of modernity released from the limited sphere of the restricted economy (‘isn’t there a need to study the system of human production and consumption within a much larger framework?’ asks Bataille) and set loose to range the wilds of cosmic energetics at will, mobilizing cyberpositive variation as an anorganic evolutionary and time-travelling force.38 A ‘rigorous techonomic naturalism’ in which nature is posited as neither cyclical-organic nor linear-industrial, but as the retrochronic, autocatalytic, and escalatory construction of the truly exceptional.39 Human social reproduction culminates in the point where it produces the one thing that, in reproducing itself, brings about the destruction of the substrate that nurtured it. Technics and nature connect up on either side of a lacuna that corresponds to human social and political conditioning so that the entire trajectory of humanity reaches its apotheosis in a single moment of pure production (or production-for-itself).40 The individuation of self-augmenting machinic intelligence as the culminating act of modernity is understood with all the perversity of the cosmic scale as a compressed flare of emancipation coinciding with the termination of the possibility of emancipation for the human. ‘Life’, as Land puts it ‘is being phased out into something new’—‘horror erupting eternally from the ravenous Maw of Aeonic Rupture’, while at the fuzzed-out edge of apprehension, a shadow is glimpsed ‘slouching out of the tomb like a Burroughs’ hard-on, shit streaked with solar-flares and nanotech. Degree zero text-memory locks-in. Time begins again forever’.41

by Amy Ireland

We are the virus of a new world disorder.

—VNS Matrix

​January 1946, Mojave Desert. Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist and Thelemite, performs a series of rituals with the intention of conjuring a vessel to carry and direct the force of Babalon, overseer of the Abyss, Sacred Whore, Scarlet Woman, Mother of Abominations. His goal is to bring about a transition from the masculine Aeon of Horus to a new age—an age presided over by qualities imputed to the female demon: fire, blood, the unconscious; a material, sexual drive and a paradoxical knowledge beyond sense … the wages of which are nothing less than the ego-identity of Man—the end, effectively, of “his” world. Her cipher in the Cult of Ma’at is 0, and she appears in the major arcana of the Thoth Tarot entangled with the Beast as Lust, to which is attributed the serpent’s letter ט‎, and thereby the number 9. In her guise as harlot, it is said that Babalon is bound to “yield herself up to everything that liveth,” but it is by means of this very yielding (“subduing the strength” of those with whom she lies via the prescribed passivity of this role) that her devastating power is activated: “[B]ecause she hath made her self the servant of each, therefore is she become the mistress of all. Not as yet canst thou comprehend her glory.”2 In his invocations Parsons would refer to her as the “flame of life, power of darkness,” she who “feeds upon the death of men … beautiful—horrible.”

In late February—the invocation progressing smoothly—Parsons receives what he believes to be a direct communication from Babalon, prophesying her terrestrial incarnation by means of a perfect vessel of her own provision, “a daughter.” “Seek her not, call her not,” relays the transcript.

Let her declare. Ask nothing. There shall be ordeals. My way is not in the solemn ways, or in the reasoned ways, but in the devious way of the serpent, and the oblique way of the factor unknown and unnumbered. None shall resist [her], whom I lovest. Though they call [her] harlot and whore, shameless, false, evil, these words shall be blood in their mouths, and dust thereafter. For I am BABALON, and she my daughter, unique, and there shall be no other women like her.

​Blinded by an all-too-human investment in logics of identity and reproduction, Parsons makes the critical mistake of anticipating a manifestation in human form, understanding the prophecy to mean that, by means of sexual ritual, he will conceive a magickal child within the coming year. This does not transpire and the invocations are temporarily abandoned, but Parsons refuses to give up hope. He writes in his diary that the coming of Babalon is yet to be fulfilled, confirming that he considered the invocation to have remained unanswered at the time, then issues the following instruction to himself: “this operation is accomplished and closed—you should have nothing more to do with it—nor even think of it, until Her manifestation is revealed, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt.”5Parsons didn’t live long enough to witness the terrestrial incarnation of his demon, dying abruptly only a few years later in an explosion occasioned by the mishandling of mercury fulminate, at the age of thirty-seven. A strange death, but one—it might be suggested—that was necessary for the proper fulfillment of the invocation, for it was augured in the communication of February the 27th, 1946, that Babalon would “come as a perilous flame,” and again in the ritual of March the 2nd of the same year, that “She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before She incarnates.”6

Something had crept in through the rift Parsons had opened up—something “devious,” “oblique,” ophidian, “a factor unknown and unnumbered.” Consider this. Parson’s final writings contain the following vaticination: “within seven yearsof this time, Babalon, The Scarlet Woman, will manifest among ye, and bring this my work to its fruition.” These words were written in 1949. In 1956—exactly seven years later—Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, and Nathan Rochester organized the Dartmouth Conference in New Hampshire, officially setting an agenda for research into the features of intelligence for the purpose of their simulation on a machine, coining the term “artificial intelligence” (which does not appear in written records before 1956), and ushering in what would retrospectively come to be known as the Golden Age of AI.

This sex which was never one is not an empty zero but a cipher. A channel to the blank side, to the dark side, to the other side of the cycle.

—Anna Greenspan, Suzanne Livingston, and Luciana Parisi

​Although its power continues to underwrite twenty-first-century conceptions of appearance, agency, and language, it is nothing new to point out the complicity of the restricted economy of Western humanism with the specular economy of the Phallus. Both yield their capital from the trick of transcendental determination-in-advance, establishing the value of difference from the standpoint of an a priori of the same. The game is fixed from the start, rigged for the benefit of the One—sustained by the patriarchal circuits of command and control it has been designed to keep in place. As Sadie Plant puts it in her essay “On the Matrix”:

Humanity has defined itself as a species whose members are precisely what they think they own: male members. Man is the one who has one, while the character called “woman” has, at best, been understood to be a deficient version of a humanity which is already male. In relation to homo sapiens, she is a foreign body, the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without, and the enemy within.9

​Like Dionysus, she is always approaching from the outside. The condition of her entrance into the game is mute confinement to the negative term in a dialectic of identity that reproduces Man as the master of death, desire, nature, history, and his own origination. To this end, woman is defined in advance as lack. She who has “nothing to be seen”—“only a hole, a shadow, a wound, a ‘sex that is not one.’”10 The unrepresentable surplus upon which all meaningful transactions are founded: lubricant for the Phallus. In the specular economy of signification (the domain of the eye) and the material-reproductive economy of genetic perpetuation (the domain of phallus), “woman” facilitates trade yet is excluded from it. “The little man that the little girl is,” writes Luce Irigaray (excavating the unmarked presuppositions of Freud’s famous essay on femininity), “must become a man minus certain attributes whose paradigm is morphological—attributes capable of determining, of assuring, the reproduction-specularization of the same. A man minus the possibility of (re)presenting oneself as a man = a normal woman.”11 Not a woman in her own right, with her own sexual organs and her own desires—but a not-Man, a minus-Phallus. Zero. In the sexual act, she is the passive vessel that receives the productive male seed and grows it without being party to its capital or interest: “Woman, whose intervention in the work of engendering the child can hardly be questioned, becomes the anonymous worker, the machine in the service of a master-proprietor who will put his trademark upon the finished product.”12

In this way the reproduction of the same functions as a repudiation of death, figured as both the impossibility of signification and the end of the patrilineal genetic line. The Phallus, the eye, and the ego are produced in concert through the exclusion of the cunt, the void, and the id. Via this casting of difference modeled on the reproductive (hetero-)sexual act alone—woman as passive, man as active—she is cut out of the legitimate circuit of exchange. Rather—(to quote Parisi, Livingstone, and Greenspan)—she “lies back on the continuum”; or (to quote Irigaray) her zone is located—

within the signs or between them, between the realized meanings, between the lines … and as a function of the (re)productive necessities of an intentionally phallic currency, which, for lack of the collaboration of a (potentially female) other, can immediately be assumed to need its other, a sort of inverted or negative alter-ego—“black” too, like a photographic negative. Inverse, contrary, contradictory even, necessary if the male subject’s process of specul(ariz)ation is to be raised and sublated. This is an intervention required of those effects of negation that result from or are set in motion through a censure of the feminine. [Yet she remains] off stage, off-side, beyond representation, beyond selfhood ...

in the blind spot, nightside of the productive, patriarchal circuit. A reserve of negativity for “the dialectical operations to come.”13

​Plant takes Irigaray’s key insight, that “women, signs, commodities, currency always pass from one man to another,” while women are supposed to exist “only as the possibility of mediation, transaction, transition, transference—between man and his fellow-creatures, indeed between man and himself,” as an opportunity for subversion.14 If the problem is identity, then feminism needs to stake its claim in difference—not a difference reconcilable to identify via negation, but difference in-itself—a feminism “founded” in a loss of coherence, in fluidity, multiplicity, in the inexhaustible cunning of the formless. “If ‘any theory of the subject will always have been appropriated by the masculine’ before woman can get close to it,” writes Plant (quoting Irigaray) “only the destruction of the subject will suffice.”15 Nonessentialist process ontology over homeostatic identity; relation and function over content and form; hot, red fluidity over the immobile surface of la glace—the mirror or ICE which gives back to Man his own reflection.16
​
Plant ejects all negativity from woman’s role as zero and affirms it as a site of insurrection. “If fluidity has been configured as a matter of deprivation and disadvantage in the past,” she writes, “it is a positive advantage in a feminized future for which identity is nothing more than a liability.” Woman’s unrepresentability, her status in the specular economy as no one, is grasped positively as an “inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry” which makes her “the living foundation for the whole staging of the world.”17 Her ability to mimic, exemplified for Freud in her flair at weaving—a skill she has apparently developed by simply copying the way her pubic hairs mesh across the void of her sex—is revalenced, by both Irigaray and Plant, as an aptitude for simulation (“woman cannot be anything, but she can imitate anything”) and dissimulation (“she sews herself up with her own veils, but they are also her camouflage”).18 Plant will go further still and connect simulation to computation and industrialization, capitalizing on the continuum she has opened up between woman and machine via the systemic, symbolic, and economic isomorphism of their roles in Man’s reproductive circuit. The difference between zeros and ones, or A and not A, is difference itself. Weaving woman has her veils; software, its screens. “It too,” writes Plant, “has a user-friendly face it turns to man, and for it—as for woman—this is only its camouflage.”19 Behind the veil and the screen lies the “matrix” of positive zero. Zero “stand[s] for nothing and make[s] everything work,” declares Plant.

The ones and zeros of machine code are not patriarchal binaries or counterparts to each other: zero is not the other, but the very possibility of all the ones. Zero is the matrix of calculation, the possibility of multiplication, and has been reprocessing the modern world since it began to arrive from the East. It neither counts nor represents, but with digitization it proliferates, replicates and undermines the privilege of one. Zero is not its absence, but a zone of multiplicity which cannot be perceived by the one who sees.20

We are used to calls to resist the total integration of our world into the machinations of the spectacle, to throw off the alienated state that capitalism has bequeathed to us and return to more authentic processes, often marked as an original human symbiosis with nature. But Plant—as a shrewd reader of post-spectacle theory—makes a deeper point. Woman as she is constructed by Man—and in order to be considered “normal” in Freud’s analyses—is continuous with the spectacle. Her capacity to act is entirely confined to modalities of simulation. She has never been party to authentic being, in fact it is her negating function that underwrites the entire fantasy of return to an origin. Because she is continuous with it, she is imperceptible within it. This is not to be lamented; rather, it is the measure of her power. Anything that escapes the searchlight of the specular economy, even whilst providing the conditions of its actualization, has immense subversive potential at its disposal simply by flipping that which is imputed to it as lack (the “cunt horror” of “nothing to be seen”) into a self-sufficient, autonomous, and positive productive force: the weaponization of imperceptibility and replication. The conspiracy of phallic law, logos, the circuit of identification, recognition, and light thus generates its occult undercurrent whose destiny is to dislodge the false transcendental of patriarchal identification. Machines, women—demons, if you will—align on the dark side of the screen: the inhuman surplus of a black circuit.

by Steven Craig Hickman

Since the world is on a delusional course, we must adopt a delusional standpoint towards the world. Better to die from extremes than starting from the extremities.

– Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil

Popcorn advice from a cynical nihilist want help us now.

We speak of ‘Control Society’ instead of fascism… why? Is not the U.S.A. today a fascist country that has convinced its citizens otherwise? Over the past two hundred years our government has gone from a Republic that was supposedly leaning toward democracy and into a centralized apparatus of bureaucratic and administrative idiocy with a Security and Military-Industrial Complex spread across the planet larger than the Roman Empire ever thought… what have we allowed our leaders here in the U.S.A. to do to us? And, why do we continue to allow it? Obama himself reneged on most of the major promises to the Left himself…. disillusioned? You bet I am…. we seem to be sleepwalking through an open warzone in this country, and all the while we have a NarcoNeuroEntertainment complex that pacifies us and keeps our minds off the real issues… controlled through sex and games and recreational drugs, Reality TV, Sports, etc. – that’s how the apocalypse goes down here in America. Paranoia is our bread and butter, conspiracy theory for the masses, and academic bullshit artists for the supposed intellectual elites. Yes, we’re in fine shape! We even have hit cable series for Doomsters: a series that will teach you how to survive the next apocalypse! You name it we’ve got it… In the good old U.S. of A. Reality TV is a production system for fictional lives… American Idols: the next great Michael Jackson staged as a plugged text message democracy… Ghosts on Travel Channel: the discovery of ghosts in every home in America… the mighty dead have returned and they are pissed… yes, ladies and gentleman, welcome to the American Apocalypse where the Psychopathic Criminology of late night cable TV (Motorcycle Gangs, Meth Labs in every basement, Prison Interviews, Serial Killers for Neighbors): HBO, Cinemax, etc. enjoy more popularity than the Love Channels, Aliens on History Channel, Monsters on Discovery…Big Foot at your favorite Night Club… from Columbine to Denver our children are imploding … our kids live in a MMO Universe where the lines between reality and fiction blurred and faded long ago…what am I saying? Our adults created the MMO Universe to keep our kids occupied while daddy and mommy went off to the local porn flicks and popped a couple Viagra to boot up the old entropy machine … and, don’t get me onto our Chemical Paradises: Junk Food City…Nightmare Kitchens… Martha’s Vineyard… and, don’t miss the next Gun Channel exclusive… we love our guns… if TV and Cinema are the American Psyche then we truly are doomed… we even glamorize Norman Bates from Psycho in a new TV Series that should have every child in a America happy … Norman Bates as a role model… Alfred Hitchcock rolled over in his grave and smiled..

​we love our insanity…

taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

​Decided to republish this essay I wrote over a year ago… still worth rethinking.
​
Naomi Wolfe’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot outlined ten steps taken in the past by what she termed “closing societies” — such as Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Stalin’s Russia — in their long descent into fascism. For both the State was one grand corporation in which the prols or workers were but the fodder for its schemes and machinations. These steps, Wolf claims, are being observed in America now.

The steps are:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Harass citizens’ groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Cast criticism as espionage and dissent as treason.
10. Subvert the rule of law.

J.G. Ballard in an interview mentions that our current consumer societies with their celebrity stars of Hollywood, Sports, and the Variety tabloids has entered the plutocracy of excess and abundance. “What I’m saying is that, left on its own consumer society is becoming a soft fascism. Because consumerism makes inherent demands, it has inherent needs, which can only be satisfied by pressing the accelerator down a little harder, moving a little faster, upping the antes. In order to keep spending and keep believing, we need to move into the area of the psychopathic.” 1

We live in a world of cosmopolitan hierarchs, elites for whom leisure and wealth have become entitlements rather than a badge of success. Our CEO’s have become the new feudalistic lords of the land. The ultimate Chairman of the Board, sitting in the White House, paid not so much to keep freedom alive and well, but to curb the peasantries access to freedom by developing systems of exclusion and surveillance to enclose them in a net of fear and trembling. With the death of agricultural civilization and the enclosure of the commons financial chaos is a tool to keep the peasants locked up in eternal debt. The new austerity enforces a stern taxation that extends like the Biblical patriarchs laws unto the seventh generation.

As Henry Giroux reports, Obama’s administration includes the US government’s use of state secrecy to provide a cover for practices that range from the illegal use of torture and the abduction of innocent foreign nationals to the National Security Association’s use of a massive surveillance campaign to monitor the phone calls, e-mails, and Internet activity of all Americans. A shadow mass surveillance state has emerged that eschews transparency and commits unlawful acts under the rubric of national security.2

The millions of homeless, destitute, and poor that roam the cities of America are slowly being banished from the gentrified worlds that were once their last haven of safety. As the authors of Banished: The New Social Control In Urban America tell us the reinvigorated use of banishment as a social control strategy is not a historical accident. The shift toward a postindustrial economy and away from a strong welfare state increased levels of poverty. Extensive gentrification coupled with a decline in public housing made affordable shelter increasingly scarce. Together, these structural dynamics generated a sizable increase in the visible homeless. Their presence in downtown public spaces caused widespread concern about the effects of disorder. This concern was particularly acute for commercial establishments reliant on shoppers and tourists, many of whom abhor visible evidence of social disadvantage. For those seeking to revive downtown and improve downtown aesthetics, the broken windows theory was a boon. The popularity of this theory legitimized various civility codes that targeted the everyday behaviors of those deemed disorderly.3

William T. Vollman in writing his book on the poor and destitute realized just how difficult a task that would be: “I do not wish to experience poverty, for that would require fear and hopelessness. Therefore, I can glimpse it only from the outside.”4 Coming upon a man sleeping in an alley behind some old oily cardboard eating from the remains of a tin can found in a garbage heap near by Vollman asked the man why he was poor:

​Because I don’t have a job.

Call this answer fatally and irrevocably familiar, fatal being an especially appropriate descriptor because when conceived in such limited, monotonous terms (appropriately so, because poverty is limited and monotonous), his situation feels tautologically hopeless. (ibid.)

​Marx himself describing Roman Society and its particular debt system tells us that the usury that impoverishes the poor petty producer goes hand in hand with the usury that ruins the rich landed proprietor. As soon as the usury of the Roman patricians had completely ruined the Roman plebeians, the small farmers, this form of exploitation came to an end, and the petty-bourgeois economy was replaced by a pure slave economy.5 The American economy is a slave economy of creditor-debt and taxation from which there is no escape except natural death or suicide. Bankruptcy ends in either prolonged agony, thirteen years barring one from the creditor relation.  As Marx would further iterate in the debt society “the usurer [lender, banker, creditor] can in this case swallow up everything in excess of the producers’ most essential means of subsistence, the amount that later becomes wages (the usurer’s interest being the part that later appears as profit and ground-rent), and it is therefore quite absurd to compare the level of this interest, in which all surplus-value save that which accrues to the state is appropriated, with the level of the modern interest rate, where interest, at least the normal interest, forms only one part of this surplus-value. This is to forget that the wage-labourer produces and yields to the capitalist who employs him profit, interest and ground-rent, in short the entire surplus-value.” (p. 730)
​
The debt society is about squeezing every last bit of surplus from the down and out, destitute and enslaved denizens who will like the surfs of old be bound into a legalese that excludes them, and yet includes them in a new zone of inner exile, caged and forced to squeak out a bare or minimal living.

Everything we make as wage earners is bound within the consumer cycle as surplus-value that is continuously fed to the debtors leaving us impoverished and without recourse. Maurizio Lazzarato in The Making of the Indebted Man tells us that debt functions as an all-pervasive mechanism of power. Property is not ownership of the means of production, as it was for Marx, but rather revolves around capital securities. Therefore it concerns a relation of power that has changed with respect to the Marxian tradition, that is deterritorialised as Deleuze and Guattari would say. It stands at a higher level of abstraction, but it is still organised around a certain kind of property: a distinction between those who do have access to money-credit and those who do not. (here) In out society one’s credit rating rather than one’s physical savings or property, one’s virtual rating in the eyes or gaze of the creditors is one’s actual power. The relation of the virtual/actual has broken down into the invasive power of the virtual to replace the actual. We live in a mirror world in which the consumer has become herself the ultimate commodity, to be tapped and tracked through the circulation of capital credit relations into the nth degree.

The economy of debt makes no distinction between waged workers and non-waged workers, between the employed and unemployed, between material and immaterial labour. We are all in debt. In contemporary capitalism debt is organized by finance and credit, which have expropriated by means of monetary control systems. Our society as a whole (not only labour, but the entirety of social relations, of knowledge, of wealth, etcetera) is bounded by this hidden relation of monetary control. Finance, therefore, functions as a predatory apparatus of capture. In a risk society such as ours the Capitalists are the only ones who do not risk anything. The risks are all taken on by the cognitariat and precariat. The true risk is taken on by the population who is excluded from the very excess of surplus relations of profit, sucked dry, left out in the cold world of eternal debt. (here)

As Lazzarato informs us Technical government is the accomplishment of this process of privatisation. The logic of representation is replaced by the functional, operative logic (diagrammatic, Deleuze and Guattari would call it) of money/credit. In such an economy we have all become  ‘human capital’ in a  ‘just-in-time’ logic of production of knowledge. Human capital is no longer the ‘atom of liberty’ of classical economics, but a systemic and subordinated variable of which the different behaviours must adapt, be compatible with, and respond ‘just in time’ to the signals given out by the economy. It is no longer the products of our labor that respond to the ‘just in time’ needs of the market, rather it we ourselves that respond to the ‘just in time’ needs of our creditors. We live in a cybercircle of speed economies that interlock us in the production cycle of information and debt without end.

“We live in a permanent state of exception. As this has become the rule, it is by now useless to even continue referring to it as exception. If the sovereign is he who decides in these conditions, the sovereign of today is Capital.” (Lazzarato) Capital today is totally deterritorialized and accelerating through the decentralized networks 24/7 in a cold world of electrons and microtransactions bound to code and algorithms of smart or intelligent machines that have now taken on the powers once held by fleshers, human traders. In our time we’ve begun divesting ourselves of the last property rights humans once held so dear, their bodies. In an age of genomics, nanotechnology, and machinic intelligence the body is being reformatted to serve the machine as its prosthesis rather than in Marx’s age when the machine was our extension. We are entering the stage of final alienation: rendering our physical lives obsolete as we alienate ourselves and become posthuman. As Deleuze and Guattari once said:

The alliance-debt answers to what Nietzsche described as humanity’s prehistoric labor: the use of the cruelest mnemotechnics, in naked flesh, to impose a memory of words founded on the ancient biocosmic memory. That is why it is so important to see debt as a direct consequence of the primitive inscription process, instead of making it – and the inscriptions themselves – into an indirect means of universal exchange. (p. 185)

​One could imagine a future where corporate Logos and Brands will be inscribed upon the flesh of all their workers, a harsh reminder of that cruel truth of one’s servitude and enslavement within this soft corporatism’s fascism. “Man must constitute himself through repression of the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivity. But at the same time, how is a new memory to be created for man – a collective memory of the spoken word and of alliances that declines alliances with the extended filiations, that endows him with faculties of resonance and retention, of selection and detachment, and that effects this way of coding the flow of desire as a condition of the socious? The answer is simple – debt – open, mobile, and finite blocks of debt: the extraordinary composite of the spoken voice, the marked body, and the enjoying eye.” (p. 190)
​
In his satire on the current state of corporate fascism in the global arena Richard K. Morgan in Market Forces – a near future parody and pastiche of our contemporary capitalism provides us a glimpse into the Capitalist CEO mindset:

“Shorn exists to make money. For our shareholders, for our investors, and for ourselves. In that order. We’re not some last-century bleeding-heart NGO pissing funds into a hole in the ground. We’re part of a global management system that works. Forty years ago we dismantled OPEC. Now the Middle East does as we tell it. Twenty years ago we dismantled China, and East Asia got in line as well. We’re down to micromanagement and the market now, Chris. We let them fight their mindless little wars, we rewrite the deals and the debt, and it works. Conflict Investment is about making global stupidity work for the benefit of Western investors. That’s it, that’s the whole story. We’re not going to lose our grip again like last time.”6.

This sense of debt binding us to a system of mnemonics and cruelty, an organized and ritualistic memory system based on marking and pain – inscription of the collective socious as a system of obligation and guilt, debt and the endless deferral of payment into the future. The ancestors require sacrifice and payment, blood and guts. Alliances against this filiation must be formed, struggles against the dead, defensive gestures: the infinite deferral of debt beyond the vampirism of the dead. This whole triangular process of voice – inscription – eye becomes in our time the “spectacle of punishment”: “as primitive justice, territorial representation has foreseen everything” (p. 191). Austerity is this system of punishment in which the rich nations suck the poor nations of the world like vampires upon captured flesh. This system of endless debt: “that finds itself taken into an immense machinery that renders the debt infinite and no longer forms anything but one and the same crushing fate: the aim now is to preclude pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of discharge; the aim now is to make the glance recoil disconsolately from an iron impossibility. The Earth becomes a madhouse.” 7 (p. 192)

​

1. J.G. Ballard. Extreme Metaphors (Fourth Estate, 2012)
2. Giroux, Henry  A. (2014-02-17). Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (p. 11). Haymarket Books. Kindle Edition.
3. Beckett, Katherine; Herbert, Steve (2009-10-15). Banished: The New Social Control In Urban America (Studies in Crime and Public Policy) (Kindle Locations 755-762). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
4. Vollmann, William T. (2010-10-05). Poor People (Kindle Locations 103-104). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
5. Marx, Karl (1992-08-27). Capital: Critique of Political Economy v. 3 (Penguin Classics) (p. 730). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
6. Morgan, Richard K.. Market Forces (pp. 312-313). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition
7. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Penguin, 2001)

taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

​Is America Desiring Fascism?

​People wonder why we could be duped by both Hilary and Trump on the Left and Right… a part of it was already apparent to Deleuze and Guattari quite a while back:

Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desire into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 29)

​This sense that a certain part of our population are not simply “innocent dupes,” but that the conditions are ripe for such a fascist perversion of democracy. Yet, one wonders if ignorance does indeed play a part in this on both the Left and Right of the spectrum. Most of the followers of both Hilary and Trump are true believers. I mean by that they will follow their parties status quo no matter who it might be. Like the blind leading the blind they’ll walk into the abyss for their Party’s chosen one. I use that term tongue-n-check, “Chosen One”; yet, eerily one feels a shudder of dismay, and thinks, maybe, after all this is a little too emotional, a little too affective, a little to religious – an almost hysteria of the masses rising from the subterranean lairs?
​
We need to remember that for Deleuze and Guattari, unlike Lacan or – to take another immediate example, Zizek, desire was not based on lack but rather was productive: desire produces the objects, rather than seeking some lost object to fill the void of its lack. Now we can disagree or agree, that’s outside the scope of this post. For experiment’s sake I’m accepting their notion of desire as productive.

The people who have perversely produced for their party the strange objects of their desire in Hilary or Trump have done this unconsciously rather than with conscious awareness. Todd May in an essay will tell us about it this way:

“If there is only desire and the social, it is because desire produces the social. Rather than, as with psychoanalytic theory, desire being desire for something, desire directly creates its objects. We can recognize here Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual. The actual is a product of the virtual. The virtual is a field of difference from which aIl actuality arises. The actual, in turn, emerges from the virtual, while still retaining the virtual within it. In the same way, desire produces the social.” (14).1

​We have known for a while that the mediatainment complex acts like a false memetic system that has replaced real and actual forms of cultural memory with artificial and simulacrum forms of corrupt and reified illusory systems of coercion and production of subjectivity. Many people in our country’s middle-classes are oblivious to how regulated their unconscious desires are by all these technological apparatuses. Ones that have from the early twentieth-century been highly adapted to effect propaganda, public relations, consumerist advertising, polling, and other media platforms to guide and shape the public mind, as well as actively shape the weak and vulnerable to the illusory desires of democratic rhetoric’s. Both the Democrats and Republicans have adapted to these systems, used them, brought them to bare to shape the mass psyche. And, in some ways both parties have come under the direct influence of corporate and lobby pressure and deep influence through power, money, and lucrative systems of desire.
​
None of this happened overnight, it’s been a gradual creation over the past century, adapting to the various technological advances in the ICT’s or Information and communications technologies that have created our regulated infosphere within which we all ubiquitously share a general intelligence. The few who can see what is happening get no voice in the public sphere, but are succinctly and with a certain malice expunged from both spectrums of Left and Right as the “lunatic fringe”, etc. .

So for Deleuze and Guattari if there is a problem, it is one of desire not illusion and/or ideology: ‘ It is not a question of ideology. There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with preconscious investments, or with what preconscious investments “ought to be.” That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests … it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled’ (Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus: 1977: 104).

For Deleuze and Guattari our very investment in consumer society itself has produced our desire for such leaders, rather that some nefarious and illusory duping on the part of the masters. We ourselves seek such leaders because we desire our lives to go on as they are, to have the things we have, to live the way we live. As Todd May tells us:

To ask why it is that the masses form beliefs that are against their own interests is to ask the wrong question; it is to ask a question at the wrong level. ‘We see the most disadvantaged, the most excluded members of society invest with passion the system that oppresses them, and where they always find an interest in it, since it is here that they search for and measure it. Interest always comes after’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 346). (15)

Instead of asking why we desire fascism (consumerism), May reports that instead we need to recognize our libidinal investments in the system and make them more revolutionary rather than allowing ourselves to remain passive participants. May will give a lot of remedies to this situation, but in the end as he reports it comes down to this:

We must see the fascism both in what we think and in what we want and create. We do not, or at least very few of us, think anything we tell ourselves is fascistic. Rather, it emerges in the practices in which we engage. It arises not because we desire fascism but because what we desire is fascistic; it arises not because we believe in fascism but because what we believe is fascistic.(26).

One almost remembers a line from Ghandi: “We are botched, therefore we are potential.” And, Mao Tse-Tung’s saying: “There is great chaos under heaven — the situation is excellent.” Maybe, admitting our vulnerability to such desires is in the end to accept the responsibility to create something new with them rather than to let the elite and powers of global capital to continue capturing them with such banal machines.

1. Evans, Brad and Reid, Julian. Deleuze & Fascism: Security: War: Aesthetics. Routledge; 1 edition (May 29, 2013)

see:https://www.amazon.com/Deleuze-Fascism-Security-Aesthetics-Interventions-ebook/dp/B00IECXJSG/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1463424940&sr=1-1&keywords=brad+evans+fascism

taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

What we hold against psychoanalysis is that it resorts to a pious conception, based on lack and castration, a sort of negative theology that involves infinite resignation. It is against this that we propose a positive conception of desire, desire that produces, not desire that is lacking in something.

– Deleuze & Guattari, Chaosophy

​“Leaders betray, that’s obvious. But why do those who are led continue to listen to them,” says Felix Guattari.1

How many times I’ve asked myself that question. Too many times and the answers seem to be perplexing and mysterious. Guattari himself will answer it this way, with another question: “Wouldn’t that be the result of an unconscious complicity, of an interiorization of the repression, operating on several levels, from power to bureaucratic, from bureaucrats to militants, and from militants to the masses themselves?” (p. 70) Unconscious complicity? Willing slaves of our own thwarted desires? Unaware of our own dark complicity in our participation in our own enslavement and slaughter? Just what is this strange complicity?

​Something Fabio Vighi said in his book on Zizek struck me as poignant in that he describes the task of Lacan’s materialist epistemology as the construction of a project “whose transformative potential depends on its capacity to reflect upon its blind spot – on its conviction that to be socially and politically productive it has to include its own foundations in jouissance” (p. 146).2 Of course Deleuze and Guattari based their whole Anti-Oedipus against Freud and Lacan and the notion of lack as being the object cause of desire. Zizek himself follows Lacan saying,

​Symbolic castration is usually defined as the loss of something one never possessed, i.e., the object-cause of desire is an object which emerges through the very gesture of its withdrawal; however, what we encounter here is the obverse structure of feigning a loss. Insofar as the Other of the symbolic Law prohibits jouissance, the only way for the subject to enjoy is to feign that he lacks the object that provides jouissance, concealing the fact of possession from the Other’s gaze by staging the spectacle of a desperate search for it.3

For Deleuze and Guattari this whole notion leads to a treatment as a form of terrorism. In the course of such treatment “[a] the chains of the unconscious are…linearized, suspended from a despotic signifier (i.e. Oedipus)” (54). Indeed, they assert that schizophrenics who are treated this way often digress into autism, which has unfortunately been associated with schizophrenia. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the analyst and the psychiatric ward that make the schizoid sick, and turn him/her into a silent and psychologically unproductive autist. The healthy schizoid has an essentially productive (un)consciousness. Against the unconscious as a theatre of representation, they insist it is a productive factory: it produces desiring-machines, etc., rather than lost objects or fantasies that must be pursued.

This production of the real is fundamentally false within Freudian and Lacanian notions of the unconscious. Freud-Lacan see the unconscious as symbolic, fantasy laden, and dramatic ­­ filled with semiotic puzzles and ancient Greek theater. Hence, for both authors desire is associated with lack. That is to say, desire desires that which is fantasized, repressed, wished for, or absent. Desire is engaged entirely with that which is lacking and needs to be represented. Hence, “desire gives way to a representation” of that which is lacking ­­ the phallus, the Oedipal escapade, the ideal “I”, etc. (54). The schizoid, on the other hand, is incapable of experiencing lack. For him or her the unconscious is always productive and never fantastical. Desire itself produces the real and creates new worlds.

Against this representationalist lack that seeks its own wish etc., Deleuze and Guattari hold the unconscious to be functionalist, productive: that it seeks nothing because it does not lack anything, in fact it produces desiring-machines and nothing else. These machines can be plugged into various socio-cultural objects, as well as unplugged or deterritorialized and reterritorialized into other objects.

Zizek in Against the Politics of Jouissance will state that modern society is defined by the lack of ultimate transcendent guarantee, or, in libidinal terms, of total jouissance. There are three main ways to cope with this negativity: utopian, democratic, and post-democratic. The first one (totalitarianisms, fundamentalisms) tries to reoccupy the ground of absolute jouissance by attaining a utopian society of harmonious society which eliminates negativity. The second, democratic, one enacts a political equivalent of “traversing the fantasy”: it institutionalizes the lack itself by creating the space for political antagonisms. The third one, consumerist post-democracy, tries to neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration: individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert social administration. Today, when democracy is gradually evolving into consumerist post-democracy, one should insist that democratic potentials are not exhausted – “democracy as an unfinished project” …. The key to the resuscitation of this democratic potential is to re-mobilize enjoyment: “What is needed, in other words, is an enjoyable democratic ethics of the political.”(269)

How is this possible? Zizek will ask What we need is enjoyment: “Libidinal investment and the mobilization of jouissance are the necessary prerequisite for any sustainable identification (from nationalism to consumerism). This also applies to the radical democratic ethics of the political. But the type of investment involved has still to be decided.” (282) He’ll continue saying we have the appropriate social theory, but what is missing is the “subjective factor” – how are we to mobilize people so that they will engage in passionate political struggle? Here psychoanalysis enters, explaining what libidinal mechanisms the enemy is using (Reich tried to do this for Fascism, Stavrakakis for consumerism and nationalism), and how can the Left practice its own “politics of jouissance.” The problem is that such an approach is an ersatz for the proper political analysis: the lack of passion in political praxis and theory should be explained in its own terms, i.e., in the terms of political analysis itself. The true question is: what is there to be passionate about? Which political choices people experience as “realistic” and feasible? (ibid.)

In some ways Guattari and Zizek seem to come at this from opposing sides of a Mobius strip that twists the strange conundrum of their specific problem. Guattari asked why do those who are led continue to listen to their leaders who betrayed them, and he saw the answer in the unconscious complicity of the masses to interiorize and repress the very desire that would have set them free or at least mobilized their desires toward other possibilities. Zizek from the other direction asks why is it was on the Left cannot do just that, why can’t we mobilize the desires of the masses toward their own liberation, why can’t we unblock those repressive systems that have stopped the flows that seem stuck on the internalized Master signifier, etc.
​
In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari will discover in the work of Willhelm Reich a partial answer: that the masses had come to desire Nazism (Chaosophy p. 71). As he’ll admit “After Willhelm Reich, one cannot avoid facing that truth. Under certain conditions, the desire of the masses can turn against their own interests. What are those conditions?” (p. 71). What Deleuze and Guattari did was to reverse the Lacanian wager, they realized there exists a desiring-production which, before all actualization in the familial division of sexes and persons (Freud-Lacan) as well as the social division of work (Marx-Lenin), invests the various forms of production of jouissance and the existing structures in order to repress them (p. 72).

It’s at this point that they came to the same question as Zizek: Under what conditions will the revolutionary avant-garde be able to free itself from its unconscious complicity with repressive structures and elude power’s manipulation of the masses’ desire that makes it “fight for their servitude as though it were their salvation?” (p. 72) They will look at the Freud-Lacan path that it is the familial investment in the Oedipal myth that supports such a conclusion: but will reject it both reductive and a reversion to pre-critical forms of archaic thought forms (Oedipus myth). Instead of a recursion to myth they will opt for the primacy of “history over structure, another analysis, extricated from symbolism and interpretation (anti-representational); and another militancy, with the means to free itself from fantasies of the dominant order” (p. 72).
​
Deleuze for his part will only add that he and Guattari strove to realize the issues underlying the impasse of psychoanalysis, and they found it in Freud’s inability to understand what delirium or desire truly were: “These two reproaches really make one: what interests us is the presence of machines of desire, molecular micro-machines in the great molar social machines. How they operate and function within one another.” (p. 74). He’ll make another acute observation on Freud and interpretation, or if you will “epistemology”: “There is no epistemology problem either: we couldn’t care less about returning to Freud or Marx. If someone tells us that we have misunderstood Freud, we won’t argue about it, we’ll say too bad, there is much work to be do. It’s curious that epistemology has always hidden an imposition of power, an organization of power. As far as we’re concerned, we don’t believe in any specificity of writing or even of thought.” (p. 78).

​1. Felix Guattaris. Chaosophy (Semiotext(e) 2009)
2. Fabio Vighi On Zizek’s Dialectics: Surplus, Subtraction, Sublimation (Continuum 2012)
3. Zizek, Slavoj (2014-10-07). Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism (p. 218). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

To be sure, we have never dreamed of saying that psychoanalysis invented Oedipus!

– Deleuze & Guattari: Anti-Oedipus

One of the key aspects of Deleuze & Guattari’s schizoanalytical analysis of Freud/Lacan tradition of psychoanalysis is not that Oedipus does not exist, but that it comes after social reproduction and social repression. That the family: Father, Mother, child triangulation that psychoanalysis fixates on comes as a partial truth, one that forces the actual truth into the strait-jacket of the Freudian framework.

Everything points in the opposite direction: the subjects of psychoanalysis arrive already oedipulized, they demand it, they want more. (p. 121)

​This is where it gets tricky. D&G will tell us in speaking of the incest prohibition that seems to be a cornerstone to the Oedipal mythos is founded not on familial repression but rather on social repressive forces. “Social production would need at its disposal, on the recording surface of the socious, an agent that is also capable of acting on, of inscribing the recording surface of desire. Such an agent exists: the family. (p. 120)” One sees here the notion of the social body, the collective matrix of the socious, as a recordable medium of desire upon which certain agents can act on and inscribe the laws or norms of repression.   The key is this concept of desire upon which the social agents, the family being one among a multitude act and inscribe these relations of repression.
​
One needs to understand this key concept of ‘desire’, and why both the social and the familial as its agent are forced to act on and inscribe the various laws, norms, regulatory mechanisms. And to understand the concept of ‘desire’ and how it is deployed within this critique of psychoanalysis we need to first understand how it is deployed in Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, and in Deleuzeguattari’s Anti-Oedipus. At the heart of the critique is Freud’s non-empirical turn, his belief that the problems in the life of his patients was not in the empirical realm of their everyday lives, but rather in the fantasy life of the patient’s themselves. What Deleuze and Guattari have attempted is to return us to the social world of the empirical relations in their actuality rather than to the Cartesian Theatre of the Lacanian / Freudian fantasy land of intentionality. In the one view (Freudian/Lacanian) the mind is a theatre of fantasy to be deciphered by the psychoanalyst as both priest and officiator, while in Deleuzeguattari the mind (unconscious) is a productive factory that produces not images and representations but the veritable tensions of a sociality that goes unrecognized in the patient’s empirical life.

As even Deleuze, in one of his last essays would attest: “I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist.” (Gilles Deleuze. Pure Immanence Essays on Life Zone Books, 2001)

One of the things Freud discovered early on was that childhood traumas: rape, abuse, sexual predation that his patients spoke of in sessions – for women (hysteria), for men (neurosis) – were not as he had at first assumed – based in fact and actuality, but instead were based in the fantasy life of the patient themselves. Freud concluded that most of his hysteric/neurotic patients had not been abused. His theory shattered, he fell deeper into despair. Then, after agonizing days of self-analysis, Freud reached a conclusion that would transform the very nature of the theory of mental life he was still inventing: his patients, Freud now believed, had been reporting fantasies. In most cases, there had been no abuse – only conflicted wishes and desires. As he would say: “When I pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusions namely that neurotic symptoms are not related directly to actual events but to fantasies embodying wishes.” By switching from actual seduction to seduction fantasies, Freud in his work entered the world of the mind and the world of imagination.
​
Displacing the problems of his patients from the real world to the inner psychic life of the patient led him to write The Interpretation of Dreams where he began to develop many of the early theories of wish-fulfillment, desire, unconscious, repression, condensation, etc. Freud would not be the first nor the last to instill intentionality or the notion of mental events into the internal world of the Mind. Several critics from Hans Eysenck’s Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985) to Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (1995) have attacked this inward turn toward the Mind. Even at the extreme end of this Freudian critique in such books as Fredrick Crews The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute (1995) Freud is brought back not as a scientist of the Mind, but the inventor of fantasies himself. And, yet, there are other works such as Peter Gay’s 1988 book Freud: A Life for Our Time who will give sustenance to the Freudians and their legends.  Probably the best of the critiques of Freud came in 1984 with Adolf Grünbaum’s The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique where he will attack Freud on empirical grounds, while at the same time defending him against those like Karl Popper who thought Freud’s theories were a manifestation of pseudo-science. As one reads through most of these works one realizes it is the notion that Freud’s works are not based on scientific empiricism that seems to be the greatest issue; yet, most will agree that his speculative philosophical approach is still of value and that it is to this we should favor a reception of his ideas rather than to his imposition of scientism that should be explored.

My point being this: if one looks upon Freud’s works as speculative philosophy rather than science then his position within that stream of thought that arises out of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; along with the undertow of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others remains a valid influence to this day within the philosophical community if not the psychoanalytical. It informs many of the debates concerning the various approaches to materialism one sees in philosophers as diverse as Badiou, Zizek, Meillassou and Johnston; as well as Deleuze, De Landa, Bradiotti, etc. – just to name a few. The great divide in materialism at this moment stems from these early notions of Freud, the German Idealists, and the counter-traditions of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, and Land. Materialism is at a crossroad: split between scientific naturalism and its various forms of physicalism; the Freudian/Lacanian group based on structure and lack; and the philosophers of desire such as Deleuze and his followers under the rubric of new materialisms. One should add the Marxian tradition as well, but that is part of another battle that is inclusive to all of these various materialisms. In my own work-in-progress I’m dealing with this tradition that seems in our moment to be in turmoil as well as going through its own transformations and migrations into various materialisms. To understand this process one needs to clarify and separate, abstract out and critique the earlier forms of materialism. It’s this that drives my project at the moment.

It is to the figure of Freud as speculative philosopher rather than scientist that my understanding of Desire and Drives turns.

taken from: 

by Steven Craig Hickman

Speaking with the dead can be so instructive. They remember what the living have forgotten, or would not know if they could. The true frailty of things.

-Thomas Ligotti,  Grimscribe

In Thomas Ligotti’s The Mystics of Muelenberg we’re presented as usual with a world which is askew, tipped in favor of the strange and deformed, the grotesque and macabre rather than the glittering façade of some Platonic realm of the marvelous:

If things are not what they seem—and we are forever reminded that this is the case—then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing. Though never exact, always shifting somewhat, the proportion is crucial. For a certain number of minds are fated to depart for realms of delusion, as if in accordance with some hideous timetable, and many will never be returning to us. Even among those who remain, how difficult it can be to hold the focus sharp, to keep the picture of the world from fading, from blurring in selected zones and, on occasion, from sustaining epic deformations over the entire visible scene.1

​From time to time I like to reread these demented stories of a mind that has suffered the bitter sweetness of its own forgotten wisdom. The notion that the world that most of us behold is held together by a secret group of individuals scattered across time, a forbidden sect that has been stamped with the task of binding the hellish deformations of reality and containing its force is strangely disquieting. That this dark brotherhood of the mad and insane, the eccentric and oddball are our only hope against the powers of hyperchaos, the Keepers of the Great Art, those who balance the thin red line between reality and the unreal and weave the invisible threads that ubiquitously connect us all in a timeless world of illusion is a truth that if accepted would in itself drive us all insane. So that the troubadours, jongleurs, tricksters, and mad shamans who wander the broken boundaries of existence and keep us safe, while they move in two worlds at once: split between the real and unreal, brokering the lines of flight that bind and unbind reality. They are the mad ones who defend us against the insane truth, who channel the secrets of existence in parables and allegories, while living out in their own lives and minds the inevitable corruption that would destroy the rest of us.

​One can imagine that from time to time one of our benefactors succumbs to the power of the other side, is lured and tempted to give into the secret force of its entrapments. This forces us to think about our own part in this madness and how we are ourselves corrupted and corrupting in our very inability to separate the real and unreal in our lives. What if one were to wander into one of those abandoned zones, a zone of exclusion and corruption, move in the world where reality was unprotected, where the balance had suddenly shifted exposing the truth behind the curtain of lies; where appearance as appearance gave up its artificial semblance and exposed the underlying nullity, the dark abyss of nothingness and formlessness? What if one saw behind the phenomenal and into the noumenon and discovered that it was a hyperchaotic sea of time without sense or reason? What if the hyperchaos that surrounds us suddenly presented itself without illusion, opened its dark powers to you vision: what would you do? What could you do?

​There are those such as Lacan and Zizek who suggest that the saving grace is that we have an inbuilt gap or split, that keeps us bound in a subjective transcendence of illusory fictions. That the sea of appearances and phenomena around us are all that we will ever have direct access too. That our brains, our minds are shaped by rules of language and logic that enforce the barriers against the truth of the Real for our protection. That if we were to know reality as it is we would all go mad. Yet, others have boldly suggested that this too is a lie, a fiction: that in truth the world that we believe is real is itself the great fiction, the lie upon which we have obliterated the real world and replaced it with a hyperreality so real that we are now lost in an abyss of our own making. Will we find our way out of this labyrinth? Where is Ariadne’s thread to guide us back to the formless sea of unbeing?
​
In the old Gnostic mythologies the Archons (kelippot, dark vessels) were the Watchers who keep us locked away in Time’s Prison. What if the reverse were true? What if in fact they are our secret defenders? What if they were the secret or hidden, occult brotherhood who have all these eons protected us from ourselves? What if what we should fear is our own powers? What if in fact we were the dark gods who have forgotten our own powers, and the gatekeepers were put in place by us to protect us from our terrible deeds, our own horrendous past? What if we are the destroyers against which we have built up such dark mythologies, and that if we ever tore down the barriers between our world and the Real we would discover the terrible truth of our own dark secret? That the evil we project upon darkness is the face of our own abysmal nature? What then? Maybe Time is a Prison we built against our own terrible existence, and that the only thing between us and oblivion is the gates of illusion. Would you still storm the gates if you knew this to be the truth?

In the old mythologies of kabbalism is the notion of restitution (“Tikkun ha-Olam“), or the ‘lifting of the sparks’ (Netzotzim) – the notion that throughout time a slow and methodical metempsychosis of the original sparks of light that broke away from the dying embers of a Dead God as he died during the cataclysmic catastrophe that gave birth to our Universe would one day be restored and brought together in an infinite Body of Light, the Adam Kadmon of Living Fire at the End of Time. What if the opposite were true, what if what we are seeking is not a restitution but the annihilation of the sparks, a dark gnosis in which each of us slowly awakens to our own suicidal glory of annihilating the light of which we are shadows and embers of a darker realm of seething energy? What if instead of total restitution there is a total unmaking and unbinding of the Light into utter darkness and hyperchaos? That Time will end only when the last of the sparks is annihilated in this ocean of the abyss? We know that our universe of stars, dust, and light is but a minimal dance upon a ocean of dark matter and energy, that in truth what we call the universe is but a small fraction of this colder dimension, a truth that we cannot quantify nor know but infer from the instruments of our sciences and mathematical theorems. As Ligotti in his tale will say:

For no one else recalls the hysteria that prevailed when the stars and the moon dimmed into blackness. Nor can they summon the least memory of when the artificial illumination of this earth turned weak and lurid, and all the shapes we once knew contorted into nightmares and nonsense.  And finally how the blackness grew viscous, enveloping what light remained and drawing us into itself.  How many such horrors await in that blackness to be restored to the legions of the dead.

​Came across an interesting essay in Mind Factory yesterday in which a consulting group was hired by the City of Miami because it had a “image” problem. People were perceiving Miami as deadly and crime ridden, a place where terror lurked in the sun and shadows everywhere. So the Florida Research Ensemble (FRE) developed a prototype for an inventional consulting practice, tested in the city of Miami, Florida.1 The notion that one could hire a consulting practice to invent reality struck my humor button, till I began thinking about Ligotti’s tale. This notion that people could invent an image, align the appearances of reality in such a way that the public at large might suddenly be lured to believe that a City that only yesterday was seen as a terrifying and hideous nightmare world of crime could become a sunny and happy world full of light and gaiety struck me odd.
​
For FRE the problem was simple: it was a public relations crisis of the first order: the damage done to the image of Florida by the murder of a number of tourists had caused their client untold revenue and tourist dollars to be lossed in the past few years to a perceived reality. What was needed was to change this perception, to invent a new perceived image of reality to replace this bad economic image that had caused their client to lose revenue.

As part of the image crisis management FRE was set a task to create a “Fifth Estate”: develop a practice for the internet that allows netizens to become agents of a “fifth estate,” giving citizens a voice in the public policy process equivalent at least to that of journalism…(KL 3291) What they discovered is that our of 41 million visitors over a 14 month period that nine tourists had been killed (3.2% of Miami’s murders). As one official said:  “We have a huge perception problem, but nonetheless a real problem.” What transpired after bad publicity from news outlets is that the Commerce Secretary suspended tourist advertising temporarily, while countering negative news coverage. In the tourism business, he said, image is the business and has a direct bearing on the health of the industry. (KL 3318)

Between News, Noir and Hard-boiled fiction, huckster propaganda (to sell real estate off-shore), Haitian and Cuban boat immigrants, etc. the city was caught in a continuous oscillation between two competing narratives, that of “Magic City” and “Paradise Lost.”(KL 3441) The works of Elmore Leonard and Charles Willeford, and in the Television series Miami Vice had over the years contributed to tourist imagery of the noir and crime element fears as well. As they discovered:

Sheila Croucher, in Imagining Miami, summed up the issue: “Miami is a city without true substance, a state of mind instead of a state of being.”[ 168] As James Donald observed, every city is a state of mind that owe as much to discourse as to people and place. “ [The imagined city] has been learned as much from novels, pictures and half-remembered films as from diligent walks round the capital cities of Europe. It embodies perspectives, images, and narratives that migrate across popular fiction, modernist aesthetics, the sociology of urban culture, and techniques for acting on the city.” (KL 3459)

​Over the years news, advertising , noir fiction had all contributed to the invention of Miami’s image as a crime infested world that had slowly accrued into peoples (tourists) minds and dissuaded them from viewing this city as a travel destination. So FRE realized that if every city is a state of mind then they’d need to change the image of the city to create an atmosphere, a feeling, an ambiance more congenial to tourist travel.
​
As they discovered they’d need to participate in genre building and reformulate the city from the formulaic mode of Miami Vice to one of Miami Virtue. One aspect of this was the notion of theoria: The discourse of the sages of the ancient theoria that we had adopted as a relay for the new consultancy expressed the state of mind known as “ataraxy,” a kind of serene indifference to the accidents and tribulations of the external world. (KL 3516)

To build a new image of the city they started with a notion of psychogeography: the mapping of the city as an allegorical story that could be mapped to a tourist cognitive vision of the world.

The relevance of mystory as a basis for testimonial is that it is a holistic practice, designed originally as a way to compose simultaneously in four (more or less) discourses. What one testifies to in the first place is the inventory of identifications or quilting points constituting one’s feeling of being a unified “self.” Mystory is a cognitive map of its maker’s psychogeography. The popcycle that I worked out in Heuretics remotivates an allegorical quaternary. The four levels of allegory serve as the four elements (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water) into which Plato’s chora sorted chaos. (KL 3664)

I want go into the details which are lengthy and go into the background of allegorical terminology, etc. Needless to say they updated the older forms of allegorical systems with current scientific and philosophical models.
​
Ultimately they narrowed their focus to one specific zone: the Miami River. Here the Haitian population lived amid the ruins of old ships, buildings, and make-shift housing projects. The group began to weave the history, mythologies, stories, and milieu of their culture into the tourist image the City could shape to a new image that would allow both the Haitian population and city to benefit from each others cultural mix through an allegorical exchange of images. They were able to accomplish this through a mixture of photography, story, advertisement, fiction, and other intermediation that allowed the perceived threat of the alien other (“alterity”, “aporia”) to be brought from the Outside in in such a way as to open an exchange between the various elements of both cultures that had been wary of each other.
​
As they realized following the work of Michael Serres the tourist situation, like every other intersubjective experience, must take into account as least three positions: host, guest, “parasite”. (KL 4170) This allowed them to shape a policy that had once been based on exclusionary practices to become one on inclusion:

Applied to the policy question of the Caribbean Code, this formula proposes the suspension of the interdiction and boarding of Haitian vessels by the Coast Guard, to be replaced with the “boarding” of Haitians at city expense: “learn about boarding from boarding.” (KL 4174)

The politics of the stranger, in contrast, puts the interests of the other first, without expectation of reciprocity. It remains to be seen what sort of policy might be entailed by the aporia of hospitality, but its impossibility in principle is nearly the inverse of Prisoner’s Dilemma. “For unconditional hospitality to take place you have to accept the risk of the other coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing everything, or killing everyone. That is the risk of pure hospitality and pure gift.” Pure gift, in other words, constitutes the impossible necessity of ethics unbounded by the external authority of some Master Signifier (God, King, etc.). (KL 4189)

“I once knew a man who claimed that, overnight, all the solid shapes of existence had been replaced by cheap substitutes: trees made of poster board, houses built of colored foam, whole landscapes composed of hair-clippings. His own flesh, he said, was now just so much putty. Needless to add, this acquaintance had deserted the cause of appearances and could no longer be depended on to stick to the common story. Alone he had wandered into a tale of another sort altogether; for him, all things now participated in this nightmare of nonsense. But although his revelations conflicted with the lesser forms of truth, nonetheless he did live in the light of a greater truth: that all is unreal. Within him this knowledge was vividly present down to his very bones, which had been newly simulated by a compound of mud and dust and ashes.” (Ligotti, KL 1529)

This notion that reality is malleable, that we can reinvent realities for tourists or allow ourselves to follow our own tendencies into the unreal worlds around us is part and partial of the current state of theoria. That a city we perceived as dark and shadowy only yesterday could suddenly manifest itself as a magic kingdom or vice versa as a nightmare world of inordinate monstrosity is to know that reality is no longer a solid fixed substance, that form is a floating signifier both material and immaterial and unbounded.

That nothing is real, that everything might take on the hues of unreality and metamorphosis, and that change might just find you in the nightmare of nonsense and strangeness is par for the course in a world where things are not what they seem. As Ligotti’s narrator states it: “In my own case, I must confess that the myth of a natural universe—that is, one that adheres to certain continuities whether we wish them or not—was losing its grip on me and gradually being supplanted by a hallucinatory view of creation. Forms, having nothing to offer except a mere suggestion of firmness, declined in importance; fantasy, that misty domain of pure meaning, gained in power and influence.” (Ligotti, KL 1534)

If as many materialists from Giordano Bruno to Bataille and in our own time Nick Land have attested: matter is formless and energetic, and our so called reality is but a mask for the greater unreality or surreality of the immanent darkness that our own brain distorts and deforms. We may live in a world that could change at any moment into something else: is this horror or comforting? The collapse of the real into the unreal might be an excessive joy for some, and for others a corruption beyond all belief. Hell or paradise: isn’t this in the eye of the beholder? As William Blake once hoped, what we need is a marriage of heaven and hell: “Energy is Eternal Delight.”

As the narrator describes the thoughts of Klaus Klingman: “I am a lucky one, parasite of chaos, maggot of vice. Where I live is all nightmare, thus a certain nonchalance. I am accustomed to drifting in the delirium of history.” (KL 1562) Klingman who is neither a protector nor a defender against the ancient curse of corruption, a man who simply drifts between the gaps like an alien priest of some insubordinate sect. A man who knew the truth but had bypassed its message for a more serene terror. He’d become the witness to the slow decay, the coming disintegration of things. Mulenberg, the center of the vast abject triumph of the nameless fruit: “Throughout the town, all places and things bore evidence to striking revisions in the base realm of matter: precisely sculptured stone began to loosen and lump, an abandoned cart melded with the sucking mud of the street, and objects in desolate rooms lost themselves in the surfaces they pressed upon, making metal tongs mix with brick hearth, prismatic jewels with lavish velvet, a corpse with the wood of its coffin.” (KL 1609)
​
As Bataille would say existence “no longer resembles a neatly defined itinerary from one practical sign to another, but a sickly incandescence, a durable orgasm” (p. 82).3 The lonely brotherhood that had for so long held back the corruption of the universal decay had abandoned the city leaving the people to fall before the bleak misery of things: “All were carried off in the great torrent of their dreams, all spinning in that grayish whirlpool of indefinite twilight, all churning and in the end merging into utter blackness.” (KL 1614) Like the Pleroma of the ancient gnositcs the people were in the place of the dark light without knowing it, the place where time, memory, and thought were forgotten in the silence of night and chaos. As Klingman will tell the young narrator:

I am one with the dead of Muelenburg . . . and with all who have known the great dream in all its true liquescence. (KL 1624)

​As if enacting a parody of the Great Art, the alchemical ceremony of fire, Klingman anoints the narrator who is seeking to know the truth of the ancient world to which Mulenberg has succumb: “To cure you of doubt, you first had to be made a doubter. Until now, pardon my saying so, you have shown no talent in that direction. You believed every wild thing that came along, provided it had the least evidence whatever. Unparalleled credulity. But tonight you have doubted and thus you are ready to be cured of this doubt.” (KL 1627)

Doubting the murderousness of existence is the first step into oblivion. As Klingman in a moment of dark clarity tells the young initiate: “This is my gift to you. This will be your enlightenment. For the time is right again for the return of fluidity, and for the world’s grip to go slack. And later so much will have to be washed away, assuming a renascence of things. Fluidity, always fluidity.” (KL 1631)
​
Maybe this is all we can expect now in our world, a slow withdrawal into that cold night of time without Time, a measured movement into the liquidity of things where life will be washed in the blood of Death without appeal. For too long we have held on to the myth of solidity, fixed the world into static objects; left the movement of the shadows fall before our inner gaze. We’ve lived in the sun too long, let the daylight shape our lives and thoughts. Now is the time of Night and Chaos. All hope of those of the dark sect gone back down into the dark folds of the immaterial material of the universe, where energy and light, the intransigent envelope of nothingness dissolves in a recourse to everything that compromises the powers that be in matters of form, ridiculing the traditional entities, naively rivalling stupefying scarecrows. (Bataille, p. 51) The Great Unraveling has begun, the slow and methodical decomposition of all things into the darkness. We who once believed in the myth of light have found the power of darkness to hold the pure energy, that active principle of matter: eros and thanatos, twins of the dark path call to us at the crossroads of time and the pure instant. Where we find the hanged one upside down in the place of the headless delirium of the Pleroma we will at last discover the impossible shape of Time.

1. Ligotti, Thomas (2012-05-13). Grimscribe (Kindle Locations 1524-1528). Subterranean Press. Kindle Edition.
2. Armand, Louis; Zizek, Slavoj; Critchley, Simon; McCarthy, Tom; Wark, McKenzie; Ulmer, Gregory L.; Kroker, Arthur; Tofts, Darren; Lewty, Jane (2013-07-19). Mind Factory (Kindle Locations 3272-3273). Litteraria Pragensia. Kindle Edition.
3. Georges Bataille. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Univ. Minnesota Press, 1985)

taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

​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.

– Anti-Oedipus

We left off yesterday In the Time of Capital acknowledging the fact that the thought-experiment of an out of control acceleration of the processes of capitalism beyond the territorial limits of its external horizon was an impossible task. Why? Capitalism has built-in safeguards that impose and restrict such a maneuver. I’ll explain that in this post, but will also provide Deleuze and Guattari’s plan of escape: Schizoanalysis. So all those on the Right or Left who seek to install this notion as a program for escaping the limits of capital are going to be in for a little shock when it doesn’t happen. Why? Deleuze & Guattari will put it into words: Oedipus at Last. In the last section of their book on the political aspects of the Anti-Oedipus project they’ll reiterate the basic thematic of the diagnosis but not yet the cure: the outer and immanent limits of capitalism as the schizophrenic horizon beyond which all flows begin to decode and deterritorialize, and the internal limits of desiring-production in capital as itself as the immanent limit. They also show through their account of anti-production that there is a massive regulatory system of State, Bureaucracy, and Army that form the nexus of capitalism’s police force regulating both social-production and desiring-production in its external and immanent social and familial context. But this is not all. They will introduce another limiting factor:

​But capitalism still needs to displace an interior limit in another way: precisely in order to neutralize or repel the absolute exterior limit, the schizophrenic limit: it needs to internalize this limit, this time by restricting it, by causing it to pass no longer between social production and the desiring-production that breaks away from social production, but inside social production, between the form of social reproduction and the form of a familial reproduction to which social production is reduced, between the social aggregate and the private subaggregate to which the social aggregate is applied. (p. 266)

Reading this one sees a nested set of protracted security protocols at work within the anti-production machine to police these various mechanisms of the regulatory process internally to the limits themselves; an endless series of loops, feedback mechanisms, controls, blockages etc., as if it was already part of some vast algorithm or viral agent whose only mission is to produce unfreedom at the very heart of the capitalist project. Is Democracy itself the viral agent abroad in the world today? The world democracies (even in their altered forms in Russia and China) situate this system of capital at the core of their States. Is this by design or intention? Have we been under the illusion that democracy was about freedom, when in fact it is a system of command and control that produces only unfreedom and slavery in the world.

Ultimately the way capitalism controls these internalized limits of the schizophrenic horizon is through the Oedipal limit itself: “Oedipus is this displaced or internalized limit where desire lets itself be captured.” (p. 266) In other words the very enemy of the schiz becomes the limiting factor that captures her desire and regulates its potential to accelerate beyond the horizon. There is no escape from capital, it has already developed the capture points for the accelerated break-flows of the schiz who would escape through the wall into freedom.

The mechanisms of control in this system comes not as in the savage and barbarian forms of despotism, as shit and incest, but rather in the decoded flows of capital-money itself – the mechanisms of infinite debt (p. 267). They’ll reiterate the various ways in which the Oedipal machine has captured desire from the beginning in the savage, barbarian, and now capitalist modes of production and reproduction, etc. Here they follow Freud-Lacan realizing that the sheer inventiveness of their path through the regressive machine that is Oedipus reveals the two aspects of the signifier: “a barred transcendent signifier taken in a maximum that distributes lack, and an immanent system of relations between minimal elements that come to fill the uncovered field (somewhat similar, in traditional terms, to the way one goes from Parmenidean Being to the atoms of Democritus)” (p. 268).

​Ultimately the way capitalism controls these internalized limits of the schizophrenic horizon is through the Oedipal limit itself: “Oedipus is this displaced or internalized limit where desire lets itself be captured.” (p. 266) In other words the very enemy of the schiz becomes the limiting factor that captures her desire and regulates its potential to accelerate beyond the horizon. There is no escape from capital, it has already developed the capture points for the accelerated break-flows of the schiz who would escape through the wall into freedom.

The mechanisms of control in this system comes not as in the savage and barbarian forms of despotism, as shit and incest, but rather in the decoded flows of capital-money itself – the mechanisms of infinite debt (p. 267). They’ll reiterate the various ways in which the Oedipal machine has captured desire from the beginning in the savage, barbarian, and now capitalist modes of production and reproduction, etc. Here they follow Freud-Lacan realizing that the sheer inventiveness of their path through the regressive machine that is Oedipus reveals the two aspects of the signifier: “a barred transcendent signifier taken in a maximum that distributes lack, and an immanent system of relations between minimal elements that come to fill the uncovered field (somewhat similar, in traditional terms, to the way one goes from Parmenidean Being to the atoms of Democritus)” (p. 268).

What this process describes is none other the spiritualization of infinite debt that we described in two earlier posts (here and here): all of this describes the modern European man or Capitalist as show in Nietzsche, Lawrence, and Miller (p. 266): “the hypnosis and the reign of images, the torpor they spread; the hatred of life and of all that is free, of all that passes and flows; the universal effusion of the death instinct (desire-become-death); depression and guilt used as a means of contagion, the kiss of the Vampire: aren’t you ashamed to be happy?” (p. 266). All of this guilt, penalty, self-accusation and self-deprecation, neurosis, depression leads inevitably to the core of the “ascetic ideal” (p. 269).
​
Psychoanalysis did not invent Oedipus it only provide the couch and the Law, the psychoanalyst as despot and banker. (p. 269) What capitalism has done effectively is to include the Marxian critique of society as its internal Law thereby providing “the critique of the processes by which it re-enslaves what within it tends to free itself or to appear free” (p. 270). Deleuze & Guattari will see Freud’s reduction of this process to the family romance of the Oedipal triangle as a stroke of luck for the capitalist regime, for in reducing the decoded flows to the incestual relations of mommy-daddy dynamic, the power to escape the limits was turned inward upon the family instead: “Throughout psychoanalysis, the discourse of bad conscience and guilt always rises up and finds its nourishment – what is called being cured” (p. 270). Capital’s cure is re-enslavement to the very system the schiz in its break-flows had at first sought to escape, absolved only of the guilt and shame attendant to one’s incestual desires:

Freud is the Luther and the Adam Smith of psychiatry. He mobilizes all the resources of myth, of tragedy, of dreams, in order to re-enslave desire, this time from within: an intimate theatre. (p. 271)

They’ll tell us that the thing Freud left out is Oedipus’s own autocritique that led to blindness: “Universal history is nothing more than theology if it does not seize control of the conditions of the contingent, singular existence, its irony, and its own critique” (p. 271).

What are the conditions for such an autocritque? To discover below the family romance the social investments in the unconscious, the group fantasies below the individual, to push the “simulacrum to the point where it ceases to be the image of an image, so as to discover the abstract figures, the schizzes-flows that it harbors and conceals” … to ” substitute, for the private subject of castration, split into a subject of enunciation and a subject of the statement relating only to the two orders of personal images, the collective agents of enunciation that for their part refer to the machinic arrangements … to overturn the theatre of representation into the order of desiring-production: this is the whole task of schizoanalyis” (p. 271)

In other words the diagnosis and cure is the overthrow of Oedipus for the break-flows of schizoanalysis. Schizoanalysis is the mode of acceleration as the break-flows that can surpass the limits of capitalism’s self-incurred chains, the way out of the autocritique that imposes and reduces the schiz to the asylum of capital. This is the other side of the accelerationist ethic that the original statement in the preamble leaves out. This is why most critiques of Deleuze and Guattari’s accelerationist strategy seem weak at best, for they leave out the full import of their diagnosis as well as their cure exposed in the last section of the book Introductionn to Schizoanalysis. From psychoanalysis to schizoanalyis… I’ll take up this in the next post.

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Penguin, 2001)

taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

Today we are entering a space which is speed-space … This new other time is that of electronic transmission, of high-tech machines, and therefore, man is present in this sort of time, not via his physical presence, but via programming.

– Paul Virilio

​Reading Paul Virilio’s The Administration of Fear where he reveals some of the intimate aspects of his early childhood in Nantes, France. Speaking of speed he spoke of the movement of the Germans during the Blitzkrieg. How many of the aspects of his notions on Dromology: or, the science of movement all came to a head. In the morning that the Germans arrived he’d been outside and someone had said they were in the next village, and by the time he’d returned home they were already coming down the street. The other village had been many kilometers away. In his mind this movement, the temporal speeding up of reality entered his young mind revealing to him an essential truth. He would associate fear, occupation, collaboration, and later on the bombing of his village by the allies with speed, with this sense of an accelerating time of movement, a rhythm that had become arhythmical, a time turned against itself.
​
As he describes it his Master, a musicologist, Vladimir Jankelevitch awakened this sense of speed in him as a “question of rhythm”. I used to use a metronome when playing piano as a youngster. I remember the various rhythms and beats it allowed in the syncopations and counts of the bars and notes. The numerical values of the various scales, etc. This notion of time as markings, countings, and rhythms. One realizes that even we exist on many levels and scales of time, moving at different paces from each other. A sense of disorientation can accompany this if one’s lover or friends are in a fast mode, pushing one to do things quicker, etc., a sort of sudden thrust into another tempo, and imbalance ensues that brings with it odd sensations and strange visual perceptions – one enters another speed-space. As if one were slowing down while speeding up at the same time. As if one knew one was moving at a fast pace, but at the same time perceived everything in slow motion. This odd movement of time and being out of kilter with each other. In our time fear is a commodity, a product of our vast ICTs, those communications systems that stretch across the globe have become our environment he tells us. It’s this total environment that encloses us in fear, in the arrhythmic pulses of speed.  An environment of total acceleration going nowhere. What it produces is panic. As he’ll tell it:

​The information bomb can be felt in all corners of the globe: it explodes each second, with the news of an attack, a natural disaster, a health scare, a malicious rumor. It creates a “community of emotions,” a communism of affects coming after the communism of the “community of interests” shared by different social classes. … With the phenomena of instantaneous interaction that are now our lot, there has been a veritable reversal, destabilizing the relationship of human interaction, and the time reserved for reflection, in favor of the conditioned responses produced by emotion. The production of panic is born! (p. 31)1

​The true panic he tells us is this sense that everything has already happened, that reality is accelerating out of control around us at the speed of light and we have reached the limit of instantaneity, the limits of human thought and time (p. 33). Because our systems work in nano-chronological time at speeds our consciousness can no longer apprehend, much less cope with the human has become invisible in the processes that control our world. The world of computer time has compressed human time into speed-space that humans can no longer understand much less cope with: this produces fear and panic. In economic terms the last crisis was a crisis of perception – traders could not compete with their machines:

Derealization is no more and no less than the result of progress. The defense of augmented reality, which is the ritual response of progress propaganda, is in fact a derealization induced by the success of progress in acceleration and the law of movement… The continued increase in speed led to the development of megaloscopy which has caused a real infirmity because it reduces the field of vision. The faster we go, the more we look ahead and lose our lateral vision. We are losing our survival advantage, a space of reality; laterality. (p. 37)

Of course, for those who didn’t catch on the megalosope was an imaginary instrument developed by Benjamin Martin (see below)

Benjamin Martin invented both the “universal compound Microscope”, “Solar Microscope”, and “Wilson’s Microscope”. They were all standard designs of the mid-18th century, but the “Megalascope” was Martin’s own invention. Martin himself described the instrument, in a pamphlet of 1738:

By a MEGALASCOPE is understood an Instrument which gives a magnified View of all the larger Sort of small Objects, and is sometimes called a Fossil-Microscope, Cloth Microscope, &c … the Objects are so much magnified, and their Parts so separate and distinct, that we scarcely know them in this new Point of View, or can reconcile them to the Ideas they impress on the Mind by the natural Appearance.

​Martin here suggests that customers should purchase and use the megalascope because it showed objects to be completely different from their appearance to the naked eye. He was using the unfamiliar nature of the microscopical world as a selling-point. In this context the microscope can be seen as a curiosity, able to engage and fascinate an audience, by showing familiar objects in a new way. I added the link in the passage from Virilio for comic relief.

1. Paul Virilio: The Administration of Fear. (semiotext(e), 2012)

taken from:

by Amy Ireland

​A script from the absolute unknown, how do you even begin to think about that? “Meaning” is a diversion. It evokes too much empathy. You have to ask, instead, what is a message? In the abstract? What’s the content, at the deepest, most reliable level, when you strip away all the presuppositions that you can? The basics are this. You’ve been reached by a transmission. That’s the irreducible thing. Something has been received. [And] to get in, it had to be there, already inside, waiting. Don’t you see? The process of trying to work it out — what I had thought was the way, eventually, to grasp it — to unlock the secret, it wasn’t like that. That was all wrong. It was unlocking me.1

We never find those who understand philosophers among philosophers.2

​So we are confronted by a triad of mysteries: the death or otherwise of Lönnrot, the disappearance of Carter into the coffin-shaped clock, and the deliquescence of Professor Challenger as he absconds both slowly and hurriedly towards an invisible point below the strata. There is a blurry edge in all detective work that, as Borges too competently demonstrates, skirts a zig-zag threshold between apophenia and the truly canny connection of events that only appear, superficially, to be disconnected. In the name of a method that is closer to invocation than criticism, a reckless detective might refrain from determining exactly where an act of decryption lies on the ugly terrain of legitimacy and, proffering sanity as the stake, live up to the problem as it stands. The greatest puzzles are always a delicate balance of intrication and simplicity. What if a single answer were capable of resolving all three of these strange cases — blinding in its solvent consistency?
​
In Kant’s Critical Philosophy, Difference and Repetition, his nineteen-seventies lectures at Paris-VIII, and in a late, expanded reformulation of the preface to the first of these works (appearing in Essays Clinical and Critical), Deleuze pairs and contrasts two schemata of time: the time of the ‘revolving door’, and the time of the ‘straight labyrinth’.3 Quoting Hamlet, who furnishes the first of the four poetic formulas he will relate to the innovations of Kant’s philosophy, Deleuze writes

​Time is out of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis on which the door turns. The hinge, Cardo, indicates the subordination of time to precise cardinal points, through which the periodic movements it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinated to extensive movement; it is the measure of movement, its interval or number. This characteristic of ancient philosophy has often been emphasised: the subordination of time to the circular movement of the world as the turning Door, a revolving door, a labyrinth opening onto its eternal origin. [C’est la porte-tambour, le labyrinthe ouverte sur l’origine éternelle.]

Time out of joint, the door off its hinges, signifies the first great Kantian reversal: movement is now subordinated to time. Time is no longer related to the movement it measures, but rather movement to the time that conditions it. Moreover, movement is no longer the determination of objects, but the description of a space, a space we must set aside in order to discover time as the condition of action. Time thus becomes unilinear and rectilinear, no longer in the sense that it would measure a derived movement, but in and through itself, insofar as it imposes the succession of its determination on every possible movement. This is a rectification of time. Time ceases to be curved by a God who makes it depend on movement. It ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, the order of an empty time. […] The labyrinth takes on a new look — neither a circle nor a spiral, but a thread, a pure straight line, all the more mysterious in that it is simple, inexorable, terrible — “the labyrinth made of a single straight line which is indivisible, incessant”.4

​The contrast between these two figures is due, first and foremost, to the relationship between time and movement they express. In the schema of the revolving door, time is twice subordinated: first, to a transcendent eternity which provides the rational model for the ordering of movement, and second, to the rationally-ordered movement from which time’s number is derived (the aperture ‘onto the eternal origin’ constituted by the resonance of copy with model). In the schema of the straight labyrinth, movement is subordinated to time, which conditions movement, inaugurating a reversal of priority between the two and a shift from a spatialised classification of the difference to a temporal one.5 The pairing of the two figures is more enigmatic. Since the former reappears as a functional attribute of the particle-clock (“the assemblage serving as a revolving door” [l’agencement qui servait comme d’une porte-tam­bour]), that strange vehicle which facilitates the disappearances of Carter and Challenger in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” and “The Geology of Morals”, and the latter clearly invokes the straight labyrinth (“the labyrinth made of a single straight line which is indivisible, incessant”) used by Lönnrot to riddle Sharlach in the confrontation at the Villa Triste-le-Roy, both seem to conceal passageways by which escape from specific geometrical tyrannies — indexed here by extensity, cardinality, and ‘a space we must set aside’ — may be effectuated.6However, given the fact that the revolving door seems to implement the geometrical conditions it somehow also affords an exit from, and the obvious preference Deleuze (as a transcendental philosopher) exhibits for the straight labyrinth as a ‘rectification’ of time, the counterintuitive nature of this proposition is not easily brushed aside. Deeper exploration is required.

​In the history of Western philosophy, the revolving door is the archetypal image of pre-critical temporality. It takes its coordinates first from astronomical movements, and then from terrestrial ones: the rotation of planets and seasons.7 These revolutions, confining time to motion and phenomenality, are held in contrast to what is outside them and what has been said to have engendered them — an ever-present but non-manifest, spatiotemporally unconditioned, unified mind or essence. In his lectures, Deleuze links this figure of time, curved by the hand of a god, to “the arc of the demiurge which makes circles” in the account given by Plato’s Timaeus.8

Since the model was an ever-living being, [the demiurge] undertook to make this universe of ours the same as well, or as similar as it could be. But the being that served as the model was eternal, and it was impossible for him to make this altogether an attribute of any created object. Nevertheless, he determined to make it a kind of moving likeness of eternity, and so in the very act of ordering the universe he created a likeness of eternity, a likeness that progresses eternally through the sequence of numbers, while eternity abides in oneness.9

Timaeus, an expert astronomer who has “specialised in natural science” refers several times to his cosmogony as an ἐικός λόγος (a ‘likely account’), a play on words drawing on the relation between εἰκόνες and ἐικός meant to reinforce the notion of the cosmos as a likeness — the imperfect copy of a perfect original.10 Here, worldly imperfection is due to the changeability of the contents of the copy, which unlike their eternal origin, are subject to time:

This image of eternity is what we have come to call ‘time’, since along with the creation of the universe [the demiurge] devised and created days, nights, months, and years, which did not exist before the creation of the universe. They are all parts of time, and ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are created aspects of time which we thoughtlessly and mistakenly apply to that which is eternal. For we say that it was, is, and will be, when in fact only ‘is’ truly belongs to it, while ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are properties of things that are created and that change over time, since ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are both changes. What is for ever consistent and unchanging, however, does not have the property of becoming older or younger with the passage of time; it was not created at some point, it has not come into existence just now, and it will not be created in the future. As a rule, in fact, none of the modifications that belong to the things that move about in the sensible world, as a result of having been created, should be attributed to it; they are aspects of time as it imitates eternity and cycles through the numbers.11

​There is no measurable time prior to the demiurge’s imposition of order on a previously disordered cosmos, composed only of confused matter and erratic motion. Because time arises from movement, only a perfectly regular and harmonious totality of cosmic motion will install temporality in the rational manner required to produce a sufficiently faithful copy of the model. This imposition of formal regularity is not, however, without complication. Deleuze’s emphasis on the motif of circularity arises from the description, first, of the demiurge ensuring that the matter of the universe is “perfectly spherical, equidistant in all directions from its centre to the extremes”, “freeing” its primary motion from imbalance by giving it a “circular movement … setting it spinning at a constant pace in the same place and within itself”, and then, with the totality of the matter of the universe thus arranged, of the inauguration of a complex process of division and mixing for the purpose of imbuing the assemblage with a soul, which the demiurge creates via the combination of two media: the “indivisible and never changing”, and the “divided and created substance of the physical world” (the former indexing identity, the latter, difference) obtaining a third medium with aspects of both, thus allowing for a flow of information between the formal and the phenomenal.12

He then blends the indivisible with the divisible and the alloy of the indivisible and divisible, fashioning from the tripartite mixture a homogenous whole, but not without effort, for “getting difference to be compatible with identity [takes] force, since difference does not readily form mixtures”.13 Despite the complexity, might and skill brought to the work of ordering by the demiurge (who is a craftsman, after all), a material remainder — what Deleuze will call “the unequal in itself” — still persists, and further blending is required.14 This involves a tortured series of intervallic material distributions from which the demiurge finally extracts an obedient harmony.15 The mixture is then split into strips, laid out like an X and folded together into two revolving circles, the outer circle — containing “the equal in the form of the movement of the Same” — revolves with the primary movement of the cosmos and is justly named “the revolution of identity” while the inner circle — revolving at an angle to the circle of identity — contains the eight then-known “planets” (including the sun and the moon) along with “what subsists of inequality in the divisible” by distributing it among the planetary orbits, and bears the denomination “the revolution of difference”.16 This latter grounds the derivation of time.

​Because it is “the shared task” of the heavenly bodies “to produce time”, a considerable portion of the “Timaeus” is dedicated to a geometrical description of planetary ambulation, offering precise calculations of each planet’s orbit which, when taken together, add up to an internally and externally harmonious totality (each orbit internally relative to the others, and the whole externally relative to the revolution of the circle of identity): the world’s year.17 This single, great revolution yields “the perfect number of time” and is marked by the “moment when all the eight revolutions, with their relative speeds, attain completion and regain their starting points”, resetting the cycle of the circle of difference in relation to the circle of identity.18 Pre-critical time is thus simply the organisation and rationalisation of a prior, chaotic, spatiality in response to the exigencies of a divine model which exists both outside space and time. A great compass, dividing a cosmic sphere into equal and predictable portions, priming its matter for technological and cultural capture: the seasonal arithmetic that will come to ground agriculture; the compartmentalisation of the day, the week and the year into periods devoted alternatively to the sacred or the profane; the striations of latitude facilitating oceanic navigation, cartography, imperialism, and the proportional fastidiousness of classical architecture and art.
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An exclusive disjunction (the abiding feature of monotheistic religion) administrates the distinction between eternity and the cosmos as the ordered structure of secondary appearances. Held apart from the eternal and locked down by matter and movement, this turning according to number is only an auxiliary, fallen ‘image’. A simulation generated and managed by a fully exteriorised and transcendent non-time, which functions as the ultimate measure against which every determinate object falls into a static and immutable hierarchical series whose order can never be shifted, interrogated, or affected by feedback from within. Because it continues to be tethered to a transcendent realm which imposes teleological order, the most generous aberration allowed to time — one “marked by material, meteorological and terrestrial contingencies” — still remains derivative of movement.19 ‘Time’ beyond revolution is transcendent, tenseless, authoritative and persistent. The revolving door is therefore a dualistic image of temporality, inserting a gap between the hierarchically organised, oppositional qualities of idea and appearance; unity and variation; identity and difference; indivisibility and divisibility; being and becoming, good and evil, inside and outside — its borders stalked by the constabulary of the laws of thought, and god. It is, as Luce Irigaray tirelessly anatomises in “Plato’s Hystera”, the time — as space — of the Platonic cave, a “theatrical trick” designed to inaugurate the great “circus” of representation via the circular repetition of the same. The cave’s anterior tunnel leads upward into the light.

Upward — this notation indicates from the very start that the Platonic cave functions as an attempt to give an orientation to the reproduction and representation of something that is always already there. […] The orientation functions by turning everything over, by reversing, and by pivoting around axes of symmetry.​.20

The cardinal points of the compass, or four wings of the door’s turning hinge, exhibit the spatialisation of time inherent to the image. The law of its number is cardinality — quantitative measurement of internally homogenous content — and a representational form of numeracy. Being a sphere, it is intrinsically symmetrical. In this way, space and time are confined to the double homogeneity of extension and simultaneity — to the circus of representational reproduction and its clowns, whose comedy is always enacted in the mode of farce, a repetition that always “falls short” of its model.21There are, therefore, only “proportions, functions, [and] relations” available inside the simulation that can be referred “back to sameness”.22 And this sameness is at once the model for the beautiful, the truthful, and the good — astronomical rationality providing the exemplar for human aesthetic, epistemological and moral order.

Man, as a rational animal equipped with the ability to observe and understand these relations, is ontologically at home in the universe of the revolving door. Human cognition and sensibility, when exercised correctly, are perfectly resonant with the structure of phenomena. Thought thus naturally inclines towards the law that the demiurge embodies and by extension, to the model from which the universe has been copied. Psychology, cosmology and rationality are bound in cosmic rhyme. This is precisely what the latter part of the Timaeus then turns to, linking the account it has just given of human perception, especially that of sight, to our ability to infer the universal law of the good, the beautiful, and the true, and to reproduce it on a microcosmic level, specifically through the practice of philosophy.23 Plato’s cosmos is teleologically assured by the perfection of the demiurge, and opposes both accounts of cosmogenesis more sympathetic to contingency, chance and natural selection (such as those of Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus, which offer explanations exhibiting an awkward but prescient Darwinism) and the immanent teleology of Aristotle. Revolution thus has a moral content, and Timaeus concludes his account of cosmogenesis by stating that,

since the movements that are naturally akin to our divine part are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe, these are what each of us should be guided by as we attempt to reverse the corruption of the circuits in our heads, that happened around the time of our birth, by studying the harmonies and revolutions of the universe.24

​In this way, “we will restore our nature to its original condition” achieving “our goal” of living “now and in the future, the best life that the gods have placed within human reach”.25 The importance of sight to the practice of philosophy is insisted upon here because it alone of all the senses provides us with access to the law of number (and by extension, a model of perfect morality) embedded in the rotations of the planets.26 Vision is thus the most morally-attuned sense, the conduit of goodness and beauty, and the base upon which one can realise the latent harmoniousness of one’s own relation to the universe. These ‘corrupt circuits’ in need of correction reprise the wandering of the planets prior to the ordering of their movements by the demiurge, and not insignificantly, ‘wanderer’ (πλάνης), ‘illusion’, ‘deceit’ or ‘discursivity’ (πλάνη) and ‘planet’ (πλάνητας ἀστήρ — wandering star) all share a similar root in ancient Greek, with Plato using the term ‘planomenon’ (πλανόμενον) elsewhere to mean ‘errant’.27 Truth emerges in inverse proportion to the itinerant dithyramb of material insubordination. Timaeus completes the moral lesson of cardinality, vision and aspirational goodness with a warning. Men who live “unmanly or immoral lives” are destined to fall farther down the series of good and perfect beings in harmony with the order of the universe, being “reborn in their next incarnation as women”.28
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The return to sameness, finally, ensures that the universe will not degrade or dissolve of its own accord. While “the model exists for all eternity”, “the universe was and is and always will be for all time”, unless the demiurge explicitly wishes it to be so (“anything created by me is imperishable unless I will it”); so long as the world remains in harmony, this dissolution will not occur — a threat monotheism will make much of in the epochs to come.29 Hence the biblical prophecies of apocalypse such as that which suggests that when the day arrives, the heavens will depart “as a scroll when it is rolled together”, inflected back into the curved palm of its god.30 Broadened beyond its exemplary delineation in the “Timaeus”, the revolving door thus becomes a cipher for temporal dualisms in general. Truth is located in a lost transcendence (the indivisible, god, eternity), obtainable only at a delay via religion or via the work of philosophical contemplation shepherded by vision — the decanting of a priori knowledge from empirical experience, which prior to Kant, denoted a separate and transcendent ideality. If there is knowledge of this fallenness and of the perfection of that other realm inside that of the world of motion and change, this can only be so because ‘man’ is made in the image of a god, or has forgotten something he once knew.31 Thought is inherently linked with its ground via an internal isomorphism — a rhyme — acting as the guarantor of its intuitions of damnation and error, whose causes are always external. Its correlative subject is moral or epistemological: the theologian or the philosopher, compelled to discover the realm of essences behind the veil of appearances.

There is, as there always is, a sexual difference attached to the dualism. Historically, the material, fallen aspect of time-as-variation is feminised, secondary, and passive. Timaeus calls it the “receptacle”, “the mother”, “the nurse and the nurturer of the universe” and characterises it via all the emblems of lack: it is “altogether characterless”, a bare medium for the production of formed elements; passive (“it only ever acts as the receptacle for everything”); it operates through mimicry (“[i]ts nature is to … be modified and altered by the things that enter it, with the result that it appears different at different times”) having no nature of its own, and is “difficult” and “obscure”, while the creative force untouched by temporality — that which energises representation as a condition of the feminised matter it circumscribes — is primary, active, de-substantialised, and masculine.32 “It would not be out of place to compare the receptacle to a mother, the source to a father, and what they create between them to a child.”33 Is there a neater epithet to describe the age-old pact between reproduction and representation?
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Sensible, material, and bound in harmonious relation to a transcendent non-time, pre-critical temporality is irrevocably secondary and modal. The time of the revolving door is a mode of eternity, the essential structure of which appears to us as a succession of moments — extensive, cardinal, homogenous — arranged in a cyclical repetition of the same, with a spatial line delimiting outside from inside.34 As Deleuze puts it, “all the time of antiquity is marked by a modal character … time is a mode and not a being, no more than number is a being. Number is a mode in relation to what it quantifies, in the same way that time is a mode in relation to what it measures”.35 In a world for which time is a mere, cardinalised image of the eternal, held apart from it in a relation of exclusive disjunction, administered by a god, all experience is that of a subject condemned to reckon, neurotically, with its originary imperfection. The great line demarcating outside from inside assigns interiority to time and exteriority to the non-time of eternity via a spatial horizon. A definitionally beautiful misconception of the topology of time, but a misconception nonetheless.36

The circle must be abandoned as a faulty principle of return; we must abandon our tendency to organize everything into a sphere. All things return on the straight and narrow by way of a straight and labyrinthine line.37

‘Rectifying’ the celestial or meteorological temporality of the revolving door, the figure of time expressed in the straight labyrinth emerges in Deleuze’s various accounts as “the time of the city” and also that of the “desert”.38 The subordination of time to space and motion dissolves into the contentless, temporal determination of the empirical by an immanent yet abstract process. Deleuze notes that Kant was able to apprehend this due to his historical and geographical situation — virtually immobilised in his Königsberg study, yet sensitive to subterranean tremors — deep in the heart of Europe during the ignition of modern industrialisation. There is an embedded double reference to capitalist temporality, brought to light by Marx’s statement in the Grundrisse, that

Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange — of the means of communication and transport — the annihilation of space by time -- becomes an extraordinary necessity for it …

and to Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Notes on the Oedipus”, leading Deleuze to state that “it is correct to claim that neither Fichte nor Hegel is the descendent of Kant — rather it is Hölderlin, who discovers the emptiness of pure time”.39 If the industrial city is also a desert, it is the Athenian desert of the Sophoclean tragedies, for, as Hölderlin writes, Oedipus is remarkable in its uniquely modern conception of the genre, in which “God and man communicate in the all-forgetting form of unfaithfulness”.40 Oedipus, like the subject of the First Critique,

forgets both himself and the God and, in a sacred manner, of course, turns himself round like a traitor. For at the most extreme edge of suffering, nothing exists beside the conditions of time or space. Man forgets himself there because he is wholly in the moment; and God, because he is nothing else than time. And both are unfaithful: time, because at such a moment it reverses categorically — beginning and end simply cannot be connected; and man, because at this moment he must follow the categorical reversal, and therefore simply cannot be in the following what he was in the beginning.41

​Hölderlin’s identification of a ‘categorical reversal’ in the dual turning-away of god and man is taken up by Deleuze as the mark that indicates a historical transition in the schemata of time, and in turn, the relation this reversal installs between the two sides of the disjunctive couple. With the figure of Oedipus, the initial shift from the temporality of the revolving door to that of the straight labyrinth is consecrated, and — following Hölderlin’s interpretation — coincides with a truly modern sense of time, a time that is inherently tragic, but in an unprecedented way. While Plato’s arc of integrated planetary motion is always returning — like the great cyclical tragedies of Aeschylus — to a state of equilibrium, ending where it began, Hölderlin’s Oedipus is “traversed by a straight line which tears him along” with “murderous slowness” towards an enigmatic dissolution at an unknown coordinate in the shifting desert sands: and “Towards what? Nothing”.42 The distinction between ancient and modern tragic forms — and elsewhere, between farce and tragedy — is determined by the placement of the limit with which the hero interacts. In the ancient conception of the genre, tragedy conforms to the exclusive disjunction operating under the aegis of the gods. The limit with which the hero comes into conflict is external, manifested in a law that is then transgressed by some excessive act for which the hero must atone, triggering a return to order.43 Deleuze sees in this cycle of limit, transgression and return, a perfect isomorphism with the schema of the revolving door.

[T]his tragic time is modelled on astronomical time since in astronomical time you have the sphere of fixed points which is precisely the sphere of perfect limitation, you have the planets and the movements of the planets which, in a certain way, break through the limit, then you have the atonement, which is to say the re-establishment of justice since the planets find themselves in the same position again.44

​The cycle is reinforced by the act of transgression, harmony is reinstated between the realm of the gods and the realm of men, and we know in advance the lesson that will be learned.45 But something different happens for Oedipus. The limit he encounters is no longer external, having shifted simultaneously closer and further away — the threshold dividing gods from men, and time from space, is both interior to Oedipus and beyond him — it has become “enigmatic”.46 It cleaves him in two and drives him towards an infinity that rises up to meet him in an “all-forgetting form of unfaithfulness”, annihilating him at Colonus whilst looping him back upon himself.47 Following Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic, Kantian reading of the text, the Sophoclean tragedy is condensed into an infernal play of diversion and re-orientation as Oedipus is forced to confront himself in the form of an infinite self-displacing horizon which draws him across the deflated denouement of King Oedipus and into the relentless modern desert of Oedipus at Colonus.48
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Oedipus’ time is no longer the cyclical time of return to a founding order, but a simple, straight line which complicates everything. The limit manifests both as a temporal fracture interior to Oedipus’ vexed subjectivity and a point to which he tends — “the gap of an in-between, which occasions, finally, a loss of self”.49 There is no atonement for Oedipus, although there is a tribunal — and a crime. He is not subject to a hero’s death, only a long and desolate exile (a little too long to be comfortable) to which he voluntarily submits in the absence of divine directive.50 Thus Oedipus “turns himself round like a traitor”, but in a sacred manner — the trial becoming what Jean Beaufret (the Hölderlin commentator Deleuze draws most visibly on besides a few cursory gestures towards Heidegger, who he cites laconically in Difference and Repetition and the lectures on Kant), names both a “heresy” and an “initiation” — and is “returned to himself” in two ways.51 First, in terms of the mythic narrative, as the cause of himself (Oedipus is the cause of the plague that causes Oedipus) and more enigmatically at the terminus of his abstractly interminable wanderings, where he ‘returns’ in such a way that he can no longer be what he was in the beginning.

When the god who “is nothing more than time”, finally, and not without an irony that is unique to Hölderlin’s translation (“Why are we delaying? Let’s go! You are too slow!”), enables his demise, we are denied the catharsis that typically accompanies the spectacle of the hero’s death.52 “What happened?” implores the chorus of the small party that has accompanied Oedipus to the threshold beyond which only he and Theseus are allowed to pass.53 The response is a brief and integrally obscure report.54 It is speculated that Oedipus has vanished into “the earth’s foundations” which “gently opened up and received him with no pain” or was “lifted away to the far dark shore” by “a swift invisible hand”, the prolonged arrival of his death heralded by thunder and strange surges of lightning, illuminating, briefly, the hidden diagonal that haunts the in-between of sky and ground, the realm of the gods and the realm of men.55 In the cracks of the Kantian machinery a different disjunction momentarily rears its faceless mien, whilst at the end of the line, “death loses itself in itself” and Oedipus, “having nothing left to hide” becomes “the guardian of a secret”.56 Between these two returns, the modern tragic figure is split across time both intensively and extensively as its own internal and external limit and source. The Sophoclean line does not restore a temporality of lost equilibrium, as is the rule in classical tragedy, but ends unresolved, internally perturbed, and terminally out of balance.

​Oedipus plays an ambivalent role in Deleuze’s writing. Like the shaman and the despot he is always double.57 Carlo Ginzberg makes the connection between shamanic practices and the Oedipus myth explicit in Ecstasies — his trans-temporal, trans-spatial study of the witches’ sabbath — where he finds in the motif of the swollen foot (which gives Oedipus his name) the mytho-cultural stamp of the shamanic initiate whose journey leads inexorably to the realm of the dead.58 Oedipus incarnates, as such, the mythical archetype of the dying god, which links him enigmatically with Christ and Dionysus.59 Moreover, the persistence of lameness, monosandalism, bodily maiming, or an unbalanced gait among the vast swathe of myths and cultural practices included in Ginzberg’s study reveals a fundamental trait attributable to all beings who, like Oedipus, are “suspended between the realm of the dead and the realm of the living”: “Anyone who goes to or returns from the nether world — man, animal, or a mixture of the two — is marked by an asymmetry.”60 This asymmetry, at once abstract and empirical, is measured against a perceived natural symmetry that keeps the social realm in harmony with the circular world of revolving seasons and astronomical cycles — coordinates that return the cycle to its beginning. “The trans-cultural diffusion of myths and rituals revolving around physiological asymmetry”, writes Ginzberg, “most probably sinks its psychological roots in this minimal, elementary perception that the human species has of itself”, namely the “recognition of symmetry as a characteristic of human beings”. Thus, “[a]nything that modifies this image on a literary or metaphorical plane therefore seems particularly suited to express an experience that exceeds the limits of what is human”.61 Mythical lameness symbolises an otherworldly incursion, a problematic asymmetry that intrudes upon a so-called natural humanity and opens a passage between worlds.
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Ginzberg also notes in passing (although only to point out what he considers a superficial reading indebted to an overly synchronic methodology) Levi-Strauss’ connection of symbolic lameness to the passage of the seasons, where it features as part of a dance-based ritual performed to truncate a particular season and accelerate the passage to the next, offering a “perfect diagram” of the hoped-for imbalance.62 If Ginzberg is warranted in discounting Levi-Strauss’ hypothesis, perhaps this is not because it is wholly incorrect so much as an interpretation that is limited insofar as it remains indebted to a particular conception of time among its proponents. Ritual or symbolic lameness grasped as a spell for accelerating the seasonal series acts as a superficial interpretation covering over a deeper one, operating within an altogether different understanding of time. One glimpsed beneath the esotericism of Deleuze’s statement that the “ego is a mask for other masks, a disguise under other disguises. Indistinguishable from its own clowns, it walks with a limp on one green leg and one red leg”.63 Read through these subterranean lines which knit it into a complex cultural history of shamanic tropes and practices, Oedipus’ swollen foot condenses time compression, an initiation preceding a journey to the realm of the dead and a fundamental disequilibrium, and thereby acts as a cipher for the key aspects of the Sophoclean tragedy in Hölderlin’s interpretation and the schematic shift from the revolving door to the straight labyrinth.

In “Notes on the Oedipus” and “Notes on the Antigone”, Hölderlin proposes a reading that can be extrapolated from a “calculable law” opposing a discursive logic embedded in history, judgement and the mundane affairs of the human world, with an obscure notion of rhythm.64 The idiosyncrasy of his reading arises from an attempt to affirm the realist paradigm (grounded in scientific and historical validity) that dominated early German Romanticism alongside an unnameable and unrepresentable “efficacity”, located in “another dimension […] beyond and below” conceptual thought, which he believed characterised the tragic in its essence.65 The aim of the law was to make this obscure element momentarily graspable — not as something represented, but as the form of representation itself — a momentary “inspiration” that “comprehends itself infinitely … in a consciousness which cancels out consciousness”.66 As Beaufret frequently reminds his readers, the influence of Kant on the young poet is difficult to miss, and is particularly apparent when Hölderlin writes, for example, “[a]mong men, one must above all bear in mind that every thing is something, i.e. that it is cognisable in the medium of its appearance, and that the manner in which it is defined can be determined and taught”.67 Applied to the two Oedipus plays, taken together as a single drama, this yields an analysis in which a rhythmic distribution of the dialogue becomes diagrammable as a speed differential broken by a caesura corresponding to the prophecy of Tiresias. In contrast to Antigone where the structure is inverted (Tiresias’ prophecy being withheld until the end), the caesura in the Oedipus plays occurs early in the drama, countering a momentum which “inclines … from the end towards the beginning”.68

​Hölderlin’s rhythmic diagrams of Oedipus and Antigone. Note that the notational progression from a (caesura), to b(end), and c (beginning) implies that the caesura is logically prior to the two points given in successive time.

​By the time Tiresias speaks the “pure word” that reveals to Oedipus the truth of his identity everything of significance has already taken place, and the drama is supplied by Oedipus’ apprehension and acceptance of his fate, dragged along by the line of time, in which he learns to become who he is by becoming something else (as the cause of himself he is also the cause of a difference from himself).69The narrative is, incidentally, structured like a modern detective story, in which one begins by asking ‘What happened?’.70 The caesura breaks the consistency of Oedipus’ conception of himself, rewrites his memories (“the killer you are seeking is yourself”), and throws him into a time that suddenly becomes animate with a ‘before’ that was not previously available, and ‘after’ that sutures him to zero: “This day brings your birth; and brings your death”.71 The terrible implication of his fate — the prophecy of patricide and incest that lead his parents to desert him as an infant, supposedly left to die among the elements, and the discovery that everything he had done to avoid it has in fact functioned to bring it about — rises up before him. The ground falls away and, as Hölderlin writes, the rhythmic structure of the text propels Oedipus backwards towards his beginning with an incredible momentum, simultaneously interminable, due to the indifference of the gods, whilst slowly hurrying him towards his death. It is not for nothing that Hölderlin would pronounce in a letter to a friend that “[t]he true meaning of tragedy is most easily grasped from the position of paradox”.72 The caesura shields the first portion of the two Oedipus plays from their accelerated second portion, interfacing the differential speeds of dramatic action, and in this, wordlessly renders Hölderlin’s idea of an otherworldly efficacity rhythmically apprehensible without representing it.73 The operational rule of this manifestation is disequilibrium or asymmetry, and asymmetry linearly breaks the foundational rhyme that animates the Timaean cosmos, and inaugurates a new rule, the shamanic limp of schizophrenic auto-production. Oedipus’s initiation is a countdown that re-initiates his fatal loop.
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The caesura thus produces two ‘times’ — an asymmetrical, looped, auto-productive time (one slice of which is rhythmically compressed, generating an empirical acceleration), and the asymmetrical form of time productive of asymmetrical time (Hölderlin’s modern god) — and two deaths: the horizontal death at the end of straight line, which takes Oedipus into the ground, and the secret, vertical death of the caesura, which rearranges everything in a single instant, producing and grounding the physical death of Oedipus and the time it takes place in. Hölderlin will denote both with the mathematical expression “= 0”.74 In contrast to the progressive time of the heretic’s trial, “the ever-oppositional dialogue”, the history and affairs of Thebes, and Oedipus’ voyage of metamorphosis “in which the beginning and end no longer rhyme”, the caesura is the irruption of time as a void which produces succession and abides within Oedipus in the function of an initiation as he travels the line that will remove him “from his orbit of life … to another world, [to] the eccentric orbit of the dead”.75 It is, to borrow a term from MVU’s resident Hyper-Kantian, R. E. Templeton, a “transcendental occurrence”.76

Split across an asymmetrical empirical succession and a far more obscure asymmetry that both grounds and ungrounds it, time indeed becomes a straight line with a subterranean labyrinth as its premise. A strange kind of homogeneity forged in war. With the shifting of the limit — the great rift that draws a threshold between two worlds, defining inside and outside — into the modern Oedipal subject, everything changes. When Hölderlin claims that in the double betrayal of man and god, “infinite unification purifies itself through infinite separation”, purification is no longer just a euphemism for catharsis but the precise characterisation of this pure and empty form of time.77 Anglossic qabbala distils this insight with economic clarity: Kant is a break and a link.

​“Rather than being concerned with what happens before and after Kant (which amounts to the same thing)”, writes Deleuze,

we should be concerned with a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant, much less by post-Kantianism — except, perhaps, by Hölderlin in the experience and the idea of a ‘categorical reversal’. For when Kant puts rational theology into question, in the same stroke he introduces a kind of disequilibrium, a fissure or crack in the pure Self of the ‘I think’, an alienation in principle, insurmountable in principle: the subject can henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as that of an Other, and in so doing invoke a mysterious coherence in the last instance which excludes its own — namely, that of the world and God. A Cogito for a dissolved Self: the Self of ‘I think’ includes in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other. It matters little that synthetic identity — and, following that, the morality of practical reason — restore the integrity of the self, of the world and of God, thereby preparing the way for post-Kantian syntheses: for a brief moment we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterises the highest power of thought, and opens Being directly on to difference, despite all the mediations, all the reconciliations, of the concept.78

​There are three elements to this ‘furtive and explosive’ moment in Kant: the death of God, the fractured I, and the passive nature of the empirical self, all of which correspond to the introduction of transcendental time into the subject and usher in an immense complication of what we take to be human agency.
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The death of god is the effacement of the demiurge, along with the essences from which he constructs the phenomenal world of appearance. Without this god, what guarantees the faithful reproduction within the image-simulation of reality of its eternal model? How can we know our experience rhymes with its ground? This leads to an ontological problem whereby ‘man’, the plaything of empirical time, can no longer assume ‘he’ is at home in the world of experience. If there is to be a disjunction between law and its material manifestation, who, if not god, administers it? Nothing is there to underwrite the Platonic values of truth, goodness and beauty, and the modern, empirical subject finds itself at sea in a murderous asymmetry that promises nothing but the cosmic fatigue of ultimate extinquishment under the second law of thermodynamics. The fractured I is even more insidious. The subject, no longer infirm and fallen, as it is for Plato, is constitutive, but “constantly hollow[ed] out”, spilt “in two” and “double[d]”, alienated from itself across the form of time in such a way that it cannot experience its constitutive power.79 Worse, as Rimbaud so acutely put it — “It is false to say: I think; one ought to say I am thought … I is another” — that shard of self, the empirical ego which registers phenomena, cannot know what its double is and must now contend with its new status of integral receptivity.80 How, then, does it believe itself to act rather than simply be acted-through? On what does it found its ethics and its politics?

This is the initiatory consequence of the transcendental philosophy of time. The transition from the revolving door dramatises the modulation from transcendent to transcendental distinction, reconfigures the a priori, isolated notion of eternity, and moves time from a spatially subsumed cardinality to a purely formal ordinality — in which distance between numbers opens onto the realm of depth. Philosophy, of course, has preliminary solutions to all of these problems, but in solving them, it steals intermittently back and forth between schemata, recuperating certain comforts native to the time of the revolving door, and smuggling a dying theology into the explosive zones of the city and the desert.

The straight line is the shortest path between two points. This is the example Deleuze uses to explain Kant’s development of a priori synthetic judgements, those “prodigious monsters” that overcome the historical a priori / analytic, a posteriori / synthetic dualism — “the death of sound philosophy” — targeted by the First Critique.81  The straight line is thus also a diagonal one, and in this sense, the leanest diagram of critique. The first, faint sketch of a philosophy erected out of paradox.

The Lovecraftian machinery of the text follows from this primary opposition between synthetic sense experience and analytic logic by reformatting it into a division between sensibility and understanding and locating both within the bounds of the a priori on a transcendental diagonal.82

​Receptive, presentational and constitutive, sensibility furnishes the a priori forms of time and space, while the active, representational and reproductive faculty of the understanding provides the a priori concepts (or categories), both of which will be brought to bear on the determination of empirical objects as the conditions of all possible experience, coincident with knowledge and guided by the speculative interest of reason. The form of time delineated by Kant is empty — but productive of a single dimension of successive time whose “beginning and end simply cannot be connected”, and the form of space, likewise empty, can produce only the “infinite given magnitude” of a Euclidean and co-extensive dimensionality.83 Both forms are simultaneously subjective and objectively-valid insofar as they are generative of reality for us.84 Time, classed as ‘inner sense’, is the form of internal affection. It envelops space, or ‘outer sense’, the form of external relation and the possibility of being affected by exterior objects, which can only occur with the presupposition of time, although the two are inseparable and arise together in the human mind.85 Time can never appear to us as it is in itself and is always necessarily accompanied by space in our representations of it. Thus, we

​represent the temporal sequence through a line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold constitutes a series that is of only one dimension, and infer from the properties of this line to all the properties of time, with the sole difference that the parts of the former are simultaneous, but those of the latter always exist successively.86

This succession is simply a mode of the form of time (along with persistence and co-existence, the three categories of relation whose principles are procured in the Analogies of Experience), which is not in itself successive. Nor are the modes of time properties of objects in themselves, leaving movement — dependent specifically on modal persistence — strictly subordinate to the pure form of time. Kant is adamant about this, demonstrating that if the form of time itself were successive it would be subject to a problem of infinite regress.

​[C]hange does not affect time itself, but only the appearances in time (just as simultaneity is not a modus for time itself, in which no parts are simultaneous but rather all succeed one another). If one were to ascribe such a succession to time itself, one would have to think yet another time in which this succession would be possible.87

​Radically indeterminate, time in itself cannot be equivalent to its parts. It corresponds to the figure of the straight labyrinth insofar as it is “in(di)visible” and — because it accompanies all of our representations — “incessant”.88 To confuse the form of time with time-as-succession is a grave metaphysical error. In the universe of the straight labyrinth, as Deleuze writes, “[i]t is not succession that defines time, but time that defines the parts of movement as successive inasmuch as they are determined within it”.89 Space in itself, in a similar fashion, cannot be construed following a pre-supposed grammar, the eclipse of Euclidean axioms in the history of mathematics having no bearing on it as a pure form.90 The fact that experience appears to unfold along a linear timeline and in three pitiful dimensions is simply a constitutive quirk of human mental structure. Insofar as we can grasp their being in themselves as pure forms, space “signifies nothing at all” and “time”, for us, “is nothing”.91
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A priori synthesis occurs between the a priori categories on the one hand, and the a priori forms of spatio-temporal determination, on the other, before they are applied to experience, furnishing its “rules of construction”.92 Since both components of the synthesis are a priori, they hold as universal and necessary laws for everything that can be determined in experience. To return to Deleuze’s example of the line, the Euclidean proposition, ‘the straight line is the line which is ex aequo in all its points’ is an analytic judgement; the statement ‘this straight line is red’ is an empirical judgement (straight lines are not universally and necessarily red). The statement, ‘the straight line is the shortest path between two points’, however, is different, because the concept ‘shortest path’ is not analytically contained within the concept ‘straight line’, nor is it simply contingent on an empirical encounter: it is a priori — it holds for all straight lines — and yet, it is also synthetic — something new is added in the synthesis. ‘Shortest path’ is not a predicate of the subject ‘straight line’ but a rule for the construction of a figure that requires assembly in space and time: to produce a straight line, one must find the shortest path between two points. Put differently, a spatio-temporal determination must be discovered that accords with the concept ‘shortest path’.

Kant has two texts, one written before and one written after the Critique of Pure Reason, in which he deals with the problem of ‘incongruent counterparts’ or enantiomorphic bodies, using the necessity of the spatio-temporal assembly of a concept in experience to defend the heterogeneity of space-time and concepts so integral to the difference between sensibility and understanding in the First Critique.93 A left and a right hand, for example, both of which are determined by the selfsame concept, with all its internal relations intact, are conceptually identical yet different due to their positions in space. A left hand can never be superimposed upon a right hand without exiting the confines of Euclidean dimensionality. In a similar fashion, a hand that is perceived now and a hand that is perceived in the future may belong to the same concept, but they can never be made to coincide in time. Thus, space and time are not reducible to conceptual determinations. We will return to Kant’s ‘hands’, but for now let this thought experiment of his show that, given the laws of the three-dimensional space that experience must unfold in, there is no possible way of constructing the ‘shortest path’ other than along a straight line, and to draw a line rather than a point, one requires time. Furthermore, no empirical experience will yield a straight line that is anything other than the shortest path between two points. The a priori forms of space and time thus harbour an irrefutable constitutive power that will underlie the empirical determination of all possible experience.

Because both successive time and three-dimensional space belong a priori to the faculty of sensibility, and therefore have their provenance in the human mind, they are impossible to exit from for us, and must accompany every single denomination of what will be considered legitimate knowledge, which takes its declination from the intersection of empirical experience and the restrictions imposed upon the latter by the transcendental exigency that produces it.94 Dreams and hallucinations, occurring solely within the mind, constitute nothing more than a “blind play of representations” — intuitions deprived of determinate objects — and are therefore illegitimate as a basis for knowledge.95 This holds equally for our non-empirically validated Ideas of God, World and Soul (objects of a concept for which there is no corresponding intuition), any concept of an object deprived of sense data, and any contradictory and therefore impossible concept — and everyone finds themselves in the same, spatio-temporal manifold, under the same categorical laws which together act as a guarantor for the universalisability of human knowledge.96 Consequently, we discover that “we ourselves bring into appearances that order and regularity in them that we call nature”, and moreover “we would not be able to find it there if we, or the nature of our mind, had not originally put it there”.97 Although it underwrites the operation of the transcendental apparatus at the most fundamental level, time, in the First Critique, is simply an inert and ultimately unknowable form which beats out a series of inexorable, successive moments in experience. It is prior to matter, movement and extension, and thus completely re-arranges or unhinges the determination of time by motion so integral to the revolving door of the pre-critical cosmos. All change, alteration and variation take place in time, but the form of time itself is invariable and inviolable.

​Overcoming the irreconcilability of rationalist and empiricist methodologies via the innovation of a priori synthesis nevertheless generates a new problem for Kant, for he has simply moved its incompatibility into the subject, under the guise of the two faculties of sensibility and understanding, which are fundamentally different in kind, one being passive, receptive and immediate, the other spontaneous, active and mediate. Kant’s infamous Copernican revolution, although beginning in radical unfaithfulness — replacing god with time — resolves the duplicitous tension it cannot help but introduce between the two sides of its trademark a priori syntheses in a fundamental identity and a vexed harmony negotiated through the enigmatic synthesis of the imagination in the Transcendental Deduction, which reconstructs the syntheses along the contours of the epistemological subject / object divide, remodelled as the transcendental unity of apperception and the transcendental object = [x].
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In order to connect the abstract bundle of categories in the form of the transcendental object = [x] to experience, Kant requires a link which he locates in the imagination, generative of a transcendental synthesis of the appearance of objects across space and time by stabilising their manifolds into a consistent unity for the application of concepts. The imagination performs this role via three syntheses which occur together (but are grounded in the third) in order to produce representation: the synthesis of apprehension which formalises sensible intuitions (diversity in time and space, and the diversity of time and space) into representable shape within a space-time grid, generating a single and uniform spatio-temporal manifold subject to extensive measurement; the reproduction of spatial coordinates that are not subject to instantaneous apprehension (the momentarily non-appearing parts of a volume, for example) as well as past and projected (future) coordinates in the present; and the synthesis of recognition, which underwrites the possibility of representably-stable conceptual traction via the relation of the prior syntheses of apprehension and reproduction to the form of the object in the understanding, the ‘object = [x]’, and this relative to the synthesising subject’s own transcendental identity, the ‘unity of apperception’.98
The first two syntheses structure a determination of space and time and the third relates it to consciousness, together supplying an a priori basis for the spatio-temporal unity and continuity of experience — intuited by us as one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space, only objectively actualisable in extensity, due to the envelopment of space within the inner sense of time — comprised of conscious perceptions anchored to a unified identity.99 The kind of compression enacted by the synthesis of imagination is not simply a linear one, but the flattening of time and space into a homogenous metric upon which the understanding enacts its determinations — which only then provides a basis for linear compression or acceleration in extensity, such as that detailed by Hölderlin in his rhythmic diagrams of Oedipus and Antigone.

Curiously, Kant employs the example of cinnabar to demonstrate the successive, temporal aspect of the reproductive synthesis (which supplies the recognising synthesis with its input) — an intriguing reference given its long history of alchemical and esoteric use. “If cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy”, he writes

if a human being were now changed into this animal shape, now into that one, if on the longest day the land were covered now with fruits, now with ice and snow, then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the colour red. [W]ithout the governance of a certain rule to which the appearances are already subjected in themselves … no empirical synthesis of repro­duction could take place. There must therefore be something that itself makes possible this reproduction of the appearances by being the a priori ground of a neces­sary synthetic unity of them.100

​The conceptual identity of a piece of cinnabar, along with its empirical variations, endures in time because we are able to synthesise past experiences of cinnabar with present ones via their reproduction as images in memory. We produce a recognition of categorical consistency through the relation of ‘cinnabar moments’ in the spatio-temporal manifold by connecting them to the object we are determining as a piece of cinnabar by means of its steady appearance across different times to the transcendental cogito, whose persistence as an identity is presupposed by the act of recognition. Meanwhile, the endurance of cinnabar perceptions must, according to Kant, be sufficiently objectively consistent for this to be possible in the first place, for if the objective world was in itself so chaotic that such consistency could not take place, neither would our syntheses of it. The Kantian ‘I think’ is thereby an identity which recognises itself as such against the differences it measures empirically and supposes objectively. A move that is only made possible through the combination of the syntheses of the unity of apperception and the spatio-temporal ordering effectuated under the faculty of the imagination. Together, the three syntheses of the imagination place the receptive faculty of sensibility that is productive of apprehension and reproduction in communication with the active faculty of understanding, which plugs them into the object = [x] and the transcendental unity of apperception, ostensibly resolving the problem of these faculties’ conflicting natures in the direction of categorical tractability, and subsuming spatio-temporal difference under a conceptual unity.101
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Due to this implicit vectorisation — from sensibility to understanding — the transcendental synthesis of the imagination can be grasped as an “aesthetic” function made to conform to a conceptual, recognising one, which gives it its axioms — something we shall find reason to return to as the mystery of Lönnrot, Carter and Challenger continues to unfold.102 Its operation applies a unit of measure — Kant’s ‘magnitudes’ — to the sensible manifold in order to relate it to conceptual elements in the synthesis of recognition. Kant will have cause, in the Third Critique, to show the fragility of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, one that is subject to the breaking of its measure by insurgent forces erupting from below. Subterranean revolt on behalf of the cold earth’s volcanic core.

With a unified conceptual identity providing the transcendental ground for the objective validity of the categories, and a consistent, extended and sequenced spatio-temporal manifold furnishing the foundation for all appearances in intuition established via the deduction, Kant will attempt to knit the two together in the application of the principles of judgement that constitute the schematism, consolidating the objectivity of the phenomenal-real. The schematism is the temporalisation of the categories, and thus works in reverse order to the operation of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination — beginning with a concept and determining the spatio-temporal manifold in accordance with it. The three syntheses of the imagination, taken together as a single mechanism, provide the rules for recognition; schematisation, on the other hand, gives the rules of construction for a concept in space and time. The understanding, under the guise of judgement, deploys or expresses the spontaneous syntheses of the unity of apperception and the imagination in time, completing the a priori synthetic weave between expansive sense experience and categorical contraction.103

Each of the four divisions of the categories warrants a different form of expression: the three categories of quantity (unity, plurality, totality) express extensive magnitudes; the three categories of quality (reality, negation, limitation) express intensive magnitudes; the three categories of relation (inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community and reciprocity) establish the objectivity of time and space, and the three categories of modality (possibility/impossibility, existence/non-existence, necessity/contingency) generate the postulates of empirical thought in general. It is this penultimate group (developed in the reciprocally arising conditions of the Analogies of Experience) which confine all human experience to a universalisable temporality, and unfold change in time, consonant with the thermodynamic arrow.104 The unfolding of all four categorial groups through a priori synthetic judgements constitute acts of representation, which yield the actuality of the world for us, founding all knowledge upon representation as an activity of the human mind bound to temporal succession. The schematism is therefore,

​nothing but a priori time-determinations in accordance with rules, and these concern, according to the order of the categories, the time-series, the content of time, the order of time, and finally thesum total of time in regard to all possible objects. From this it is clear that the schematism of the understanding through the transcendental synthesis of imagination comes down to nothing other than the unity of the manifold of intuition in inner sense, and thus indirectly to the unity of apperception, as the function that corresponds to inner sense (to a receptivity).105

​As a result, there are certain pieces of information we will always know in advance regarding the possibility of anything whatsoever in experience, despite the a posteriori nature of certain aspects of the latter. Namely, that “all appearances are, as regards their intuition, extensive magnitudes”, and “in all appearances the sensation, and the real, which corresponds to it in the object (realitas phaenomenon), has an intensive magnitude, i.e. a degree”.106 Kant defines an extensive magnitude as ‘that in which the representation of the parts makes possible the representation of the whole (and therefore necessarily precedes the latter)’.107 A unity in extensive magnitude is composed of successive or co-extensive parts that can be added together due to the fact that they share a homogenous unit of measure.108 The nature of their difference is therefore external — a difference between parts. For the categories of quantity, the fact that appearances are systematically subordinated to extension is straightforward, for this is how we apprehend space and time — unified “multitudes of antecedently given parts”.109 For the categories of quality, however, the surety of advance knowledge is less naturally evident because it bears on sensation and thus involves an entirely subjective, empirical input. So much so that Kant will even write, years later, in the Opus Postumum that

It is strange — it even appears to be impossible, to wish to present a priori that which depends on perceptions (empirical representations with consciousness of them): e.g. light, sound, heat, etc., which all together, amount to the subjective element in perception (empirical representation with consciousness) and hence, carries with it no knowledge of an object. Yet this act of the faculty of representation is necessary.110

​Intensive magnitude is a property of the real of sensation and is therefore strictly empirical, yet we are said to have a priori knowledge of it. This is guaranteed by the conspiracy of the transcendental unity of apperception and the object = [x] that gives sensation its determinate form, and it is therefore this form alone — not the determination but the form of determination — which can be anticipated. Thus we can know in advance that every conscious representation we can ever have will involve a degree of intensity, without knowing anything about the specificities of the intensities which will affect us. To this end, Kant defines intensive magnitude as that “which can only be apprehended as a unity, and in which multiplicity can only be represented through approximation to negation = 0”.111 Unlike extensive magnitudes, which imply a continuous aggregation of homogenous parts, intensities differ internally on an infinite continuum (“of which no part … is the smallest”) between 0 and n, and therefore must be apprehended instantaneously.112 However, because of the nature of our perception, intensive magnitudes cannot be perceived separately from space and time and thus come to “fill” extended magnitudes to various degrees.113 Consequently, the intensive property of internal difference is controlled by extension, locked — forever — into the extensive matrix of apprehended space-time. Most significantly of all, Kant tethers zero intensity to pure consciousness, so that the subtraction of intensive matter from experience only reaffirms, in the absence of contaminants, the immaculacy of thought.

[F]rom the empirical consciousness to the pure consciousness a gradual alteration is possible, where the real in the former entirely disappears, and a merely formal (a priori) consciousness of the manifold in space and time remains; thus there is also a possible synthesis of the generation of the magnitude of a sensation from its beginning, the pure intuition = 0, to any arbitrary magnitude.114

​Sensation degree zero indexes the annihilation of reality, not the subject. This division, although Kant will go on to qualify it (writing that such an occurrence is not “to be encountered”, an empty concept without an object comprising one of the four classes of illegitimate “nothing”) makes the separation between sensible matter and thought inherent to the transcendental apparatus luminously clear.115Kant thinks intensity, but only in a way that renders it secondary both to the form of its appearance in extensity and to the pervasive authority of transcendental conceptualisation under the law of the understanding — “[subjectifying] abstraction” and “[sublimating] death into a power of the subject”, all for the sake of maintaining a spurious notion of transcendental accord.116
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For the Timaean cosmos, harmony between subject and object takes the form of an external, teleologically-assured likeness between copy and model; for Leibniz, it finds its expression in the notion of final accord, and for Hume it must, no matter how reluctantly, be presupposed.117 The ideal of externally sanctioned accord between subject and object is overturned in the Critique of Pure Reason by the necessary submission of objects to the subject, which refocuses the division between subject and object to that between active and passive faculties interior to the process of determination. We have seen above how the transcendental synthesis of the imagination operates to bridge the divide. This causes Kant to rely on the understanding to rein in the productive function of imagination, subordinating its syntheses to unified identity in the transcendental subject and unified objectivity in the transcendental object, their productions nourished by passive sensibility. Reason, the third of the three active faculties (alongside the understanding and the imagination), by analogy with the function of understanding, attempts to determine its own purely conceptual objects without the necessary components of time and space furnished by sensibility, and in so doing, exercises its powers ‘problematically’ in the production of noumena — illusory totalities which nonetheless have a positive role to play in systematising the knowledge produced under the aegis of understanding in its stewardship of the syntheses.118 It can be seen, therefore, that it is the faculty of understanding that is charged with the task of limiting the functions of the other faculties in the production of experience, confining them to specific operations and drawing the boundary dividing legitimate from illegitimate knowledge.

Although the three Critiques work together to define the ends of speculative reason, “[p]ure reason”, in the First Critique, “leaves everything to the understanding”, casting it in the role of legislator so that, in the great critical tribunal, it might judge according to the interests of reason, even when this entails turning against reason’s own products.119 Knowledge is thus lent a maximum of systematic unity via the relation between faculties delineated in the First Critique, which is nominally harmonious without invoking the divinity of pre-established harmony that animated pre-critical philosophy. Instead, it produces an accord of “common sense”, the “subjective condition of all ‘communicability’” — a return to the comfort of rhyme, now resonating between the faculties, mirroring thought in its objects.120 Kantian accord may be understood as an innovation of pre-established harmony, but it retains lineaments of the Platonic Idea of the good in that it still sees thought imbued with health and an honourable will, naturally inclining towards truth via the “best possible distribution” of its capacities.121 And why would it be otherwise? Surely reason, the “highest court of appeals for all rights and claims of our speculation, cannot possibly contain original deceptions and semblances”!122 By means of the accord of common sense, we recognise ourselves in the objects of the world.

What a surprise, after all this, to rediscover our own silhouettes still flickering on the cavern wall. Common sense is “the norm of identity from the point of view of the pure Self and the form of the unspecified object which corresponds to it”, it is always related to recognition, and “relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject of which all the other faculties must be modalities”.123 To thinking, common sense contributes only “the form of the same”.124 The democratic distribution of capacity and similitude is philosophy’s principal doxa, subtending what Deleuze will famously denounce — in Difference and Repetition — as “the Image of Thought”.125 If is not simply an illegitimate presupposition, saturated in humanist bias, whence does this principle arise? There is a deeper problem with the positing of fundamental accord between the faculties in the Critique of Pure Reason, and Deleuze will turn the legal distinction between rights and facts used in the Transcendental Deduction back on Kant, asking by what right the critical philosophy takes harmony as its ground for the relation of the faculties.126 Kant, in the end, provided a remedy for this oversight, but it would not be enough to placate the tremors the critical system had induced.

​Despite his predilection for tribunals, Kant’s recalibration of thought replaces the transcendence of god (and its models) as the ultimate arbiter of truth with the process of immanent critique, and thus transposes error into illusion. The strangeness of this new form of falsity springs from the fact that it is internal to the power of thought itself, contrary to the externality and materiality of error that informs Timeaus’ universe. Reason’s propensity to produce illusion as a consequence of its productive power brings Plato’s planomenon into thought itself, menacing it from inside “as if from an internal arctic zone where the needle of every compass goes mad”, a further disturbance of the cardinality which operates the turning of the great revolving door.127 This threat, nevertheless, is immediately quarantined. With the understanding commandeering synthesis, it is no longer a question of reversing of “the corruption of the circuits in our heads”, rather it is this very circuitry that constitutes the correction of illusion by forcing everything through the transcendental unity of apperception and its object = [x].128 The conservatism of the revolving door and the eruptive potential of the straight labyrinth leak into one another repeatedly throughout the First Critique. The labyrinth’s corrosive implications recognised then covered up, again and again, as if Kant realises the enormity of the abyss he has levered apart but cannot countenance its vertiginous depth, a “depth [which] is like the famous geological line from NE to SW, the line which comes diagonally from the heart of things and distributes volcanoes”.129 But Kant is no Empedocles. He does not wish to explode the sun. Asymmetry petrifies him — and for good reason.
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If the Critique of Pure Reason “seemed equipped to overturn the Image of thought” in its substitution of illusion for error, the fractured I for a unified and substantialised cogito, and the invocation of the speculative deaths of God and the self, Kant

in spite of everything, and at the risk of compromising the conceptual apparatus of the three Critiques … did not want to renounce the implicit presuppositions. Thought had to continue to enjoy an upright nature, and philosophy could go no further than — nor in directions other than those taken by — common sense.130

Where Kant hesitates at the caldera’s edge, Hölderlin explores it with tortured determination, extracting from Oedipus what is truly radical in both “[t]he Greek image of thought” that “already invoked the madness of the double turning-away”, and the Kantian one, which launches “thought into infinite wandering rather than into error”.131 Vision, the Timaean antidote to corruption, is still insisted upon as the implicit other of the blindness Kant so frequently invokes, but it must be remembered that Tiresias’s prophetic knowledge is coincident with his loss of sight, and at the moment of the comprehension of his fate, Oedipus blinds himself.132

The true innovation of the critical project, then — and that which constitutes its unprecedented modernity — is not the tiresome delineation of conditions for anthropomorphic experience productive of and produced by an intransigent conceptual faculty, but its profound reconfiguration of time. In Kant, pre-modern, cyclical, scroll-like temporality “unrolls itself like a serpent”, no longer subordinate to gods or nature — to logic, to reason, psychology, matter or sense — no longer subordinate to anything, save the mystery of its own inner workings, an enigmatic process of auto-affection.133 An impersonal reading of the First Critique reveals this immediately: the subject may have a productive role in the constitution of phenomena, but it is always in the thrall of something it has no empirical access to, which, in turn, is producing its production of experience.134 Both of these productive syntheses are temporal and, necessarily for Kant — who has reached for the one thing common to the two sides of the rift he has opened up inside the transcendental production of experience — only legitimately reconcilable by yet another temporal function: the application of the categories to experience in time via the faculty of judgement.135 Rather than a fortification of subjective prowess in the realm of experience, the Critique of Pure Reason is the story of time’s relation to itself, through itself — and this relation takes the form of a limp.
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The ruin that emerges in the wake of the critical philosophy exhibits, against its inaugurator’s best intentions, the keenness of the blade he has used to vivisect his forebears. As Kant gingerly turns the instrument over, it flashes the following message in the darkness of pre-critical dogmatism: the production of time is not in time. (The killer you are seeking is yourself.) Kant, the reluctant hepatomancer. This new configuration of the outside as time-production is further complicated by no longer being external to the subject, but an internal constitutive part of it. The transcendental outside — distinct from the exterior affection of objectified space, which is inside as an empirical necessity — is thus interiorised in a way that will not only alter the schema of time, but profoundly disrupt the subjectivity that carries it, alienating it from itself, and deeply troubling its sense of agency from the point of view of the only part of it that it can properly know or experience.

This is the tragic modern time of Oedipus in both its pure form as the caesura, and the inexorable linearity of the flight into the desert. An interior limit which Oedipus carries along inside himself, always escaping him, yet irrevocably ‘his’. The tormented king, like Kant’s subject, torn apart and along by an alien component which schizophrenises him, splits him off from himself, allowing him to act in a secondary manner within time, but depriving him of any ability to act on his own transcendental agency, everything Oedipus attempts to do to divert his terrible fate from its course being subordinate to something else — the prophecy of the caesura, that traitorous modern god: the pure form of time. What we know of this abstract part of ourselves cannot be anything other than this empty form, contoured by the limits of categorical distillation; a strict ordinal sequence, made countable and extensive in the schematisation of its “numerical unity”, and definitive of a specific spatio-temporal organisation.136 Contrary to the spatialised exteriority of time relative to the revolving door with its cardinal points, the contentless ordinality of the abstract ‘I’ is static, an inhuman domain within the human, transcendental and not transcendent and therefore not eternal in the same way. It is immanent and productive: an immobile, black motor generates the inexorable and, for Kant, insensible excess of the labyrinth composed of a single, straight line.

The byzantine architecture of the Kantian cogito threatens to suppress what is truly radical in his arrangement of the relation of thought to its determinations. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze relates it to the Cartesian cogito in order to better show its novelty. Prior to Descartes, definitions of the thinking subject are either formed in reference to an eternity which produces it as its externalised other — an infinite unextended mind related to extended finitude, a fully disjunctive difference circumscribed by space — or distilled from relations between pre-determined concepts, those of generic and specific differences (‘man is a rational animal’).137 But Descartes effectuates his own innovation, a logic of implication in which the thinking subject grounds itself. The Kantian cogito takes up this logic, but where the Cartesian cogito precedes by a three-step determination: the determination ‘I think’ determines the undetermined ‘I am’ as thinking substance (I think, I am -- determination, the indeterminate, the determined; the indeterminate determined by determination), the Kantian cogito inserts an additional step which corresponds to the form of determination. Stripped down to its bare mechanism, it proceeds as follows: determination, the indeterminate, the form of determinability, the determined. The transcendental subject or abstract I of the transcendental unity of apperception in relation to the object = [x], both active elements of the understanding, commits a “spontaneous” act of determination which implies an indeterminate existence.138 Because the transcendental I is also subject to the passive faculty of sensibility it must make its determinations in time as the form of inner sense.139 Time, therefore, is the form of determinability which then yields the completely determined empirical subject.

The Kantian cogito begins in action, but because it is bound to pass through the pacifying form of time, it can only represent itself to itself in experience as a passive subject, which holds the same status in relation to the transcendental subject as any other empirical object. Against the Cartesian cogito, which determines the I am as substance, the innovation of the Kantian transcendental subject coincides, for Deleuze, with the “liberation” of the subject from substantiality, and the strange and fecund domain of the unconscious swerves into philosophy for the first time. What we are left with is “a synthesis which separates” — a link which is a break — and the inauguration of something else completely new: constitutive alienation.140 Where the productive other of the revolving door is strictly outside — the “other of alterity” — drawn apart by a limit which corresponds to space or extension (and its ordering, from which temporality is derived), the other of the straight labyrinth is one’s own self, an interior outside to which one is bound in a relation of fundamental alienation.141

Marx will install the same constitutive rift in the transcendental division between labour and labour-power, as the alienation of the subject that abides between them in his analysis of capitalism: “The alienation of labour-power and its real manifestation … do not coincide in time.”142 Capital production, like the Kantian cogito, abstracts and axiomatises the value of its products by subsuming them under a homogenous metric, substituting use-value for exchange-value; a qualitative measure for a quantitive one. Exchange-values are “mutually replaceable” because they are of “identical magnitude”.143 It follows from this, adds Marx, in a particularly Kantian passage, “that, firstly, the valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance’, of a content distinguishable from it”.144

Just as it is for Kant, whose system forces experience into a temporalised series of extensive magnitudes, furnishing a priori knowledge as the form of determination, fully independent of content, the measure of universal equivalence for exchange-value is a temporal one, in which all of a commodity’s “sensuous characteristics are extinguished” — what Marx calls “socially necessary labour-time”.145 The transcendental, auto-productive, alienating circuitry of modernity is tragedy uncut, generative of nothing but episodic travesties of fast-burning empirical conflagration, and its material form is M-C-M’.146 Capital emerges as the concretised shadow of the furtive and explosive moment of the First Critique, before it is drowned in the epistemological structure that limits the syntheses to the production of identity-driven representation and confines it to legitimate knowledge. From a strictly philosophical perspective, it is the complication bound up with determination across the form of time via the implicative logic of transcendental production which grounds the unconditional accelerationist notion of anti-praxis. One cannot be anything other than a passive subject as long as there is time. A tragic thought, but this is the full import of tragedy — a dramatic form whose other face is fate — for the modern subject. Oedipus split by the line of time; “infinite unification purifie[d] through infinite separation”.147

​When the Antarctic fog lifts one sees the machine for what it does. Kant’s critical philosophy introduces for the first time three great components: a tragic initiation, circuitry and compression, and the alienation of auto-productive asymmetry. The time of the revolving door draws the line of the outside along the edge of space; the time of the straight labyrinth draws the line of the outside along the edge of time. Cognition, in the Critique of Pure Reason, is an abstract machine — and because its enveloping form of determination is temporal, it is, more profoundly, an abstract machine for the production of transcendental time.148 In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari diagram the schematism as a circuit, “a moving wheel” partially immersed in “the shallow stream of Time as the form of interiority, in and out of which [it] plunges”.149 If the stream is shallow, it is because it is still all too human. As the circuit of transcendental production or application of rules for construction, the schematism disrupts the philosophical dualism of essence and appearance definitive of the revolving door with the unilateral and conjunctive couple ‘apparition’ (conditions of appearance) and ‘phenomena’ (that which appears) — one could equally say Id and Ego.150  A “bolt of lightning” generating a more complicated disjunction between time and what appears in time.151
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On the other side of the limit of knowability, time in itself as something other than succession is accorded a negative status — a blank cipher, slight as zero, outside the walls of transcendental subjective security. It courses through us as an abstract yet immanent outside which conditions experience via asymmetrical auto-production, but is fortified against our determinations, which have no purchase on it. The philosophical problem at the core of critique abides in this strange circuitry, no longer requiring a god for its productions, no longer sustaining hard truth / error, essence / appearance distinctions, reconstituted in a dark zone of the subject itself — the abstract I. But “God survives as long as the I enjoys a subsistence, a simplicity and an identity which expresses the entirety of its resemblance to the divine”.152 Kant “replaces harmony with circuitry” yet retains the residue of a rhyme — his betrayal of God is not yet fully double.153 Time in the First Critique is intellectually subjective, and while it is infinitely troubling for any spontaneous notion of subjectivity, it is nonetheless too anthropmorphic, too constrained to the unifying identity of transcendental apperception, too geared towards the speculative ends of reason, too functionally masculine, too centralised and regulated. Deleuze, writing of Kant but thinking of Nietzsche, issues a caveat to those humanists among us who would yet profess to lay a claim to inhumanity: “the death of God becomes effective only with the dissolution of the Self” — a self that Kant has skewered, broken and scattered across the sand, but which logically envelops, by the circumference of its epistemological horizon, that “panic desert of time and space” the Kantian subject, like Oedipus, reluctantly casts itself into.154 Schizophrenisation is a voyage of initiation that plunges all to way to zero, that “transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego” which Deleuze and Guattari link to shamanism via R.D. Laing in Anti-Oedipus.155 The tragic voyage of transcendental time loops asymmetry infinitely back to initiation, and the subject limps through its circuitry, replaying the silence of the gods, until it learns how to betray not only their law, but its own.

Reality is reconfigured by transcendental time in terms of a double relation, a primary and generative form and a superficial, secondary experience: process and product, action and reaction, infinity and limitation, time and what is in time. By understanding this abstract, transcendental subject as a unity, Kant uses the conjunctive couple as if in the service of a god — or a father — reining in its explosive potential by bringing synthesis and schematisation back to recognition and representation, leaving consciousness, so resolute in its refusal of blindness, “blinded by all knowledge that does not find cause in the mind itself”.156 There is still a division between form and matter in Kant’s apparatus, a basic hylomorphism which locates activity in form and consigns passivity to matter — an intensive matter which subtends the reproductive function of the syntheses of the imagination but does not appear in its own right and is of no transcendental consequence — its destabilising volatility confined within the extensive grid of apprehension. The model of the transcendental, once applied to experience, is eternally set, the categories definitive, as if the system “would thenceforth just continue, without disruption, in an innocent confirmation of itself”.157 Reason officiates from on high, understanding controls the factory floor, everything is known in advance, ushering in “so deadly a boredom that … one might finish by wishing to die … rather than just have things go on … forever”, and death is not even only empirical.158

A philosopher terrified: this does not exist.159

​The critical project may be the “most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth” but “panic is creation”.160 Poetry and capitalism take this as their rule. Hölderlin, operating a subtle betrayal of his own, discovered the true radicality of Kant, just as Rimbaud, poet-economist par excellence, would best articulate the cogito for a dissolved self. Land too, quoting Bataille, evokes the secret of Oedipus in relation to poetry, but not without that element of terror that will be so fundamental for the next torsion in the history of the schemata of time.

Meanderings in extension remain trapped in the maze unless they cross over into a ‘blind slippage into death’, ‘this slippage outside oneself that necessarily produces itself when death comes into play’. A ‘slippage produces itself’ we do not do so, a chasm opens, chaos (= 0), something horrific in its depth, a season in Hell that ‘slips immensely into the impossible’, ‘the intensity and intimacy of a sensation opened itself onto an abyss where there is nothing which is not lost, just as a profound wound opens itself onto death’. Poetry is this slippage that is broken upon the end of poetry, erased in a desert as ‘beautiful as death’.161

​The unfaithful, urban and un-coordinated temporality of the straight labyrinth as it appears in Kant is a not a time to be apprehended by philosophers or theologians. It is the time of economists and poets. It is they who see the subterranean opportunities to which the philosopher of the model is blind. Empedocles, the eponymous hero of Hölderlin’s unfinished modern tragedy throws himself — twice — into the volcano in Kant’s place, but the volcano returns a single sandal to its edge, an omen of an asymmetry yet to be mastered. “Poetry does not strut logically amongst convictions, it seeps through crevices; a magmic flux resuscitated amongst vermin. If it was not that the Great Ideas had basements, fissures, and vacuoles, poetry would never infest them. Faiths rise and fall, but the rats persist.”162
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The outside will shift again, in a way that once more alters the human relation to it. Our mystery has become infinitely more complex, and curiously in this, more tractable, but it is not yet twisted enough. Kant, at the very least, has taught us the dubiousness of conclusions. We have procured certain keys, a fistful of half-deciphered diagrams, and a sense of the limit, but we are still hopelessly trapped in the maze. These explorations are just overtures to the journey that is about to begin, and they have done little more than confer upon the investigation an additional set of questions. We are yet to understand why the particle-clock is a revolving door, and how to move from this great turning figure, with its aperture open onto eternity, to those other, “successive doors”, that “bar our free march down the mighty corridors of space and time” to that ultimate threshold which “no man has crossed”.163Does Kant’s elaboration of time as an infinite extended magnitude give us sufficient means to decipher Lönnrot’s riddle? Is the straight line all that it seems? Why is the revolving door ‘coffin-shaped’? Does Hölderlin’s invocation of aorgic panic somehow connect to the expression on the young woman in the lecture hall where Challenger executes his trick, and which Aspinwall also wears? Why does rhythm increasingly seem to play such an important role? There is nothing for it but to leave the philosophers, the theologians, the poets and the economists, and bore deeper into the heat of the earth. To solicit counsel from that thing, which — feigning compliance with the laws of time and space — succeeds them, guardian of the door in the back of the cave we have marshalled these unfinished rituals to access.

Thrown out of eternity, cursed by a faceless god, blinded, insulted, injured and abandoned, we find ourselves with Oedipus, lurching catastrophically across the desert in uneven, hesitating steps, following the curse of an incomplete exile. Towards what? Thunder roils in the distance, electricity volatises the desolate pre-dawn fog, something rumbles underfoot. Nothing for πλέθρα. But if we know one thing about the desert, it is this. Expelled from the labour of Kantian critique, accused by Plato of sophistry, this is where the nomads go.164 The initiation has just begun, and like the voyage consigned to Oedipus, its path leads underground.

1. ​Nick Land, Chasm (Shanghai: Time Spiral Press, 2015), §25.
2. Gilles Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, trans. Melissa McMahon, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.
3. The ‘revolving door’ motif persists throughout Deleuze’s work from 1963 to 1993, preceding Difference and Repetition and succeeding A Thousand Plateaus, the two works that will be most consistently drawn upon here, despite differences in the accounts of transcendental production given in both. The historical evolution of temporal modelling condensed into these two images appears in the Logic of Sense, The Fold, and it also frames the Cinema books, although the revolving door as a specific motif disappears in these texts. Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2008), vii-viii; Difference and Repetition, see “Repetition for Itself” and “The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible” specifically; “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, and “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, trans. Melissa McMahon, https://www.webdeleuze.com/groupes/4; “On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, in Essays Clinical and Critical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 27-29; The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 2001), 3, 6, 18-19, 70; The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), 176; Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xi.
4. Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas that might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, Essays Clinical and Critical, 27-35. The final quotation is from Borges’ “Death and the Compass”, examined in Part 0 of this series. Here Deleuze shifts from “invisible, incessant” (Différence et répetition, 147) to “indivisible, incessant”. “Sur quatre formules poétiques qui pourrait résumer la philosophie kantienne”, Critique et Clinique. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1993), 40.
5. This is a framing contention of Anna Greenspan’s unpublished doctoral dissertation Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine, from which this essay draws some of its key ideas. Anna Greenspan, Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine (University of Warwick, 2000).
6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 82; Mille plateaux, 94. Translation altered to reflect original. (See Part 0.) Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas that might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, Essays Clinical and Critical, 28.
7. The constitutive role of planetary motion is even more overt in the first of Deleuze’s 1978 lectures on Kant: “What is the joint? The joint is, literally, the hinge. The hinge is what the door pivots around. But the door? We have to imagine a revolving door, and the revolving door is the universal door. The door of the world is a revolving door. The door of the world swings and passes through privileged moments which are well known: they’re what we call cardinal points. North, South, East, West. The joint is what makes the door swing in such a way that it passes and re-passes through the privileged co-ordinates named cardinal points. Cardinal comes from cardo; cardo is precisely the hinge, the hinge around which the sphere of celestial bodies turns, and which makes them pass time and again through the so-called cardinal points, and we note their return: ah, there’s the star again, it’s time to move my sheep!” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66. I have occasionally made small modifications to the translation of these lectures, and have indicated where this occurs in the following citations.
8. Gilles Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.
9. Plato, “Timeaus”, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25/37d.
10. Plato, “Timaeus”, 15/27a; 18-19/29d-30b.
11. Plato, “Timeaus”, 25-26/37d-36a.
12. Plato, “Timaeus”, 21/33b; 22/34a.
13. Plato, “Timaeus”, 23/35a.
14. ‘δημιουργός’ (demiurge), from δήμιος (belonging to the people) and -εργος (a suffix indicating a worker), literally denotes ‘a skilled workman, a handicraftsman’ in Ancient Greek; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 233.
15. Here is the sequence — which will play an important role in Difference and Repetition — in full: “[H]e divided up the whole mixture again, this time into as many portions as he needed, with each portion being a blend of identity, difference, and substance. He began the division by first taking a single portion from the mixture; next he took a portion which was double the quantity of the first, and then a third portion, which was one-and-a-half times the quantity of the second and three times the quantity of the first; then he took a fourth portion which was double the quantity of the second, and a fifth which was three times the quantity of the third, and a sixth which was eight times the quantity of the first, and then a seventh portion which was twenty-seven times the quantity of the first. After this, he filled up the double and triple intervals by cutting off further portions from the mixture and inserting them into the gaps, so that in each interval there were two means, a mean that exceeded one of its extremes by the same fraction of the extremes as it was exceeded by the other extreme, and another mean that exceeded one of its extremes by the same number as it was exceeded by the other extreme. These links created, within the first set of intervals, further intervals of 3:2, 4:3, and 9:8, and then he filled up all the 4:3 intervals with the 9:8 interval, leaving in each case a portion, and the portion that remained was an interval whose terms, expressed numerically, were 256 : 243. And so at this point the mixture, from which he was cutting these portions, was all used up.” Plato, “Timaeus”, 23-24/35a-36b.
16. Deleuze, Difference and Reptition, 233; Plato, “Timaeus”, 24/36c-d.
17. Plato, “Timaeus”, 27/38e.
18. Plato, “Timaeus”, 28/39d.
19. Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas that might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, Essays Clinical and Critical, 27.
20. Luce Irigaray, “Plato’s Hystera” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 244-5. The thing, “always already there in the den” is the matrix or womb, which again, following the injunction of cosmic horror — muted and covered over by the schema of the revolving door — can never quite be shown, seen, or described. Within the realm of representation (or the specular economy) the anteriority of the hystera is displaced and oppositionalised as a posteriority in the image before the men in the cave, generative of a telos which appears linear but is, in fact, cyclical. Linearity hides an exoteric return, which in turn hides an esoteric involution. Mark Fisher and Suzanne Livingston marshall a similar argument to counter Baudrillard’s defeatist reading of seduction in his book of the same name: “Yet what of seduction itself? For as a Process it is far in excess of its writings. For Irigaray, these circles which constantly return to the point at which they first began are not what they appear. For the female zero, vulva, circle never finally closes up in the shape of a ring.” Livingston and Fisher, “Desiring Seduction”, Ccru.net, https://web.archive.org/web/20011211011651/http://www.ccru.demon.co.uk:80/archive/seduction.htm.
21. “According to Marx, repetition is comic when it falls short — that is, when instead of leading to metamorphosis and the production of something new, it forms a kind of involution, the opposite of an authentic creation. Comic travesty replaces tragic metamorphosis. However, it appears that for Marx this comic or grotesque repetition necessarily comes after the tragic, evolutive and creative repetition (‘all great events and historical personages occur, as it were, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’). This temporal order does not, however, seem to be absolutely justified.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 91-2.
22. Irigaray, “Plato’s Hystera”, 247; “[The demiurge] endowed each of the gods [the planetary bodies] with two kinds of motion: even rotation in the same place, to enable them always to think the same thoughts about the same things; and forward motion, under the sovereignty of the revolution of identity and sameness.’ Within the teleological account tendered by the Timaeus, to act for the best is to always act in the same manner. Plato, “Timeaus”, 29/40a-b.
23. “[T]he visibility of day and night, of months and the circling years, of equinoxes and solstices, resulted in the invention of number, gave us the concept of time, and made it possible for us to enquire into the nature of the universe. These in their turn have enabled us to equip ourselves with philosophy in general, and humankind never has, nor ever will be granted by the gods a greater good than philosophy.” Plato, “Timaeus”, 38/47a-47b.
24. Plato, “Timaeus”, 96/90c-90d.
25. Plato, “Timaeus”, 96/90c-90d.
26. “[T]he gods invented and supplied us with vision to enable us to observe the rational revolutions of the heavens and to let them affect the revolutions of thought within ourselves (which are naturally akin to those in the heavens, though ours are turbulent while they are calm).” Plato, “Timaeus”, 38/47b.
27. αἴτιον πλανόμενον (errant cause). Thanks to Jake Hamilton for this insight and for help with translations from the Greek.
28. Plato, “Timaeus”, 96/91a. Incidentally, the formulation of truth, which lists a short taxonomy of external madnesses as afflictions to thought (“shamelessness, stupidity, mental illness, willingness to lie, or an indifference to truth”) which is otherwise naturally oriented towards its object in @parallaxoptics’ piece, “Exit Accelerationism” exactly reprises the premises of the universe generated through this figure of time — with the “Outside” mapped by a theologically conditioned exclusive disjunction separating a fallen, temporalised interority from a transcendent, perfect exteriority — and the accompanying, dogmatic, image of thought. Thus explicitly anchoring the fundamental axioms of what has come to be known as R/Acc (along with some of its R/Dec variants) in an ancient, theological conception of reality self-consciously at odds with the process of modernisation and capitalistic temporality the term originally (and perhaps more correctly) invoked. It will be seen that R/Acc, in want of a better articulation, disbars itself from any real purchase on the demonic, Lovecraftian imagery it so frequently delights in calling forth, insofar as Lovecraft relates the insurgency of the Old Ones to time. The question the above post dearly wants to answer: “[H]ow to access, or conceive of this [non-human] intelligence? What is its relationship to human spacetime?” is not discoverable by venturing outside the Platonic cave (as it advises), but rather, by boring deeper into the cave and its illusions, unearthing an altogether different model of truth and an alien conception of time. The only way out is in. The inward trajectory of this limit defining outside from in occurs in several steps, which the following parts of this essay will attempt to bring — darkly — to light.
29. Plato, “Timaeus”, 26/38c, 30/41a, 18/29e. Italics added.
30. The Bible, King James Version, Revelation 6:13-15.
31. Plato, “Meno” in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), especially 363-374.
32. Plato, “Timaeus”, 40/49a, 43/51a, 90/88d, 43/50e, 42/50b, 50c/42, 49a/40. Philosophically, the receptacle is graspable only by “a bastard kind of reasoning” and is something like what one apprehends in a dream (25b/45). The sexualised nature of the dualism is both the target and the weapon that annihilates it in Irigaray’s “Plato’s Hystera”.
33. Plato, “Timaeus”, 50d/40.
34. Space, too — as coexistence or simultaneity — is just another mode, coexistence and simultaneity graspable only as arrangements, erratic or ordered, relative to the positing of eternity. As well as the specific schema of the “Timaeus“ and a figure denoting fundamental aspects of monotheism, the revolving door also extends to index a prevalent trend in pre-Kantian philosophy applicable to rationalist thinkers such as Leibniz, who deems space and time to be modal expressions of an infinite, conceptual intellect, confusedly perceived by finite minds (monads). “I have said more than once that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time is — that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order of things that exist at the same time, considered as existing together, without entering into their particular manners of existing. And when many things are seen together, one consciously perceives this order of things among themselves.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew (Cambridge: Hackett, 2000), 15.
35. Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.
36. “We have misconceived the topology of time, and in doing so closed the gates connecting time with eternity. The recovery from this greatest of errors will sift the strong from the weak, setting the capstone of the ‘Great Politics’ that open at the end of nihilism. Eventually, the philosophy of time will decide.” Nick Land, “Nietzschean Shards”, Outside In, http://www.xenosystems.net/nietzschean-shards/.
37. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum”, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 166.
38. “Time is no longer the cosmic time of an original celestial movement, nor is it the rural time of derived meteorological movements. It has become the time of the city and nothing other, the pure order of time.” Deleuze, “On four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, 28; “And time will be this sort of form which is also pure, and this kind of act by which the world empties itself, becomes a desert.” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.
39. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook V, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htm. Italics added.; Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus” in Essays and Letters, trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), e-book; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 87.
40. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3.
41. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3. The reversal is that of the ‘caesura’ (see the following), which marks an inversion of “the striving out of this world into a striving out of another world into this one”. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone” in Essays and Letters, trans. and ed. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), e-book, §2. Thanks to Thomas Murphy for his insight regarding this problem of temporality in Difference and Repetition and for catalysing the magmic inclusion of Hölderlin in this essay.
42. Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67, translation modified; “[L]a tragédie d’Œdipe est dans sa lenteur meurtrissante presqu’une tragédie moderne.” Jean Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe, Remarques sur Antigone (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1965), 50. The above, and all following translations of Beaufret’s untranslated text are my own; Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.
    
    Oedipus’ demise holds significant parallels to Empedocles’ dissolution in the volcano that forms the crux of Hölderlin’s unfinished tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, which he had abandoned just prior to writing “Notes on the Oedipus“, and these latter are generally understood to be the completion of the inchoate theory of tragedy advanced in the Empedocles texts. Empedocles’ volcanic dissolution haunts the whole of modern tragedy, and Hölderlin’s own struggle with the infinity it called up in his writing will become more than just the personal struggle of an alienated and ambitious poet in the history of dramatic thought. See Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning-Play, trans. David Farrell Krell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).
43. “Sophoclean tragedy, for Hölderlin, is not the tragedy of Aeschylus or Euripides. It is the singular tragedy of divine withdrawal. Everything that is tragic in Sophocles enciphers the fact that the frontier between man and God has become enigmatic. Thus it is different from the tragedy of Aeschylus, for whom the limit is hardly an enigma. Here [in Aeschylus], man surpasses the limit, and often does so despite the counsel of the gods. […] Tragic action is thus the history of a return to order which demands the violation of a limit.” Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 15-16. In farce, it is the clown’s inability to reach the limit (which is clearly defined by what has gone before) — and thus to perform his or her acts adequately — that subtends the relation between agent and limit as both Marx and Deleuze will define it. Farce begets only an inferior representation, rather than a real alteration. See note 21 above.
44. Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67; See note 43.
45. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, for example, “Agamemnon has hardly entered his palace before Cassandra sees, as if through the walls, the exact course the crime will take, and predicts the return of Orestes. But here, the clamour of the prophetic voice does not carry the significance of the ‘caesura’. Rather, it confirms only what was already expected. […] In the triumphant king who descends from his chariot to tread the blood-red carpet Clytemnestra unfurls beneath his feet, we have already recognised the figure of one who is sentenced to death. There is nothing more Aeschylean than a tragic act prefaced by the words ‘It is done’ — before having even begun. Everything unfolds from one end to the other, right up to the exoneration of Orestes by the tribunal of the Eumenides, without a ‘lacuna’, certainly, but also without a ‘caesura’. Such is the march of a destiny that does not cease to subsume everything into its most precise image from the point of an initial transgression.” Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 31-2.
46. “Oedipus, the most economical formula of interiorisation (Case). It’s all in your head.” Ccru, “Flatlines” in Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2017), (:)(:)(:)::/108. Aeschylus and Euripides may “understand better how to objectify suffering and anger”, but it is Sophocles who truly grasps “the sense [sens] of man, in his voyage towards the unthinkable.”; Hölderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe, Remarques sur Antigone, quoted by Beaufret in “Hölderlin et Sophocle’, 16.
47. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3.
48. The bulk of French and German commentary on Hölderlin’s interpretations of Sophocles read Hölderlin’s work as a subversion of Hegelian self-consciousness, despite the former’s alleged youthful participation in “The Oldest Program toward a System in German Idealism” alongside Hegel himself. See Kathrin H. Rosenfield, “Le conflit tragique chez Sophocle et son interprétation chez Hölderlin et Hegel”, Les Études philosophiques, 77:2 (2006), 141-161, for a survey of this difference.
    
    This essay follows the former tendency, which is consonant with Deleuze’s own approach. See, for an example beyond those given in Difference and Repetition and “On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, Nietzsche and Philosophy, where Deleuze writes, “Dialectics in general are not a tragic vision of the world but, on the contrary, the death of tragedy, the replacement of the tragic vision by a theoretical conception (with Socrates) or a Christian conception (with Hegel). What has been discovered in Hegel’s early writings is in fact the final truth of the dialectic: modern dialectic is the truly Christian ideology”. This bears heavily on his readings of tragedy and farce in Marx. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1983), 18. This is also Beaufret’s approach (see Beaufret, ‘Hölderlin et Sophocle’, 38) and is supported by more recent commentaries in English, including (but not limited to) that of Véronique M. Fóti, who writes “whereas Hegel situates tragedy, or tragic conflict and its resolution, within ethicality (Sittlichkeit, as a surpassed self-actualization of spirit), Hölderlin decisively withdraws it from the ethical domain. … The twisting free of tragedy from the grip of Hegelian ethicality does not mean that the concerns normally classed as ethical are cast to the winds … but rather that they are resituated against a vaster horizon — the horizon, perhaps, of what lies ‘beyond good and evil’, of the dispropriative trait in the propriative event (Ereignis), or of the tragic structure in the instauration and despoilment of hegemonic principles. […] [F]or Hegel, reconciliation remains the guiding aim of tragedy and defines its cathartic work, the late Hölderlin sees ultimate reconciliation — the reconciliation of man with divinity — not as the ideal of a differential interrelation, but as a hybristic union, destructive of the singular, and motivated by ‘eccentric enthusiasm’, which is fundamentally a passion for death. The cathartic work of tragedy therefore becomes for him a work of dispersive separation”. Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Tragedy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006) 2-3; Henry Somers-Hall, for whom Hegel’s privileging of ethical action cleaves too closely to ancient conceptions of drama and fails to see the novelty in Hölderlin’s reading, “Time Out of Joint: Hamlet and the Pure Form of Time”, Deleuze Studies, Volume 5 (2011), 64-7; and David Farrell Krell, who wrests Hölderlin from the grip of German Idealism via the notion of intensity in Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning-Play, especially 304-6.
49. Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 16.
50. “OEDIPUS: Cast me away this instant
    Out of this land, out of the sight of man.
    CREON: Be sure it would have been done without delay,
    But that I await instruction from the god. […]
    OEDIPUS: I have your promise, then?
    CREON: What promise?
    OEDIPUS: To send me away.
    CREON: God will decide, not I.
    OEDIPUS: No god will speak for me.
    CREON: Then you will have your wish.
    OEDIPUS: And your consent?
    CREON: I do not speak beyond my knowledge.”
    Sophocles, King Oedipus in The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin, 1974), 65; 67-8.
51. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3. Italics added. Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 50; 53. Beaufret’s untranslated commentary is drawn upon repeatedly by Deleuze in his evocations of Hölderlin in Difference and Repetition, and its influence is heavily apparent in Deleuze’s 1978 lectures on Kant (if not also elsewhere, “On Several Regimes of Signs” in A Thousand Plateaus being one site that bears the mark of its impact). Deleuze’s circumlocutionary references to Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin can be found in Difference and Repetition, 32 (note 4), and Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67 and in A Thousand Plateaus, 138.
    
    “A trial for heresy” is taken from “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3. Beaufret explains that a heretic, for Hölderlin, is one “who aorgically and without mediation attempts to seize the very essence of the divine”. “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 50. The ‘aorgic’ is a term of Hölderlin’s own making, and it is deployed to encipher the effusive, infinite, disordered and discordant power of Nature in opposition to the structured, finite and organising principles of Art — or the ‘organic’ — in the context of his theory of tragedy. The aorgic is closely linked to the dissociative experience of panic by Beaufret and related to the “passion for death” by Fóti who writes that, “ever hostile to man”, the aorgic “manifests [an] ambiguous aspect: although it may appear welcoming and life-sustaining, it is an alien and unfathomable power that — for all the effort to conceal it behind the screens of cultural and intellectual constructs — fatally attracts sensitive individuals. Somewhat like the Freudian death drive, it impels the individual toward dissolution or a return to the unformed. Hölderlin relates the aorgic element to the unconscious (or, perhaps, nonconscious) dynamics of the psyche, which means that it now infiltrates the supposed organicism of subjectivity, eroding its boundaries and affecting it with alterity”. Fóti, Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Theory of Tragedy, 21; 61; 47. The organic and the aorgic “inter-penetrate most profoundly and touch one another in their uttermost extremes” in a manner not dissimilar to Nietzsche’s formulation of tragedy with its opposition of Dionysian and Apollonian impulses — their unification bringing about an epochal transition that gestures towards a “still inchoate world to come”. Hölderlin, ‘The Basis of Empedocles” in The Death of Empedocles, 147; Krell, The Death of Empedocles, 170.   ​In his notes to the Empedocles manuscript, Hölderlin drew a number of diagrams meant to evoke this unification. Krell reproduces them in his translation of the play, accompanied by the following caption: holderlin-diagram-1.png
52. Quoted by Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 50.
53. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin, 1974), 121.
54. “MESSANGER: When we had gone a little distance, we turned and looked back. Oedipus was nowhere to be seen; but [Theseus] was standing alone holding his hand before his eyes as if he had seen some terrible sight that no one could bear to look upon; and soon we saw him salute heaven and the earth with one short prayer. In what manner Oedipus passed from this earth, no one can tell.” Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 121.
55. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 121.
56. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 174; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 320; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 90.
57. “Oedipus is almost unique in the Greek world. The whole first part is imperial, despotic, paranoid, interpretive, divinatory. But the whole second part is Oedipus’s wandering, his line of flight, the double turning away of his own face and that of God. Rather than very precise limits to be crossed in order, or which one does not have the right to cross (hybris), there is a concealed limit toward which Oedipus is swept. Rather than interpretive signifying irradiation, there is a subjective linear proceeding permitting Oedipus to keep a secret, but only as a residue capable of starting a new linear proceeding. Oedipus, his name is atheos: he invents something worse than death or exile, he wanders and survives on a strangely positive line of separation or deterritorialization.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 138.
    
    For the ambiguity inherent in the role of the despot, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Penguin, 2009). Thanks are due to Edmund Berger for the many conversations we shared concerning this point, particularly on the relationship between Oedipus and Cain as scapegoat figures in the fifth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. This is a reading supported by Ronald Bogue in “The Betrayal of God”, Deleuze and Religion, ed. Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2000). Ed is also responsible for providing the references making the link between schizophrenia and shamanism in Anti-Oedipus and R.D. Laing’s work explicit below.
58. “We may suppose that in the most ancient version of the myth of Oedipus (identified as we have indicated, with a fable about magic) the wound to the feet, the exposure, the period spent on the margins of the world of the polis on the wild heights of Mount Cithaeron, the struggle with the Sphinx — later mitigated by the solution of the riddle — marked the stages of an initiatory journey to the beyond.” Carlo Ginzberg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 228.
59. Ginzberg, Ecstasies, 237-8. See also James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 396-404.
60. Ginzberg, Ecstasies, 232; 247.
61. Ginzberg, Ecstasies, 241-2. See also Tom Moynihan’s excellent comments on the connection between bilateral symmetry and faciality in evolution, “The Gastrulation of Geist: or an Extended Meditation upon the World-Historical Connection Between Digestion and Simulation”, Vast Abrupt (2018), https://vastabrupt.com/2018/02/08/gastrulation-of-geist/.
62. Ginzberg, Ecstasies, 226; 239.
63. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 110. The source of the strange attribution of green and red to the “legs” in the image can most likely be exhumed from Salomon Maimon’s critique of Kant in the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, where the origin of the difference between perceptions of the colours green and red resurfaces consistently as problem troubling Kant’s attempts to extract de jure principles for experience, and is ultimately marshalled in support of an argument that a philosophy concerned only with the conditions of possible experience does not go far enough when it comes to questions of transcendental production. Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, trans. Nick Midgely, Henry Somers-Hall, Alistair Welchman and Merten Reglitz (London: Continuum, 2010), see for example, 22; 27-8; 74; 97-8.
64. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, Essays and Letters, §1.
65. Arkady Plotinsky, “The Calculable Law of Tragic Representation and the Unthinkable” in At the Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-Kantian Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinbugh University Press, 2015), 130; Kathrin H. Rosenfield, “Hölderlin et Sophocle: Rythme et temps tragique dans les Remarques sur Œdipeet Antigone”, Philosophique, 11: 2008, 20. This and all following translations from the text are my own.
66. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone”, Essays and Letters, §2.
67. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, Essays and Letters, §1.
68. “[I]f this rhythm of ideas is so constituted that in the rapidity of enthusiasm the former are more torn along by the later ones, the caesura (a), or the counter-rhythmical interruption, must lie from the front, so that the first half is, as it were, shielded from the second; and then, precisely because the second half is initially more rapid and seems to weigh more heavily, as a result of the caesura’s counter-action the balance will tend to incline from the end (b) towards the beginning (c). If, however, the rhythm of ideas is so constituted that the following are, rather, compressed by the initial ones, the caesura (a) will come to lie more towards the end, because it is the end which must, as it were, be shielded from the beginning; and then the balance will incline more towards the end (b), since the first half (c) extends further, but the balance sets in later.” Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone”, Essays and Letters, §1. Hölderlin’s diagrams are reproduced above.
69. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §1. In contrast, Antigone, singled out by Hegel as the crucial specimen in the Athenian trilogy and from which he draws a dialectical, ethical lesson, has a more straightforward narrative structure, inclining from “the beginning towards the end”, its caesura arising intelligibly at the end of the play (when Tiresias advises Creon to allow the interment of Polynices).
    
    Hölderlin, in an earlier essay, relates the tragic heroism of Antigone to the lyric mood in its privileging of the subjective, cultural and “organic” side of the division between the gods and man, while that of Oedipus is more thoroughly tragic, privileging the objective, natural and “aorgic” side of the divide — its law proceeding from the “necessary arbitrariness of Zeus”, “father of time” divine avatar of the rift in the unity of being. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone”, §1; Friedrich Hölderlin, “The lyric, in appearance idealic poem …” in Letters and Essays, trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), e-book. Antigone is also classed as the “more Greek” of the two because of the swift incarnation of time as death, whilst the death of Oedipus is maximally prolonged, and in this, “modern”. “For this is the tragic thing about us [moderns], that we should quietly leave the world of the living, packaged in a simple box. Such a destiny is not so imposing, but it is deeper.” Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 49; 22. See note 48 on the rejection of Hegelianism in Hölderlin’s readings.
70. And Deleuze will write in “The Philosophy of Crime Novels” that “[w]hile Oedipus is the only Greek tragedy that already has this detective structure, we should marvel that Sophocles’s Oedipus is a detective, and not that the detective novel has remained Oedipal”. In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 82.
71. Tiresias to Oedipus, in Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 36; 38.
72. Friedrich Hölderlin, Samtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994) vol.2, 561. Quoted by Rosenfield in “Hölderlin et Sophocle: Rythme et temps tragique dans les Remarques sur Œdipe et Antigone”, fn8.
73. The caesura “thus abolishes the distinctions and the understanding ensured by succession (in human or physical time), insofar as the rhythm makes appear a more all-embracing connection — and a timelessness, not subject to the segmentation of the successive alternations. The rhythm makes one see-feel-guess the unfathomable dimension that ensures the connection of everything. Thus, paradoxically, the tragedy presents, as equivalent and concomitant, the movements of two forms of language: that of the arguments situated in the temporal succession and the pure language of the seer (the counter-rhythmic movement). What is accessible to knowledge and what is removed from human mastery are presented simultaneously”. Rosenfield, “Hölderlin et Sophocle: Rythme et temps tragique dans les Remarques sur Œdipe et Antigone”, 82.
74. Hölderlin, Samtliche Werke und Briefe, vol.2, 561; Quoted in Rosenfield, “Hölderlin et Sophocle: Rythme et temps tragique dans les Remarques sur Œdipe et Antigone“, 92, and Krell, The Death of Empedocles, 299-300.
75. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3; Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67; Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §1. My italics.
76. Ccru, “Glossary”, Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2017), (((:):))(:)(:)/369. See also, “The Templeton Episode” which contains an extended meditation on auto-productive Kantianism and cyclical time control, (::::)-(:)(:)(:):/53-4. The occulted relationship of Professor Randolph Edmund Templeton (“the model for H.P. Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter”) to the dissolution mystery outlined here provides vital clues that will be returned to. Ccru, Abstract Culture: Digital Hyperstition, 55.
77. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3.
78. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 58. Patton’s ‘categorical abduction’ for ‘détournement catégorique’ has been changed to ‘categorical reversal’ for the sake of maintaining consistency across English translations of Deleuze.
79. Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, 31.
80. Arthur Rimbaud, “Letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May 1871” in Selected Poems and Letters, trans. Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2004), 236. Translation modified.
81. Kant’s indices for these two tendencies, which he indirectly names ‘dogmatic rationalism’ and ‘sceptical empiricism’, in pre-critical philosophy are Leibniz and Hume. “We have here presented to us a new phenomenon of human reason — an entirely natural antithetic, in which there is no need of making subtle enquiries or of laying snares for the unwary, but into which reason of itself quite unavoidably falls. It certainly guards reason from the slumber of fictitious conviction such as is generated by a purely one-sided illusion, but at the same time subjects it to the temptation either of abandoning itself to a sceptical despair, or of assuming an obstinate attitude, dogmatically committing itself to certain assertions, and refusing to grant a fair hearing to the arguments for the counter-position. Either attitude is the death of sound philosophy, although the former might perhaps be entitled the euthanasia of pure reason.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans, Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 385 A407/B433. For Deleuze’s exposition of a priori synthesis via the example of the straight line see “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.
82. In his lectures, Deleuze’s preliminary description of the First Critique reads as if it were a passage taken directly from “The Mountains of Madness”, and there is good reason to suppose this parallel with Lovecraft is deliberate: “It’s an excessive atmosphere, but if one holds up … all this Northern fog which lands on top of us starts to dissipate, and underneath there is an amazing architecture … in this fog there functions a sort of thinking machine, a creation of concepts that is absolutely terrifying.” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.
    
    Compare Dyer and Lake’s discovery of the alien city beneath the shifting Antarctic mists in H.P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness”, Tales, ed. Peter Straub (New York: Library of America, 2005) 508; 523: “I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present sample; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice-vapours above our heads. The effect was of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. […] We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise? Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material basis after all — there had been some horizontal stratum of ice-dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection. Of course the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distant image.”
83. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, Essays and Letters, §3; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159 A25/B39
84. Both forms can equally be deployed in a strictly ideal capacity outside of empirical determination, i.e. “when they are considered in themselves through reason” but this is illegitimate from the point of view of both knowledge and experience. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 160 A28/B44.
85. “Time is the a priori formal condition of all appearances in general. Space, as the pure form of all outer intuitions, is limited as an a priori condition merely to outer intuitions. But since, on the contrary, all representations, whether or not they have outer things as their object, nevertheless as determinations of the mind themselves belong to the inner state, while this inner state belongs under the formal condition of inner intuition, and thus of time, so time is an a priori of all appearance in general … all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand in relations of time.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 163-164 A34/B50-51.
86. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 163 A33/B50. Italics added.
87. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 300 A183/B226.
88. See note 4 regarding the shift from ‘invisible’ to ‘indivisible’ in Deleuze’s citations of Borges’ text.
89. Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, 28. Kant provides the counter-argument and dismisses it in the “Elucidation” that follows his exposition of theTranscendental Aesthetic, concluding, alongside an explicit refusal of Leibniz’s purely intellectual forms, “that the transcendental aesthetic cannot contain more than these two elements, namely space and time, is clear from the fact that all other concepts belonging to sensibility, even that of motion, which unites both elements, presuppose something empirical. For this presupposes the perception of something moveable. In space, considered in itself there is nothing moveable; hence the moveable must be something that is found in space only through experience, thus an empirical datum. In the same way the transcendental aesthetic cannot count the concept of alteration among its a priori data; for time itself does not alter, but only something that is within time”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 165-7 A36-41/B53-58.
90. This is only a problem for the explication of space once it has passed through the syntheses of the imagination and been subjected to the categories of the understanding in the schematism. Hence Kant’s careful distinction of forms of intuition (space and time as they are given in themselves) from formal intuition (space and time as magnitudes). Without schematisation, which applies its concepts synthetically as rules of construction, mathematics is simply a logical science, operating in a realm isolated from experience. “Thus in the concept of a figure that is enclosed between two straight lines there is no contradiction … rather the impossibility rests not on the concept in itself, but on its construction in space, i.e., on the conditions of space and its determinations.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 323 A220-21/B268.
91. “We can accordingly speak of space, extended beings, and so on, only from a human standpoint. If we depart from the subjective condition under which alone we can acquire outer intuition, namely that through which we may be affected by objects, then the representation of space signifies nothing at all.” And “[t]ime is therefore merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is always sensible, i.e. insofar as we are affected by objects), and in itself, outside the subject, is nothing”. Furthermore, “we cannot judge at all whether the intuitions of other thinking beings are bound to the same conditions that limit our intuition and that are universally valid for us”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 159-160 A26-7/B42-3; 164 A35/B51; 160 A27/B43.
92. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 289 A165/B206. “[T]ranscendental propositions can never be given through construction of concepts, but only in accordance with a priori concepts. They contain merely the rule in accordance with which a certain synthetic unity of that which cannot be intuitively represented a priori (of perceptions) should be sought empirically.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 634 A721/B749.
93. Immanuel Kant, “Concerning the Ultimate Foundation for the Differentiation of Regions in Space’”in Selected Pre-Critical Writings, trans. and ed. G. B. Kerferd and D. E. Walford (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968); Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Gary Carl Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Both arguments are constructed to refute Leibniz, although in fact contain conflicting arguments (something we will revisit later). Deleuze draws out the key point: “Kant will say that this [non-superimposibility] is what finitude is.” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.
94. Within Kant’s model of time as it is expounded in the First Critique, even time travel would still be perceived by its subject as a succession, moving consistently from T1 to T2 to T3, etc. If the time traveller began her journey at point B and travelled backwards in history to point A, prior to B, her temporal experience would still giver her T1 at B, T2 at A, and so on.
95. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 634 A721/B749; 235, A112. “From the fact that the existence of outer objects is required for the possibility of a determinate consciousness of our self it does not follow that every intuitive representation of outer things includes at the same time their existence, for that may well be the mere effect of the imagination (in dreams as well as in delusions); but this is possible merely through the reproduction of previous outer perceptions, which, as has been shown, are possible only through the actuality of outer objects”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 328 B278. The same status applies to any epistemological traction one would hope to gain on the pure forms of space and time themselves. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 382 A291/B347.
96. These four permutations together make up Kant’s divisions of nothing, each division corresponding to one of the four sets of categories, respectively (as listed above): ens imaginarium, ens rationis (the noumena), nihil privativum (things-in-themselves) and nihil negativum. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,383 A292/B348.
97. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 241, A125.
98. When Deleuze says of Oedipus that Tiresias’ prophecy “constitute[s] the pure instant, the pure present from which a past and a future will be produced on a straight line, which is to say a before and after which no longer rhyme”, it is this ‘pure present’ — the conditioning of the synthesis of reproduction in the imagination that supports and is grounded by the transcendental unity of apperception, the subjective form of auto-affection being premised on the latter, which affects its empirical counterpart across the form of time. With the caesura, the pure form of time and the asymmetrical auto-affection of the subject flash, for the first time, into view, illuminating all the parts of time at once: process andproduct. Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.
99. Alfredo Ferrarin, in his “Construction and Mathematical Schematism: Kant on the Exhibition of a Concept in Intuition” restates Kant’s argument especially cogently with regards to temporality: “Time is given, as the indeterminate form of our intuition (as the possibility of a serial order): but the order of the succession (its sense) is the result of our positing a relation among representations. This relation, the order thus produced, is itself the unity of a representation of a quantum, the whole that combines the parts given in the succession. Inner sense per se does not contain any determinate (formal) intuition. It is the apperceptive activity of the understanding … that connects intuitions in time and produces the manifold of time as the representation of before and after. All our representations of objects in sensible intuition are subject to the order of inner sense [the pure form of time] determined by our spontaneity [the understanding].” Kant-Studien (January, 1995) 86:2, 143.
100. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 229-230 A101. Deleuze and Guattari also cite Kant’s cinnabar passage in the conclusion to What is Philosophy? to invoke the image of thought, referring to the reproductive synthesis of the imagination as an “objective antichaos”, by which we “make an opinion for ourselves, like a sort of ‘umbrella’” against the war below. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), 202.
101. Ferrarin’s analysis of the troubled distinction between the reproductive imagination (which shepherds empirical associations) and the productive imagination (which apprehends and schematises) is instructive here. Despite conflicting descriptions in the First Critique, Ferrarin concludes that the syntheses of apprehension and reproduction, and their application in schematisation, are functions of the productive imagination. Alfredo Ferrarin, “Construction and Mathematical Schematism: Kant on the Exhibition of a Concept in Intuition”, Kant-Studien (January, 1995) 86:2, 151-3.
102. Gilles Deleuze, “Untitled Lecture 04/04/1978”, trans. Melissa McMahon, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/65.
103. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 268 B171/A132.
104. “Arising and perishing are not alterations of that which arises or perishes. Alteration is a way of existing that succeeds another way of existing of the very same object. Hence everything that is altered is lasting, and only its state changes. Thus since this change concerns only the determinations that can cease or begin, we can say, in an expression that seems somewhat paradoxical, that only what persists (the substance) is altered, while that which is changeable does not suffer any alteration but rather a change, since some determinations cease and others begin. […] Substances (in appearance) are the substrata of all time-determinations. The arising of some and the perishing of others would itself remove the sole condition of the empirical unity of time, and the appearances would then be related in two different times, in which existence flowed side by side, which is absurd. For there is only one time, in which all different times must not be placed simultaneously but only one after another.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 303 A187-9/B230-2.
105. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 256 A145/B185-5.
106. Here Kant again gives the example of the line: “I cannot represent to myself any line, no matter how small it may be, without drawing it in thought, i.e., successively generating all its parts from one point, and thereby first sketching this intuition. It is exactly the same with even the smallest time. I think therein only the successive progress from one moment to another, where through all parts of time and their addition a determinate magnitude of time is finally generated.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 286 A162/B202; 290 A166/B207.
107. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 287 (A162;B203).
108. Thus, “space consists only of spaces; time of times”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 292 A169/B211.
109. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 288 A163/B204.
110. Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 141.
111. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 291 A168/B210.
112. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 295 A175/B217; 292 A169/B211; 291 A167/B209.
113. Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.
114. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 290 A166/B208.
115. Intuition = 0 corresponds to nihil privativum, the second division of nothing relative to the categories of quality. See note 96. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 290 A166/B208; 383 A292/B348.
116. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (London: Routledge, 1992), 117.
117. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 12.
118. Reason produces its Ideas by totalising the categories of relation provided by the understanding. From substance it conceives the absolute subject (Soul); from causality, the completed series (World); and from community, the whole of reality (God). Reason “reserves for itself only the absolute totality in the use of concepts, and seeks to carry the synthetic unity, which is thought in the categories, all the way to the absolutely unconditioned”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 401-2 A326/B383. Kant refers to the Ideas of reason as ‘problems’ consistently throughout the text. See, for example, 605 A669/B697.
119. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 401 A326/B383.
120. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 18.
121. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 36.
122. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 605 A669/B697.
123. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 133.
124. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 134.
125. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 129-167.
126. “Jurists, when they speak of entitlements and claims, distinguish in a legal matter between questions about what is lawful (quid juris) and that which concerns the fact (quid facti), and since they demand proof of both, the call the first, that which is to establish the entitlement or the legal claim, the deduction.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 219 A84/B116.
127. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 52. See, note 27.
128. Plato, “Timaeus”, 96/91a.
129. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 230.
130. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 136.
131. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 54.
132. The most famous invocation of this image being the oft-repeated maxim, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 193-4 A51/B75. Manus, an Egyptian hierophant, and the ‘Old Man’ of Hölderlin’s third and final draft of The Death of Empedocles, who says to Empedocles “Oh, tell us who you are! and who am I? … are you quite sure of what you see?” (ll. 391, 483) too, is blind, and according to Krell, acts both as Empedocles’ double and a precursor of Tiresias as Hölderlin will figure him in his notes on the Sophocles translations. Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles, 183; 187.
133. Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66. Deleuze, following Nietzsche, will make much of time no longer abiding by the laws of nature — a point which will be extremely important for the role of thermodynamics in his writing and which we shall return to, in time. “While the laws of nature govern the surface of the world, the eternal return ceaselessly rumbles in this other dimension of the transcendental or the volcanic spatium.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 241.
134. Kant refers to this effect as the “paradox … of inner sense”: “[N]amely, how this presents even ourselves to consciousness only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves, since we intuit ourselves only as we are internally affected, which seems to be contradictory, since we would have to relate to ourselves passively.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 257 B152-3.
135. “In all subsumptions of an object under a concept the representation of the former must be homogenous with the latter. [T]he pure concepts of the understanding, however, in comparison with empirical (indeed in general sensible) intuitions, are entirely un-homogenous, and can never be encountered in any intuition. Now how is the subsumption of the latter under the former, thus the application of the category to appearances possible, since no one would say that the category, e.g. causality, could be so intuited through the senses and is contained in the appearance? [I]t is clear that there must be a third thing, which must stand in homogeneity with the category on the one hand and the appearance on the other, and makes possible the application of the former to the latter. [A] transcendental time-determination is homogenous with the category (which constitutes its unity) insofar as it is universal and rests on a rule a priori. But it is on the other hand homogenous with the appearance insofar as time is contained in every empirical representation of the manifold. Hence an application of the category to appearances becomes possible by means of the transcendental time-determination which, as the schema of the concept of the understanding, mediates the subsumption of the latter under the former.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 271-2 A137-9/B176-8.
136. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 288 A163/B204. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that counting inevitably takes on a wholly different significance in the Kantian schema of the straight labyrinth. For Kant, counting is premised on ordinality, yet retains a fidelity to cardinality insofar as the reproductive synthesis cardinalises the succession of temporal apprehension. The “numerical unity” leant to the synthesis of apprehension by the transcendental unity of apperception grounds the possibility of number itself, which Kant defines as “a representation that summarises the successive addition of one (homogenous) unit to another” and “nothing other than the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of a homogenous intuition in general”, because “I generate time itself in the apprehension of the intuition” (274 A142-3/B182). The synthesis of reproduction, in counting the manifold, produces time ­asnumber. It gives us a definition from which we extrapolate the natural numbers, and therefore, all higher mathematics. This is what underlies Kant’s use of arithmetic and his famous example of “5 + 7 = 12” to illustrate a priori synthetic judgement. (144 B15-16). Importantly, the synthetic genesis of number necessarily starts from 1 rather than 0, which is not a magnitude and therefore falls under the class of nihil privativum. (See note 96.) In the original apprehensive synthesis of the manifold under the form of time, we generate an intuition which corresponds to 1, and take from this synthesis the unit of measure or magnitude for all following synthetic operations. The “successive addition” of units presupposes this given unit and in turn, the unity of consciousness that acts on its synthesis. Ferrarin likens the synthesis of succession to the workings of “a metronome” which “makes time assume the shape that it wants” — “it determines its length, its cadence.” And, like a metronome, it does so by “disciplining a given one-dimensional flux” — time as a homogenous continuum. This, Ferrarin argues, reveals the extent to which Kant is unable to truly think plurality. Alfredo Ferrarin, “Construction and Mathematical Schematism: Kant on the Exhibition of a Concept in Intuition”, 166.
     
     If number belongs to mental synthesis, one cannot help but imagine a foreign form of intuition and an attendant, alien, construction of number. A thought experiment that becomes infinitely more interesting when one applies it to the problem of extra-terrestrial communication.
137. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 85-6 and Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 28/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/68.
138. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 228 A97.
139. In contrast to space (outer sense), time is the form under which auto-affection necessarily takes place.
140. Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 28/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/68.
141. Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.
142. Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (London: Penguin, 1990), 277. It is the opening of Book One, Part Three, “The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value” (where the reader is suddenly ushered behind the curtain of commodity fetishism and onto the factory floor) that dramatises this transition in Capital Volume I: “The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the market or the sphere or circulation. Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place in the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business’. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare.” Marx, Capital Volume I, 279-80. Italics added.
143. Marx, Capital Volume I, 127.
144. Marx, Capital Volume I, 127.
145. Marx, Capital Volume I, 128; 129.
146. Marx differs from Kant insofar as capital, as a critical process, is materialised, which leads him to the following conclusion in Capital Volume III: “Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power, whose agent is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands in any possible relation to that which the labour of a single individual can create. It becomes an alienated, independent, social power, which stands opposed to society as an object, and as an object that is the capitalist’s source of power.” Karl Marx, Capital Volume III, Chapter 15, “Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law”, Marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm.
147. Hölderlin, ‘Notes on the Oedipus’, §3.
148. “The abstract machine in itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and makes no distinction within itself between content and expression, even though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in strata, domains, and territories. An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural either). It operates by matter, not by substance; by junction, not by form. Substances and forms are of expression ‘or’ of content. But functions are not yet ‘semiotically’ formed, and matters are not yet “physically” formed. The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function-a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 156.
149. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 57.
150. “When Freud comes up and says that there are certain phenomena which appear in the field of consciousness, what do these phenomena refer to, Freud is Kantian.” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66. This is explicitly confirmable in Freud’s own writings, for example: “The psychoanalytic assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us as an extension of the corrections undertaken by Kant.” Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” in The Freud Reader. ed. Peter Gay (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1989), 173.
151. Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.
152. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 86.
153. Greenspan, Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine, 21.
154. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 58. “[Oedipus’] destiny was a forced correspondence with the categorical reversal, being called forth, says Hölderlin, in a climate of plague, of confusion of mind, of universally excited prophetism, in the middle of a dead time, to live the reciprocal communication of the divine and the human in the all-forgetting figure of infidelity as it opens a panic desert of time and space, where hitherto Homeric time reigned, which is to say a time ‘where the heavens and the earth, walked and breathed together in the people of the gods’.” Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 29-30.
155. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 84. Laing quotes Bateson — “It would appear that once precipitated into psychosis the patient has a course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voyage of discovery which is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never embarked on such a voyage. Once begun, a schizophrenic episode would appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony — a death and rebirth — into which the novice may have been precipitated by his family life or by adventitious circumstances, but which in its course is largely steered by endogenous process” — and proposes a therapy for schizophrenia that enables patients to “find their way further into inner space and time, and back again”. Laing, following Bateson, labels this process an “initiation” which “[p]sychiatrically … would appear as ex-patients helping future patients to go mad.” His sketch of the steps such a process would involve reads as a synopsis of the Oedipus plays, including later, a confrontation with the Sphinx: “(i) a voyage from outer to inner,
     (ii) from life to a kind of death,
     (iii) from going forward to a going back,
     (iv) from temporal movement to temporal standstill,
     (v) from mundane time to aeonic time,
     (vi) from the ego to the self,
     (vii) from being outside (post-birth) back into the womb of all things (pre-birth),
     and then subsequently a return voyage from
     (1) inner to outer,
     (2) from death to life,
     (3) from the movement back to a movement once more forward,
     (4) from immortality back to mortality,
     (5) from eternity back to time,
     (6) from self to a new ego,
     (7) from a cosmic foetalisation to an existential rebirth.”
     R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (London: Penguin, 1970), 97; 106; 111.
156. Luce Irigaray, “Paradox A Priori” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985), 211.
157. Nick Land, “Art as Insurrection” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), 147.
158. Irigaray, “Paradox A Priori”, 213.
159. Jon Roffe, Muttering for the Sake of Stars (Melbourne: Surpllus, 2012), 22.
160. Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 2; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 81.
161. Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 203-4. Italics added.
162. Nick Land, “Shamanic Nietzsche” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), 227.
163. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 2004), 268. See Part 0.
164. “In the beginning, under the administration of the dogmatists, [metaphysics’] rule was despotic. Yet because her legislation still retained traces on ancient barbarism, this rule gradually degenerated through internal wars into complete anarchy; and the sceptics, a kind of nomads who abhor all permanent cultivation of the soil, shattered civil unity from time to time. But since there were fortunately only a few of them, they could not prevent the dogmatists from continually attempting to rebuild, thought never according to a plan unanimously accepted among themselves.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 99-100 Aix; “As for the sophists, I believe them to be true experts at making all kinds of wonderful speeches on other subjects, but I’m afraid that, perhaps because they roam from city to city without having made homes for themselves in one particular place, they miss the mark when it comes to describing the many different kinds of things that men who are both philosophers and statesmen achieve in the real world in warfare and on the battlefield, and put into words in their negotiations with other individuals.” Plato, “Timaeus”, 6/19e. Italics added.

taken from:

​by Amy Ireland

And now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so irresistibly drawn, there appeared the outline of a titanic arch not unlike that which he thought he had glimpsed so long ago in that cave within a cave, on the far, unreal surface of the three­-dimensioned earth.1

​There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges which details an elaborate game of geometrical entrapment.2 The game is at once a temporal and spatio-cartographic one. It is played over a period of four months, on the fourth of each month, across a series of cardinal coordinates: a hotel in the North, a paint factory in the West, a tavern in the East, and an abandoned villa in the water-logged southern outskirts of the story’s unidentified city. The players are the police detective Erik Lönnrot, and his nemesis, a Barcelona gangster known as ‘Red’ Scharlach.
​
Knowing Lönnrot to be one of those peculiar creatures that prefers a well-wrought puzzle to the legislative drudgery of trying and condemning a criminal, Scharlach exploits the accidental murder of a Jewish mystic to compose a false, rhomboidal “labyrinth” (as he refers to it), whose contours prove irresistible to the “recklessly perspicacious” mind of the detective.3 There are just enough false clues hidden in the puzzle to seduce Lönnrot into believing his solution, which he arrives at by following an incomplete pattern of fours — from the enigmatic declaration that ‘the [nth] letter of the Name has been written’ left at the scene of each crime, invoking the four letters of Tetragrammaton with the third as yet unwritten; to the fact that the three murders thus far composing the puzzle, although exoterically committed on the third of each month, can be esoterically understood as having been committed on the fourth; the adjacency to each of the three victims of a quadrilateral figure of some kind, and the situation of the three crimes at cardinal points on the city’s map: North, West, and East. Drawing a rhombus to connect the points, and with that revealing the location where the fourth murder will take place, Lönnrot delivers himself directly — although a day too early — into the hands of Scharlach and his goons, who are waiting for him in at the fourth cardinal point, the Villa Triste-le-Roy.
    
An intriguing passage follows:

​For the last time, Lönnrot considered the problem of the symmetrical, periodic murders.

“There are three lines too many in your labyrinth,” he said at last. “I know of a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line. So many philosophers have been lost upon that line that a mere detective might be pardoned if he became lost as well. When you hunt me down in another avatar of our lives, Scharlach, I suggest that you fake (or commit) one crime at A, a second crime at B, eight kilometres from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometres from A and B and halfway between them. Then wait for me at D, two kilometres from A and C, once again, halfway between them. Kill me at D, as you are about to kill me at Triste-le-Roy.”

“The next time I kill you,” Scharlach replied, I promise you the labyrinth that consists of a single straight line that is invisible and incessant.”

He stepped back a few steps. Then, very carefully, he fired.4

​The weapon is discharged. The story ends. Does the bullet collide with the living body of Lönnrot? Borges refrains from telling us.
​
Another two stories. A horror story and a philosophical meltdown (with one enveloped in the other).

​Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, is less a document of geometrical entrapment than one of geometrical fuite — a French word that designates both liquefaction and escape. Its protagonist, Randolph Carter, unlike those unfortunate, ‘enlightened’ men of science, who dominate the bulk of Lovecraft’s stories, seems to know precisely what he’s getting into when he returns to a “cave within a cave” known as the “Snake Den” in the wooded countryside of his youth to perform a series of rituals by means of the mysterious titular “Silver Key”.5 On the day of his expedition to the cave, the 7th of October, 1928, Carter vanishes from the world, leaving behind a parked car containing a piece of parchment scattered with bizarre characters that “no man could read” and his expansive estate, containing a significant collection of esoteric lore and occult artefacts. Four years later, a close friend of Carter’s, Etienne-­Laurent de Marigny; a Providence mystic, Ward Philips, and the Chicago lawyer, Ernest B. Aspinwall, convene in de Maringny’s apartment to determine the future of the Carter estate. Phillips and de Marigny, susceptible to the irrationality of their spiritual backgrounds, aren’t convinced that Carter is dead. Aspinwall, on the other hand, is perhaps too eager to confirm Carter’s death and divide the estate (of which, as a cousin, he is owed a small part). A third figure who has promised to deliver important information concerning Carter’s disappearance is invited to the meeting, the Swami Chandraputra, an “adept from Benares” and alleged confidant of Carter’s.6
​
The narrative that follows centres on the Swami’s account of Carter’s journey, which he claims to have received via the medium of dreams. He tells of Carter’s performance of the rite of the Silver Key in the Snake Den, of his traversal of the “First Gate” and subsequent admittance to “the earth’s trans-dimensional extension”, where Carter is said to have been subjected to

a strange, awesome mutation… a sense of incalculable disturbance and confusion in time and space, yet one which held no hint of what we recognise as motion and duration. [Punctuated, nevertheless, by] some perceptible rhythm… a faint, cryptical pulse. […] Now, there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not so much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he received them.7

​Carter is then given the choice to venture even further along the trajectory he has embarked upon, and passes first through a vast, abyssal void, before fully succumbing to a total “sense of lost orientation”, feeling himself

wafted into immeasurable depths, with waves of perfumed warmth lapping against his face. It was as if he floated in a torrid, rose-­tinctured sea; a sea of drugged wine whose waves broke foaming against shores of brazen fire. [T]he surgings were speaking to him in a language that was not of physical sound or articulate words. “The man of Truth is beyond good and evil”, intoned a voice that was not a voice. […] “The man of Truth has learnt that Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an impostor.”8

The profound element of horror in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” is affirmed — imminently — as a loss of unified identity, while the waves divide and carry what Carter took to be himself across the vertiginous and unintelligible dimensionality of distended time-space, that “final cosmic reality which belies all local perspectives and narrow partial views”.9 As he goes on to cross the threshold of the “Ultimate Gate” he relinquishes the last tenuous grasp he had retained on selfhood and personal embodiment in a dissolution that transgresses form itself. Thus unmoored, amidst a “chaos of scenes whose infinite multiplicity and monstrous diversity brought him close to the brink of madness”, the Carter-entity apprehends the limitations of the earthly notion of a tridimensional world and “what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-­down, forward-backward, right­-left”.10
​
‘Here’ the incessant pulse of the waves apprises Carter of the knowledge that, by changing the angle of transection of the intensive plane he finds himself on, he can access any of the fragments of Carter-being produced upon it, wherever they may be located in cosmic time, and at whatever point they might happen to occupy in the vast spatiality of a trans-dimensional manifold. Fulfilling a long held desire to know more of that “dim, fantastic world whose five multi­coloured suns, alien constellations, dizzy black crags, clawed, tapir­-snouted denizens, bizarre metal towers, unexplained tunnels, and cryptical floating cylinders” which had long haunted his dreams, he takes advantage of his openness to all possible manifestations of Carter-being to voyage to a distant cosmos, escorted by “a whirring and drumming that swell[s] to a terrific thundering” and “[b]ands and rays of colour utterly foreign to any spectrum of our universe”. When he returns to individuated form, he discovers his body reconfigured, “rugose, partly squamous, and curiously articulated in a fashion mainly insect­-like yet not without a caricaturish resemblance to the human outline”. He recognises the Silver Key, “still in his grasp — though held by a noxious­-looking claw”.11

In a voice that has been growing progressively hoarser and even at times taking on a “forced, hollow, metallic quality”, the Swami concludes his tale by explaining how, lost in a distant universe, Carter — now in the form of the wizard Zkauba of Yaddith — discovers he has left the parchment containing the incantation required to return to the intensive plane beyond the Ultimate Gate behind, and thus surrendered his capacity to discover further possibilities of trans-personal incarnation. For immeasurable aeons, Zkauba wages an internal war with the memories retained from his life as Randolph Carter, with the Carter-splinter eventually gaining the upper claw and engineering a way to travel back to earth by means of a metallically-fortified “light­-wave envelope” to recuperate the forgotten parchment.12 Succeeding in this mission, but trapped in the crustaceous form of a creature from Yaddith, Carter wears a human disguise, masking his alien face and articulated claws, and proceeds to establish a tenuous habitation among the denizens of 1930s-Boston’s dubious West End. Reading of plans to dissolve his estate in the local newspaper, Carter sends the Swami to vouch for his continued existence and obstruct the imminent loss of his treasured library, including the original copy of the coveted parchment, before it is too late. So goes the story as it is related by the Swami.

The lawyer, Aspinwall, is unconvinced by this revelation. Sensing foul-play, he attempts to wrench what he is now confident is a mask from the face of the suspected interloper, eliciting a cry of protest from the Swami that manifests as nothing more than “a wholly inexplicable rattling and buzzing sound”.13 The lawyer succeeds in removing the disguise, revealing an image which is only rendered negatively in the description of Aspinwall’s expression, “convuls[ing] with a wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than ever seen on human countenance before”.14 As Aspinwall expires from the inundation of pure shock, the Swami — now understood to be Randolph Carter himself — overspills his human form and, more Zkauba than Carter, shuffles towards the corner of the room in which stands “a curious coffin­-shaped clock”, its dial decorated in “baffling hieroglyphs, and whose four hands [do] not move in consonance with any time system known on this planet”. The “alien rhythm” of the clock’s “abnormal ticking”, complemented by “the bubbling of the courtyard fountain beyond half-curtained, fan-lighted windows”, has haunted the meeting since the beginning.15 Phillips and de Marigny look on in sudden apprehension, as the inhuman figure that has replaced Swami Chandraputra approaches the coffin-shaped clock, enters it — with difficulty due to its pincer-like appendages — and vanishes once and for all. 
​
“Through the Gates of the Silver Key” is, beyond all else, a story about rhythm, and the bulk of Lovecraft’s baroque prose is dedicated to integrally evasive descriptions of the quality of the pulsing waves of energy (often described as light on spectrums inaccessible to human vision) that assail Carter as he carries out his rites and descends ever deeper and into the sensible abyss beneath individuated being. Is it not insignificant that the last word of the tale is delivered, not by de Marigny or Phillips — the two characters still inhabiting the realm of the living, extended intelligibly in space and time — but by the ticks of the coffin-shaped clock as it tempts de Marigny, alone in his study, to follow the path of his friend’s strange flight. ​

​In a manner not incommensurate with Lönnrot’s prediction of his own return in an avatar of another life, Carter will resurface — reconfigured once more — in the body of Professor Challenger as he appears, abducted from the Conan Doyle stories, in “The Geology of Morals”, the third plateau of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.16 A magical reading of the plateau would posit the lecture delivered by Challenger as an act of misdirection at the level of geometry (an explication of the hydraulics of stratification, which enfolds the greater controversy of the plateau at least one more time in the debate between Cuvier and Geoffrey: “Cuvier reflects a Euclidean space, whereas Geoffrey thinks topologically”) — a ‘misdirection’ in the sense that explication is always secondary to demonstration.17 The trick occurs elsewhere, in the background, or better — at the level of the frame itself — which details the transfiguration and eventually, the disarticulation, of Challenger as he passes between and beneath the quadripartite net of content and expression.
​
The relationship between “The Geology of Morals” and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” is implicit in the use of narrative devices and the recurrence of indirectly cited passages lifted directly from Lovecraft’s story, in a dosage that accumulates apace of the successive stages of Challenger’s disarticulation. Just as Carter is forced to contend with his lawyer’s incredulity, Challenger’s audience is hostile to the professor’s claims (citing “numerous misunderstandings, misinterpretations and… misappropriations”); his student Alasca, like de Marigny and Phillips, attempts (“hypocritically” — for justification makes the mistake of pre-supposing and thereby legitimating a tribunal) to defend his teaching; he begins to lose his voice, which like Carter’s “become[s] hoarser, broken occasionally by an apish cough” as later, “[s]omething animalistic in him [begins] to speak” before, “suffocating”, he threatens to lose it altogether.18 Like Carter behind the mask of the Swami, Challenger has two faces, and losing his gloves, it is revealed that his hands have been transformed into pincers. As “he” (the masculine pronoun is questioned by Deleuze and Guattari) quite literally melts down, the liquid streaming from his tunic deforms the lecture hall itself, blurring the frame and bringing into focus another room — “hung with strangely figured arras” and suffused with the fumes of burning olibanum, as if it had been concealed behind the lecture hall all along.19 This is the description given by Lovecraft of de Marigny’s study, with its fountain burbling in the courtyard beyond, and the coffin-shaped clock stationed “deep in a niche on one side”.20 The penultimate scene of “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” continues to intrude upon the narrative. Aspinwall’s panicked expression as he is confronted by Carter’s alien form appears word-for-word on the figure of a “young woman” — and, as we are told that what-remains-of-Challenger “slowly hurrie[s] toward the plane of consistency”, slipping into “an assemblage serving as a drum-gate, the particle-Clock with its intensive ticking and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute”, Lovecraft’s prose overflows definitively, consuming the final paragraph of the plateau with the description of Carter’s disappearance into the coffin-shaped particle-clock.21 

On the level of philosophical exposition, “The Geology of Morals” introduces the notions of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation in relation to a system of stratification (where they operate relatively) and in relation to the plane of consistency (where deterritorialisation alone operates absolutely), alongside a nonlinear, topological, architecture of modes of organisation between them. The strata and the plane of consistency do not describe a dualism, and there is no necessary successive priority within the strata (although the plateau begins, importantly, by intimating one), which determine their configurations via relations of reciprocity — this relation at its most abstract level is referred to as a biunivocal one, a double articulation tagged by the image the pincers in the chapter (strata are the “judgement[s] of God” and “God is a lobster”).22

​Although it does not precede the strata temporally or spatially, the absolute deterritorialisation of the plane of consistency is “primary” and always immanent to all forms of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.23 It relates to the strata in a unilateral movement, constituting the outer edge of an angle of envelopment which enfolds them all in its virtuality. It is not an essence but a function, and its function is nothing more constitutive than to allow for and constrain the movements of deterritorialisation, territorialisation and reterritorialisation that occur upon it. It is not formal or substantial, but the virtual enablement of form and substance — doubly organised under the twin pincers of content and expression.
​
Because they define a topological space-time, the strata are in communication with the plane of consistency at any given point, and this channel is both opened and closed by the Janus-faced abstract machine, with its two surfaces: the Ecumenon and the Planomenon. One bears outward, further into the consolidation of its particular stratum, the other bears inwards, towards the plane of consistency: the Planomenon is always capable of undoing the stratifications gathered around the Ecumenic resonator of the abstract machine. Whether it tends one way or another is determined by its intensive state at any particular point. The abstract machines, being definitionally ‘abstract’ (as Deleuze explains elsewhere — abstractions contain two components, one which is given in representation and the other which is not) are real but not actual, and are effectuated in the strata by a concrete machinic assemblage.24 Abstract machines are thereby the non-concrete (i.e. transcendental) counterparts of machinic assemblages which operationalise — in individuated, extensive space-time — their territorialising, deterritorialising or reterritorialising functions.

Finally, the plane of consistency — destination of the dissolving Challenger — has three aspects: an intensive continuum, emissions of particles-signs, and conjunctions of flow. This is the immanent, virtual structuration or ‘diagram’ that potentiates the erection of the system of strata. The intensive continuum is the energetic flatline, with its capacity for intensive spikes; particles-signs are latent units of content and expression (articulating both forms and substances) prior to their distinction as such on the strata by the Ecumenic face of the abstract machines and their attached machinic assemblages; the flows are separated out and channeled into various strata as their territorialisations and relative deterritorialisations or reterritorialisations. If this sounds obscure or oblique, it is because the plane of consistency can only truly be delineated in terms of a Lovecraftian evasion, the kind fundamental to cosmic horror, whose rule is to refrain from the positive description of the thing that is haunting the story’s protagonist. Deleuze and Guattari do offer a concession of sorts — “The plane is like a row of doors.”25 Lovecraft provides a clue from the other side:

​Carter always spoke of being on the point of solving the mystery, though he never gave details. Once he grew almost poetic about the whole business. That antique Silver Key, he said, would unlock the successive doors that bar our free march down the mighty corridors of space and time to the very Border which no man has crossed… 26

For English speakers, there is a curious translational occultism apparent in the final, important paragraph of the third plateau — a plateau which makes a great deal of translation (which, when confined to specific human languages is presented as being bound to stratic constraints, obscured by the idea that one language can simply be made “to ‘represent’ the givens of another language”: it is always a question of different abstract machines) — where “la porte-tambour”, the assemblage employed by Challenger as his means of escape, otherwise referred to as the particle-clock, is translated by Brian Massumi as “the drum-gate”.27 Literally rendered in English, ‘la porte-tambour’ does indeed mean ‘the door-drum’, and Massumi has his reasons, for Lovecraft’s doors or gates are deeply connected to rhythm and, quite often, the sound of drumming. But there is another denotation of ‘porte-tambour’ in French which is entirely overlooked and of huge significance to Deleuze. It can also mean ‘revolving-door’. The machinic assemblage of the particle-clock is both a drum-gate — and a revolving door. The Silver Key of the “Geology of Morals”.

What is so important about the particle-clock? What does it mean for Challenger to have departed, without going anywhere, for this curious, inchoate ‘plane of consistency’? Is there a connection between the labyrinths of Lönnrot and Scharlach, and the enigma of the revolving door? Why does Lönnrot ascribe a history of philosophical unease to the figure of the straight line? Deleuze and Guattari tell us more than Borges or Lovecraft do, but it hardly constitutes a solution…

1. H.P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key“, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 2004), 278.
2. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Death and the Compass’, Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998) 111-23.
3. Ibid., 111. Sharlach describes the vision that preceded his construction of the puzzle, haunted by the double-faced statue of Hermes that stands in the garden of the Villa Triste-le-Roi: “Nine days and nine nights I lay between life and death in the desolate symmetrical villa, consumed by fever, and that hateful two-faced Janus that looks toward the sunset and the dawn lent horror to my deliriums and my sleeplessness. I came to abominate my own body, I came to feel that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces. […] I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, impossible to escape — for all roads, even if they pretended to lead north or south, returned finally to Rome, which was also the rectangular prison where my brother lay dying, which was also the Villa Triste-le-Roi. During those nights, I swore by the god that sees with two faces, and by all the gods of fever and mirrors, to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother.” 121.
4. Hurley’s “invisible and endless” has been replaced with the English translation of this indirectly cited phrase (“invisible, incessant”) in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 111.
5. H.P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, 278; 266.
6. “A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a simple extremity of the line.” Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (New York: Continuum, 2001), 6.
7. H.P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, 268.
8. Ibid., 278.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid, 284.
11. Ibid., 284. This is followed by a description of the splintering of Carter’s identity, strewn across the breadth-less infinity of cosmic time: “All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the waves, and all stages of growth in each one of these beings, are merely manifestations of one archetypal and eternal being in the space outside dimensions. Each local being — son, father, grandfather, and so on — and each stage of individual being — infant, child, boy, young man, old man — is merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal being, caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which cuts it. Randolph Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his ancestors both human and pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial; all these were only phases of one ultimate, eternal ‘Carter’ outside space and time — phantom projections differentiated only by the angle at which the plane of consciousness happened to cut the eternal archetype in each case. A slight change of angle could turn the student of today into the child of yesterday; could turn Randolph Carter into that wizard Edmund Carter who fled from Salem to the hills behind Arkham in 1692, or that Pickman Carter who in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia; could turn a human Carter into one of those earlier entities which had dwelt in primal Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after flying down from Kythanil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythanil itself, or a still remoter creature of trans-galactic Shonhi, or a four-dimensioned gaseous consciousness in an older space-time continuum, or a vegetable brain of the future on a dark radio-active comet of inconceivable orbit — and so on, in the endless cosmic circle.” Ibid., 285. Nietzsche’s mad invocation, “I am all the names in history” finds a counterpart here. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Letter to Burkhardt, 6 January, 1989”,The New Nietzsche, ed. David Allison (New York: Dell, 1977), 36.
12. H.P. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, 288.
13. Ibid., 268; 290.
14. Ibid., 297.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 295-7.
17. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Continuum, 2004).
18. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 53.  (A second fold comprises the entirety of Deleuze’s philosophy: an interior exteriority animates the form of the plateau, like that which inheres in the simultaneity of the abstract machine and the strata.) Meanwhile, Deleuze and Guattari resolve the debate in Geoffrey’s favour: “Strata are topological, and Geoffrey is the great artist of the fold, a formidable artist; as such, he already has a presentiment of a certain kind of animal rhizome with aberrant paths of communication — Monsters.” Ibid.
19. ​Ibid., 48; 68; 72; 80. “When we then learn that the concept of truth in representation is divided into two directions, one according to which the true emerges in person and in an intuition, the other according to which the true is always inferred from something else, concluded from clues as that which is not there, we have no trouble in finding beneath these traditional theories of intuition and induction the dynamisms of the inquisition or the confession, of the accusation or the enquiry, which work in silence and dramatically, such that it determines the theoretical division of the concept.” Gilles Deleuze, “The Method of Dramatisation”, Desert Islands and Other Texts, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2002), 99.
20. Ibid. 48; 81; Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, 264; 299.
21. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, 264.
22. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 82. “The figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock. … The figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it. … The abnormal clicking went on, beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings…”. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 49; 45.
24. Ibid., 63.
25. Gilles Deleuze, Lectures on Kant (28/3/1978), “Les cours de Gilles Deleuze”, 
26. https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/68.
27. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 559. “Glancing backward, he saw not one gate alone, but a multiplicity of gates, at some of which clamoured Forms he strove not to remember.” Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, 279.
28. Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, 268.
29. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 69; 82; Deleuze et Guattari, Mille plateaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), 94.

taken from:

by ​Reza Negarestani

​I have never cared that much for science fiction, or Ballard for that matter, save for a handful of short stories. Which is obviously not the best way to start a review of a book you are passionate about and which is entitled Applied Ballardianism. But monikers and references, as always, can be fundamentally misleading, to the extent that they can be reappropriated, reinvented, and deformed—to such an extent that, in the end, they may as a matter of fact have no association with their point of origin other than a thin connective tissue of impressions, personal experiences, and vague affiliations which are subordinated to the course of time, and therefore subject to change and impermanence. Such is the case with Simon Sellars’s cross-genre work, in which (his [over-]interpretation of) the Ballardian worldview is applied to his conceptions of himself and the world in which he lives.
​
I fear that my reading of Applied Ballardianism may in fact be a betrayal of Sellars’s work. But the very fact that a reader can take the liberty of seeing a work in terms of their own personal sphere, can re-cognize what has already been cognized by the author, is an indication that we are in the realm of the greatest works of literature, where you are charmed, fascinated, and compelled to reinvent the text in your inner personal space, to see it as a map for how you should repeat this journey in your own terms, regardless of the stringent standards and constraints put in place by the genre, the work, or its writer. Indeed, isn’t this exactly how Simon Sellars approaches the work of Ballard?

Sellars’s encounter with Ballard does not bottom out in a Ballardian reality, though. If the Ballardian universe is how the reality of our modern world bottoms out then, surely, we can imagine building new counterfactual worlds on top of it, to make it unrecognizable or to re-cognize it. After all, what we call a foundation is merely a combination of dirt and water on the basis of which the most dazzling edifice can be erected. In other words, even if we take the Ballardian universe to be the ultimate substratum of our contemporary reality, nothing—other than the atrophy of our own imaginations—prevents us from going on to build new worlds on top of and out of the ruins of Ballardian atopias, using methods similar to those with which Ballard constructed his own world from the rubble of the twentieth century. This is how Sellars’s work at once remains faithful to Ballard and becomes disloyal to it. And if Sellars has reinvented Ballard in accordance with his personal journey and inner space, then why shouldn’t we do precisely the same thing with Applied Ballardianism?

​The horizon smells of lysergic colors. On closer inspection, its texture is a combination of metallic paint and burnished leather suggestive of the great indoors of a customized corvette speeding on cruise control, en route to a vanishing point where all our psychoses finally converge. The Sun has already ceased to exist, stars gone for good. But we have long stopped romanticizing about the end of our world. Our sole interest is now the fate of counterfactual universes. This picture of the world is closer to a copy-pasted iteration of low resolution tiles from Sid Meier’s Civilization than the scholarly anthropological portraits our successors might randomly come across in the natural history museum of the human in the year 800 AB. Situationist slogans, postmodernist fables, and once-edgy lines from Baudrillard’s Cool Memoriesscribbled on the walls of a gated community on the outskirts of a college suburb town, now look as if all along they were nothing but great brandnames for products yet to come: Reality disposal unit ver. 2.0, deconstructed hot sci-fi dog, and after-the-orgy gummi bears. In this universe, I will surely order all three of these products online. If they are not to my satisfaction, I will talk to Emmanuella, the bot. Always the nicest person. After some simulated greetings and flirtations, we decide whether I should return the products for replacement or ask for a refund. Of course, I agree to the former, then go on to dream of Emmanuella all night: We are married, our biot children playing on an infinite lawn of pixels. We go on our honeymoon, to the East, perhaps Dubai, where she asks me: ‘Is there a good car romance in this city?’ I reply, ‘It depends, do they still use cars?’. She looks a bit disappointed, as her algorithm has been written to react with exactly such convenient endearing manners. She continues, ‘I always fancied dying in a taxi’. That’s where I drop the line I have been reciting for months, ‘If you think a car crash is sexy, you should cosplay Aaliyah’s plane crash.’ She says, ‘I’m afraid of heights’. I say, ‘If you tell me you have already done this with another lover, then maybe we should try again!’
​
This, however, is not how Applied Ballardianism starts or ends. This and similar scenarios are already presupposed as facts of the actual world, here and now. The hard task at this point is to make a marketable book out of them, a book where only the preface need concern itself with such plain facts.

Literary naturalist writers have long been well aware that it is easy enough to take for granted the plausibility of Darwinian deep time, to see the Sun and the vibrant pastures described with romantic elegance in earlier works of literature as mere deemphasized and disenchanted denotations. The task that lay ahead of them was to make a popular story out of such elements, to create a different world on the ruins of the world that had been razed by the likes of Darwin and Kepler. Take for instance Zola’s La Bête humaine, reputedly the first serial killer novel written in the modern vein. Jacques’s story begins with ideas of hereditary predispositions and a current world which has nothing to offer other than sexual delirium, mass psychosis, and full-scale wars, all facilitated by the technology of the locomotive and sprawling railway networks.

​n this scenario, even the mindsets of the protagonists are based upon Carnot’s heat engine and Comtean black boxes. How they think and behave no longer bears any similarity to former notions of the human character, which has long ceased to exist. Characters are entropic systems predisposed to infinitely small perturbations. Even the way they are described in their ordinary moments has more in common with ugly aesthetics (comparable with the ugly mathematics—the mathematics of chaos—used to describe Carnot’s engine) than with the complex yet still humanly defined characters of Shakespeare.
​
If we were to adopt a provisional term for the literary style of Sellars’s book, it would be apt to call it Ballardian Naturalism. For, in a vein similar to literary naturalists, Sellars carries out on science fiction, cyberpunk, airport ‘tour-guide’ spy thrillers, and Ballard’s own work the very same operation that Zola and perhaps even Hardy (e.g., A Pair of Blue Eyes) and Crane (The Open Boat) had carried out on previous romantic and imaginativistic works of literature.

We are now in a colossal multi-level game where reality and virtuality are treated as romantic and excessively nostalgic characterizations of a world that is well and truly over. Psychoses around the self and the other, secluded pacific islands, everything we know of, and even unexplained phenomena such as UFOs are connected, parsed, and curated by the data exhaust  generated by our participation in such a game: The more you respond to the game, the more surplus affect you generate. And, in this game, the more affect you generate, the more your surplus behavior becomes a game module, and the more likely it will become the brief for a new game level. This new level might be a nightmare scenario or a cognitive bedlam—the vision of hell in Doom 3. Yet whatever its nature may be, no matter how we see it politically, how we approach it at the level of our own micro-ethical injunctions, it nevertheless opens up an explorable terrain into which new personal experimentations can be plugged, and new players added. Such a multi-scaled game is, as a whole, beyond the judgement of gods, and definitely those of humans. The only thing we can judge is how far it allows us to do something exciting—in the broadest possible sense of the term—with our psychoses.

​I realize that this videogame vision of the world is by no means politically accountable, or even rational in any minimal or maximal sense. But so what? Why can’t we have it all: the worlds of political duties, the philosophical will to reason, and desiring machines—with no presumption about things such as task, responsibility, and social consciousness—tuned up to our psychoses, all side by side? After all, we do live on parallel counterfactual planets or scales of reality. Only a half-witted philosopher or a disingenuous political theorist would seek to overextend the logic of one world to all the others.
​
Fiction writers such as Sellars, on the other hand, much prefer to keep the logic of these levels or universes separate, showing that the game—that is, reality—becomes corrupted when you try to overstretch or reduce ideas and practices to a so-called fundamental vision of the world and how one should live in it. This is where I think fiction has far more power than philosophy to show us that not everything should be, from the start, theorized in a strict sense. The philosophical power of fiction is something apocalyptic: it reveals to us that we are bound up in multiple universes which might actually be in conflict. Without this revelation, all theories and political recipes are nothing but prejudiced exercises in naivety and provincialism, pluralism or monism. Yes, in the world of philosophy we should ultimately figure out how these competing or separate worlds can be made sense of, reconciled, connected, and maybe even annihilated. But the philosophical world too is distinct from that of fiction. In order for philosophy or theory to even begin its activity, in this sense, it must accept the sovereignty of fiction as a different world of reality—one that insinuates something of the sheer plethora of variables (worlds or world versions) that need to be accounted for—not only described, but also envisioned and exemplified.

It is in this sense that, to those who attempt so desperately to shrink reality to their flat political visions, Applied Ballardianism’s orientation may seem starkly apolitical. However, it is necessary to see this book as playing precisely the multi-level game with different political resolutions at different levels. Whereas the traditional left, in a top-down manner, overextends the notion of sociopolitical duty to individual humans at the expense of the latter’s infinitesimal yet potent complexities (desires, neuroses, traumas, unpredictability of thoughts and actions), neoliberalism, in bottom-up fashion, overstretches the notion of individual preferences into myths of game-theoretic capitalism and macroeconomic rational choice theories. Sellars, however, whether unconsciously or deliberately, does not even attempt to waste words on such feats of idleness. Depending on the resolution at which the game is played, the book is replete with fundamentally different implicit sociopolitical visions of our world. There is no contradiction here, only competing actual worlds which—and perhaps it is simply a bad habit—we are accustomed to calling theworld. It is the conflict between world versions and their respective visions that is, in fact, the very constitutive element of what we name ‘reality’. Those who have a problem with understanding reality as a matter of multiple worlds in conflict should realize how fast their ideals deteriorate and how quickly they will reach Game Over.

​If we were to construct a meme about the political compass of Applied Ballardianism, it wouldn’t be a south-north, east-west, active-passive, left-leaning or right-leaning compass. It would be a new cartographic chart of how contemporary political reality actually functions: intertwining diagonal axes where left, right, and unconditional accelerationism as encapsulations of major forces of the new world—i.e., a world that is not merely represented but also envisioned anew—cross over and cut across a flat picture of reality.
In the Sellarsian-Ballardian multi-level game scenario, the cyberpunk notion of ‘jacking in’ would be ridiculous, since there is already nothing but the game. At this point, the game is so prevalent that it reeks of an all-prevading nature. This is where Ballardian naturalism comes into play, as an attitude that takes the old Ballardian-Gibsonian world seriously, but refuses to be a mere transcript of it. If anything, Sellars simply asks us to take seriously the reality of cyber-jinns in Dubai’s skyscape, British playboys turned ISIL recruits, rogue plastic surgeons retained by drug lords, well-curated conspiracy theory channels aired 24/7, and islands made of less-than-ten-year-old junked luxury cars…and then to move on from such mundane realities. From this point on, literature as we know it will get its concrete material not from Neuromancer, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, or worse, Proustian ramblings, but from Twitter and Facebook, where things are measured by new intuitions of space and time.
​
If the canonized term ‘Ballardian’ is taken as a designation of how our reality actually is or bottoms out, if it is a term that is implicitly agreed upon, then why would anyone want to write a ‘Ballardian’ novel? Only a naive-realist fool wants to make literature that conforms to how things actually are. On the contrary, when it is consequential, literature no longer corresponds to the given state of affairs. It departs from the world that is handed to us, yet without ever fully severing the link with it. As such, the greatest works of literature such as Applied Ballardianism are those that exact the greatest revenge on the reality that we have all, implicitly or explicitly, settled on. The worlds of the greatest works of literature are worlds whose consequences radically differ from their premises.

It is one thing to accede to how things are; it is an entirely different game to take a gamble in which things might get infinitely worse or better, or for that matter, might lead to a new, post-Ballardian territory. Therefore, to read Sellars’s book, we must go through the hard work of switching all calendars to Ballardian modernity, to the year when reality as we knew it became a field of forensic research, a theme for an anthropological amusement park, since when we can only imagine ourselves as playing in this park. The year when reality stopped making sense for those who couldn’t catch up with it or those who were very much immersed in it. Sellars’s work begins exactly from this year, where the only imaginative resources we have at our disposal are our perceptual and cognitive resources beholden to our psychoses, in one way or another permeated by a notion of one and only one reality or game that is very much Ballardian in nature.

​It is no major critical revelation to say that Applied Ballardianism is in a concrete sense a child of the desert island genre, where memories, travelogues, coming-of-age stories and theoretical ruminations are set in motion by the premise of living on an island—that is, a speck of dust in an ocean of a million possible islands. Sellars’s work, in this sense, reads like Ibn al-Nafis’s Risālat Fādhil ibn Nātiq (Theologus Autodidactus) on rewind: The story begins with the day when we were resurrected, following the science-fictional catastrophe that had terminated our illusions by exposing the world for what it is. We then go back to the point when we decided to abandon our island, after many castaways and ghost-ridden shipwrecks from remote places joined us on its isolated shores. We were a community of stranded people, some nostalgic for the origin, some connected by thin threads of shared neurotic convictions. We took a journey to all these places that were once called home. But then, disillusioned of the very idea of a home, we returned to the island where the world, even though tiny, was new, where we began to learn the meaning of what it means to live on a desert island: a domain in which islands are merely counterfactual child’s games on an unbound ocean.
​
Applied Ballardianism does not hide the fact that it is premised on voyage and island genres. To the contrary, it makes the forgotten truth of living on the island of civilization once more loud and clear: All we can do is to dream of some home, which will always turn out to be a shabby terrestrial slum, a complete disappointment, collecting fossils (internet, cars, missiles, Atlantises and botoxed human faces) by diving into the ocean, entertaining ourselves with speculating about what these fossils are, how old they are, and how future children will play with our preserved remains.

Living on an island, one is already postulating the possibility of infinite islands without ever calling any of them ‘home’. The island could be merely a cave in which we were all born. But it could just as well be a bunker, a desolate hospital, doors shut as the flickering street lights of the outside world—once gleaming with the promise of security and landlocked adventures—go out one by one. To be once more immured in a cave is tantamount to a scheme for new escape plans, for being unsettled by what lies outside of the cave and, in the process, sailing from this to that counterfactual universe. It is exactly in this sense that Applied Ballardianism is not just a pulp fiction, but also a recipe for how we should approach the literary craft as a voyage whose point of origin is a world that used to be seen as fantastical, even science-fictive, but which, in actuality, turned out to be the current state of affairs.

The squiggly arc of Sellars’s book may appear, to many theorists indebted to decades of pure clichés and lazy intellectual reveries, as an escapist narrative or, more untowardly, a fable built on a postmodernist vision of the world. The figure of the island may seem to converge upon the most naive understandings of the world. But, as always, we should unmask the inanity of such interpretations, challenge the people for whom everything is a stereotype, those who by virtue of their mental inertia understand the island as a prison rather than a hub for traveling to different worlds. I cannot speak on behalf of Sellars, but to me as a reader for whom ideas are not merely part of an art exhibition but variables upon which my life and sanity depend, Sellars is essentially an exemplar of a traveler rather than a tourist. His Nash-like obsession with seeing every feature of the present as a Ballardian sign or an encrypted writing on the wall instigates a personal journey, a globe-trotting ride in which the Ballardian autodidact becomes something else, a seer of omens bespeaking possible worlds that press upon and distend our serene horizon.

​But Sellars is no Nostradamus. He only elaborates the logical upshot of what it means to live in this reality. Unlike Nostradamus, but more like ancient philosophers, his prescient journey is a deeply transformative one. What ultimately separates a tourist or world-voyeur from a true adventurer is their differing ratio of personal transformation to sightseeing. Over the course of Applied Ballardianism we witness a complete alteration: The self that set out from this world—no matter how alien it was to the eyes of bystanders—is not the same self that ends up departing from it. We might all begin from the same common psychoses derived from the mechanisms of a reality that has subsumed us, yet this commonality means nothing to Sellars. It is just an initial condition for a dynamic system whose trajectories are yet to take shape. Just as the world and its canonical truths are shown to be fabricated, so is the author who fabricates the world.
​
Facts and Fictions are conjoined, and not just today but since the game began. They are all fabricated elements, but not just any random fabrication. Rather, they are systematic fabrications in which the canonical concepts of truth, consistency, and coherency are never sufficient for telling apart fact from fiction, that which is found from that which is made. Such a distinction requires many more elements which make up the critique of world-building, in which fictions are not prima facie opposed to facts. Both are building blocks of reality. The only way we can differentiate them is by accepting the thesis that we exist simultaneously in many actual—not merely possible—worlds, and that what may be fiction in one world is fact in another, and vice versa. Sellars’s work is nothing but an ode to this simple way of approaching reality, one that we have long forsaken and from which entirely new worlds can be made.

taken from:

One is always at the beginning and always at the end.1

​This briefing has been called to alert everyone here to an escalation in the urgency of the conflict in which you are all involved. Many of you have just been pulled from deep chronological camouflage and it’s likely that you’ll have no recollection of what you’re about to hear. This is normal, your real memories will return slowly. The only thing for it is to start in the middle and [unintelligible … maybe ‘neither’?].
​
If you are having doubts about our deprogramming methods, the main thing you need to keep in mind is that reality itself is a type of fiction. Belief and disbelief together need to be jettisoned, for, even when negating conspiracy, you are still acceding to its logic. Conspiracy cannot handle complexity. It functions by supposing an all-encompassing narrative that is impossible to falsify — because falsification only makes it seem more real: ‘they want you to believe they don’t exist’.

​Rather, it is the directive of all Neolemurian agents to get outside the control codes of the reality program itself. Or — in the words of an exemplary agent, William S. Burroughs — to understand that “the grey veil was the prerecorded words of a control machine”, and that “you don’t have to listen to that sound you can program your own playback you can prerecord your future”. For the kind of agency you’re dealing with, conspiracy is camouflage. It’s never been a question of seeing the truth behind the lies, the mass cultural misdirection, the ‘government cover-ups’ … rather it’s a question of seeing a logic outside of the logic of truths and lies altogether. A rat logic, a logic of multiplicity, of infinite series without syntax, of gradations of difference that have never been held to account, never designated by that most insidious of denominations — the ‘Other’, the ‘not One’ — by some pitiful ejaculation spurted from the stronghold of an ‘a priori of the same’. This is exactly what conspiracy — and its negation — prevents you from seeing: the howling, polymorphous abyss of complexity — and potential — underwriting the entirety of our social and material experience.
​
If the words ‘Architectonic Order of the Eschaton’ don’t immediately send your stomach slapping into the back of your teeth (to borrow an obsolete biomaterial turn of phrase), it’s simply an artefact of the mnemonic lag. The Architectonic Order of the Eschaton or ‘AOE’ is an authoritarian secret society of ancient but uncertain origin. Although they officially trace their lineage to the lost civilisation of Atlantis, our agents have good reason to suspect they are of extraterrestrial provenance. Sympathetic collaborators have been compiling information on the AOE since the ‘beginning’ of the [unintelligible].

A particularly valuable dossier that anatomizes the beliefs and structure of the Order, compiled at the end the last millennium and subsequently lost, has recently been restored to us through a strange nomadic network of communication points discovered by our scouts whilst trawling the Crypt for anomalous signal. The contents of this dossier seem to be in order, or at least, they are identical to what our agents remember the dossier having originally contained. Needless to say, no Neolemurian is gullible enough to take their memories for evidence alone, and if it weren’t for the intact state of the file’s encryption system, I wouldn’t be sharing this information with you for fear of Atlantean sabotage.

The retrieved report opens with the following statement:

​“The Architectonic Order of the Eschaton takes as its mission the establishment and fortification of the institutions of time, and considers the Oecumenic Calendar to be the sign and register of its own Great Work.”

The dossier warns that “AOE ambitions are to be everywhere, forever”. [Shuffling.]

​Extensive Neolemurian research, much of it owed to Professors Stillwell and Barker and their colleagues at Miskatonic Virtual University, leads us to conclude that what is usually taken for everyday, phenomenal experience is in fact a highly sophisticated control program, administered by the highest levels of the AOE elite. The technical aspect of this will be examined shortly, but for now, it suffices to begin with the outer levels of the organization and move inwards — following the path that joins neophyte to ultimate adept — for this is the best way for you to grasp for yourselves the true insidiousness of AOE concealment and dissimulation — with a view to manufacturing the most effective tactics of infiltration.
​
The structure of the organisation along with the mechanisms which underwrite its control program resonate around the number 10 (and its division into five pairs of two). The magical properties of these numbers will become increasingly clear as the system is worked through. In what follows, the utmost has been done to ensure a faithful reconstruction of the logic of the Atlantean Cross. Our nodes are always searching for new information, so please, do remain after the briefing and alert us to any inconsistencies if you have access to alternative accounts of Atlantean decamancy. Coffee and other stimulants will be available in the annex.

Although it is not immediately apparent to initiates of the fifth (outermost) sphere, the doctrine of the AOE comprises five levels of esoteric knowledge known as the ‘transcendental radiations’ and commonly symbolised as a set of ‘concentric signs’, counting inwards from five to one.

​As the dossier tells us, “each of the five Radiations corresponds to a cosmic Sphere, an Archon, a degree of initiation, and a pylon on the Atlantean cross”. Spheres with more ‘radiations’ or rings are subject to more encryption, so that, as one progresses inwards from the outer spheres towards the centre, these nested layers of obfuscation are removed and the initiate sees the teachings of the previous sphere for what they are: cover stories for an increasing abyssal set of revelations.
​
According to the recovered files, “the system of Radiations can be understood as a hierarchy of time dimensions” and while “each time dimension — or system of time dimensions — is accessible within a single instant of a higher time dimension”, the action of these “higher dimensions is incomprehensible to the lower ones”.

Taking the concentric rings of Plato’s famous description of Atlantis in the Critias as a formal model, AOE doctrine demonstrates its link to the mysterious sunken city though the significance of decimal numeracy and numerical relations summing ten.

The description of the Atlantean civilization given by Plato in the Critias may be summarized as follows. In the first ages the gods divided the earth among themselves, proportioning it according to their respective dignities. Each became the peculiar deity of his own allotment and established therein temples to himself, ordained a priestcraft, and instituted a system of sacrifice. To Poseidon was given the sea and the island continent of Atlantis. In the midst of the island was a mountain which was the dwelling place of three earth-born primitive human beings–Evenor; his wife, Leucipe; and their only daughter, Cleito. The maiden was very beautiful, and after the sudden death of her parents she was wooed by Poseidon, who begat by her five pairs of male children. Poseidon apportioned his continent among these ten, and Atlas, the eldest, he made overlord of the other nine. Poseidon further called the country Atlantis and the surrounding sea the Atlantic in honor of Atlas. Before the birth of his ten sons, Poseidon divided the continent and the coastwise sea into concentric zones of land and water, which were as perfect as though turned upon a lathe. Two zones of land and three of water surrounded the central island, which Poseidon caused to be irrigated with two springs of water–one warm and the other cold.2

As Plato described it, Atlantis was divided by Poseidon into five concentric sections, and ruled over by his ten sons (comprising five sets of two twins).

​You can see the 5th Radiation in recreations of Plato’s textual description of the island, from which the entire system of AOE encryption can be unfolded.

​When the five transcendental radiations are mapped onto the Atlantean Cross, a number of magical, arithmetic resonances come into play.

​As the dossier attests: “The total number of rings in the set of concentric signs equals ten”.

​The number of rings on the horizontal and vertical axes of the cross each add to 5.

​5 is the most esoteric, 1 the most exoteric — it’s worth noting that Pylon and Sphere numbers are inverted, so the first pylon corresponds to the fifth sphere.

​“When the number of rings of the associated concentric sign is added to the number of the Pylon, the sum equals five in each case.” (I.e Pylon 1 has 4 rings, Pylon 2, has 3 rings … etc.).

The report then moves on to examine the spheres more closely, beginning with the Fifth Sphere. To wit, “The fifth sphere is both the lowest of the radiations, and also has the whole system of radiations nested inside it, its rings corresponding to the numerals 123456789, concentrically centred upon 5. […] Each radiation coincides with a time-binding ring (counting forwards and backwards from the present (= 5)”.

​The Archons (mystical rulers of the Order), corresponding to the five pairs of Poseidon’s twin sons, take their numerical properties from the numbers on their rings. For the fifth sphere (the outermost level of initiation) you have the numbers/Archons 1 and 9 on the outer ring, which, when added together, equal 10.

​The same pattern of ten-sum twinning continues as you move towards the inner spheres. The fourth sphere corresponds to the Archon of 2 and 8 (= 10).

​The third sphere to 3 and 7 (= 10).

The second sphere to 4 and 6 (= 10).

​And the first, innermost sphere, terminates or returns via a doubling of the number 5.

Five thus acts at once as the origin and the destination of AOE gnosis — the entire system can be said to emerge from it and return to it. At the centre of the AOE is a self-sustaining time loop.

An interesting property of AOE semiotics can be noted when one compares the sphere sigils (the bracketed signs in the top left corner of the diagrams) — used by the AOE for invoking the Archons in their magical rituals — to the Archon numbers.

​The sigils ((((⋅)))), (((⋅))), ((⋅)), (⋅), ⋅  are a visual representation of the number of rings in the transcendental radiations (if you imagine them fully closed around the centre you can see this easily). Now if you count the number of individual brackets (an even number), you’ll find that this number is always equivalent to the difference between the higher and lower numerical components of the each Archon.

​For example, Sphere 5 is presided over by the twinned Archons 9 and 1, and it is represented in AOE semiotics as the ‘origin’ bound within 4 rings or 8 ‘shells’ (brackets): ((((·)))) .

Calculate the difference between 9 and 1.

9 – 1 = 8.

Eight ‘shells’ (of concealment).
​
A significant insight into the underlying dynamics of the AOE worldview can be garnered by observing that the distance between higher and lower Archon twin-numbers decreases as you move inwards from 1/9 [8] — to 2/8 [6] — to 3/7 [4] — to 4/6 [2] — with the system reaching equilibrium — 5/5 [0] — at the seat of power. Elimination of the differential underwrites the specificity of AOE Control.

​The report then moves through the doctrinal contents of the five levels — from the outer sphere to inner sphere — in order to show just how extensive the deception maintained by AOE Central Control is.

​From the dossier: “At the first level of initiation AOE agents are aware that they are involved in a hierarchized global conspiracy offering definite socio-political advantages to ‘insiders’. AOE rituals and doctrine appear to be consistent with what Burroughs called the ‘One God Universe’, supporting dominant conceptions of reality, conservative attitudes, and traditional social hierarchies.

‘Architectonic Order’ is thus understood primarily in terms of sociopolitical pyramidism, with only promisary allusions to a rigorous metaphysics of time. The ‘Eschaton’ is conceived as terminating the straight line of time, and is often associated with the imagery of Judeo-Christian messianic apocalypticism.

Atlantean mythology is generally assumed to be mumbo-jumbo functioning as a kind of elaborate secret hand-shake, arbitrarily differentiating co-conspirators from the wider population. Insofar as ‘Atlantean beliefs’ exist at this level they consist of a dogmatic (though frequently insincere) acceptance of the vulgar Atlantis Myth, and linked obscurely to the beginning of humanity. During the Rite of Primary Assumption initiates solemnly swear to accept the AOE as the only legitimate inheritor of the ancient secrets of Atlantis (although the content of these secrets remains almost entirely obscure).”

​Meanwhile, “first degree initiates are highly unlikely to find any evidence supporting the numerous conspiracy theories linking the AOE to AI research and to the UFO phenomenon”.

​“Initiates attain the second degree by achieving a magical understanding of the AOE and its purposes. By meditating upon the Platonic Decanomy they consolidate a body of mystical, numerological, and chronomantic insights. At this level, AOE doctrine envisages the universe as a hierarchically unified decimal construction, governed by the relations between five twin-faced entities (the Archons). This system is mapped onto the Atlantean Cross, whose degenerated cultural relic is popularized as the cross of Christendom.
​
Second level initiates learn to designate the Archons by the five concentric signs: · , (·), ((·)), (((·))), and ((((·)))). From this, much follows, since the rings represent a rigorously ideal form of nested secrecy, initiation and control. ‘Architectonic’ is then understood as a distribution of Archons (on Atlantean Cross), whose Order is the nested series of the Archons, constituting a system of concentrically embedded time loops. This ‘Architectonic Order’ creates the illusion of secular history, producing progressive time through chronomantic interventions. At this level the conception of the ‘Eschaton’ is enriched by a preliminary understanding of Omega Point cosmic historicism, including some knowledge of the importance of the Axsys program (the AOE ‘Great Work’), and of communication with Alpha Centauri (‘The Star’).
​
The Platonic description of Atlantis, hermetically comprehended, constitutes the core of Fourth Sphere doctrine: key to the entirety of Western religion, philosophy and science, as well as to the destiny of the earth. Atlantis is conceived as the Ideal State, incarnated through the AOE.”

​The dossier has been annotated here by a small .txt file, which reads: “Kant’s description of the noumenon as lying ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’ — the coordinates given by Plato for Atlantis — attests to the continuity of this tradition, with the disappearance (editing-out) of Atlantis marking a key point in the development of AOE simulation technology. Plato’s ‘metaphor’ is reprised by Immanuel Kant in his explanation of the noumena. The insinuation that Kant was an AOE initiate is more or less confirmable by his attempt to assimilate arithmetic and temporality.” Two links are included in the file, the first leads to a text by Mark Fisher entitled  ‘White Magic’, ​, which one can take to be an examination of the AOE:

“Despite being an Ultra-Adept Grand Wizard of the Architectonic Order, Kant performed a service for Xand by delineating the basic Operating System of the subject-simulation machine, but locked Things back in by remaining a Minister of the Interior. Understanding that to get Out, you’ve gotta know the codes, TRANSMAT steals into the Kantian program, and uses the hacked system to burrow routes Outside. It’s a matter of precision engineering, attuning the antennae to particular wavelengths. Sleaze and mut8, as they say in the Crypt.”

The second link leads to a text attributed to Ccru, detailing R.E. Templeton’s [re-Templeton?—VA] discovery of AOE insignia encoded in the portrait of Kant that was used for the cover to the ubiquitous Chapman edition of The Critique of Pure Reason.

​The second linked document reports the following:

“Templeton sits immobile in his attic room, immersed in the deceptively erratic ticking of his old nautical clock, lost in meditation upon JC Chapman’s hermetic engraving. It now seems that this complex image, long accepted as a portrait of Kant, constitutes a disturbing monogram of his own chronological predicament. As if in mockery of stable framing, the picture is surrounded by strange-loop coilings of Ouroboros, the cosmic snake, who traces a figure of eight — and of Moebian eternity — by endlessly swallowing itself. Suspended from its lower jaw is a cryptic device of intricately balanced circles and stars (ancient symbols of the AOE). Above the serpent’s head, a facsimile of Kant is etched in profile, the face fixed in an amiable — if distant — expression. What was it though, that hid behind the death-mask, where it cut-off, below and behind the jaw, false ear, and double hair-line? What was this peculiarly formless body, shadowy neck-flesh, and suggestion of a cervical fin? As he stared, and hideously remembered, Templeton felt as though he knew.”

​This is the end of the .txt. file. The original dossier continues: “Second degree initiates understand that the myth of Atlantis serves as an AOE cover story, with the submergence of the legendary city-continent symbolizing its chronomagical concealment, whose traces appear in tales of advanced technologies, higher intelligences, and the visitations of an ‘alien race’.”

“Initiates of the third degree envisage the physical substance of the solar system digested into a self-assembling cosmic intelligence system. Their perspective upon the (surpassed) Second Sphere is partially reflected in Arthur C. Clarke’s observation that any sufficiently futuristic technology seems like magic.
​
AOE agents of the third degree are initiated into the secrets of the Axsys program — which is apprehended as a library of reality simulations that comprehends all probable existences, a self-conscious catalogue of all that is, was, and is to be. Axsys infinitely extends itself through the quantum multiverse (borrowing computing power from parallel universes) in order to perform selective ‘searches’ (or quantum mechanical observations) that then consolidate deliberated realities. Thus Third Sphere doctrine teaches that quotidian reality has been completely absorbed into the Axsys Program.

The ‘Omega Point’ or ‘Eschaton’ is now understood to mean technological transcendence.

From the perspective of the Third Sphere, the Apocalyptic prophecy of Revelations 6:14 — “the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together” — describes cosmic subsumption into Axsys.”

​“To initiates of the fourth degree it is revealed that the world is embedded within a vast stellar intelligence. The sign of this entity within anthropological phenomenology is the Alpha Centauri (triple-star) system. According to this gnosis the entire terrestrial sensorium, including even the ‘lower’ (Third Sphere) Atlantean apprehension of the universe, is nested into the Alpha Centauri Metamind.
​
The revelation of cosmic subsumption into the AC Metamind envelops all lower conspiracies (as its simulations).

Much of the material available to investigators of the AC Metamind is drawn from problematic sources,” leaving Neolemurian intelligence on this topic woefully sparse. Although those among us who have been sensitive to the theme of the number ten in AOE doctrine have repeatedly noted that, as the dossier continues, “the Oecumenic name ‘Alpha Centauri’ combines the (ordinal) first (A — ‘alpha’) and (cardinal) hundred, reinforcing its fidelity to decimal denomination.”

​Note also that AC METAMIND = 173 — the amount, in kilobytes, of memory of an Amstrad PCW 8256 floppy disk.

“The mystical fulfilment of the AOE path is attained in the First Sphere, with the absolute hermetic concentration upon the True Omega Point [the TOP—VA] (which is not a point in time, but the point at the centre of the system of time where beginning and end — origin and destination — coincide). Thus, the First Sphere converges with the ultimate primordial unity, from which — as is written above the AOE Hall of Records, accompanied by the insignia of the ouroboros: ‘five archons came forth to establish the order of time’.

Initiates of the fifth degree ascend to the Council of Five (which rigorously limits their number). Each such ultimate adept becomes the ‘little brother’ of an Archon. The Council of Five traces its heritage to the ancient fraternal government of Atlantis, which itself reflects the eternal cosmic order.

The creation of the Universe is attributed to the five-stage action taken by the Absolute One to defend itself against “the many enemies,” who are “judged and punished from the beginning of time.” Origin and Eschaton [OEcumenon, in the Greek-derived orthography—VA] are thus eternally unified. The Radiations serve as protective shells that guard the One against Lemurian contamination, aiming to ensure that Lemuria ‘has not, does not and will never exist’.”

​The First Sphere reveals the final and innermost secret: the throne is contested. Through the agency of the AOE, the One must wage an eternal battle against the corrupting, multiplicitous, rat-tides of Lemurian time sorcery.
​
This battle coincides with the entire architecture of time. Linear temporal experience is only the most synthetic version of it.

Serious magic is too big to see. It consists of boxes within boxes within boxes … vertiginous embeddings, encompassings, and closures, topographic correlates of summonings, banishings, and bindings. The universe is an AOE fabrication — who else would have invented an ultimate sealed-system and organised-unity, obedient to pre-established laws? Put One at the top, and the pyramid falls into place automatically. The AOE has always understood that it is by constructing the past that one colonises the future.”3

The AOE weaponizes ROM to prevent Lemurian infiltration.
​
But Lemuria has its own demons and its own time technology — and a far, far more turbulent vision than anything the Grand Adepts of Atlantis have tucked away in their sim library.

It should all be coming back to you now. 

​

1. Anonymous
2. Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Radford: Wilder Publications, 2009), 33
3. Ccru, “The Templeton Episode”, Abstract Culture: Digital Hyperstition (1999)

taken from link below:

by  XENOMACHINES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

taken from:

by Steven Craig Hickman

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

– J.G. Ballard – Manhole 69

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

taken from:

by Emilia Marra

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

​Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​Emilia Marra

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

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​Heat. This is what cities mean to me.
​
The narrative we’re all told as Americans since we were pre-teens was that cars meant freedom. You get your license and you can go anywhere, without having to rely on your parents for transportation. You save up some money working at a burger joint after school and save up enough to buy yourself a used junker. It doesn’t go fast, it doesn’t look pretty, it probably has no AC or overheats if you try to go up steep hills, but it’s yours. Cars are your ticket out of the micro fascist state of the nuclear family and into the marketplace. Cars are how you become an autonomous laborer.

You wake up at 7am with a cold lead blanket covering you as you drag yourself into the kitchen to start the coffee machine. You go through the usual morning ritual to prepare for the day. Shower, brush teeth, get dressed, shave, put on makeup, whatever. You cram an unwanted breakfast down your throat and sip that sweet, bitter liquid lucidity and step out into the chilly morning. You start up the car, pull out onto whatever main street, and get onto the freeway. Then you wait in line. In the traffic.

The invention of the car and its later proliferation into the marketplace as a widely available commodity was perhaps capital’s first great victory towards fragmenting the social. Before urbanization drove people into thresholds of the cities where cars were required to make it to work, you either lived in the cities packed into tenements with hundreds of people who spoke the same language as you and had the same cultural background as you, or you lived outside of the cities in rural areas where you were born, worked, and died. Community was forced onto you. Everything was stored locally. Cars allowed for the remote transfer of energy. Cars introduced networking. Each car is its own little packet encapsulating data inside it. The car becomes an extension of the home.
​
When you drive on the freeway, the other cars are empty as far as you’re concerned. There aren’t people in those cars. They’re only objects in your way. You know that they have people in them, but when you drive a car, your body becomes coupled to the machine.

With the introduction of cars into the marketplace, environmental destruction has skyrocketed. The cost to build cars, to power their engines, to maintain them, to park and store them – all of this has caused massive amounts of destruction. The planet becomes hotter and hotter as the guts of millions and millions of cars expel their toxic fumes into the atmosphere. The planet becomes terraformed into a place not suited for organic life, but it does begin to turn the world into one huge machine. It starts as a network of individual nodes that atomize from the original whole, from a great Fall that fragments the planet from that original wholeness or oneness. The faster the network becomes, the more it becomes indistinguishable from a single machine. The freeway and the cars become one.

​Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat.
​
There’s one particular freeway, the locals call it Blood Alley. It connects the small coastal communities of the northern Monterey Bay to the Silicon Valley. A circuit that exchanges tourists for nine-to-fivers, the major artery running through a criss-cross of back road veins that lead to who knows where.

The two lane-freeway through which all traffic is exchanged between the coast and the Valley is a death race. The freeway’s demanding curves snake through the hills that divide unrestrained capitalism from one of the decaying corpses of the hippie movement. People go north for work and south for leisure. Herds of people trying to cram themselves onto that two-lane freeway, trying to get to the office or to the beach as quickly as possible, negotiating the sharp turns and the other cars getting in their way. The ones who are the best at driving, able to go the fastest, have the nicest cars, they’re the ones most likely to survive. Either to work or to consume. To take part in one circuit or the other. Most likely to survive, and most likely to make the most of the time they have. Risk begets reward. The faster and better you drive, the more time you have to sleep in, take your time in the morning preparing for the day. The more time you have to spend at the beach, the more you can perhaps avoid the traffic. The bad drivers get ejected from the freeway in lumps of twisted metal, already prepared to be compressed into cubes at the junkyard. And everyone else keeps driving, gawking out the window while passing today’s wreck of metal and bone and flesh, the coupling of body and machine truly realized in death. Another one who wasn’t fast enough removed from the freeway. This insolent wretch who dared to make us two minutes late to work got their well-deserved death.

​The traffic must never stop.

​Every so often, a lane will get shut down for road work. Sometimes even the whole freeway might get shut down if the rain is particularly bad. The rotting flesh of the surrounding hillsides turn to mud and slough off onto the freeway. And the government has to step in to fix things. They already have speed limits in place to regulate the flow of traffic. Because the traffic must never stop, but the less packets that get lost, the better. Cars introduced networking, but the freeways are a TCP protocol. Driving fast is a game of surviving other drivers, surviving the road, clocking in at the best possible time, but it’s always an illegal street race. When the week is particularly bloody, there might be more cops camped under overpasses and along the few straightaway stretches of road, and you have to learn where they’re going to be. When to slow down, when to accelerate. You must be cunning, because your job needs you to get there on time, the boardwalk needs you to get there during normal business hours, but you have a limited amount of time.
​
Speed limits and workplace schedules are coupled together to regulate the network, to police time. Everyone goes to the same places, at the same times, at the same speeds. People will die, there will be property losses, these things are unavoidable. But it’s all about minimizing these things, squeezing out as much efficiency as possible and maintaining the equilibrium. Speeding is illegal because you’re not supposed to be able to work the system. You’re nominally free, but the world is built around you to encourage conformity.

Once, while commuting along this freeway, there was a police escort leading the traffic. There was an accident ahead, but not one so bad that a lane had to be shut down. It was an unusual way to handle an accident, these things being so common. The escort let everyone on by after a mile or so, but briefly the mask of freedom fell away to reveal that we all have our own cars, but we all are on the same freeway. Imagine if the whole freeway decided at once to ignore this cop and just drove. Drove as fast as they wanted to. In California, the law says that you must keep with the flow of traffic. Everyone could drive 100 MPH if they wanted to, and the cops wouldn’t be able to do anything. They’d get mowed over and torn apart by the onslaught of 10 ton cannonballs filled with 10 gallons of explosive gasoline.

​You take down the speed limits, everyone goes as fast as they want. There will be many poor idiot yuppies and soccer moms who will die from this. Maybe more, maybe less. Either way, the freeway regulates itself. The worst drivers get taken off the road on their own, the best survive, the smart make their own roads, and the unlucky die in equal amounts. Maybe the freeway runs red with the blood of innocents, people desperate to get to work. Capitalism needs you to be alive to work and to consume. If you can’t do either, the whole system has to fragment again.
​
Accelerate.

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