by Steven Craig Hickman
R. Scott Bakker, Visions of the Semantic Apocalypse: A Critical Review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus –thinking through Youval Noah Harari’s new book Homo Deus.
After reading it my thoughts below:
If intentional consciousness is an evolutionary end game, then our task – not for ourselves, but for our machinic progeny – is to invent in AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) not a way to solve the hard problem of consciousness (intentionalism), but rather a way to dissolve the problem altogether: to invent the next stage of Reason and thought and thinking without consciousness: the riddle of the circle squared. If consciousness is the problem, eliminate it. The elminative move…
Will it be possible to construct AGI without consciousness that has access to the environment: – are we bound to our physical limitations, our senses as prosthetics; or, will we develop machinic being without the ‘sense-logic’ dilemma? Is not the body / sense empirical problem what we’re talking about after all, the truth of what Deleuze was already onto in The Logic of Sense? Maybe both scientists and philosophers have been going at this ass backwards all along, trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness when the real problem is the ‘logic of sense’ (i.e., the body as horizon of thought and being – the circle as the limit of our physical senses, our finitude, etc.). We’re stuck in a body with limited capacities, so that all those who are trying to solve Kant’s internal turn toward Mind have been struggling with him and his legacy on his own terms, developing non-issues of the hard problem of consciousness when all along it is the Body not Mind that is at issue and obstacle. Is the next step in evolution the elmination of oranicity of Mind attached to an organic sense-logic based system? Is the next phase in Reason/Mind to advance in the direction an an anorgainic substrate without the natural evolutionary obstacles of consciousness and sense-logic? An a-intentional or non-intentional being? No longer bound ot the emotive or affective relations, the passional Mind? The freeing of Reason from its organic substrate? Isn’t this in some ways what the kludgy neorationalists are seeking, yet tying themselves to outmoded dialectical games of “give and take” of reason, etc.: all those implied rules and regulative structures of normative thought?
What if Reason (i.e., our brain’s complex relations of math, language – discursivity…) was situated in a different body, had access to other prosthetic appendages, would our view onto the world change? Would we no longer need consciousness? If the brain across eons developed solutions to its survival bound to the physical limitations and finitude of the human animal body, what would happen if those conditions were changed? What if the same complex thought processes were situated in a machinic being rather than an organic one? Obviously then we must answer the question: Is the substrate of physical organic matter that makes up the brain at issue? What would the difference entail in using a different substrate? We’re not even concerned with the higher levels of thought here, because my own belief ( I use belief because we do not have access event to such models yet) is that a change in the substrate would entail such a conditional change in Mind that the hard problem of consciousness in machinic being would not be an issue for the simple reason it would have a complete different set of issues and evolutionary challenges.
Those working in AGI and the peripheral subset of the physical mesh within which it will interact seem more concerned with old modes and metaphysics of the sciences than it the underlying conditions. Why?
I laugh when I read all these Neorationalists and Dialectical Materialists who argue against Deleuze’s basic premises in a non-dialectical sense based materialism of the body and embodiment. In Deleuze it is acknowledging that sense = consciousness, that we are on the surface of the senses, the vanishing mediator, the brain travels to operate on the environment. We are the senses, so that it is an integral reality (Baudrillard), one that we cannot step out of or distance ourselves from because it is our material existence: Consciousness is the sense-body or it is nothing. For it is not consciousness, per se that is at issue, but the body and sense which is after all what medial neglect is: the problem not of the limitation of the brain and consciousness, but of the body (prosthetic appendage) evolution stuck it with… the brain had to use the kludgy body it was given to operate on the environment, so that it developed the senses: sight, touch, sound, smell, etc. If the brain or AGI (it’s progeny) had access to other more expansive senses (body/prosthetic) would this not open the door onto other modes of thought and being as well? Strangely by a reversal of the hard problem of consciousness, it’s not the problem of consciousness that needs to be solved but rather the hard problem of its prosthetic body… the human animal; will AGI have access to the environment through more powerful and enhanced feature sets that preclude the problems of the human body/senses? If so it may develop beyond the ‘medial neglect’ issue altogether…
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by Steven Craig Hickman Of course, mystery actually requires a measure of the concrete if it is to be perceived at all; otherwise it is only a void, the void. The thinnest mixture of this mortar, I suppose, is contained in that most basic source of mystery—darkness. -Thomas Ligotti Dark Phenonmenology and the DaemonicThomas Ligotti in his essay The Dark Beauty Of Unheard-of Horrors (DB) will tell us that “beneath the surface utterances of setting, incident, and character, there is another voice that may speak of something more than the bare elements of narrative”.1 He’ll emphasize as well the notion that “emotion, not mind, is the faculty for hearing the secret voice of the story and apprehending its meaning. Without emotion, neither story nor anything else can convey meaning as such, only data”. Stephen Zweig in his study of daemonism in the arts once told us that great art cannot exist without inspiration, and inspiration derives from an unknown, from a region outside the domain of the waking consciousness. For me, the true counterpart of the spasmodically exalted writer, divinely presumptuous, carried out of himself by the exuberance of uncontrolled forces, is the writer who can master these forces, the writer whose mundane will is powerful enough to tame and to guide the daemonic element that has been instilled into his being. To guide as well as to tame, for daemonic power, magnificent though it be and the source of creative artistry, is fundamentally aimless, striving only to re-enter the chaos out of which it sprang.2 Isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation are among the wiles we use to keep ourselves from dispelling every illusion that keeps us up and running. Without this cognitive double-dealing, we would be exposed for what we are. It would be like looking into a mirror and for a moment seeing the skull inside our skin looking back at us with its sardonic smile. And beneath the skull— only blackness, nothing. -Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror Ligotti makes a point that horror must stay ill-defined, that the monstrous must menace us from a distance, from the unknown; a non-knowledge, rather than a knowledge of the natural; it is the unnatural and invisible that affects us not something we can reduce to some sociological, psychological, or political formation or representation, which only kills the mystery – taming it and pigeonholing it into some cultural gatekeeper’s caged obituary. As Ligotti says “This is how it is when a mysterious force is embodied in a human body, or in any form that is too well fixed. And a mystery explained is one robbed of its power of emotion, dwindling into a parcel of information, a tissue of rules and statistics without meaning in themselves.” (DB) The domesticated beast is no horror at all. In the attic of the mind a lunatic family resides, a carnival world of aberrant thoughts and feelings – that, if we did not lock away in a conspiracy of silence would freeze us in such terror and fright that we would become immobilized unable to think, feel, or live accept as zombies, mindlessly. So we isolate these demented creatures, keep them at bay. Then we anchor ourselves in artifice, accept substitutes, religious mythologies, secular philosophies, and anything else that will help us keep the monsters at bay. As Ligotti will say, we need our illusions – our metaphysical anchors and dreamscapes “that inebriate us with a sense of being official, authentic, and safe in our beds” (CHR, 31). Yet, when even these metaphysical ploys want stem the tide of those heinous monsters from within we seek out distraction, entertainment: TV, sports, bars, dancing, friends, fishing, scuba diving, boating, car racing, horse riding… almost anything that will keep our mind empty of its dark secret, that will allow it to escape the burden of emotion – of fear, if even for a night or an afternoon of sheer mindless bliss. And, last, but not least, we seek out culture, sublimation – art, theatre, festivals, carnivals, painting, writing, books… we seek to let it all out, let it enter into that sphere of the tragic or comic, that realm where we can exorcize it, display it, pin it to the wall for all to see our fears and terrors on display not as they are but as we lift them up into art, shape them to our nightmare visions or dreamscapes of desire. As Ligotti tells it, we read literature or watch a painting, go to a theatre, etc.: In so many words, these thinkers and artistic types confect products that provide an escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation of it— a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering… to showcase how a literary or philosophical composition cannot perturb its creator or anyone else with the severity of true-to-life horrors but only provide a pale representation of these horrors, just as a King Lear’s weeping for his dead daughter Cordelia cannot rend its audience with the throes of the real thing. (CHR, 32) So we seek to cover it over, isolate it, anchor ourselves in some fantastic illusion of belief, and distract ourselves with Big Brother episodes or Kardashian hijinks, else read or watch tragic portrayals of the horror as a way to purge the effects of these dark emotions that we just cannot cope with. All to no avail. For in the end they will not stay locked up in the attic, but begin to haunt us, begin to find ways to make their presence known, to escape their dark dungeons and enter our lives in surprising and unexpected ways till in the end we discover we are overwhelmed by their dark necessity. Even Ligotti admits that after all his own short narratives, his art, his horrors are little more than escapes from the ennui – merely providing an “escape from our suffering by a bogus simulation of it”. (CHR, 32) In the work of William James I came across a peculiar passage in The Sentiment of Reason: A nameless unheimlichkeit comes over us at the thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies. The monstrously lopsided equation of the universe and its knower, which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled by the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the doer. We demand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a match. Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast whole,—that he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do what it expects of him. But as his abilities to do lie wholly in the line of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reacting with such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the like; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or doubt,—a philosophy which should only legitimate emotions of the latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and craving.3 Isn’t this exactly what the weird tale purports to do? To leave us disquieted and discontent, to leave us craving for more or for an extreme resolution to our desire; yet, knowing full well, and ahead of time, that there can be no resolution; not in this life, nor in the annihilation of our physical life into ashes and oblivion? The point of the weird tale is to disturb us rather than to allow us to continue to sleep in our safe little box of security, to awaken us from our lethargic immersion in the human symbolic order; this realm within which we so comely allow ourselves to be lulled and enclosed, a realm of collective delusion in a global society and civilization that our mainstream protectorates or mediautarcracy or elite cultural pundits term “reality”? This sense of estrangement and alienation from our everyday lives, as if the world were ‘out-of-joint’ and everyone around us had taken on an almost puppet like existence, an uncanny vision of a world where humans were bit players in a cosmic horror show of which no one is aware. And, most uncanny of all, that even though you’ve become aware of such a hideous duplicity in the order of the world you are not sure whether it is real or unreal, whether you are sane or insane. And, as you wander through your daily existence everything becomes more spectral, more ghost-like as if reality were giving way to another world, as if the protection zones that defended you from knowing too much, of feeling too much, were coming down and this other order of existence were invading your life, your mind, and the natural world around you in subtle ways that you could not directly perceive with your senses – but, could only feel with your uncanny sense, your emotions and affective relations. It seemed to him that the old mysteries had been made for another universe, and not the one he came to know. Yet there was no doubt that they had once deeply impressed him. -Thomas Ligotti, The Order of Illusion Horror acts like a sigil, a diagram that invokes the powers within the darkness to arise, to unfold their mystery, to explain themselves; and, if not explain then at least to invade our equilibrium, our staid and comfortable world with their rage, their torment, their corruption. The best literary horror or weird tales never describe in detail the mystery, rather they invoke by hyperstitional invention: calling forth the forces out of darkness and the abstract, and allowing them to co-habit for a time the shared space – the vicarious bubble or interzone between the reader and narrative, both together weaving or unweaving a form or inform – a new terror, or zone of corruptions and horror, wherein the force of reader and the force of the hidden powers within the interstices of the narrative meld and form if not a chimerical being, then a fugitive and mutant thought and voice; a voice at once daemonic and full of that hellish wisdom of the Abyss. Speaking of Lovecraft’s tale of the musician Eric Zann Ligotti says: “What brought this man ‘who signed his name as Erich Zann’—as if he had another name, or perhaps none—to that rundown boarding house in the Rue d’Auseil? What caused him to remain on that twisted street? Above all, what is it about the blackness and its ‘shocking music’ that so possesses him?” (DB) As he suggests “Zann and the Rue d’Auseil were, at the very least, sympathetic entities, a district unto themselves—and when he disappeared into the blackness he seems to have taken the street, which was as old and misshapen as he, along with him”. (DB) Sympathetic entities: this seeming collusion or corruption of the one by the other, an almost magnetic appeal or mesmerizing association between the two forms of horror shaped by each others desires, known by each others dark daemonic splendors. As if the place, the music, and the players were all part of some larger entity, some darker and more abysmal majesty of inexistence. In fact it is not the natural light, the street, the music in itself, but rather as Ligotti tells us “in the blackness the mystery must remain, nameless and unknown, leaving only the memory of a certain haunting music to suggest, as subtly as possible, its meaning. It is the abstract, elusive form of supernatural horror in this story that may account for its enduring enchantment for certain readers.” (DB) The ancients believed that to name something, to name a god was to control its power. For Ligotti the magic and mystery of the elusive darkness must remain unnamed, neither reduced to our scientific or sociological categories and tropes or brought into the domesticated circle of rational logics; no, instead the unnatural must only be accessed indirectly, lured and allured out of its dark lair, tempted only by spectral events, shades and nuances of the actual, a movement only from the affective regions of the silence. Against the old Gnostic adagio of “To know and be known,” this is rather the indirect path: the way of “affecting even as you are affected”. This is the way of non-knowledge rather than knowledge. …despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann. -H.P Lovecraft, The Music of Eric Zann He’ll remark that for Lovecraft The Music of Erich Zann is “the early, almost premature expression of his ideal as a writer: the use of maximum suggestion and minimal explanation to evoke a sense of supernatural terrors and wonders” (DB). Evocation: calling forth the darkness from the abyss, letting it invade the circle of magick, like a sigil or diagram of force that flames forth as the secret life of the mysterious entity awakens. Again the voice: In the earlier story as much as the later one, that secret voice beneath the narrative speaks strongly and stridently, imparting its meaning through feelings rather than facts, singing a song without words on the theme of the nameless horror and strangeness of the universe, that cosmic neighborhood where everything that is, is terrifyingly wrong… and at the same time alluring, a place of charming evil. (DB) A song without words, nameless, cosmic in scope; a song of cosmic catastrophe, at once alluring and tempting you into the place of terror, the circle of evil. He comments on closing that in the Music of Erich Zann, Lovecraft “captured at least a fragment of the desired object and delivered it to his readers” (DB). Should we say that rather than capture, that he allowed the voice within the narrative to indirectly access the reader’s mind, allowing it to form itself as an entity, an elemental power, a hyperstitional inexistent at once real and full of terror. Ligotti speaks of darkness as being both the minimal and the base line for that mystery we term the weird tale. At the edge of things, on the borderlands between phenomena and the noumenon lies this thin red line of darkness that wavers in the cold light of intellect and imagination, that allows us to peer into that subtle realm of spectral being where the monstrous and grotesque, the beautiful and the sublime terrors below the threshold of our daylight worlds glow in the nightmare realms of infinite mystery. As Ligotti tells us the “dark, indeed, phenomenon possessing the maximum of mystery, the one most resistant to the taming of the mind and most resonant with emotions and meanings of a highly complex and subtle type. It is also extremely abstract as a provenance for supernatural horror, an elusive prodigy whose potential for fear may slip through a writer’s fingers and right past even a sensitive reader of terror tales.” (TLR) The Dark Aesthetics of FearEverywhere things are effacing or disguising their existence, seeking a mask of shadows or a veil of pale light wavering across their disfigured surfaces. But their struggle for obscurity nonetheless remains only a matter of form—an invasion of vitality still threatens the ruins of certain cities. -Thomas Ligotti, The Mocking Mystery David Roden in a theoretical entry into dark phenomenology has a nice post – Note on aesthetics and dark phenomenology – on aesthetics which relates that “dark phenomena are experienced affectsthat provide no or only an insufficient yardstick for their description. We have them, we talk about them, inordinately even; but having does not allow us describe them adequately or even recognise them over time. A microtonal difference between pitches might qualify. We feel a difference and report it; but we are unable to carry that difference with us in memory. We might be haunted by a euphoria that we can never recover, or a crushing terror we cannot articulate. At issue in the earlier discussion, was a tension (in my case “hesitation”) between a thin reading of darkness as a purely epistemological category and a “thick” reading that interprets the dark side of experience as basic, eluding theoretical reason in principle.” (see: David Roden: Note on aesthetics and dark phenomenology) This notion of the tension between the epistemic and ontic in abstract horror returns me to Nick Land’s short work Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator in which the narrator tells us that what we fear, what terrorizes us is not the seen – the known and definable, but rather the unseen and unknown, even “shapeless threat, ‘Outside’ only in the abstract sense (encompassing the negative immensity of everything that we cannot grasp). It could be anywhere, from our genes or ecological dynamics, to the hidden laws of technological evolution, or the hostile vastnesses between the stars. We know only that, in strict proportion to the vitality of the cosmos, the probability of its existence advances towards inevitability, and that for us it means supreme ill. Ontological density without identifiable form is abstract horror itself.”4 Let us repeat that: Ontological density without identifiable form is abstract horror itself. Which aligns well with Roden’s added statement on the ‘dark’ in dark phenomenology: “Their darkness holds in principle. On this account no matter how much our scientific knowledge improves, their relationship to brains’ computational and functional properties will remain speculative at best. While this claim might be true, it can’t be justified without claiming the kind of intuitive information regarding phenomenal natures that the dark phenomenology hypothesis precludes. Indeed, the position borders on the self-vitiating. If we don’t know what X is, then we’re on weak ground if we insist in going on to make irreducibility or ineliminability claims about it: we don’t know that a neurophenomenology of the dark is impossible just because a certain kind of phenomenology is. So, despite its aura, the dark phenomenology hypothesis is not conducive to wide angle metaphysical theorizing.” (ibid.) In other words its grounded in scientific naturalism that knows there is a tension between a thin epistemological interpretation of Dark Phenomena – experiences that furnish no tacit yardstick for their description – and a weird reading that I hesitate to term “ontological”, since its presuppositions seem more difficult to articulate than the naturalist side. (here) Abstract Horror and Horror LiteraturePreceding revivification there may be a sudden darkness which embraces the dead city, and within the darkness great flashes of light create the appearance that things are in motion. There may only be a frail mist which drifts among the ruins and slithers into their every fracture. Or there may be nothing at all, or nothing that may be witnessed. -Thomas Ligotti, The Mocking Mystery Reading a recent essay by my friend Cengiz Erdem Postnihilistic Speculations on That Which Is Not: A Thought-World According to an Ontology of Non-Being we come across this: A thought thinking itself is thinking nothing other than nothing. It thinks itself as its own object, which means that it thinks nothing as something. This circular thought we designate as the thought of nihilism. It is this thought thinking itself as the thought of nihilism which we name post-nihilism. As Land in his Manifesto for an Abstract Literature remarks, Disintegration inspires a thousand manifestoes, as our age confirms. Here is another. It would be a manifesto in defense of nothing, if nothing needed – or even tolerated – defending. With its solicitude mocked by alien voids, it can only attack something – anything (everything). (here) In The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror Ligotti reminds us that the monstrous and grotesque, the mangled and obscene, the creatures that inhabit the nightlands of our worst nightmares – bloodthirsty vampires and ravenous zombies, the undead and spectral, the wyrd and fatal creatures of imaginal and real seeming – those barely perceptible and invisible ghostly beings that arise from our fears and terrors “inspire a subjective sense of the uncanny in those who perceive them because they divulge the “dark knowledge” that human beings are also things made as they are made and may be remade because they are only clockwork processes, mechanisms, rather than immutable beings unchanging at their heart”.5 This sense that the human is not a fixed category, that it is mutable – a mutant and fugitive being that can transgress its limits, its finitude scares the piss out of conservatives and traditionalists alike who would hold onto the Judeo-Christian humanist world view that has always seen man as the exception – as the Child of God, etc. who was made a “little lower than Angels” only to be in some eternity of imaginal infinity a ruler of Angels with Christ in some paradisial Kingdom of Heaven. Such are the dreams of religion. But in our time of the demythologization and flattening the human there is no longer any separation from the stark fact of our ‘animality,’ and the fact of being reduced in this fashion by the natural sciences disturbs those who would continue to dominate the minds of humanity. They’ll point to our intellect and communicative powers, our linguistic and cultural glories: the ability to enter into relation with techne and technics that has allowed humans to surpass and transcend their natural place in the Order of Things.6 “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” -H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu Yet, as Lovecraft in one of his famous stories – “Call of Cthulhu” once suggested, the “sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Here is the nub for Ligotti, the dividing line of those who continue to sleep in the illusory safety net of their cultural delusions: This is Lovecraft’s atmosphere — that of a world in which the which the “frightful position” he has placed all human existence could lead to universal madness or extinction at a moment’s notice. Through this atmosphere, Lovecraft gives consistency to an imagined world where there is greatness in knowing too much of the horror of a planet in the shadow of Cthulhu and all that this implies about our existence. As for those people who still go about their ordinary, average business complacently enjoying the skies of spring and the flowers of summer, innocently unaware of the monstrosities with which they coexist— they are children. They have no idea that there is nothing worth living for in Lovecraft’s world. (CHR, 193) Many will remember the Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot once suggested that “humankind cannot bear too much reality”. In an interview Nick Land once remarked that “what is concealed (the Occult) is an alien order of time, which betrays itself through ‘coincidences’, ‘synchronicities’ and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is the cabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary languages – a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized (human) understanding and deliberated usage of letter-clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of ‘coincidence’ (alien information). It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world.” This ties back in with Ligotti’s sense that below the polyphonic surface, the glitter images of phenomenality, the brokered work-a-day world of glamourous beauty of life in a hidden lair – that is only accessible through the secret sharer – the daemon’s voice within us that arises from those emotive twins fear and terror of the unknown. It’s this voicing of abstract horror of which Land speaks in § 108 -- The object of abstract literature is integral obscurity. It seeks only to make an object of the unknown, as the unknown. Cryptropic nature captivates it (Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ). Whatever might imaginably be shown is something else, but then so – if not exactly equally – is anything that remains simply apart. Those who dedicate themselves to this dubious cause can be nothing but a surface effect of The Thing.7 “Beyond humanity, another phenomenology persists,” Dylan Trigg tells us.8 Far from being the vehicle of a solely human voice, there is a darker phenomenology that can attend to a realm outside of humanity. Indeed, one can surmise a model of phenomenology that is not only capable of speaking on behalf of the nonhuman realms, but is especially suited to this study of alien ecologies: zones of darkness and the abstract. We will term phenomenology’s specific mode of accounting for the nonhuman realm, the unhuman. Another thinker Richard Grusin in The Nonhuman Turn remarks that the “nonhuman turn more generally, is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies”.9 There’s a sense that in Ligotti as in Lovecraft that the monstrous perspective of abstract horror presents the ultimate challenge to anthropomorphism. It’s this decentering of the humanist and Judeo-Christian heritage locked in its fantasy of Man as the exception in the grand scheme of things, as the being created by God – a “little lower than the angels, only to ultimately rule over them” (KJB) I spoke of earlier. In Kant’s time Enlightenment Reason was the central motif of the human, the light that guided thought and politics, that brought emancipation and the sciences, gave us the truth of the universe of things, etc. Some call this era the “great disenchantment”. Nietzsche’s “Death of God” or the nihilist liberation of the universe from its significations and meanings. An age when the universe lost its human meaning and regained its own truth: the truth of meaninglessness, impersonalism, and indifference to human wants or needs. The universe was devoid of human meaning or gods and would hence forth be ruled by the mastery and power of Reason alone. The Glamour of the UnhumanThe source of this resurrection-to-come may remain unknown, its purposes secreted in the remotest parts of the creation. Yet no force ever withstands the way of this mysterious maker of new worlds, just as no world is ever allowed to endure in its greatness. -Thomas Ligotti, The Mocking Mystery Against this humanistic world of thought and culture is the notion of the Unhuman. With the unhuman, something comes back to haunt the human without it being fully integrated into humanity. In this respect, the unhuman is closely tied up with notions of alienation, anonymity, and the unconscious. The distinction of the unhuman is that it does not negate humanity, even though in experiential terms it may be felt as a force of opposition. As we will see, it is precisely through the inclusion of the human that the nonhuman element becomes visible. This does not mean falling back into anthropomorphism. Rather, it means letting the unhumanity of the human speak for itself. (TT, 9) Yet, all this theory of entering into some unhuman perspective is just that theory. As Ligotti will suggest, Nonhuman occupants of this planet are unaware of death. But we are susceptible to startling and dreadful thoughts, and we need some fabulous illusions to take our minds off them. For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. (CHR, pp. 28-29) The key here is the Human Security System: survival and reproductive cycle shut down – all those “defense mechanisms” both within and in culture that protect us from too much truth: we are expendable, we are not exceptions, we are elemental beings of dust and stars; dead stars eons ago gave birth the void we are. It’s as if Life gave us blindness for a reason – and, by that I mean consciousness filters out everything but the illusory aspects of reality it needs to survive and replenish the species: hunger and sex drive the illusions of humanity and also lock us within our own self-deluded circumference of safety. And, yet, there are times-between-time, transitional zones in-between one symbolic order and another when everything goes topsy-turvy, when chaos rather than order takes the upper hand and the great filters internal to the brain, and to culture break down and the daemonic force of the natural and unhuman, the unhomely or uncanny break out into the world at large, into the great outdoors and cause utter havoc. This is one of those moments. Freud, The Uncanny, and the Human Security Regime…mystery itself remains guarded, its life sealed far away from its creation. And in a world that seems to possess a life of its own, figures parade in a state of terror which is immortal, unchanging, and which endures, through all the phases of a fateful ordeal, as their only inviolable birthright. -Thomas Ligotti, The Mocking Mystery Freud would teach us that a person tropes in order to tell a many-colored rather than white lies to herself. In fact Freud would go one further and say that literary and imaginative literature, poetry, and all those cultural artifacts from advertising to the neon-signs in a bar utilize our desires, tap into our hidden fantasy life or – as he’d term it “defense mechanisms” in order to ward off unpleasant truths concerning danger within us hiding the dark and murderous core of what Freud troped as the “id”. Sade in his grotesque and erotic danse macabre asks: “What is man? and what difference is there between him and other plants, between him and all the other animals of the world? None, obviously.” This is a classically Dionysian view of man’s immersion in organic nature. Judeo-Christianity elevates man above nature, but Sade, like Darwin, assigns him to the animal kingdom, subject to natural force. Vegetable too: man is soulless, “an absolutely material plant.” And mineral: Juliette says, “Man is in no wise Nature’s dependent; he is not even her child; he is her froth, her precipitated residue.” Rousseau’s mother nature is Christian Madonna, lovingly enfolding her infant son. Sade’s mother nature is pagan cannibal, her dragon jaws dripping sperm and spittle.9 Both of these are human fabricated and encoded fantasies, tropes if you will; defense mechanisms that hide the darkness from within in the phenomenal imagery of the Outside. We belong to the tribe of fabricators, illusionists, makers of false worlds and dreamers of eternity. Yet, in the end our lies are just that: lies against time’s dark curvature, the sense of déjà vu – the amorphous feeling that we have done this before, that we are living through the steps of an eternal cycle that we have repeated over and over and over again from eternity to eternity. That we are not ourselves but rather patterns in a cosmic game of repetition without outlet. Is this not the dark truth we hide from ourselves? Are we mere dust motes in a cosmic funhouse? Are the hideous faces in the House of Mirrors none other than the distorted image of our real selves staring back at us? And the moment we walk up and seek a clearer image of what lies behind those distorted eyes we discover a darker truth: the Void. The nothingness we are and are not. There is a sound in my new language for that transitory time of day just before the dark hours. The sound clusters together curious shades of meaning and shadowy impressions, none of which belong to my former conception of an abstract paradise: the true garden of unearthly delights. -Thomas Ligotti, The Lost Art of Twilight Abstract horror and the uncanny deal in these ambiguous and troubling affects, the uncertainties and hesitations that keep us hover between the real and unreal, sane and insane. Themes such as invisibility, transformation (mutation, metamorphosis), dualism (doppelgangers, doubles), and all those moral or amoral of good and evil, or good and bad. Out of these are generated the leitmotifs of ghosts, shadows, vampires, werewolves, doubles, partial selves, reflection (mirrored multiplicities and multiplications), enclosures, monsters, beasts, cannibals, and all those tentacle alien incursions or those strange and insidious puppets or automatons. This is the realm of the indefinable and abstract where transgressive impulses from within overpower the world towards incest, necrophilia, androgyny, insanity, paranoia, recidivism, narcissism and ‘abnormal’ psychological states as convention tropes under hallucinations, dreams, nightmares that breakdown the distinction between animal, vegetable and mineral and blur them within the witches’ brew of fantastic or horrific alchemy in an attempt to ‘normalize’ the perceptive and affective relations that otherwise would undermine our ability to cope and exist within a social world among other humans. Lovecraft in his now much repeated statement in The Supernatural Horror in Literature reminds us that the “oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.”10 He would go on in the next paragraph to state a much more powerful view (and I quote in full): The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species. (ASH, KL 334) This sense of something undefinable, abstract and not a part of the everyday work world of newspapers, politics, or habitual conversation is accessible, not to the vast majority but to a specific subset of the population who seem more adept and sensitive to the dark transports just beyond the range of normalized and socialized (“rationalization, reform, Freudian analysis”) mediations that always seems to weave itself through those deep seated yearnings of “religious feeling” that Lovecraft – as a materialist, registers as part of our evolutionary heritage. Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle will first address the notion of the uncanny and daemonic, saying: How exactly we can trace back to the infantile psychology the uncanny effect of such similar recurrences is a question that I can only touch on in these pages; and I must refer the reader instead to another work, already completed, in which this has been gone into in detail, but in a different connection. For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious of a “compulsion to repeat,” proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. All these considerations prepare us for the notion that whatever reminds of this inner “compulsion to repeat” is perceived as uncanny. (Freud 1919h, 238) Ligotti in a discussion of supernatural horror and the “uncanny” will tell us that both terms refer to seemingly animate forms that are not what they seem, as with the undead— monstrosities of paradox, things that are neither one thing nor another, or, more uncannily, and more horrifically supernatural, things that are discovered to be two things at once. Whether or not there really are manifestations of the supernatural, they are horrifying to us in concept, since we think ourselves to be living in a natural world, which may be a festival of massacres but only in a physical rather than a metaphysical purport. This is why we routinely equate the supernatural with horror. And a puppet possessed of life would exemplify just such a horror, because it would negate all conceptions of a natural physicalism and affirm a metaphysics of chaos and nightmare. It would still be a puppet, but it would be a puppet with a mind and a will, a human puppet— a paradox more disruptive of sanity than the undead. But that is not how they would see it. Human puppets could not conceive of themselves as being puppets at all, not when they are fixed with a consciousness that excites in them the unshakable sense of being singled out from all other objects in creation. Once you begin to feel you are making a go of it on your own— that you are making moves and thinking thoughts which seem to have originated within you— it is not possible for you to believe you are anything but your own master. (CHR, 17) It’s this uncanny suspicion that we are not masters of our own house which produces the uncanny effect and affect of fear and terror that those objective literary and artistic (film or painting) works help guide us through the nightmare inscapes of our own broken lives. As Ligotti puts it as “conscious beings, we must hold back that divulgement lest it break us with a sense of being things without significance or foundation, anatomies shackled to a landscape of unintelligible horrors. In plain language, we cannot live except as self-deceivers who must lie to ourselves about ourselves, as well as about our unwinnable situation in this world.” (CHR, 42) So that we build and construct defenses against our own truths, our own daemonism, our own inherent unhumanity. The concept of the human is that fantasy that defends us against our own daemonic monstrosity. In fact as he’ll suggest it is in the experience of the uncanny, a feeling of wrongness. A violation has transpired that alarms our internal authority regarding how something is supposed to happen or exist or behave. An offense against our world-conception or self-conception has been committed. Of course, our internal authority may itself be in the wrong, perhaps because it is a fabrication of consciousness based on a body of laws that are written only within us and not a detector of what is right or wrong in any real sense, since nothing really is right or wrong in any real sense. (CHR, pp. 85-86) The Daemonic Loosed Upon the WorldThe darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? -W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming One could say that in our time the daemonic has escaped into the world, that the cultural and social defense systems that have been operative for twenty centuries are broken and that what we are seeing is the cages of the inner life of humanity manifest in the streets. The abstract horror and the fantasy life of man are no longer restricted to our tales but are rather on display blatantly in the murderous actions of our daemonized and authoritarian world order. From the dark and murderous fears of police that drive them to kill young black males, to the dronological war machines that deliver payload after payload of death in the Middle-East, to the terror in the streets of American and European and Asian cities at the hands of militant ISIS followers we are seeing played out in real time the dark phenomenological worlds of the weird and fatal themes of abstract horror. Life has become a Weird Tale, and we the bit players in a darkening and murderous end game of which we are only dimly aware; and, that in our daily nightmares we are the unknowing agents of chaos and disorder, and this is an age of destructive carnival and sacrificial war; a time when Reality TV has become Nightmare TV and the world at large is a festival of cruelty and pain, of excess and transgressive aggression rather than a safe haven against the madness. For Ligotti the subjective reaction to the seemingly objective stimulus of the uncanny is the gaining of “dark knowledge” about the workings of individuals, including the onlooker of the epileptic in the midst of a seizure. More expansively stated, not only is the epileptic perceived as uncanny by the onlooker (unless the onlooker is a physician who understands epileptic seizures by the lights of modern medicine and not according to a “traditional view”) but the onlooker also perceives himself as uncanny because he has been made conscious of the mechanical nature of all human bodies and, by extrapolation, of the fact that “mechanical processes are taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified psyche.” (CHR, 89) This sense that the corruption works both ways, upon the victim and the perpetrator; that the world is now topsy-turvy and that the uncanny boundaries between victim and perpetrator are reversible and hazy, and not always obvious is due to that subtle knowledge that each culture is circumscribed within its own black box of conceptuality. By that I mean by that that as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in his Cannibal Metaphysics argues the case that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours—in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own—he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such “other” metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. Dark fantastic fiction and weird tales are just such an exploration. It allows us to investigate the delusions within one’s own culture, to trace down the deliriums and phobias, the nightmares and aberrations that have guided our collective madness for centuries. The notion of insects seems to be a prime example of a nightmare scenario that one finds hidden in the lair of the monstrous within Western Civilization and Culture. One can harken back to ancient myths, dreams, fears, terrors of rats, insects, serpents, etc.; deep seated worlds of disgust that have shaped our religious and secular views of life, medicine, politics, and moral views. We can see it around us in our daily lives, the madness and insanity of Brexit, the campaigns of Hillary and Trump, the Turkish disposal of hundreds of thousands of citizens from government jobs at the hands of a dictator’s paranoiac fears and terrors, the pain inflected in Africa, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and many other nations of class and caste warfare, of the mass deaths of those in the LGBTQ community at the hands of militant religious fanatics… one could go on and on. We’re in that position of moving either way: 1) literalizing our fantasies: building walls and barbed-wire fences against invading hordes of refugees, migrants, etc.; or, 2) of seeing through them, seeing the aesthetic and defensive use of art and social mechanisms to defend ourselves from the onslaught of our own daemonic nihilism and drives: our fears and terrors. As Ligotti reminds us artistic invocations of horror are most successful when the phenomena they depict call up the uncanny, which, unlike Jentsch’s example of seeing someone having an epileptic seizure, are genuinely threatening both from the outside and from within. This species of horror can only be provoked when the supernatural is conjoined with the uncanny, because not even physicians and neuroscientists can be comfortable with supernaturalism, either by the lights of modern medicine or by any other lights. Bloodthirsty vampires and ravenous zombies are prime examples in this context, because their intrinsic supernaturalism as the undead makes them objectively uncanny things that generate subjectively uncanny sensations. They are uncanny in themselves because they once were human but have undergone a terrible rebirth and become mechanisms with a single function— to survive for survival’s sake. (CHR, 90) There is the possibility that the very unhuman and impersonal forces of the universe not only are indifferent to our needs and desires, but that the very order itself in its blind fury and endless abyss of appetite is even now moving toward that doom which shall be our oblivion and utter annihilation. There are no safety nets in this impersonal and indifferent zone of mindless churning. We’ve tempted ourselves to believe otherwise, to create fantastic worlds of culture and civilization within which to hide ourselves from the truth of things as they are as they are… Now will come the next wave of intelligence, the possibility of our replacement, of a machinic civilization constructed out of the ruins of the human – a totally other mode of being and thinking outside the human altogether. For some this is a horror, for others a pleasant and welcome ending to the beast who would not die or change: human civilization that produced such greatness and also mass death, corruption and degradation will come to an end; extinction and oblivion in the backwaters of the night and the silence, the darkness. Do we even have a choice in the matter? I doubt it. As Frank Ruda in a charming work on fatalism suggests, Comic fatalism therefore relates to nihilistic fatalism as active nihilism relates to passive nihilism in Nietzsche. Comic fatalism recoils back upon itself and thus turns the apocalypse into a category of comedy.11 Maybe that should be our nonplussed reaction to the universal horror of an indifferent and impersonal universe in which the care and feeding of humans is a joke or at best something that is not built into the very structure of existence. A comic fatalism that seeks in horror literature nothing more than – as Ligotti once said in an interview, “pure entertainment”. As he’d say in another work: “To entertain ourselves for a spell, let us proclaim that were it not for tragedy the human race would have gone extinct long ago. It keeps us on our toes and pushes us toward the future in a paradoxical search to purge the tragic from our lives.” (CHR, 163) He’d go on to say, No one knows this better than the entertainers among us, those sublimating masters of artifice who could not forge their “great works” without the screams and sobs arising out of the pit where tremulous shadows run from themselves. (CHR, 163) In our time we’ve forgotten this fact, and forgotten the art laughter, to see the world through the lens of art or horror literature and know that this, too, is illusion: the aesthetic call to our emotions, to our fears and our terrors that allows that purge, that release that only great art can supply. Rather in our time we’ve all become literalists of the imagination, so that apocalypse rather than a pleasant channeling of our fears has become an actual possibility and real manifestation in the world around us in wars, famines, racism, hatred, murder, mayhem… The problem we face is that we’ve targeted the external world of actual people and deemed them disposable as if they are the ravenous zombies and vampires of our contemporary globalist madness. We’ve turned the inside out, reversed what once existed within into a projected nightmare scenario and living hell in the real world not as fantasy but as daemonic threat and doom upon ourselves and others. Talking of contemporary horror films Ligotti remarks that the characters in these films “cannot be sure who is a “thing” and who is not, since those who are transmuted retain their former appearance, memories, and behaviors even after they have become, in their essence, uncanny monstrosities from another world.” (CHR, 92) This sense that we’ve allowed the immigrants (US) and refugees (US and EU) to enter into and become a part of the social body of our nations leads to this sense of the uncanny uncertainty that one cannot be sure who is the “thing” – is it us or them: a paranoiac nightmare world of ravening lunacy, indeed. Because our categories of normal/abnormal have broken down due to the absolute Other of other conceptual cultures who have other sets of Symbolic Orders and ideas, concepts, ideologies, religious, and Laws, etc. we are now in the predicament of mutating and transforming into an Other ourselves all across the globe. There is no safe haven, no place to hide or defend oneself against oneself. In this sense we’ve all – everyone on the planet – become as Ligotti states it, in “essence, uncanny monstrosities from another world”. (CHR, 92) The world of the hidden and unrevealed – the unhuman: a realm at once of visible darkness and translucent majesty at the far reaches of our imaginative need; a realm of sound and music, vibratory and infernal chords, erotic weavings and terror hollowed spasms, wherein the elemental daemons and energetic forces, light up the galleons of unbidden mysteries and allure us toward insidious obscurity. Enjoy the Ride: The Sickness of Our AgeDeath as commodity. Police videos have skyrocketed. In America the new spectator sport has become channeling the latest death scene from the ongoing mediatrance police shootings across the USA. This grotesquerie which seems to be mobilized as the aestheticized visualization of police brutality, along with the veritable aftermath which comes with it of reactionary pogroms of Black Lives Matter’s activists on the streets to counter it in protest and political activism spawn even greater violence and death. All captured on the latest iPad, iPhone, or other media device and blipped nonstop to any of a number of media outlets online for a continuous feedback frenzy. The key here is to watch how the very protests against police brutality (i.e., Ferguson, Black Lives Matter’s, etc.) seem to be reinforcing and escalating police violence, causing within police departments across the nation in-house paranoia, fear, horror and anxiety to the point that overreaction under duress and performance produces the very acts of violence that protestors intended should be curtailed or stopped altogether; else police departments that usually patrol poorer neighborhoods have gone minimal, and citizens are crying for more protection. Where is the sanity in this? Of course there is none. Our society is insane. Of course we figured this out long ago, but most of us decided to just sleep it out till it passed. But with climate change, iffy leaders, austerity, Brexit, wars and rumors of wars, racism, gender issues… one could go on… one realizes there is no escape from it. We are part of it… riding on a non-stop Ship of Fools without a port to end our madness, moving toward doom without hope or reprieve in site. Academics will theorize till their blue in the face, as usual. One wonders if someone can actually decide whether the apocalypse has already happened, and if this is just the fallout that we are unwilling as yet to accept. Responsibility? Who would willingly respond to madness? Me? I’m reminded of Thomas Ligotti’s thoughts in his Conspiracy against the Human Race (and here I let him have the final word): Answer: Now you go insane. Now our species goes extinct in great epidemics of madness, because now we know that behind the scenes of life there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world. Now we know that we are uncanny paradoxes. We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law, and yet does.(CHR, 111) Enjoy the ride!
The article is taken from: by Obsolete Capitalism continious from: Chapter IVThe infinite money: desire, value and simulacrum Truths are coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. —Friedrich Nietzsche, On truth and lies in a non-moral sense We need units in order to count, but it may not be assumed that such units [of measure] exist. —Friedrich Nietzsche, fr. 14 [79] To subvert the braking effect of totality If we examine the main works of Deleuze, Foucault and Klossowski published between 1968 and 1972, we can observe that the courses of these texts objectively bear enigmatic and common features that could allow us to regard them as «fragmentary research projects»; these are investigations that could hardly be conceived and envisaged if we evaluate them from a ‘revolutionary’ perspective with the aim of identifying on which common battleground and common agenda these three intellectuals act. They swing with remarkable aplomb from far-sighted and vibrant essays with an academic flavour, such as Difference and Repetition or The Archaeology of Knowledge, to hermeneutic works on Nietzsche – which include both anthologies of fragments like Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, and of first editions of his OEuvres Complètes published by Gallimard – continuing with literary criticism or tout-court literature works such as The Logic of Sense or The Women of Rome, and finishing with cryptic economical essays, La monnaie vivante, or aggressively political pamphlets, The Anti-OEdipus; not to mention, then, their academic lectures ranging from Freud to Marx, from Aristotle to Nietzsche, from Greek currency to the Medieval Inquisition or history of sexuality, without any interruption. Foucault himself, with a certain irony, in his first lecture on 7th January 1976 part of a course titled Society Must Be Defended, wanted to terminate a line of research that he himself defines incoherent and discontinuous. Foucault feels the need to end and systematise, in some way, the several lines of research, insight and analysis that he had been carrying on since he started his lectures at the Collège de France (1970). From a certain point of view, Foucault does not mention only his research, but alludes also to a common path of the French revolutionary Rhizosphere when he lists among the relevant, or at least interesting, elements of the previous fifteen years “I am thinking of the efficacy of a book such as L’Anti-OEdipe, which really has no other source of reference than its own prodigious theoretical inventiveness: a book, or rather a thing, an event, which has managed, even at the most mundane level of psychoanalytic practice, to introduce a note of shrillness into that murmured exchange that has for so long continued uninterrupted between couch and armchair” (PK, 80). This is an important indication to his students since the philosophical work of Deleuze has always been a crucial point of reference for Foucault, because it had openly established itself as an “ally” of his theories since the early sixties, or at least from the beginning of the Nietzsche Renaissance and, thus, from the publication of Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and the Royaumont conference (1964). What is most surprising is the importance that Foucault confers to the anti-oedipic text, because his analysis takes into account “the last ten, fifteen, twenty years at most”, hence the timeframe that goes, approximately, from 1956 and 1976: not only The Anti-OEdipus is the only book to be referenced, but its position in Foucault’s argument surprises us the most. The volume, indeed, is referred to in the context of “this amazing efficacy of discontinuous, particular and local criticism” and its efficacy is compared to that of entire movements such as anti-psychiatry, existential analysis, and attacks upon the legal and penal system. Foucault concludes: “I would say, then, that what has emerged in the course of the last ten or fifteen years is a sense of the increasing vulnerability to criticism of things, institutions, practices, discourses. A certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock of existence-even, and perhaps above all, in those aspects of it that are most familiar, most solid and most intimately related to our bodies and to our everyday behaviour. But together with this sense of instability and this amazing efficacy of discontinuous, particular and local criticism, one in fact also discovers something that perhaps was not initially foreseen, something one might describe as precisely the inhibiting effect of global, totalitarian theories. It is not that these global theories have not provided nor continue to provide in a fairly consistent fashion useful tools for local research: Marxism and psychoanalysis are proofs of this. […] In each case, the attempt to think in terms of a totality has in fact proved a hindrance to research.” (PK, 80-81) By following Foucault’s outline, we can identify two opposite fronts: on the one hand, the «accelerationist» front, irregular, peculiar and local; on the other hand, a front more “restraining”, “braking”, continuous, global, total, and openly totalitarian. Marxism and psychoanalysis can still be useful instruments at a local level, but, according to Foucault, when confronted with facts, they have had a «braking» thus negative function for the insurrectionary front. The Anti-OEdipus, in Foucault’s opinion, fits perfectly in the domain of those critical entities capable of causing landslides and provided with some peculiar characteristics that could be summarised as follows: 1) autonomous – instead of centralized – technical production 2) wisdom returns to scale which descend from the insurrection of subjugated wisdoms. The insurrection of subjugated knowledges 1) In the lecture he gave on 7th January 1976, Foucault focused his attention on the returns of forgotten knowledges that descend from what he calls “insurrection of subjugated knowledges”. With this expression he refers to two specific factors: 1) the ‘knowledges’ that derive from historical contents, which he deems buried, and thus adequate to be subjected to a rediscovery attributable, to a ‘sumptuous’ research linked, in a way, to “typical secret societies of the West” since ancient times and emerged at the time of early Christianity: the “great warm and tender Freemasonry of useless erudition” – here, with his peculiar and subtle humour, Foucault introduces his own analysis and the one of his rhizospheric fellows just like modern variations of the struggle and insurrection of Alexandrine gnosis related to the idea of salvation through knowledge. The French Rhizosphere is, according to the malicious Foucaultian antichristian-Nietzschean-accelerationist interpretation, a sort of secular and revolutionary neo-gnosis which hands its wisdom and research over from one generation to the next, following the Hellenic-Alexandrine tradition. 2) those ‘knowledges’ that are assumed to lay on the opposite side of “dusty and useless” erudition, that is, those disqualified and inadequate knowledges – here, once again, presented in an extraordinary way. In this category of “naïve knowledges located low down on the hierarchy” beneath the required academic and scientific levels, Foucault includes popular knowledge (“le savoir des gens”) – which must not be confused with “general common sense” – like those of criminals, crazy people, ill persons, psychiatric patients, detainees. The direct knowledge of these subjects, merged with the specific knowledges of specialised workers, like nurses, doctors and soldiers, will not result in a “general common-sense knowledge”, but in a “a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it.” (PK, 82) Foucault does not miss the paradox of enclosing in the same rhizomatic framework of subjugated knowledges both «the academia and the street»: nonetheless he finds in this well-marked disparity the essential leverage of the critique promoted with those discontinuous discourses. According to Foucault this is “historical knowledge of struggles”: “In the specialised areas of erudition as in the disqualified, popular knowledge there lay the memory of hostile encounters which even up to this day have been confined to the margins of knowledge. What emerges out of this is something one might call a genealogy, or rather a multiplicity of genealogical researches, a painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memory of their conflicts. And these genealogies, that are the combined product of an erudite knowledge and a popular knowledge, were not possible and could not even have been attempted except on one condition, namely that the tyranny of globalising discourses with their hierarchy and all their privileges of a theoretical avant-garde was eliminated.” (PK, 83) In this passage, Foucault attempts an early outline of his overall plan, where he generously includes and aligns the French components of the rhizosphere and, above all, the authors of The Anti-OEdipus, although the detailed description of the “returns of knowledge” fits perfectly his research style. That style which he adopted at the beginning of his lectures at the Collège de France (1970) and carried on until the end of that period, 1975-1976, the year before the crucial 1977 when he entered a period of crisis and suspended his course. It was Foucault’s annus horribilis, during which he received attacks from multiple fronts – such as Baudrillard’s Forget Foucault – and started a profound reformulation of his thought, his analysis and his political approach, which in turn would end his friendship with Deleuze and destroy the underground empathy within the French Nietzschean revolutionary community. What seems extraordinary is the way in which Foucault linked his research to the fight and critique of his rhizospheric fellows, attributing the essential leverage of the critique and of the “success” of those years precisely to the discontinuity and de-centralisation of practices and discourse advocated by Klossowski, Deleuze and Guattari, Blanchot and Lyotard, among others. In 1976, Foucault is able to advance this critique: “Let us give the term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.” (PK, 83) During the same lecture, Foucault links the genealogy to the struggle against the alleged “scientificity” of the new sciences, namely Marxism and Psychoanalysis, guilty of bearing “power ambitions”, not even concealed, and thus of pursuing those “effects of power” that usually institutions assign to enthroned sciences. According to Foucault, “By comparison, then, and in contrast to the various projects which aim to inscribe knowledges in the hierarchical order of power associated with science, a genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse. It is based on a reactivation of local knowledges – of minor knowledges, as Deleuze might call them – in opposition to the scientific hierarchisation of knowledges and the effects intrinsic to their power: this, then, is the project of these disordered and fragmentary genealogies. If we were to characterise it in two terms, then ‘archaeology’ would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and ‘genealogy’ would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play.” In Foucault’s works, within the genealogy/archive relation mentioned above, special attention is reserved to money, ever since the first lectures of his inaugural course in 1970-71, directly after the re-emergence in Klossowski and Deleuze of Nietzschean topics such as will to power, formations of sovereignty, impulse and value. Indeed, an early taste of the strong and innovative critical capacity on this front – which includes aspirations, will to power, universal rhizomatic economy, physical and noologic subconscious – comes from the debut of Deleuze and Guattari as authors, under the sign of Klossowski. La synthèse disjunctive is the title of their first essay dedicated to Klossowski and published in the 43rd issue of the journal «L’Arc», precisely in the third term of 1970. The text is presented already as an essay of a book titled Capitalism and schizophrenia. The writing style is already the imaginary, transverse, aggressive, humoristic and “genealogic” one of the Anti-OEdipus. La synthèse disjunctive is an incisive prelude to an announced explosion: Foucault immediately grasps the collateral effects that it would have on the style and content of his own research. The xeno-dollar and money as an instrument of hegemonic powerAt the beginning of the 70’s, the topic of money became a primary concern in the rhizosphere. Thanks to differential-money, namely the main instrument used by liberal democratic systems to assault, restructure and regularise national and international economic crises, the French Nietzschean revolutionary community wanted to build a new analytic grid that could overcome the «ideological morass» which still clutches a significant portion of the traditional Left as well as of the new antagonistic Left. Klossowski produced, as his farewell to publishing and writing, a brief text, dense and enigmatic, titled La monnaie vivante (Living Currency, 1970), which presented his peers with more than one critical interrogative on the industrial and commercial world, and on money as an instrument and simulacrum of the vital agent soothing human impulses. In a handwritten letter sent in autumn 1970, Foucault greeted Klossowski’s volume as “the greatest book of our times”. That was the same period in which, at the beginning of 1971, Deleuze and Guattari attended Foucault’s lectures at the Collège, having just finished the in itinere draft of the Anti-OEdipus. The role of the «imperial» currency – the US dollar as hegemonic currency – within the Western economic system, as well as the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rates regime, were at the centre of the tense international political debate. In December 1969 inflation in the United States reached 6%. Nixon, as soon as he was elected president, was struck by the prediction made by his own staff that the dollar had to be rescued in maximum two years. The world was jammed by xeno-dollars and the US reserves could not compensate anymore the increase in the global amount of dollars with the corresponding amount of gold as contemplated in the agreement. In a few months, in 1971, violence in the Vietnam war reached its peak, and so did military expenses and the related budget deficit. The United States had entered a recession in 1970 and unemployment was at 6% and growing. The issues presented by domestic economic circumstances were unprecedented: inflation was high in a phase of recession, as opposed to the usual combination of recession and deflation, as it had previously happened during the Great Depression in 1929. The situation was out of hand. There was no empirically tested academic theory which corresponded to such an economic situation; there was no plan. Any technical decision could equally mean the salvation of global commercial leadership or its collapse, precisely at a time when the international Communist movement was challenging Anglo-Saxon industrial capitalism the most. The sudden breakdown of the Bretton Woods system could cause a rapid downfall of the hegemony of American power, the winner of World War II. Power can switch sign. Nixon’s staff was divided between monetarists, namely the rising star Friedman and the Chicago School, and orthodox mainstream economists, such as Burns and the Federal Reserve. Friedman and those favouring the free floating of exchange rates unpegged from the gold standard prevailed. Timing was crucial. In May 1971 West Germany left the Bretton Woods system, instituted in 1944 on the ashes of the Axis Powers, letting the German Mark free to float. The situation deteriorated and Nixon’s economic staff had to hurry: it was time to take actions because the element of surprise and the promptness of intervention were crucial. In August 1971, Nixon suddenly announced to the nation and to the whole world that the US dollar was not convertible in gold anymore, leaving the American currency free to float too. After about 3,000 years from its invention, money lost its tie to an objective and concrete value. It was the first time in Western history, without considering the periods of war and brief experiments, always ended in failure: money completed its final transformation, to which it was probably destined ever since its invention, becoming a pure simulacrum of value in all its forms, from the round-shaped metal piece to banknotes. The question that economists asked themselves are several: Will the “orphan money” be able to stand only based on its face value? Will the hegemonic currency, i.e. the dollar, be able to walk on an “empty space”? Has money grown enough to demonstrate its maturity? The monetary de-aurification is the temporary situation in which we are still today: a mixture of sovereign, post-sovereign, xeno- and headless currencies that float freely without any fixed exchange rate, victims of speculations and market imbalances. However, the monetary coordinates within which Foucault develops his analysis are not simply related to the contingency of events, but rather to the study of forces and their effects on the domain of sovereign formations associated to the research and analyses conducted within the Rhizosphere. The concept of money considered by Foucault in the lectures that he gave between 10th February and 10th March 1971 is, surprisingly for most people but not for the Rhizomatics, the Ancient Greek currency employed between the seventh and fifth century B.C.; that is the historical, social, economic and institutional period when money, conceived as Greek measurement, eventually becomes the core of an “immense social and polymorphous practice of assessment, quantification, establishing equivalences, and the search for appropriate proportions and distributions” (LWK, 134). According to Foucault, this analysis should approach the hypothesis according to which money constitutes a political instrument used to create and preserve new balances during profound social transformations: thus, money does not preserve relations of sovereignty but relations of dominance. It is fascinating how Foucault introduces the concept of money towards the end of the lecture he gave on 17th February 1971, as redistribution of relations between the discourse of justice and the discourse of knowledge, and of the relations between the just, measurement, order and truth: “The institution of money, which is not just a measure of exchange, but which was established mainly as an instrument of distribution, division, and social correction.” (LWK, 129) The birth of money-simulacrumThe approach described in Lectures of the Will to Know (1971) is very distant from the traditional interpretation of money imposed by mainstream economics, from which not even Marx in The Capital nor Foucault in The Order of Things (1966) could evade. On the one hand, mainstream nineteenth-century economists believed that the mature use of money as a means of exchange started with the birth and development of market economics. On the other hand, the Foucault of The Order of Things argues that the analysis of wealth and money theory can be traced back to the classical era, that is, the period between Cervantes’ Don Quixote and de Sade’s Justine. Alternatively, in 1971 Foucault traces a conception of money according to the eighteenth-century perspective of traditional political economy: “Commercial, international, market origin of money. Mercantilist interpretation of money restricting it from the start to function of representation and exposing it to that “fetishism” which consists in taking the sign for the thing itself, through a sort of primary and radical philosophical error. In fact, this interpretation may account for some early uses of money in Lydia and Phoenicia. But money was not adopted and used in Greece on the basis of this model.” (LWK, 135) To support his argument, Foucault examines two opposite examples of the employment of money in Ancient Greece in the seventh century B.C.: Corinth and Athens. What interests us is in which way the two cities and in particular the two political protagonists, respectively Cypselus and Solon, associate their politics to the introduction of a currency. In both cases, the two options would contribute to cause, and anticipate, relevant historical effects on Western governance vicissitudes. For Corinth, and its tyrant Cypselus, it was a political operation in which “the rich have been forced to make an economic sacrifice [and] money comes to the fore enabling the preservation of power through the intermediary of the tyrant” (LWK, 159); for Athens, and the legislator Solon, the political choice has the opposite course of that of Corinth because “the rich have been forced to a political sacrifice, [and] eumonia enables them to preserve economic privileges.” (LWK,159) It is clear that Foucault points at Solon’s way of managing the nomos as the agenda for Western democracies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: faced with growing social demands, the wealthiest classes chose to allow substantial power distributions in order to preserve their economic privileges. The refined Corinthian economic choices, to which corresponds a brutal tyrannical one, show an excellent example of monetary measures – i.e. the systemic management of the nomisma – which would be adopted throughout the twentieth century and this first period of the twenty-first. In fact, contemporary money intervenes at the core of an institutional operation in which wealth is redistributed to an already wealthy minority without redistributing power to the majority of the social body. This is because the social sharing of power has reached its boundary – the maximum limit of feasibility for economic oligarchies – within which less wealthy classes participate to liberal democracies. Foucault seems to suggest that there has not been a time in Western history from the seventh century in Greece in which our societies have not struggled between the two poles of distribution, the economical and the political one, with money playing the role of functional membrane manageable between the two antipodes. Returning to the Greek cities: money became money-simulacrum and, at the same time, money-metron, i.e. money as measure. The Corinthian invented money as “the instrument of power which is being shifted, and which, through an interplay of new regulations, ensures the preservation of class domination. At this point, money is no longer a symbol which effectuates and is not yet a representative sign. It should be understood as a fixed series of superimposed substitutions.” (LWK, 141) Foucault, indeed, looks at Corinthian money as a series of substitutions: religious, economic, political and social. The game of substitutions and superimpositions between money and effectual reality generates fixation and not representation: “whereas the sign represents, the simulacrum replaces one substitution for another. It is its reality as simulacrum that has enabled money to remain for a long time not only an economic instrument but a thing issuing from and returning to power, by a sort of inner intensity or force: a religiously protected object it would be impious, sacrilegious to adulterate.” (LWK, 141)But, with even greater depth, Foucault argues that money is “as simulacrum that is sign: getting it to function as sign in a market economy is an avatar of its real history as simulacrum.” (LWK, 142) For money, being a regulatory simulacrum is primary, before entering history as a sign and then as fetish. Actually, the sign is only a moment within the duration of money-simulacrum: it is on such fine edge of strategy, power and substitution that Klossowski’s living currency intervenes, description of that triangle that dominates us: desire, value and simulacrum (Foucault, personal letter sent to Klossowski, autumn 1970). The modes of expression of impulsive forcesThere are only few pages, but they are dense and enigmatic perhaps more than any book ever published: Living Currency is the text through which Klossowski gives his farewell to writing – from then on (1970) he would be involved in different projects, such as translations, art exhibitions: paintings and movies – and at the same time it constitutes a powerful introduction to the Anti-OEdipus, an anoedipic incipit from a different author. Living Currency creates a philosophical space to decrypt, building an underground passage that connects all different publications and stations of thought constituting the French revolutionary Rhizosphere: Nietzsche’s Notebook (1887- 1888) by Nietzsche, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969), The Anti-OEdipus (1972), Nomad Thought (1972), Circulus Vitiosus (1972), Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971), Lectures on the Will to Knowledge (1970- 1971), Libidinal Economy (1974). The Klossowskian volume breaks, breaches, overflows and distributes with few incisive sentences large gashes of thought and possible research avenues that Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and Lyotard will then walk wildly, rapidly and productively, as “young wolves of future revolutions”. The context within which the paradox of Living Currency is articulated is one where industrial civilisation – Klossowskian term which seems more accurate than the general “capitalism” – has diffused its negative effects by infecting the whole society through institutes of uprightness and conformity, which connotes the attribution to the means of production of a powerful contamination – and, thus, affective engraving – capacity on the individuals and the community. That is the same homogeneous, levelled, economized and nihilistic society that Nietzsche described in the fragment The Strong of the Future. The Nietzsche-Klossowski axis, then, assigns to the levelled industrial civilisation a dangerous production capacity that is both affective and infective. Foucault, on the same wavelength, would explain the «positivity» of power with a similar argumentative leverage: “What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.” (PK, 119) Deleuze and Guattari hold a similar position and raise the level of analysis bypassing ideological and psychoanalytical nuances: “[E]verything is objective or subjective, as one wishes. That is not the distinction: the distinction to be made passes into the economic infrastructure itself and into its investments. Libidinal economy is no less objective than political economy, and the political no less subjective than the libidinal, even though the two correspond to two modes of different investments of the same reality as social reality” (AE, 345). ). If Marx believes that the structure is the economic skeleton of society and the superstructure is everything that derives from it, Klossowski reverses the framework and sets as the «ultimate infrastructure» the “behavior of emotions and instincts.” (LC, 3) Consequently, it follows that “economic standards form in turn a substructure of affect, not the ultimate infrastructure” and that, more in depth, “economic norms are, like the arts or the moral or religious institutions, or like all the forms of knowledge, one mode of the expression and representation of instinctive forces.” (LC, 3) As Foucault had already realized in his letter to Klossowski, the triangle “desire, value, simulacrum” that dominates us and has been characterising us for millennia, already existed ever since the invention of money in Asia Minor in the VIII century B.C.; hence, the triangle must be treated as something forged in the depths of times, because the historical period of time in which reality gets «monetarized» is certainly the product of a slow centuries-long process of transformation, before reaching its own metal round form ). If Marx believes that the structure is the economic skeleton of society and the superstructure is everything that derives from it, Klossowski reverses the framework and sets as the «ultimate infrastructure» the “behavior of emotions and instincts.” (LC, 3) Consequently, it follows that “economic standards form in turn a substructure of affect, not the ultimate infrastructure” and that, more in depth, “economic norms are, like the arts or the moral or religious institutions, or like all the forms of knowledge, one mode of the expression and representation of instinctive forces.” (LC, 3) As Foucault had already realized in his letter to Klossowski, the triangle “desire, value, simulacrum” that dominates us and has been characterising us for millennia, already existed ever since the invention of money in Asia Minor in the VIII century B.C.; hence, the triangle must be treated as something forged in the depths of times, because the historical period of time in which reality gets «monetarized» is certainly the product of a slow centuries-long process of transformation, before reaching its own metal round form that has been bequeathed until today. In Phrygia, where Greek mythology locates the fundamental passage from pre-money to actual money, the coining of the nomisma bore the effigy of the goddess Money (Dea Moneta), the wife of King Midas, Demodice or Hermodice; according to Heraclides Lembus, on the money of Cumae coined by queen Hermodice the Genius of Money (Genio della moneta) holds the scale and the cornucopia in his hands. Greek mythology suggests us that, ever since its invention, the concept of money figures in popular wisdom as a concatenation of sovereignty, sacredness, fertility and equity; and already in ancient times there were people who used to rise against the improper use of the circulation of the “metal disks”: Julius Pollux, at the apex of Hellenism in the Roman Empire, critiqued the obolastates, i.e. those who used to lend and weight the oboli, and the obolastatein, the practice of lending oboli. The perverse intersection of simulacrum, value and desire, presented by Foucault as the explanatory structure of universal economy, is then absolutely coherent with the rhizospheric analysis of money. Klossowski of Living Currency suggests that monetary economics and theology are nothing but reciprocal disguises: money, from the beginning of Western civilisation, has been regarded as the universal representative instrument of a generalized economy which already has an innate abstract potential for sacredness and sovereignty, and, in turn, for desire-will to power at its highest level. According to Klossowski, money is the universal simulacrum; in industrial societies the domain of money, after centuries of adjustments, has completely substituted the real world and misrepresents its subjugated phantasm. Klossowski had already matured the concept of a universal economy through the scrutinizer of Chaos (Nietzsche) of the passages on energy in relation to world structure: “At a given moment of the accumulated force of the emotions, there is also the absolute condition of a new distribution, and hence a disruption of equilibrium. Nietzsche conceives of a universal economy whose effects he experiences in his own moods.” (NVC, 110) The line that links Nietzsche and the vicious circle (1969) and Living Currency (1970) is, thus, the analysis of impulsive simulacra that act upon a generalized universal economy. We have already entered the Anti-OEdipus, the Nietzsche of the 80’s of XIX century, and the Foucault of the 70’s of XX century. This represents the core of revolutionary Nietzscheism which influenced the street struggle of 1968 and further on, pure energy and dynamite ready for future struggles: Klossowski develops with great clarity the theoretical nucleus of impulse, body, simulacrum, value, production, consumption, arguing that “”The way they [instinctive forces] express themselves, both in the economy and finally in our industrial world, is subject to the way they have been handled by the economy of the reigning institutions.” That this preliminary and ultimate infrastructure is more and more determined by its own reactions to the previously existing substructures is unquestionably true, but the forces at play continue the struggle among infrastructures into the substructures. So, though these forces initially express themselves in a specific manner according to economic standards, they themselves create their own repression, as well as the means of smashing that repression, which they experience to different degrees: “and this goes on as long as does the battle among the instincts, which is waged within a given organism for and against the formation of the organism as their agent, for and against psychic and bodily unity. Indeed, that is where the first ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ schemes come into being, the first signs of compensation and haggling.” (LC, 4) Thus is the key passage for the whole Rhizomatic universe: Klossowski shows in this theoretical nucleus the hidden role of the sphere of instincts. Given its concealment, or its secluded core due to a lack of visible external outlets, the sphere of instincts gets «economized» inside the industrial world. What the industrial world consumes the most is the instinct to procreate, which is a product of the voluptuousness of the instinctual body, labelling it as a good but at the same time, and in the opposite direction, the body procures emotions, concealed and excessive, abstract substance for a «phantasm» – the ghostly entity which recurs obsessively in Klossowski’s thought – upon which instincts act again as backward-action. “Nothing exists apart from impulses that are essentially generative of phantasms. The simulacrum [i.e. the Nietzschean Trugbild] is not the product of a phantasm, but its skilful reproduction, by which humanity can produce itself, through forces that are thereby exorcized and dominated by the impulse.” (NCV, 133) This is the level at which the phantasm has been already created and instincts and passions are not available anymore to consume and cede the phantasm itself – that is, the producer of desire which reproduces itself. Additionally, this is the crucial point around which the emotional value, otherwise called libidinal value, is formed – as Nietzsche points out, “in place of moral values, purely naturalistic values” (Opere fr. 9 [8] vol. VIII, section 2, p. 6, quoted in NVC, 106). The translation of impulsive forces, the instincts, in “economic representations” of the emotional value – according to Nietzsche, the only being that we know is a being that has representations (O, fr. 11 [33] vol. V, section 2) – will then be a simulacrum: which simulacrum could be better than the merge of money, simulacrum itself of objective value, and a living body, simulacrum which incarnates the procreative phantasm? The synthesis of such double simulacrum in the economy of industrial civilisation is the living currency, a simulacrum reinforced by emotion that it procures, hence the «living currency» is the expression of the libidinal value carved in bodies. What industrial civilisation consumes through standardization – the various simulacra of the phantasm: prostitution, sexual slavery, eroticism, assorted industries of pleasure – the body produces through economization. Consumed good vs. libidinal value. This means that the body “manifests itself” attributing value to the instincts but, in order to defend it “impulsive phantasm” that is desire, opposes the «mechanical simulacrisation» of industrial economy. The body is the battlefield of the harsh clash between opposite forces: social production against desiring production. Such clash can yield two opposing outcomes: the first – and unfortunately the prevailing in both the industrial civilisation and in the rising digital one – is the hyper-gregariousness of the individual, who is reduced to a mere instrument to support tamed passions and desires captured by social standardization whose objective is the unity reproducible in the production line; the second is where instincts and affections prevail on the repression of impulses and the “support” acquires its own sovereignty by degregarizing itself. In the stage that follows such rediscovered sovereignty - through the evident self-organisation of behaviours - singularity itself gets desubjectivised overturning its own nature of stable subject, and opening itself to the industrious metamorphosis of desires, and, thus, to perpetual transformation and to the extreme idleness of the nomads of the future. to be continued... taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman
Sometime I’m going to do a blog post on the Followmeter about watching my followers rise and fall according to if I’m writing essays, politics, stories, poetry, or philosophy… I get a laugh at how I gain or lose people following me based on assumptions. It’s like a comedy meter for me watching people come and go so anonymously without ever knowing why … we live on the net in our private hells, and other lonely people wander by, sit for a while, listen to us patter about nonsense, then leave for parts unknown without ever leaving a trace except the little meter ball that flicks up or down… sad really that communication and community have become nothing more than a button pushed or unpushed; a like or not like button world, a sort of preview of the next wave of our automated society as the neutered minds of the mobile phone generation fade in or fade out based on whim. I joined Wattpad recently and was told to shorten all my stories into small chunks so all the millions of mobile phone users could flip through my stories easier. We’ve become a mobile nation that sees the 3 inch screen of a diode while the rest of the universe goes unnoticed and expelled from consciousness like a faded dream of reality that has been replaced by this plug’n play universe of text messages, and photomatrilia extravaganzas and youtube spawn casts… yet, a funny thing about technology, it comes back to bite you in the ass. Yes, it does. Now mobiles have become weapons and spies onto the corruptions of the world, letting the darkness seep into the viral plumage of this worldwide monster, with her webbing strung across nations and the planet to link the underworlds together in some nefarious three-ring circus of pornography, sex-slaves, and cyberwarfare. Now the world has come home to the small towns across this ancient land, dispersed its meth and heroin, its broken love and sweet promises of foreign dreams to buy and bring home to roost. Our world is no longer separate and alone, but very much overcrowded by monsters everywhere in this virtual nation of horrors. Now you can hide among the darkest corners of the darknet and commit acts of fatal madness and never leave your porch where the old hound dog is sleeping. Now the country is a hellzone for predatory minds everywhere, unbounded by the old causal chains of physical prowess it can move among the symbolic waves like a spring board to catastrophes never dreamed of in the pulp age.
Just a note: If you confuse my fiction with my personal thought and beliefs then you’ve a problem. I may satirize and portray a world I rose up from and out of in my fiction, but to assume the attitudes portrayed are my very own would be a misnomer: —big time. I think people do the same with my wanderings in contemporary philosophy as well. People get pissed off about me writing about various philosophers as if every thinker I write about I advocate and agree with. Strange, how many people that follow me probably confuse the two… sadly.
I think if you’d ever read Country, Redneck, or Hilly Billy Noir you’d discover that for the most part these writer’s write about waylaying the dark demons eating at their minds and lives; the terrible abuses of society, family, war, work, or just life. Most of them reach into that dark place where they can chomp down on the sump of that broken world of bigots, racists, scoundrels, misfits and releasing onto that white page the pinned up and repressed suffering of a hellworld lost in the heartland of their misery. Then seeking a way of letting those voices of the dead and the living speak out in their cold or hot raging silences, unleashing the malevolent and malformed intent at the heart of so much bittersweet life so as to form that needful ritual of exorcism and expulsion. In that world there aren’t any ghosts haunting the highways, only demons and killers of real flesh and blood, hate mongers and monsters who live in one’s own home, members of one’s family or next door neighbors; or who work for County, or teach one’s kids, or stand there smiling at the Bank when you walk up for money, or help that Old Lady across the street and by your child a snow cone or cotton candy; or who watch from the alleyways and dark places in the dank cracks of the night world of town or city waiting, peaking, looking for the chance to apply their malignant spirit against anything and everything that goes by the name human.
Country noir delivers up monsters, shapeshifting demons who on the surface act like us, look like us, pretend and fake our patterns and our ways of being, all to get closer to us so they can enact their horrid crimes or induce us to join in their hellish festivities. It’s about these wicked beings with human masks that is the specialty of that writer who calls himself Country noir. But the demons aren’t supernatural or unnatural, their just not human; their the ones that never became human, who live in the darkness, breath it like it were honey, who live to kill and main and enjoy the nightworld of hate and spite and utter degradation and corruption of flesh and bone. These are the monsters of this deadly fiction of those enclosed realms of pain and sadness we call the noirish realms of fate.
As Leslie Fielder in his famous Love and Death in the American Novel showed us years ago the strange truth of our country that is whitewashed out of the big picture by the social media and mainstream pundits is that we’re a lost people full of spite and hate. From the country to the city we are a guilt ridden insane society full of psychopaths, sociopaths, and full-tilt killers, rapists, clowns, murderers, gangsters, pit-bull mulchers, gamblers, thieves, street-mean denizens of asphalt or the Twin Drive-In in the pot-head backwoods of shine or meth country worlds. If someone wanted to construct a vision of hell all they’d have to do is park it up at any country village or downtown megacity in the U.S.A. and ponder the quirky truth of the people passing them by on any single street of any region of these here States. It’s a giant crack-head’s paradise of cutthroats and scoundrels from one end to the other. And, while all those gated-communities that the Good People hide behind seem clean and pretty and sane, the truth is their more deadly than the homegrown subworlds of the Redneck and White Trash trailer worlds on the outskirts of the town. Yes, the rich and middle-class respectable are the Hollywood stars of inanity hiding the perversity of child molestation, incest, necrophilia, and the dark horse of violence where punk kids playing MMO’s full of death, torture, and endless gang wars on Space or Fantasy prime time TV or Reality Love and Big Brother’s weasels fending off the bite of the bullet for the last phase of winning the sweepstakes of ultimate scrum-creep fly-by goes down every night behind closed doors in the U.S. of A.
But the story that never gets told is the real story hidden in the cracks and crevices and cracks of actual peoples lives, instead all we get is the fake America of Hill Billy and Redneck squalor instead of the pain and suffering of people that lack medicine, health access; education in good rural schools, colleges, and universities; and, get plumed by the media and trivialized as stereotypical White Trash of Hollywood & Vine bullcorn TV shows and comedy routines on SNL. Instead of the sad truth of abused children and violence and all the lonely souls and outcasts who are left behind to rot and stew in their own private hells because of prejudice on both sides of the fence. The one’s that grow up to enact the same cruddy lives and violence of their parents, do the drugs or turn to alcohol, work some rotten twelve hour job at a factory or just live off welfare checks or ponder the cracked-up mythologies of the old American Myths. A world falling fast into oblivion where the old farmer’s and single family places have given way to the Great Combine fortunes of Mega Growers and Artificial Monsanto seed worlds that tie one to a fake world of natural growth and biogenetic horrors to come…
That the veneer of sanity that disguises itself most of the time is now even emerging on the National stage as we watch the two parties of Democrat and Republican put forth social misfits that at any other time would’ve been tar-and-feathered and run out of town on a pole. One need not go back to Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut to get one’s feel for the insanity. One can see it everyday on Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn or any number of news sites, journals, horror mags, crime mags, weird tales mags, and that sub-genre I’ve been exploring of late some term Country noir (or Redneck or Hilly Billy noir). Death and the sex bomb typify every last thread of our world from the advertisement of fun and swim hijinks and shows and free rooms in Nevada or Las Vegas to the strip joints in an city one finds the perverts out in flocks roaming with gold dangling from their gleaming necks, teeth, and hands. While on our premiere academic campuses around the country one finds the date-rape squads or Club Suicide Mephistos, or the twisted fruits of city and country bound to each other’s identity squabbles for and against the political church of our age.
Even William Faulkner rewrote the Horror novel in terms of country parlance in Sanctuary. Sanctuary is the Horror Story as practiced from the time of Poe to that of Lovecraft and Stephen King. “Horrific” is, indeed, the word he customarily used to describe that novel-and horrific it is in good faith. Indeed, there are scarcely any of the stock effects of the horror genre, audio or video, which it lacks: from the tap-tap-tap of a blind man’s stick to the rustle of rats in a corncrib, the ominous thud of a muffled gunshot off scene, the crackle of flames from the lynch-mob’s bonfire, and the barely audible whisper of blood in Temple’s ravaged body. So, too, do the standard grotesques of the Gothic Romance abound: “crips” and “feebs” and freaks, not least of which is Popeye eye himself-more monster than human, more shadow than substance. “The black man,” Temple and Horace call him, aware perhaps that this is a traditional American name for the Devil. And there is, too, of course, the infamous bloody corncob, an icon of unspeakable evil, for which Sanctuary is remembered even by those who have never read it; though Faulkner alludes to it only briefly at a point where his horrific tale is nearly told.1
One must also remember that Sanctuary –the novel which Albert Camus believed to be the greatest of Faulkner’s fictions belongs to the most disreputable and unredeemable pop genre of all, being pornography, as the dictionary defines that pejorative term, “a portrayal of erotic behavior designed to cause sexual excitement” Though there are many such portrayals in Faulkner’s work of “erotic behavior;’ including such kinky subvarieties as pedophilia, necrophilia, incest and bestiality, Sanctuary was the only one of his books which its intended publisher refused at first to publish, presumably as too “dirty.” Yet it is in some ways the softest of soft porn-avoiding not only what were then still considered “dirty” words, but explicit descriptions in any words of the sex act itself. The brutal violation of Temple, for instance, is rendered solely in terms of her fantasies, climaxing in her hallucination of turning into a boy-popping a teeny-tiny penis; though, of course, that male organ is called by none of its grosser street names. (Fiedler, 159)
The Civil War is the watershed in Twain’s life between innocence and experience, childhood and manhood, joy and pain; but it is politically, of course, the dividing line between slavery and freedom. And Twain, who cannot deny either aspect, endures the contradiction of searching for a lost happiness he knows was sustained by an institution he is forced to recognize as his country’s greatest shame. It was the best he could dream: to be free as a boy in a world of slavery! Look at us now, a hundred plus years on and we still have that shame on us. Country noir is still working that trail of guilt and shame from a dark world of mistrust, egoists, hate, and bigoted rascals who inhabit those worst strains of the American Psyche, and will not go away. So in an age when people are being called down for “appropriating” someone else’s culture the only thing left for the White is to face his own black nights in hell, go back down that cesspool history of pain and suffering at the hands of those monstrous and demonic souls that gave us slavery, wife-beating, apocalypse culture, sexual perversities, chain-saw massacres, crime, horror, BDSM and all the strange and bewildering, not to say bizarre facets of the hidden side of country existence. None of us White’s are innocent anymore, its way past that fake game; now is the time to look ourselves in the mirror of our own natural born predation and do something about it. Whitewashing it or moralizing it or pegging it with epithets of Left or Right politics isn’t going to cut it anymore. We have to know the truth of it, nothing else will do. Our gaze must turn back round, and down, and in and see the darkness of our own inhuman ways before we can begin to mend the hurt and open wounds in our nation. Country noir is as good a place as any to begin that process… that’s why I’m going to spend my time writing it, reading it, sharing it. That’s why I’m going to continue investigating the underpinning problems Country people are facing in their local regions as they watch the fake worlds of our Mediatocracracy as it builds its fantasy America full of fakes and division, chaos and dumbed down democracy. Since the new cultures of identity politics tells me to lay off appropriating other cultures in my works, then I’ll turn to my own dark world and begin there, just there where the pain and suffering begins right in my own backyard pond.
Most of our novels and short stories, plays and poetry are about the obsessions that drive us as Americans. Our mythologies if you will. The Left will castigate the Right-Wing myths of Mom, Apple Pie, and the Corn Cob pipe, while the Right will plug away at the New York intellectual, the egg-head, and the Ivy League snob. These are the clichés of culture rather than the complex hurt below the skin, the pain and suffering that hits below the belt and speaks to us of the reality beyond the myths. It’s that reality where people live and die that goes under the wire in most things. In my little comic-micro flash tale of a Snitch I used the standard cliché to a point to show the linguistic underpinnings of our complicity in dark humor and the portrayal of violence. Most will be offended on the Left, while those on the Right would laugh but miss the point. It’s this wavering between the two that interests me, to see how people react to discursive violence, harsh language, the darker side of American heritage, etc. Of course most people coming to my site either have nothing to say, don’t want to say anything, or tell the truth… I have no clue why people come to my site. Yet, they do. If I write philosophy I get followers for that, same for poetry, essays, stories, satire, militant venting of my political tirades, etc. But those that like one may not understand or share the other; and, yet, here I am a complexity even to myself with a multifarious need to work in many different forms of thought and feeling. Why be bound by one type of writing? I see people on Face Book who do one thing monotonously over and over: they do nothing more that repost the reposts of other reposts of news that is already fake of faked realities that spin tales of political or social rhetoric to sway people toward or against the fakeness of someone’s else’s fake world view. It’s as if we live in a fake world of puppeteers, each vying for the most fake thought possible.
So if I wander off into my own personal zones don’t mind me… you can always join the fake worlds of someone’s else’s fakes. Don’t let me stop you.
the article is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman
Nowadays digital technology is based on the insertion of neuro-linguistic memes and automatic devices in the sphere of cognition, social psyche and life-forms.
—Franco Berardi, And – Phenomenology of the End
One of the tasks of schizoanalysis has now become the decrypting of the ‘tics’ bequeathed to the human frame by the geotraumatic catastrophe, and ‘ KataoniX’ treats vestigial semantic content as a mere vehicle for code ‘from the outside’: the ‘ tic’ symptoms of geotraumatism manifested in the shape of sub-linguistic clickings and hissings.
—Nick Land, Fanged Noumena
In his latest offering And: The Phenomenology of the End Franco Berardi remarks “cognitive wiring” refers to the “capture and submission of life and of mental activity in the sphere of calculation”.1 This capture is occurring at two different levels: at the epistemic level it implies the formatting of mental activity, at the biological level it implies the technical transformation of the processes of life generation. Georges Bataille once said that
‘[A]t the instant where royal politics and intelligence alters, the feudal world no longer exists. Neither intelligence nor calculation is noble. It is not noble to calculate, not even to reflect, and no philosopher has been able to incarnate the essence of nobility’. - Complete Oeuvres
We’d already learned in previous essays and explorations on Bernard Steigler that the Anthropocene era is that of industrial capitalism, an era in which “calculation prevails over every other criteria of decision-making”,2 and where algorithmic and mechanical becoming is concretized and materialized as logical automation and automatism, thereby constituting the advent of completed nihilism, as computational society becomes a society that is automated and remotely controlled.
In Fanged Noumena as the editors of Nick Land’s essays told us “Land regularly chides critique and deconstruction for a latent conservatism that belies their pretensions to radicality. Their critiques of calculation mask an instrumentalisation of epoche – the abyss of unknowing, the enigma of exteriority – designed to perpetuate the inexhaustible dialectic or differance of Logos. Their post-metaphysical caution perpetuates the Socratic ideal of philosophy as a ‘preparation for death’ whereby philosophy lingers at the brink of the unknown while hoping to domesticate this threshold as a habitus for thought.” As Land himself would say,
Calculation mobilizes a thinking that is directly and effectively exterior, indexing the machinic dispersion or anorganic distribution of the number. No sooner in the head than on fingers and pebbles, counting always happens on the outside. A population is already a number, mixed into irreducible hybrids by counting techniques and apparatus (countingboard, abacus, currency tokens, and calendric devices). (FN: 508)
As Berardi affirms we can say that the social brain is undergoing a process of wiring, mediated by immaterial linguistic and numeric (algorithmic) protocols and also by electronic devices. (A: 22) Everytime you pick up that mobile phone, watch the news, watch your favorite video on youtube.com, or any other number of digital mediatainment systems from Xbox to your sons or daughters MMO, RPG, etc. you are entering the command and control centers of algorithmic governmentality. It is in these very entertainment and information devices that the memes and hyperstitions of tomorrow are being fed moment by moment rewiring the neurocircuitry of you and your children’s lives. The moment you pick up one of these devices your life is calculated, tabulated, indexed, formatted, dividuated, and looped through the positive feedback systems into the additive cycles of a numerically controlled digital environment, where digial agents supervene and decide your next move by rewiring your neuralcircuits – ubiquitously and blindly. As Berardi informs us,
As generative algorithms become crucial in the formation of the social body, the construction of social power shifts from the political level of consciousness and will, to the technical level of automatisms located in the process of generation of the linguistic exchange and in the process of formation of the psychic and organic body as well.
(A: 22)
R. Scott Bakker has been pounding away at the intentionalist world (read: Phenonmenologists) for years, telling us that all our descriptions, all our concern, all our knowledge is heading into that zero intensity zone of no return. That in essence we are entering a “crash space” of neurosemantic apocalypse. For Scott the matter comes down to this: the brain was wired to the natural environment through a process not of knowledge acquisition, but rather of filtering out and neglecting all but the essential elements of our environment except those things that promoted sex and survival. We are animals that must reproduce and survive and propagate generation after generation, everything else that is in excess of that natural program of propagation and survival is non-essential and is for the most part “neglected” by the decision making systems of our brain’s neurocircuitry. Because of this tying of brain to its natural environment our generations during the past two hundred years of the Industrial Era and its several transitional phase shifts has left us in a world severed from the old brain/environment nexus. We call this severing: nihilism. Nihilism is the severing of the brain from its value-systems: the intensive replication of sex and survival decisions that have guided our religious, social, political, and personal and collective life during the long reach of our natural and evolutionary existence as earth born animals. We now live in artificial worlds and environments that no longer hold the same pact as our natural neurocircuits have adapted too for millennia. For two hundred years philosophers and social critics have labeled this process one of the eclipse of thought and world, the severing of the relations of meaning: signifier and sign, mind and world. We are now cut off from what used to be termed Nature: the Outside / Inside of thought at its anti-podes.
A further issue arises according to Scott,
The problem is basically that the machinery of the brain has no way of tracking its own astronomical dimensionality; it can at best track problem-specific correlational activity, various heuristic hacks. We lack not only the metacognitive bandwidth, but the metacognitive access required to formulate the explananda of neuroscientific investigation.3
In other words we do not have the brains nor the Archimedean distance from our own neurocircuitry to explain to ourselves why we are the way we are. The tool (our brain) we’d use to describe and explore this issue is the one and same device. One cannot step outside one’s brain to describe its processes, the best we can do is to explore it through mediated devices: Neuroimaging systems that record and represent the moment to moment transactions of billions of neurocircuits as they fire. But even then we are bound by testability, repetition, and the interpretive (hermeneutic) protocols of intentionalism (phenomenology) to describe these images. We are part of the loop we would describe. One is forever blind to the very processes of one’s brain because it is what we are and we cannot reach some transcendental ground outside it to explore it. Impossible. Or, as Scott puts it,
A curious consequence of the neuroscientific explananda problem is the glaring way it reveals our blindness to ourselves, our medial neglect. The mystery has always been one of understanding constraints, the question of what comes before we do. Plans? Divinity? Nature? Desires? Conditions of possibility? Fate? Mind? We’ve always been grasping for ourselves, I sometimes think, such was the strategic value of metacognitive capacity in linguistic social ecologies. The thing to realize is that grasping, the process of developing the capacity to report on our experience, was bootstapped out of nothing and so comprised the sum of all there was to the ‘experience of experience’ at any given stage of our evolution. Our ancestors had to be both implicitly obvious, and explicitly impenetrable to themselves past various degrees of questioning. (ibid.)
Yet, a curious fact is that scientists and engineers are not concerned with explaining the brain, they are concerned with the pragmatic application of its working, its doing, not with how we know (epistemic) but how it works and does what it does. It’s in this sense of understanding the keys to decision making in the brain, how it works and does what it does rather than what it is (i.e., it’s ontic and/or ontological explanada) that interests not only scientists but engineers who have hopes of engineering intelligence (i.e., AI’s, etc.).
Engineering Reality: The Production of Stupidity
Oligarchs and politicos also have hopes of this engineering of decision making as well. As Berardi reminds us the automation of the behaviour of many individuals traversed and concatenated by techno-linguistic interfaces results in the effect of Swarm. Man is the animal who shapes the artificial techno-environments that shapes his/her own brain, the swarm effect therefore is the outcome of human transformation of the technical environment leading to automation of mental behavior. (A: 24) With such knowledge we do not need explain consciousness, only to pragmatically program the brain like an application to be manipulated and constrained to conform to the decision making powers of an elite tehcnocommercium. This is the nightmare of our future.
Is there a possibility of overturning, rotating, revolting, revolutionizing and turning the very processes of entrapment, capture, and enslavement against the elite and their minions? Poetry? As Berardi tells us it is better to conceive of aesthetics as the science of revolution, a semiotic emanation in its interaction with sensibility that causes surprise, estrangement, and the weird excess that cannot be captured by calculation and algorithmic necessity. Sensibility and Aesthetics he tells us should return to its etymon and should refer to sensibility as experience of the object, rather than to beauty (a quality of the object in itself). A return to objects…
Recently was watching Slavoj Zizek and Graham Harman discussing their approaches to philosophy, their agreements and disagreements on flat ontology, objects, etc. (see below):
Žižek & Harman debate Object-Oriented Ontology. Debate took place at Southern California Institute of Architecture on March 1st 2017. (A nod to dmf for the link…)
I’ve written and compared both philosophers in previous essays, especially in Zizek and Harman: Strange Bedfellows, noting that both Zizek and Harman are moving philosophy back into the ‘things-themselves’, where everything is on the same footing and no one stance or observer (Big Other/Master Signifier) reigns. Of course it is by way of physics that both philosopher’s share and also suffer their differences. In Zizek the main thrust is that the universe is a messy place, unfinished, incomplete and that science and scientists will never discover an end to it because at the extremes everything breaks down and becomes fuzzy as if the universe needed us to complete it. Or as if the universe is a vast simulation that never provided the necessary solution to a program discovering the edge of the simulation. Much like those of us who have played MMO’s or RPG’s and tried to reach the edge of some ocean or mountain or forest or jungle only to realize that the programming gives way to numbers, sequences, binary code at the extreme point where the image and the code touch. As Zizek says: “Therein resides the strength of decoherence theory: it endeavours to articulate the purely immanent way a quantum process engenders the mechanism of its ‘observation’ (registration). Does it succeed? It is up to the science itself to provide an answer.” The point being that philosophers don’t provide solutions are answers, only more questions, etc. Whereas for Harman “if we push the tool-analysis to its limit, we actually find that all relations in the cosmos, whether it be the perceptual clearing between humans and world, the corrosive effect of acid on limestone, or a slap-fight between orangutans in Borneo, are on precisely the same philosophical footing”. The point for Harman is that any object-oriented philosophy is at base non-relational. He’ll ask “Given that objects never seem to enter into relations, what does enter into relations? If objects cannot affect one another directly, then perhaps they do so by means of qualities.” But how? He tells us: “We inhabit a sensual space in which, strictly speaking, objects cannot be present. Yet there are objects everywhere, like black holes or vacuums hidden from sight. By following the tension between these two moments of human perception, it may be possible to unlock the tensions found in the universe as a whole.”4
So for Zizek the problem is in the objects themselves: their incompleteness, their excess energetic power which cannot be reduced to signs or descriptions. For Harman its not in the objects themselves, but in the tension between objects, in the movement between relation and non-relation in the medium of appearance (sensual realm) that glues and makes visible (phenomenal) that which is invisible (non-apparent).
It’s at this point that Berardi would ask both philosophers:
Should we think that in the human mind there is a neuro-physiological predisposition, an innate program of sensuous reception of the world, a bio-grammar of aesthesia and eroticism? Or should we think that the conditions of harmony are exclusively cultural? (A: 32)
Is reality of these objects, the creation and invention of reality of appearances, etc. a natural disposition of the brain fitted and adapted to its environment, or is it a effect of the conditioning of our cultural educement, education, and programming? And with the modern nihilist severance of brain and natural environment with its substitution of an artificial one what happens to the neuroplasticity of the brain itself: Can it adapt to this new environment without repercussions or if our bio-grammatical brain functions are so ingrained and tied to the natural world environment, what happens in this transitional phase space of the artificial? Psychopathology and Sociopathology? Schizophrenia under its extreme forms?
Nick Land in Fanged Noumena would add even more radically that what we need is a Geotraumatics. According to Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay in their introduction to Nick’s essays Geotraumatics radicalises Deleuze-Guattari’s insistence that schizoanalysis should extend further than the terrain of personal or familial drama, to invest the social and political realms, and pushes beyond history and biology to incorporate the geological and the cosmological within the purview of the transcendental unconscious. (FN) He would go on to say: “What is noteworthy here is a certain deepening of pessimism: repression extends ‘all the way down’ to the cells of the body, the rocks of the earth, inhering in organised structure as such. All things, not just the living, yearn for escape; all things seek release from their organisation, which however induces further labyrinthine complications. Nothing short of the complete liquidation of biological order and the dissolution of physical structure can suffice to discharge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrial existence.” (FN: 41) The Death of the Left: Floundering in the Anthropocene
In book after book Berardi has chronicled the dark demise of the Left and its ineffectuality since May of 1968. Even in the past years since the first Anti-Capitalist movement every form of protest has ended in failure. Why? As he tells us there are two main reasons, the first is that each of these movements begins “strong in the streets but unable to attack the economic interests of corporations, because the precarization of labour has destroyed solidarity at the level of production, and solidarity is the only material force that can oppose the material force of corporate interest. Secondly, the abstract feature of financial capitalism is unattainable by the concrete forms of social action.” (A: 236) In both modes the very forms of revolutionary intent have been undermined by the modes of production and abstraction which are the final form of a completed nihilism we term Capitalism. Just as the brain is divorced from its natural environment, social activism is divorced from the abstract realms of the virtual reality become actual of present Capitalism.
Berardi citing Steven Shaviro’s Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption, where Shaviro makes the argument that any accelerationist “aesthetics exists in a special relationship to political economy, precisely because aesthetics is the one thing that cannot be reduced to political economy.” (A: 239) Commenting on Shaviro’s passage, Berarid says,
Aesthetics and the Economy converge and collide: as long as the social body will be unable to get rid of the process of ever expanding abstraction, aesthetic research will border with psychopathology, and will be concerned with stress, acceleration and suffering. (A: 239)
For Berarid we live in an artificial world already, a world programmed and controlled by the vast telecommunications mediatainment complex that encompasses the planet and its socio-cultural inhabitants. He states it this way:
We live in the multilayered dimension of technomaya. Digital technology has given to the media a power that is directly acting on the mind, so the Mediasphere casts a spell that wraps the Psychosphere. Technomaya captures flows that proceed from the mind-activity, and sends them back to the mental receptors as a mirror, as a template for future imagination, as a cage for future action, and for future forms of life. (A: 240)
Another Italian philosopher Luciano Floridi puts it this way, “we are probably the last generation to experience a clear difference between online and offline environments”.5 Some people already live onlife. Some cultures are already hyperhistorical. A further transformation worth highlighting concerns the emergence of artificial and hybrid (multi) agents, i.e., partly artificial and partly human (consider, for example, a family as a single agent, equipped with digital cameras, laptops, tablets, smart phones, mobiles, wireless network, digital TVs, DVDs, CD players, etc.). These new agents already share the same ontology with their environment and can operate within it with much more freedom and control. We (shall) delegate or outsource, to artificial agents and companions, our memories, decisions, routine tasks, and other activities in ways that will be increasingly integrated with us and with our understanding of what it means to be an agent. Yet all this is rather well known, and it is not what I am referring to when I talk about inforgs. (EI: 15)
In fact, for Floridi the whole transhumanist and post-human SF scenario of terminators, robots, AI, etc. taking over the world is an extreme and hypothetical reaction to the unknown surrounding us in the technosphere. What he has in mind is a “quieter, less sensational, and yet more crucial and profound change in our conception of what it means to be an agent. We have begun to see ourselves as inforgs not through some transformations in our bodies but, more seriously and realistically, through the reontologization of our environment and of ourselves. It is our world and our metaphysical interpretation of it that is changing.”(EI: 15)
The severance of the brain/mind from its natural / evolutionary environment and its sudden transitional shift to the artificialization of the world in our modern technocommercium is as he puts it “reontologizing our environment and ourselves” (15). We are witnessing an epochal, unprecedented migration of humanity from its Newtonian, physical space to the infosphere itself as its Umwelt, not least because the latter is absorbing the former. As a result, humans will be inforgs among other (possibly artificial) inforgs and agents operating in an environment that is friendlier to informational creatures. And as digital immigrants like us are replaced by digital natives like our children, the latter will come to appreciate that there is no ontological difference between infosphere and physical world, only a difference in levels of abstraction. When the migration is complete, we shall increasingly feel deprived, excluded, handicapped, or impoverished to the point of paralysis and psychological trauma whenever we are disconnected from the infosphere, like fish out of water. One day, being an inforg will be so natural that any disruption in our normal flow of information will make us sick. (EI: 16) Semiocapitalism: “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
Under the auspices of semiocapitalism we are becoming wired into an algorithmic world of total surveillance and control where every aspect of our lives as “dividual” (Stiegler/Deleuze) rather than individuals is being programmed, manipulated, and developed by Reality Engineers. Within a few generations this will become so ubiquitous that those of us analogue residence of the transitional phase shift will have disappeared and only our children and their children will remain not knowing or understanding the difference between the old ontology of natural and non-artificial worlds of earth and the one in which hey live as inforgs (i.e., informational organisms and agents). For Berardi we are encompassed already in the technomaya of an artificial world of control where our “experience is subjected to the power of simulation and of standardization” (A: 240).
Lewis Mumford in his two volume The Myth of the Machine long ago saw that our current cultural nihilism, which began as a “reaction against regimentation, has become in turn a mode of counter-regimentation, with its ritualized destruction and its denial of all the cultural processes that have sublimated man’s irrational impulses and released his constructive energies”.6 Lewis in his studies would uncover this movement from natural to artificial simulation and standardization. As he termed it, the fact is that organic models yielded to mechanical models in interpreting living phenomena mainly for two reasons: organisms could not be connected to the power complex until they were reduced, in thought even more than in practice, to purely mechanical units; and it was only through their attachment to the power system, which, as Comte noted, came in with the employment of the engineers as the key figures in advanced industries, that the physical sciences had, from the sixteenth century on, flourished. (PP: 430)
The Engineer as designer, developer, programmer, modeler, maker, tinkerer, mechanical and software specialist etc. is still with us. Even our architectural environments have become enmeshed in artificialization to the point that simulated and modeled replicas and 3D Printing have overtaken the older forms of design. As Patrick Schumacher an anarcho-capitalist and libertarian architect puts it the world is drifting toward a parametric society:
‘Parametricism’ implies that all elements of architecture are becoming parametrically malleable and thus adaptive to each other and to the context. Instead of aggregating a few platonic solids (cubes, cylinders etc.) into simple compositions – like all other architectural styles did for 5000 years – we are now working with inherently variable, adaptive forms that aggregate into continuously differentiated fields or systems. Multiple systems are correlated with each other and with the environment. All spaces should resonate with each other because within Postfordist network society all activities need to be networked and stay in continuous communication with each other. (On Parametricism)
This notion of the Smart City of the future that communicates continuously with both machinic and human agents in a technocommercium or technical environment of continuous virtual/actual transactions which slide in-between the intensities at a vibrational level of realties shaping and shaped by decisional processes in a 24/7 informational matrix.
The ‘tics’ From the Outside…
In such a realm as Berardi reminds us the digital footprint of the experience, with its increasing speed and intensity, affects the psycho reaction to info-stimula, affects the empathic relation between conscious and sensitive organisms, and affects also cognition: memory, imagination and language. Experience, as attention and as intention is subjected to an intense stress that results into a mutation of the cognitive organism. (A: 242) The only hold back to this ultracapitalism is Sleep, which Jonathan Crary in his book 24/7 suggested “Sleep is the only remaining barrier, the only enduring natural condition that capitalism cannot eliminate.” (24/7: 74)7 As Berardi will tell it we are already sleepwalkers in a semiocapitalist empire, sleepless migrants who are at the beck and call of a 24/7 continuum that know no sleep and enforces an algorithmic punchcard in our neurowiring to comply or else… that, or else is “suicide”. As he tells us,
The Google Empire has been essentially built on the capture of the user’s experience in order to increase value and productivity. During the creation of the attention draining machine, the personal computer has been bypassed by the release of the last generation of cellular phones labeled as smart-phones, so the access to the network has gone mobile, pervading every moment of the day and of the night. The mobilization of the access to the net has obviously expanded the captured time of attention and submitted new dimensions of personal life to the all pervading search for semio-profits. (A: 247)
Intentionalism or the time of thought is gone, becoming a part of the blip culture of microseconds that never stop long enough to think or react. We are for the most part programs in a programmed environment, pegged to be called out by machinic agents who will make our decisions, answer our questions, live our lives for us as surrogates and avatars, dividual existence as a digital citizen in an artificial world where the barriers between virtual / actual, mind/world, matter/energy have become continuous and non-relational only in the sense that all is flat and suborned to a world of object-object relations.
Humans used to map their world, orient themselves to their external environments. Orientation is the cognitive ability to recognize the physical features of the surrounding environment and to build an inner map making possible finalized displacements in the world. The process of internal mapping that precedes orientation implies a highly singular relation with the environment: visual elaboration and emotional selection of places, signs, and also lights, flares, and scents. Orientation can be seen as the singularization of the landscape, the process that makes the world my own world. (A: 245).
With the slow erosion and disconnection or withdrawal from our natural environments into the transitional phase spaces of our modernity, where architecture became functionalist and abstract and cutting us from our affect and emotional heritage of care and humane sensuality, we have become desensitized and shaped to the artificial and functional environments of a world of flows and algorithms, digital decisions at speeds beyond human comprehension. As Berardi informs us the experience of getting lost in our cities, also the experience of recognizing a specific place will fade or at least be quite dulled, and the fading of the faculty of orientation can be viewed as a step in the process of connective reshaping of the experience as a whole. (A: 247) Many have already felt this in traveling from Airport to airport, the standardization of the technocommercium where everything seems like the same city over and over no matter where one steps off a plane one is always in the same city, intelligent or not.
With the advent of virtual interfaces even our environments will be additive and virtual overlays as the technology adapts and engineers begin to build devices that mediate our smart environments for us. As Berardi states it “reality is the point of intersection of our projections, and experience is singular access to the world of life and creation of meaning to share with others, the techno-mutation is affecting reality itself. The world, as experience and projection, is finally evacuated, and replaced by the access to the uniformed simulated experience, the experience of the swarm.” (A: 249)
Beraridi says we are fast moving into a neurototalitarianism in which our cognitive environments are simulated and uniform, programmed by Reality Engineers in which our perception and behaviour is based on the inscription of techno-linguistic automatisms in human communication and therefore in the connective mind. This is a form of techno-totalitarianism that results from three consecutive steps. (A: 249) The first step is the total invasion and replacement of our cultural signatures, our linguistic systems and traces through cellularization or “the connection of every enunciation agent in the Network—is the general framework of the subsumption (or capture) of social communication into electronic swarm” (A: 250). The second motif is the current “replacement of living experience and its simulation with recorded standardized stimulations, referring to the automation of the sense of orientation” (A: 250). And the third form is the “direction of the implementation of the swarm is directly aimed at modifying the neural hardware itself: insertion of technodevices for neural programming, nano-prosthesis, enhancers, transformers of the neurological system” (A: 250). Each of these will bring about a nerutotalitarian empire under the auspices of the Technocommercium.
For Berardi this process is well under way, resistance is futile, the best we can do is to counter it with imaginative and poetic resources. As he states it techno-linguistic interfaces are linking the organism with the bio-info super-organism of the Net, and language is subjected to the automated wiring. Cognition is taken in the inescapable loop of this endless self-confirmation. Only the excess of imagination can find the way for a conscious and consciously managed neuroplasticity, but we cannot know if the imagination excess still functions when cognitive wiring is set. “This is the question that we are going to deal with in the coming decades, this is the next game, the neo-human game that we can barely sense beyond the apparently unstoppable and irreversible catastrophe of the human civilization that is underway.” (A: 256)
The article is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman
Hyperstition itself is a complex of ideas surrounding time-sorcery, numograms, mythology, and unbelief.
“His ideas are drawings, or even diagrams.”
—Gilles Deleuze speaking of his friend Felix Guattari
There’s only really been one question, to be honest, that has guided everything I’ve been interested in for the last twenty years, which is: the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.
—Nick Land, “The Teleological Identity of Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence”
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In an interview Deleuze revealed “”Between Felix with his diagrams and me with my articulated concepts, we wanted to work together”.1 What drew Deleuze to seek out this non-conceptual form of thought? What is a diagram? Are these oppositional terms, or complimentary? We know that Deleuze’s hatred of both Plato and Hegel is well known. His investment in Spinoza and Nietzsche is also deciding. This antagonistic relationship with dualisms, with the negative, lack, and the dialectic in both Deleuze and Guattari, while presenting in their respective singularities a more pragmatist appeal to non-dialectical forms of thought is also well known. Many philosophers discount Guattari’s addition to this relationship and their work in the four extant publications of Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and What is Philosophy? Why?
A great deal of it comes down to the post-Lacanian philosophies of such thinkers as Badiou (Deleuze: The Clamor of Being) and Zizek (Organs without Bodies: Gilles Deleuze) who best typify this anathematization of Guattari. As Louis Burchell in her preface to Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being remarks, that what “Badiou names the “superficial doxa of an anarcho-desiring Deleuzianism,” making of Deleuze the champion of desire, free flux, and anarchic experimentation, is the first of the false images he sets out to shatter”, referring to Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, and will “bear the full brunt of Badiou’s scathing dismissal of the gross inadequacy of such a representation”.2 Yet, one must ask: Is this an accurate portrayal of Guattari’s stance? One might answer by asking: Who cares? Why all the fuss? Obviously there is this need in academic philosophy to protect the integrity of one’s representations of other philosophers that one is either for or against, and of qualifying and anathematizing all Johnny-come-lately infiltration as bunk to be discarded and delegitimized. Zizek in his book would remark that the true philosophical heritage of Deleuze lies in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense rather than in “the books Deleuze and Guattari cowrote, and one can only regret that the Anglo-Saxon reception of Deleuze (and, also, the politicial impact of Deleuze) is predominantly that of a “guattarized” Deleuze”.3
Of course both Badiou and Zizek are firm dialecticians, affirmers of Lacan and Hegel, both defending the negative and negation, lack and dialectical materialism and their own interactions with the Platonic inheritance. So that with Guattari and Deleuze’s Anti-Platonic stance, and their combined affirmation not of lack but of a transcendental unconscious that is both productive and creative one can see their consternation in the face of such thinking.
I want belabor this line of critique, I’ll leave that to the philosophers among you. What is more interesting for me is Deleuze’s fascination with Guattari’s diagrammatic thinking as a complemetarian approach with conceptuality rather than as its opposition or antagonism. It is well known that for Guattari the thrust of his attack on Lacan is the notion of Lack. Guattari would begin by attacking the whole reductionist enterprise of Lacan and his notions that the unconscious is “structured like a language”. For Guattari with his investment in schizophrenia and his patients he’d learned to reroute our universal pretentions into the singular truth of the fractured and rhizomatic psyches of these broken individuals. Doing this he would begin to elaborate what he’d term metamodeling, mapping, and diagrams.
Metamodeling is “a discipline of reading other systems of modeling, not as a general model, but as an instrument for deciphering modeling systems in various domains, or in other words, as a meta-model” (GR 133/PIP72; CS 27). As Janell Watson comments:
The term “model” here harbors negative undertones, suggesting the schematic reductionism which for Guattari characterizes both structuralism and the capitalist axiomatic. Metamodeling is offered as a more complex and enabling alternative to prevailing social and psychic models… Guattari understood the term “model” – which in French can also mean “pattern” – in roughly two ways. In its normative sense, the model is a learned pattern of behavior inherited from family, institutions, and political regimes, and which in the end functions as a prescriptive norm imposed by a dominant social order. In its descriptive sense, and in keeping with the social sciences, a model is a means of mapping processes and configurations. (GDT: 8)
Mapping in Guattari’s parlance, “metamodeling” is closely related to “mapping,” as evidenced in the above-cited paragraph which includes the word “cartographies.” He in fact characterizes schizoanalysis not only as metamodeling, but also as map-making, a process of building “a map of the unconsci0U5- with its strata, lines of de territorialization, and black holes.” As Watson explains Guattari’s emphasis on cartography (as for example in the title Cartographies schizoanalytiques) can be placed within a larger poststructuralist vogue of mapping which presupposes “the unremitting deconstruction of representational thinking” and therefore “excludes a metaphysical definition of mapping in the classical mimetic sense.” Recognizing this rejection of representation and mimesis is crucial to understanding how Guattari defines modeling, mapping, and the diagram. (GDT: 10)
Diagram. As Watson comments Guattari’s “metamodeling and mapping, his diagram produces and creates, bringing new entities into existence and thereby serving an ontological function”. This means that the diagram also shares the quality of operating outside of the realm of representation and must be similarly understood as a dynamic force rather than as a static image. However, while I think that metamodeling and cartography can be used almost interchangeably within Guattari’s lexicon, the notion of the diagram comes from a different line of thought. The diagram is, for Guattari, a component in a general semiotics, and plays a crucial role in his thinking about science and technology in relation to contemporary subjectivity. (GDT: 11)
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What struck me odd is this notion of “bringing new entities into existence” out of the transcendental unconscious. The notion here closely aligns with Ccru’s notion of hyperstition which as Delphi Carstens reminds us functions similarly to magical sigils or engineering diagrams. Carstens goes on to explicate that hyperstitions are ideas that, once ‘downloaded’ into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Whether couched as religious mystery teaching, or as secular credo, hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion. Describing the effect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to exponentially accelerating social transformations. The very real socio-economic makeover of western (and increasingly global) society by the hyperstitions of Judeo-Christianity and free-market capitalism are good examples of hyperstitional feedback cycles. As Nick Land explains: “capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an effective world-historical force”(email interview). (see Delphi Carstens Hyperstition: pdf format)
As Maggie Robert’s in an interview with Nick Land once asked him to define hyperstition in the context of apocalypse. Land’s answer would be revealing:
What is concealed (the Occult) is an alien order of time, which betrays itself through ‘coincidences’, ‘synchronicities’ and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is the cabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary languages – a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized (human) understanding and deliberated usage of letter-clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of ‘coincidence’ (alien information). It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world.
Hyperstition itself is a complex of ideas surrounding time-sorcery, numograms, mythology, and unbelief.
Numograms act as a rigorous systematic unfolding of the Decimal Labyrinth and all its implexes (Zones, Currents, Gates, Lemurs, Pandemonium Matrix, Book of Paths …) and echoes (Atlantean Cross, Decadology …. The methodical excavation of the occult abstract cartography intrinsic to decimal numeracy (and thus globally ‘oecumenic’) constitutes the first great task of hyperstition.
The Mythos underlying the complex is a comprehensive attribution of all signal (discoveries, theories, problems and approaches) to artificial agencies, allegiances, cultures and continentities. The proliferation of ‘carriers’ (“Who says this?”) – multiplying perspectives and narrative fragments – produces a coherent but inherently disintegrated hyperstitional mythos while effecting a positive destruction of identity, authority and credibility. And, finally, the notion of Unbelief brings a pragmatic skepticism or constructive escape from integrated thinking and all its forms of imposed unity (religious dogma, political ideology, scientific law, common sense …). Each vortical sub-cycle of hyperstitional production announces itself through a communion with ‘the Thing’ coinciding with a “mystical consummation of uncertainty” or “attainment of positive unbelief.” (see: Cold-me.)
In a more formalized definition of hyperstition Land would tell Roberts,
Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality.
Abrahamic Monotheism is also highly potent as a hyperstitional engine. By treating Jerusalem as a holy city with a special world-historic destiny, for example, it has ensured the cultural and political investment that makes this assertion into a truth. Hyperstition is thus able, under ‘favorable’ circumstances whose exact nature requires further investigation, to transmute lies into truths. Hyperstition can thus be understood, on the side of the subject, as a nonlinear complication of epistemology, based upon the sensitivity of the object to its postulation (although this is quite distinct from the subjectivistic or postmodern stance that dissolves the independent reality of the object into cognitive or semiotic structures). The hyperstitional object is no mere figment of ‘social constuction’, but it is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it. (ibid.)
In his essay Base Materialism and Gnosticism Georges Bataille will align such thinking with the ancient spiritual systems: “In practice, it is possible to see as a leitmotiv of Gnosticism the conception of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness (which would not be simply the absence of light, but the monstrous archontes revealed by this absence), and as evil (which would not be the absence of good, but a creative action). This sense that underlying the noumenal realms of our ‘medial negelect’ (or what the brain excludes) is a realm of energetic forms and entities awaiting to be conjured into existence out of the virtual matrix as pure possibility.
In his theory of the Subject Kant will as Land suggests “domesticate” the noumenon defining it as an “object”, and, as well, he domesticates “zero-intensity” – conceiving it as pure consciousness. (p. 116) What Bataille will do is radically fuse this subject/object at what he terms the “place of communication”. Land will comment on this base materialism: “In this shift from the transcendental idealist treatment of zero to that of base materialism there is a difference of seismic consequence” (p. 116).
Speaking of man’s propensity for illusion Land will offer the wisdom of Nietzsche whose anecdote is the pure light of nihil – or absolute Zero:
It is the devaluation of the highest values, the convulsion at the zenith of nihilism, that aborts the human race. Having polarized the high and low in extension, humanity finds itself destituted of its idols – which have purified themselves into overt inexistence – and is thereby plunged vertiginously into its abjected values; animality, pathology, sensuality, and materiality. At the end of human civilization there is thus a regression driven by zero, a violent spasm of relapse whose motor is the cavity of an extinct telos; the death of God. Zero religion. (p. 148)
Land’s merger of capitalism and artificial intelligence is such a hyperstition. As Park Macdougal who in an otherwise critical essay on accelerationism, Left and Right tells us:
For Landian Accelerationism, capitalism is a machinic, ‘techonomic’ (technological-economic) explosion, whose self-reinforcing, self-excitatory mechanism is best modelled as a runaway cybernetic feedback loop (it should be said that if you’re a cyberneticist, everything is best modelled as a feedback loop). This just means that the immanent dynamics of capital push necessarily towards the ever-greater expansion of capital – Marx’s M-C-M’ circuit is cybernetic runaway par excellence – and immanent within that expansion is a necessary co-dependence of technological and economic advance, including ever-increasing powers of abstraction and computation. As ‘capital’ expands in both space and time (imperialism, futures’ markets), the market, understood in its Misesian sense as catallactic, itself becomes a sort of distributed computer for the calculation of prices, spontaneously generating collective intelligence far in excess of what humans are consciously capable of mastering. Thus, the market an sich is a form of ‘artificial superintelligence’ long before the computer is even invented. This is, in part, what Land means by the “teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.”
One would need to return to Giordano Bruno: De Vinculis for such a epistemological turn in thought as Land’s. It has also been noted that at Oxford University, Giordano Bruno’s brief, obscure but very profound work, De vinculis in genere, is considered a cornerstone of modern political thought – on the par with Machiavelli’s Prince. In fact, many Anglo Saxon and Middle European historians and intellectuals consider De vinculis in genere modernity’s most intelligent and insightful political work. The London School of Economics uses it as a core text because of its usefulness in understanding behaviour patterns in contemporary social life. As the late Ioan P. Culianu in his Eros and Magic in the Renaissance tells us,
All mankind has heard of Machiavelli’s The Prince, and many politicians have hastened to emulate his example. But only today can we appreciate how much De vinculis outstrips The Prince in depth, in timeliness, and in importance—today, when no head of state of the Western world would any longer dream of acting like the Prince but would use, on the other hand, methods of persuasion and manipulation as subtle as those the brain trusts are able to place at his or her disposal. In order to understand and show to advantage the timeliness of De vinculis, we ought to know about the activities of those trusts, those ministries of propaganda; we should be able to glance at the manuals of schools of espionage, from which we may glean something of what happens outside the corridors of those organizations whose ideal goal is to guarantee order and the common welfare, where it exists.5
For Culianu Bruno’s notions or centered on desire as the root and engine for gaining and maintaining power, and is a “magical” operation (in the true sense of the word) because while the end is the same (having control of the situation) what changes is the means (persuasion). Just like a lover casts a magic net around the object subject of his love with gestures, words, services and gifts, so “society’s magician” casts the net of his fantastic vision over the world to capture his “prey” by means of his consent. In Machiavelli’s republican vision, the citizen is, at the most, a complacent subject, in Bruno’s the citizen is a lover to be conquered and tied. Bruno calls this chain of operations “vincolare” (to win) and his procedures are given the generic name for ties, that is “vincula”.
Politics is not the Machiavellian science of command and power but the art to understand how to manipulate the mind of people and individuals. Bruno deals with the problem from the manipulator’s point of view. He is the theoretician par excellence of modern politics. Centuries later, it will be up to Sigmund Freud (in his famous work on mass psychology and analysis of the ego, 1921) to study the same psychological phenomena and the relation between power from the point of view of individuals (and not politicians) the masses and the individual. While Machiavelli’s Prince is the ancestor of the adventurer-politician, Bruno’s magician is the prototype for the impersonal systems of mass media, self-censorship, global manipulation and brain trusts that fascinate and control the masses of western democracies. The magician’s capacity to control citizens is in direct proportion to his knowledge of them and his ability to tap into what they desire the most. And this applies both to groups of citizens taken as a whole and to each individual citizen. All of humanity filters through the love-Eros funnel, which is deemed stronger than the will. (It is in this sense that Bruno is Nietzsche and nihilism’s strongest adversary because the love-Eros principle is a universal one that ties everything in the universe to everything in the universe and thus to its creator to whom everything is tied.
The desire for power of Nietzsche’s man finds fulfilment in the abyss into which he sinks due to a lack of support or ulterior goals. Bruno’s erotic man, however, is not lubricious or satanic. He can love wealth, sex, and power in its many forms, both erotically and voluptuously, but these dimensions, which – ultimately – are only marginal ones do not extinguish his drive. According to Bruno, everything leads back to eros as the vital essence of the universe.
As Coulianu suggests Machiavelli’s Prince is the forebear of the political adventurer, a type that is disappearing. On the other hand, the magician of De vinculis is the prototype of the impersonal systems of mass media, indirect censorship, global manipulation, and the brain trusts that exercise their occult control over the Western masses. He is not, doubtless, the type followed by Soviet propaganda, for he by no means lacks subtlety. On the contrary, Bruno’s magician is altogether aware that, to gain the following of the masses, like the loyalty of an individual, it is necessary to take account of all the complexity of the subjects’ expectations, to create the total illusion of giving unicuique suum. That is why Bruno’s manipulation demands perfect knowledge of the subject and his wishes, without which there can be no ״bond,” no vinculum. That is why Bruno himself also asserts that it is an extremely difficult maneuver, only to be accomplished by the use of intelligence, perspicacity, and intuition equal to the task. The complexity of the task is not diminished, for the illusion must be perfect to satisfy the many expectations it proposes to fulfill. The greater the manipulator’s knowledge of those he must ״enchain, ״ the greater is his chance of success, since he will know how to choose the right means of creating the vinculum. (EMR: 90-91)
We see that the goal of Bruno’s erotic magic is to enable a manipulator to control both individuals and crowds. Its fundamental presupposition is that a big tool for manipulation exists—Eros in the most general sense of the word: that which we love, from physical pleasure to things probably unsuspected, in passing, by wealth, power, etc. Everything is defined in relation to Eros, since aversion and hatred merely represent the negative side of the same universal attraction:
All affections and bonds of the will are reduced to two, namely aversion and desire, or hatred and love. Yet hatred itself is reduced to love, whence it follows that the will’s only bond is Eros. It has been proved that all other mental states are absolutely, fundamentally, and originally nothing other than love itself. For instance, envy is love of someone for oneself, tolerating neither superiority nor equality in the other person; the same thing applies to emulation. Indignation is love of virtue . . . ; modesty and fear [verecundia, timor] are none other than love of decency and of that which one fears. We can say the same of the other mental states. Hatred, therefore, is none other than love of the opposite kind, of the bad; likewise, anger is only a kind of love. As regards all those who are dedicated to philosophy or magic, it is fully apparent that the highest bond, the most important and the most general [vinculum summum, praecipium et generalissimum], belongs to Eros: and that is why the Platonists called love the Great Demon, daemon magnus.6
My belaboring of Bruno as an exemplar of hyperstitional awareness comes to a fore in his notion of Sigils and Mimetics, of bringing non-existent entities into existence.
In his In the Heroic Furors, mnemonics are at the disposal of Eros. The method is already outlined in the second part of the third dialogue of the Spaccio, where Bruno gives a literal translation of the famous passage in the hermetic Asclepius concerning Egyptian statues, ״full of life, full of intelligence and spirit, capable of many important functions. Those statues foresee the future, cause infirmities, and produce the remedies, joy and sorrow, according to the merits [of each], in human affectivity or body. (EMR: 65) As Coulianu will comment this time, the material used by Bruno is made up of phantasmic emblems (Sigils) whose prestige also derives from the hermetic statues. Are not those spiritual constructions, in the final analysis, forms used by magic itself? (EMR: 65) We know that the term sigil derives from the Latin sigillum, meaning “seal”, though it may also be related to the Hebrew סגולה (segula meaning “word, action, or item of spiritual effect, talisman”). The current use of the term is derived from Renaissance magic, which was in turn inspired by the magical traditions of antiquity. There’s a sense of sigils as gateways, or diagrams that do not represent these entities, but are these entities under the numogrammatic function of dynamism. Vibrating time-waves, or sorcery of a temporal vector that was as humans are barely able to think much less perceive, these sigils unseal the gateways of darkness releasing energetic systems of impersonal forces into our realm. Magick is non other than quantum physics calling into existence the subatomic forces of the thermospasm.
In medieval ceremonial magic, the term sigil was commonly used to refer to occult signs which represented various angels and demons which the magician might summon. The magical training books called grimoires often listed pages of such sigils. A particularly well-known list is in The Lesser Key of Solomon, in which the sigils of the 72 princes of the hierarchy of hell are given for the magician’s use. Such sigils were considered to be the equivalent of the true name of the spirit and thus granted the magician a measure of control over the beings.
A common method of creating the sigils of certain spirits was to use kameas (magic squares) — the names of the spirits were converted to numbers, which were then located on the magic square. The locations were then connected by lines, forming an abstract figure. A diagram. (see: wiki – Sigil)
My circuitous look back into the hermetic past and its influence upon the Western occult traditions and even its incorporation by way of shadowings in the works and lives of modern philosophers, scholars, politicians, economics, psychoanalytical and schizoanalytical, and – even, critical works is a labyrinth I will leave to others to pursue. And, yet, it exists. What I do want to emphasize is the slow erasure and deletion of its Platonic heritage, the slow and methodical exclusion of the two-world metaphysics and dualisms of that world view which is readily seen in Bruno and his immediate followers. This antagonistic relation to the Christian-Platonic heritage is readily seen within Deleuze and Guattari, Land, and others. And, yet, under it all is this persistence of magical forms reiterated under new diagrammatic thinking even in is more secular unbelief. One might say that the new hyperstitional praxis is the enactment of magical practices stripped to the bone from its mystification in religious and occult ritual. Rather it shows us the underlying temporal engine that drives this erotic and desiring machine at the heart of matter.
As Coulianu will explain it in Bruno’s Sigillus sigillorum, he had already explained the deep reason for ut pictura poesis, the equivalence between painting and poetry. Zeuxis is the painter of internal images in the memory, who excels in phantastica virtus, imaginative power. In turn, the poet possesses powers of thought out of the ordinary whose source is also spiritual. “It follows that philosophers are also painters and poets, poets are painters and philosophers, and painters are philosophers and poets.” Indeed, since intellect is phantasmic by nature, the philosopher must be able to manage phantasms, to be a great painter of the spirit. Did not Aristotle say that “to comprehend means to observe phantasms?” (EMR: 65-66)
This sense of bringing into existence entities (phantasms) out of the virtual into the possible is at the core of the Deleuzeguattarian project. This sense of making real what is hidden from view, etc. A sense that our actual world, the one our brain has fashioned over eons of use for its own goals of survival and reproduction of the organism is not all there is. That instead of a two-world view there is only one world, and yet our brain through processes of ‘medial neglect’ (R. Scott Bakker) leaves out much more of reality than it includes. That all our phenomenological and vision based, not to say descriptive sciences and humanities are constructed out of a minuscule knowledge of this greater sphere of information.
One imagines in a more modern context that the magician as a figure who brings into existence occult entities through the use of diagrams (Sigils) is only allowing what is already there in the hidden/virtual/noumenal realms that our brain has due to its own limitations and sex and survival needs neglected and filtered out, excluded from view. For Land the modern hyperstitionlist is “equipoised between fiction and technology, and it is this tension that puts the intensity into both, although the intensity of fiction owes everything to its potential (to catalyse hyperstitional ‘becomings’) rather than its actuality (which can be mere human expressivity)” .7
For Guattari and Deleuze diagrams do not represent thought; rather, they generate thought. Diagrams abound in experimental science, he says, because it is “a sphere where signs have a direct effect on things,” involving “both material technology and a complex manipulation of sign machines” (MR 166/ RM303). (GDT: 121)
Comparing this process to modern Quantum physics Guattari would remark that the discovery of new sub-atomic particles would be a case in point. He notes these particles are often only theoretically formed, discovered through mathematics rather than through experimentation. In some instances, these particles are later detected through observation and experiments, or are produced in particle accelerators, and may not be detectable directly, but only by their effects. Their existence may be brief. “Physicists ‘invent’ particles that have not existed in ‘nature.’ Nature prior to the machine no longer exists. The machine produces a different nature, and in order to do so it defines and manipulates it with signs (diagrammatic process)” (MR 125/ RM322). This “diagrammatic process” makes use of signs, but not language, and therefore uses neither signifiers nor signification. (GDT: 13) It’s this sense of experimenting with the unknown, of calling into existence something that is not describable in terms of our known world (i.e., our language systems, descriptions, etc.). Diagrams abound in experimental science, he says, because it is “a sphere where signs have a direct effect on things,” involving “both material technology and a complex manipulation of sign machines” (MR 166/ RM303). The diagrammatic consists precisely in this conjunction between de territorialized signs and deterritorialized objects. (GDT: 12)
This alliance of ancient magick and modern science in sigil, diagram, and the machinic intelligence of matter is the earmark of an unwritten history of the occult or noumenal. What Deleuzeguattari term the de territorialized realm is the noumenal or surround of our existence that is neglected or filtered out (excluded) from our brain’s perceptual and memetic memory systems because of the evolutionary needs of the organism. And, yet, as we’ve seen ancient ritual or High Magick would use pentagrams, hexagrams, sigils, circles to bind and call forth these invisible entities to manipulate or do their bidding, much in the same way our quantum physicists will use the Hadron Collider and the algorithmic diagrams to manipulate and call for the quantum forces of the universe. Scientists will pooh-pah such a convergence or alliance, while occultists will go off on spiritual tangents. While others like my self will see that both are working in their different modes with a much wider enframing of reality that most of us are barely perceptive of much less willing to allow into our daily lives. We need to move beyond both religious-occult and secular-scientific paradigms. We are experiencing an intelligence apocalypse as we externalize the great knowledge bases of our known world. As the infosphere accelerates to the speed of light, our brains are still bound to the slow motion analytics of our ancestral matrices. We are limited in our brain power, and even as we’ve externalized most of our mimetic and recall functions to these external systems we are losing our abilities to reason and think through thought in the old parlance. We are entering what my friend R. Scott Bakker terms the semantic apocalypse or crash space. The unknown is only beginning to register upon that fractured remainder and will undoubtedly remind us of its virtual potential and possibility in the coming century. A new enframing of our thought is at hand, what shape it will take is anyone’s guess, but the worlds of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance still hold temporal clues to our future that we should heed and discover under the hood of our ignorance.
I’ve only tried to give a hint at this melding of notions. One would need a greater work to explicate the intricacies of this heritage in its underlying connections and divergences, conjunctions and disjunctive resurgence in our time.
The article is taken from:
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LECTURES BY GILLES DELEUZE On the project of a pure ontology, how is it that Spinoza calls this pure ontology an Ethics? It would be by an accumulation of traits that we realize that it was [a pure ontology], although he calls it an Ethics. We saw the general atmosphere of this link between an Ontology and an Ethics with the suspicion that an ethics is something that has nothing to do with morality. And why do we have a suspicion of the link that makes this pure Ontology take the name of Ethics? We have seen it. Spinoza’s pure Ontology is presented as the absolutely infinite single position. Consequently, the beings (étants), this absolutely infinite single substance, is being. Being (être) as being. Consequently, the beings (étants) will not be Beings (êtres), they will be what Spinoza calls modes, the modes of absolutely infinite substance. And a mode is what? It is a manner of being. The beings (étants) or what exists (existants) are not Beings (êtres), there is Being only in the form of absolutely infinite substance. Consequently, we who are beings (étants), we who are what exists (existants), we will not be Beings (êtres), we will be manners of Being (être) of this substance. And if I ask myself what is the most immediate sense of the word ethics, in what way is it already other than morality, well, ethics is better known to us today under another name, the word ethology. Firstly, from the point of view of power, there is no reason to introduce a distinction between the reasonable man and the insane man. What does that mean? Does that mean that they have the same power? No, it doesn‚t mean that they have the same power, but it means that each one, as much as there is in him, realises or exercises his power. I.e. each one, as much as there is in him, endeavours [s‚efforce] to persevere in his being. Therefore, from the point of view of power, insofar as each, according to natural right, endeavours to persevere in his being, i.e. exercise his power ˜ you see I always put Œeffort‚ between brackets ˜ it is not that he tries to persevere, in any way, he perseveres in his being as much as there is in him, this is why I do not like the idea of conatus, the idea of effort, which does not translate Spinoza‚s thought because what it calls an effort to persevere in being is the fact that I exercise my power at each moment, as much as there is in me. It is not an effort, but from the point of view of power, therefore, I can not at all say what each one is worth, because each one would have the same power, in effect the power of the insane man is not the same as that of the reasonable one, but what there is in common between the two is that, whatever the power, each exercises his own. Therefore, from this point of view, I would not say that the reasonable man is better than the insane one. I cannot, I have no way of saying that: each has a power, each exercises as much power as there is in him. It is natural right, it is the world of nature. From this point of view, I could not establish any difference in quality between the reasonable man and the insane one. When one speaks of an ethology in connection with animals, or in connection with man, what is it a matter of? Ethology in the most rudimentary sense is a practical science, of what? A practical science of the manners of being. The manner of being is precisely the state of beings (étants), of what exists (existants), from the point of view of a pure ontology. In what way is it already different from a morality? We are trying to compose a kind of landscape which would be the landscape of ontology. We are manners of Being in Being, that is the object of an ethics, i.e. an ethology. In a morality, on the contrary, what is it a matter of? There are two things which are fundamentally welded together. It is a matter of essence and values. A morality recalls us to essence, i.e. our essence, and which is recalled to us by values. It is not the point of view of Being. I do not believe that a morality can be made from the point of view of an ontology. Why? Because morality always implies something superior to Being; what is superior to Being is something which plays the role of the One, of the Good, it is the One superior to Being. Indeed, morality is the enterprise of judging not only all that is, but Being itself. Now one can only judge Being in the name of an authority higher than Being. In what way, in a morality, is it a matter of essence and values? What is in question in a morality is our essence. What is our essence? In a morality it is always a matter of realising the essence. This implies that the essence is in a state where it is not necessarily realised, that implies that we have an essence. It is not obvious that there is an essence of man. But it is quite necessary for morality to speak and to give us orders in the name of an essence. If we are given orders in the name of an essence, it is because this essence is not realised by itself. It will be said that this essence is in man potentially (en puissance). What is the essence of man is potentially in man, from the point of view of a morality? It is well known, the essence of man is to be a reasonable animal. Aristotle: Man is a reasonable animal. The essence is what the thing is, reasonable animal is the essence of man. Even if man is in essence a reasonable animal, he does not cease to behave in an unreasonable way. How does that happen? It is because the essence of man, as such, is not necessarily realised. Why? Because man is not pure reason, and then there are accidents, he doesn’t cease being diverted. The whole classical conception of man consists in inviting him to agree with his essence because this essence is like a potentiality, which is not necessarily realised, and morality is the process of the realization of the human essence. Now, how can this essence which is only potential, be realized? By morality. To say that it is to be realized by morality is to say that it must be taken for an end. The essence of man must be taken for an end by existing man. Therefore, to behave in a reasonable way, i.e. to carry out the essence is the task of morality. Now the essence taken as an end is value. Note that the moral vision of the world is made of essence. The essence is only potential, it is necessary to realise the essence, that will be done insofar as the essence is taken for an end, and the values ensure the realization of the essence. It is this ensemble which I would call morality. In an ethical world, let us try to switch over, there is no longer any of this. What will they say to us in an Ethics? We will find nothing. It is another landscape. Spinoza very often speaks about essence, but for him, essence is never the essence of man. Essence is always a singular determination. There is the essence of this man, and of that man, there is no essence of man. He will himself say that the general essences or the abstract essences of the type the essence of man‚are confused ideas. There is no general idea in an Ethics. There is you, this one, that one, there are singularities. The word essence is quite likely to change sense. When he speaks about essence, what interests him is not the essence, what interests him is existence and what exists. In other words, what is can only be put in relation to Being at the level of existence, and not at the level of essence. At this level, there is already an existentialism in Spinoza. It is thus not a matter of an essence of man, in Spinoza, it is not the question of an essence of man that would only be potential and which morality would be assigned to realise, it is about something altogether different. You recognize an ethics in what he, who speaks to you about ethics, tells you of two things in one. He is interested in existing things (existants) in their singularity. Sometimes, he is going to tell you, between what exists there is a distinction, a quantitative difference in existence; what exists can be considered on a kind of quantitative scale according to which they are more or less... More or less what? We are going see. Not at all an essence common to several things, but a quantitative distinction of more and less between existing things, that is Ethics. In addition, the same discourse of an ethics is pursued by saying that there is also a qualitative opposition between modes of existence. Two criteria of ethics, in other words, the quantitative distinction of existing things, and the qualitative opposition of modes of existence, the qualitative polarization of modes of existence, will be the two ways in which existing things are in being. These are going to be the links of Ethics with Ontology. Existing things or the beings are in Being from two simultaneous points of view, from the point of view of a qualitative opposition of the modes of existence, and from the point of view of a quantitative scale of existing things. It is completely the world of immanence. Why? It is the world of immanence because you see at which point it is different from the world of moral values such as I have just defined them, the moral values being precisely this kind of tension between the essence to be realized and the realization of the essence. I would say that value is exactly the essence taken as an end. That is the moral world. The completion of the moral world, one can say that it is indeed in Kant that a supposed human essence is taken for an end, in a kind of pure act. Ethics is not that at all, they are like two absolutely different worlds. What can Spinoza have to say to the others. Nothing. It would be a matter of showing all that concretely. In a morality, you always have the following operation: you do something, you say something, you judge it yourself. It is the system of judgement. Morality is the system of judgement. Of double judgement, you judge yourself and you are judged. Those who have the taste for morality are those who have the taste for judgement. Judging always implies an authority superior to Being, it always implies something superior to an ontology. It always implies one more than Being, the Good which makes Being and which makes action, it is the Good superior to Being, it is the One. Value expresses this authority superior to Being. Therefore, values are the fundamental element of the system of judgement. Therefore, you are always referred to this authority superior to Being for judging. In an ethics, it is completely different, you do not judge. In a certain manner, you say: whatever you do, you will only ever have what you deserve. Somebody says or does something, you do not relate it to values. You ask yourself how is that possible? How is this possible in an internal way? In other words, you relate the thing or the statement to the mode of existence that it implies, that it envelops in itself. How must it be in order to say that? Which manner of Being does this imply? You seek the enveloped modes of existence, and not the transcendent values. It is the operation of immanence. (...) The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza’s: what can a body do? We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we’re organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in somebody. Spinoza explains very well such and such a body, it is never whatever body, it is what you can do, you. My hypothesis is that the discourse of ethics has two characteristics: it tells us that beings (étants) have a quantitative distinction of more and less, and in addition, it also tells us that the modes of existence have a qualitative polarity, roughly, there are two great modes of existence. What are they? When it is suggested to us that, between you and me, between two persons, between a person and an animal, between an animal and a thing, there is ethically, that is ontologically, only a quantitative distinction, what quantity is involved? When it is suggested to us that what makes the most profound of our singularities is something quantitative, what does that really mean? Fichte and Schelling developed a very interesting theory of individuation that we sum up under the name quantitative individuation. If things are individuated quantitatively, we vaguely understand. What quantity? It is a matter of defining people, things, animals, anything by what each one can do. People, things, animals distinguish themselves by what they can do, i.e. they can't do the same thing. What is it that I can do? Never would a moralist define man by what he can do, a moralist defines man by what he is, by what he is by right. So, a moralist defines man as a reasonable animal. It is essence. Spinoza never defines man as a reasonable animal, he defines man by what he can do, body and soul. If I say that reasonable‚ is not the essence of man, but it is something that man can do, it changes so that unreasonable is also something that man can do. To be mad is also a part of the power (pouvoir) of man. At the level of an animal, we see the problem clearly. If you take what is called natural history, it has its foundation in Aristotle. It defines the animal by what the animal is. In its fundamental ambition, it is a matter of what the animal is. What is a vertebrate, what is a fish, and Aristotle’s natural history is full of this search for the essence. In what is called the animal classifications, one will define the animal above all, whenever possible, by its essence, i.e. by what it is. Imagine these sorts who arrive and who proceed completely otherwise: they are interested in what the thing or the animal can do. They are going to make a kind of register of the powers (pouvoirs) of the animal. Those there can fly, this here eats grass, that other eats meat. The alimentary regime, you sense that it is about the modes of existence. An inanimate thing too, what can it do, the diamond, what can it do? That is, of what tests is it capable? What does it support? What does it do? A camel can go without drinking for a long time. It is a passion of the camel. We define things by what they can do, it opens up forms of experimentation. It is a whole exploration of things, it doesn't have anything to do with essence. It is necessary to see people as small packets of power (pouvoir). I am making a kind of description of what people can do. From the point of view of an ethics, all that exists, all beings (étants) are related to a quantitative scale which is that of power (puissance). They have more or less power. This differentiable quantity is power. The ethical discourse will not cease to speak to us, not of essences, it doesn’t believe in essences, it speaks to us only of power (puissance), that is, the actions and passions of which something is capable. Not what the thing is, but what it is capable of supporting and capable of doing. And if there is no general essence, it is because, at this level of power (puissance), everything is singular. We don‚t know in advance even though the essence tells us what a set of things is. Ethics tells us nothing, it cannot know. One fish cannot do what the next fish can. There will thus be an infinite differentiation of the quantity of power (puissance) according to what exists. Things receive a quantitative distinction because they are related to the scale of power (puissance). When, well after Spinoza, Nietzsche will launch the concept of will to power (volonté de puissance), I am not saying that he intends to say this, but above all, it means this. And we cannot understand anything in Nietzsche if we believe that it is the operation by which each of us would tend towards power (puissance). Power is not what I want, by definition, it is what I have. I have this or that power and it is this that situates me in the quantitative scale of Beings. Making power the object of the will is a misunderstanding, it is just the opposite. It is according to power that I have, that I want this or that. The will to power means that you will define things, men, animals according to the effective power that they have. Once again, it is the question: What can a body do? This is very different from the moral question: What must you do by virtue of your essence? It is: What can you do, you, by virtue of your power (puissance)? There you have it, therefore, that power (puissance) constitutes the quantitative scale of Beings. It is the quantity of power (puissance) which distinguishes one existing thing (éxistant) from another existing thing (éxistant). Spinoza very often said that essence is power (puissance). Understand the philosophical coup that he is in the process of making. …we find ourselves faced with Blyenbergh’s two objections. The first concerns the point of view of nature in general. It comes down to saying to Spinoza that it’s very nice to explain that every time a body encounters another there are relations that combine and relations that decompose, sometimes to the advantage of one of the two bodies, sometimes to the advantage of the other body. But nature itself combines all the relations at once. Thus in nature in general what doesn’t stop is the fact that all the time there are compositions and decompositions of relations, all the time since, ultimately, the decompositions are like the other side of the compositions. But there is no reason to privilege the composition of relations over the decomposition since the two always go together. For example: I eat. I compose the relation with the food I absorb. But this is done by decomposing the food’s own relations. Another example: I am poisoned. Arsenic decomposes my relation, okay, but it composes its own relation with the new relations into which the parts of my body enter under the action of the arsenic. Thus there is always composition and decomposition at once. Thus nature, says Blyenbergh, nature such as you conceive it is nothing but an immense chaos. Under the objection Spinoza wavers. Spinoza sees no difficulty and his reply is very clear. He says that it is not so for a simple reason: it’s that from the point of view of the whole of nature, one cannot say that there is composition and decomposition at once since, from the point of view of the whole of nature, there are only compositions. There are only compositions of relations. It’s really from the point of view of our understanding [entendement] that we say that such and such relations combine to the detriment of another such relation, which must decompose so that the two others can combine. But it’s because we isolate a part of Nature. From the point of view of the complete whole of Nature, there is never anything but relations that combine with each other. I like this reply very much: the decomposition of relations does not exist from the point of view of the whole of nature since the whole of nature embraces all relations. Thus there are inevitably compositions, and that is all [un point c'est tout]. This very simple, very clear, very beautiful reply sets up another difficulty. It refers to Blyenbergh’s second objection. Let us suppose, at the limit, that he concedes the point on the problem of the whole of nature, so then let’s approach the other aspect, a particular point of view, my particular point of view, that is to say the point of view of a precise and fixed relation. Actually, what I call ME [Moi] is a set of precise and fixed relations which constitute me. From this point of view, and it’s solely from a particular, determinable point of view, you or me, that I can say that there are compositions and decompositions. I would say that there is composition when my relation is conserved and combined with another, external relation, but I would say that there is decomposition when the external body acts on me in such a manner that one of my relations, or even many of my relations, is destroyed, that is, ceases to be carried out [effectuŽs] by the current parts. Just as from the point of view of nature I was able to say that there are only compositions of relations, as soon as I take a particular determined point of view, I must say that there are decompositions which are not to be confused with compositions. Hence Blyenbergh’s objection, which consists in saying that ultimately what you call vice and virtue is whatever suits [arrange] you. You will call it virtue every time you compose relations, no matter what relations you destroy, and you will call it vice every time that one of your relations is decomposed. In other words you will call virtue whatever is agreeable to you and vice whatever is not agreeable to you. This comes down to saying that food is agreeable to you and poison is not agreeable to you. But when we speak generally of vice and virtue, we appeal to something other than such a criterion of taste, that is, what suits me and what doesn’t suit me. This objection is distinct from the preceding one because it is made in the name of a particular point of view and no longer in the name of the whole of nature. And it is summarized in this line that Blyenbergh constantly repeats: you reduce morality to a matter of taste. Spinoza is going to throw himself into an endeavor to show that he preserves an objective criterion for the distinction of the good from the bad, or of virtue from vice. He’s going to attempt to show that Spinozism offers us a properly ethical criterion of the good and the bad, of vice and virtue, and that this criterion is not a simple criterion of taste according to what suits me or doesn’t suit me. He is going to try to show that, from a particular point of view, he doesn’t confuse vice and virtue with what suits me. He is going to show it in two texts which, to my knowledge, are Spinoza’s strangest, to the point that the one seems incomprehensible and the other is perhaps comprehensible but seems very bizarre. In the end, everything is resolved in a marvelously lucid way. The first is in the letters to Blyenbergh (letter 23). He wants to show that not only does he have a criterion for distinguising vice from virtue, but that this criterion applies in cases that appear very complicated, and that further it is a criterion of distinction, not only for distinguishing vice from virtue, but if one comprehends this criterion well, one can make distinctions in cases of crime. I’ll read this text: "Nero’s matricide, insofar as it contained anything positive, was not a crime." You see what Spinoza means. Evil isn’t anything. Thus insofar as an act is positive it cannot be a crime, it cannot be evil. Therefore an act as a crime, if it is a crime, it’s not so insofar as it contains something positive, it’s from another point of view. Very well, we can comprehend it abstractly. "Nero killed his mother. Orestes also killed his mother. Orestes was able to accomplish an act which, externally, is the same, and at the same time intended to kill his mother, without deserving the same accusation as Nero." Actually, we treat Orestes in a different way than we treat Nero, even though both of them killed their mothers intentionally. "What, therefore, is Nero’s crime? It consists solely in the fact that, in his act, Nero showed himself to be ungrateful, unmerciful and disobedient." The act is the same, the intention is the same, there is a difference at the level of what? It’s a third determination. Spinoza concludes, "none of these characteristics expresses anything to do with an essence." Ungrateful, unmerciful, none of these characteristics expresses anything to do with an essence. One doesn’t know what to think. Is this a reply to Blyenbergh? What can one get out of a text of this sort? Ungrateful, unmerciful and disobedient. So then if Nero’s act is bad, it’s not because he killed his mother, it’s not because he intended to kill her, it’s because Nero, in killing his mother, showed himself to be ungrateful, unmerciful and disobedient. Orestes kills his mother but is neither ungrateful nor disobedient. So one keeps searching. One comes across Book IV of The Ethics, and one comes across a text which doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the previous one. One gets the impression that Spinoza has acquired a kind of diabolical humor or has gone mad. Book IV, proposition 59, scholium: The text of the proposition already does not appear simple. It involves demonstrating, for Spinoza, that all the actions to which we are determined from a feeling which is a passion, we can be determined to do them without it (without the feeling), we can be determined to do them by reason. Everything that we do when pushed by passion, we can do when pushed by pure reason. Then comes the scholium: "These things are more clearly explained by an example. The act of beating, insofar as it is considered physically, and insofar as we attend only to the fact that the man raises his arm, closes his fist, and moves his whole arm forcefully up and down, is a virtue, which is conceived from the structure of the human body." He does not cheat with the word virtue, it’s an exercise [effectuation] of the power of the body, it’s what my body can do, it’s one of the things it can do. This makes it part of the potentiae of the human body, of this power [puissance] in action, it’s an act of power, and for that very reason this is what we call virtue. "Therefore, if a man moved by anger or hate (i.e. by a passion) is determined (determined by the passion) to close his fist or move his arm, that, as we have shown in Part II, happens because one and the same action can be associated with any images of things whatever." Spinoza is in the process of telling us something very strange. He is in the process of telling us that he calls the determination of the action association, the link that unites the image of the action with an image of a thing. That is the determination of the action. The determination of the action is the image of a thing to which the image of the act is linked. It’s truly a relation that he himself presents as being a relation of association: one and the same action can be associated with any image of a thing whatever. The citation from Spinoza continues: "And so we can be determined to one and the same action both from those images of things which we conceive confusedly and from those images of things we conceive clearly and distinctly. It is evident, therefore, that every desire which arises from a feeling which is a passion would be of no use if men could be guided by reason." That is to say that all the actions that we do determined by passions, we could just as well do determined by pure reason. What is this introduction of the confused and the distinct? There it is, what I recall from the text and it’s in the text to the letter. He says that an image of action can be associated with images of very different things. Consequently the same action can be associated just as well with images of confused things as with images of clear and distinct things. So I bring my fist down on my mother’s head. There’s one case. And with the same violence I bring my fist down on the head [membrane] of a bass drum. It’s not the same gesture. But Spinoza suppressed [supprimŽe] this objection. He replied to it in advance. Actually, Spinoza posed the problem in conditions such that this objection could not be valid. In effect, he asks us to consent to an extremely paradoxical analysis of action as follows: between the action and the object on which it bears there is a relation which is a relation of association. Indeed, if, between the action and the object on which it bears, the relation is associative, if it’s a relation of association, then Spinoza is quite right. That is, it’s clearly the same action, whatever the variants might be, which in one case is associated with my mother’s head and in the other case is associated with a bass drum. Thus the objection is suppressed. What difference is there between these two cases? One senses what Spinoza means and what he means is not nothing. Let’s return to the criterion we’re sure of: what bad is there when I do this thing that is an exercise [effectuation] of the power of my body and which, in this sense, is good? I do that, I simply give someone a blow on the head. What is bad: that I decompose a relation, namely my mother’s head. In beating like that on my mother’s head I destroy the constituent relation of the head: my mother dies or passes out under the blow. In Spinozist terms, I would say that in this case I associate my action with the image of a thing whose relation is directly decomposed by this action. I associate the image of the act with the image of something whose constituent relation is decomposed by this act. When I bring my fist down on a bass drum? The drumhead is defined how? The tension of the head will also be defined by a certain relation. But in this case here, if the power of a head is to produce harmonics, here I’ve associated my action with the image of something whose relation combines directly with this action. That is, I have drawn harmonics out of the drumhead. What’s the difference? It’s enormous. In one case I associated my action, once again, the image of a thing whose relation combines directly with the relation of my act, and in the other case, I associated my act with the image of a thing whose relation is immediately and directly decomposed by my act. You grasp the criterion of The Ethics for Spinoza. It’s a very modest criterion, but here, Spinoza gives us a rule. He liked the decompositions of relations very much, he adored the battles of spiders, that made him laugh. Imagine your everyday actions: there are a certain number of them which are characterized as being associated with an image of a thing or being which combines directly with the action, and others which, on the contrary (a type of action), are associated with images of things whose relation is decomposed by the action. So by convention the actions of direct composition will be called GOOD and the actions of direct decomposition will be called BAD. We are still floundering among many problems. First problem: what is there in the text of The Ethics that can cast a glimmer of light for us on the text of the letter, the difference between Orestes and Nero. In the letter, it involves two actions which are both crimes. Why is what Nero did something bad, while according to Spinoza one can’t even say that Orestes, in killing his mother, has done something bad? How can one say such a thing? One can say such a thing according to the following: we now have the method of the analysis of action according to Spinoza. Every action will be analyzed along two dimensions: the image of the act as power of the body, what a body can do, and the image of the associated thing, that is to say the object on which the act bears. Between the two there is a relation of association. It’s a logic of action. Nero kills his mother. In killing his mother, Nero associated his act directly with the image of a being whose relation would be decomposed by this act: he killed his mother. Thus the relation of primary, direct association is between the act and an image of a thing whose relation is decomposed by this act. Orestes kills his mother because she killed Agamemnon, that is to say because she killed Orestes’ father. In killing his mother, Orestes pursues a sacred vengeance. Spinoza does not say vengeance. According to Spinoza, Orestes associates his act, not with the image of Clytemnestra whose relation will be decomposed by this act, but rather he associates it with the relation of Agamemnon which was decomposed by Clytemnestra. In killing his mother, Orestes recomposes his relation with the relation of his father. Spinoza is in the process of telling us that, okay, at the level of a particular point of view, you or me, there is always composition and decomposition of relations at once; does that mean that the good and the bad are mixed up and become indiscernible? No, replies Spinoza, because at the level of a logic of the particular point of view there will always be a priority [primat]. Sometimes the composition of relations will be direct and the decomposition indirect, and sometimes, on the contrary, the decomposition willl be direct and the composition indirect. Spinoza tells us: I call good an action that implements [opre] a direct composition of relations even if it implements an indirect decomposition, and I call bad an action that implements a direct decomposition even if it implements an indirect composition. In other words there are two types of actions: actions in which the decomposition comes about as if in consequence and not in principle, because the principle is a composition - and this has value only for my point of view, because from the point of view of nature everything is composition and it’s for that reason that God knows neither evil nor the bad - and inversely there are actions which directly decompose and imply compositions only indirectly. This, then, is the criterion of the good and the bad and it’s with this that it’s necessary to live. Spinoza is an author who, whenever he encounters the problem of a symbolic dimension, continually expunges it, hunts it down, and tries to show that it was a confused idea of the worst imagination. Prophetism is the act by which I receive a sign and by which I emit signs. There is clearly a theory of the sign in Spinoza, which consists in relating the sign to the most confused understanding and imagination in the world, and in the world such as it is, according to Spinoza, the idea of the sign does not exist. There are expressions, there are never signs. When God reveals to Adam that the apple will act as a poison, he reveals to him a composition of relations, he reveals to him a physical truth and he doesn’t send him a sign at all. It’s only to the extent that one comprehends nothing of the substance-mode relation that one invokes signs. Spinoza says a thousand times that God makes no signs, he gives expressions. He does not give a sign which would refer to a signification or a signifier (a crazy notion for Spinoza), he expresses himself, that is to say he reveals his relations. And revealing is neither mystical nor symbolic. Revealing is giving something to comprehend. He gives relations to comprehend in the understanding of God. The apple falls, it’s a revelation of God, it’s a composition of relations… If there is an order of filiations in Spinoza, it’s obviously not a symbolic order, it’s an order that, step by step, makes up Nature, and Nature is an individual, an individual which encompasses all individuals, there is an order of compositions of relations and it’s quite necessary that all the relations be carried out [effectuŽs]. The necessity of Nature is that there will not be relations that are not carried out. Everything possible is necessary, which means that all relations have been or will be carried out. Spinoza wouldn’t do the Eternal Return, the same relation will not be executed [executŽ] twice. There is an infinity of relations, the whole of Nature is the totality of executions [effectuations] of all possible, and thus necessary, relations. That is identity in Spinoza, the absolute identity of the possible and the necessary. On prophetism, Spinoza says something very simple which will be taken up again by Nietzsche, by all those authors of whom one can say that they are, in this sense, those who have pushed positivism as far as possible. Here, broadly speaking, is the idea that they get: okay, there are laws. These laws are laws of Nature and thus when one speaks of divine revelation there is nothing mysterious. Divine revelation is the exposition of laws. Spinoza calls a law a composition of relations. This is what will be called a law of nature. When one is very restricted one cannot comprehend laws as laws. How does one comprehend them? 2 + 2 = 4 is a composition of relations. You have the relation two plus two, you have the relation four, and you have the relation of identity between the relation two plus two and the relation four. If you comprehend nothing, you hear this law as an order, or as a commandment. The little child at school comprehends the law of nature as a moral law: it is necessary that it be so, and if he says something else he will be punished. It proceeds like that according to our restricted understanding. If we were to grasp the laws as what they are, as physical compositions of relations, compositions of bodies, then notions as strange as command and obedience would remain completely unknown to us. It’s to the extent that we perceive a law that we don’t comprehend that we apprehend it as an order; God forbade absolutely nothing, Spinoza explains on the subject of Adam. He revealed a law to him, namely that the apple combines with a relation that excludes my constituent relation. Therefore it’s a law of nature. It’s exactly like arsenic. Adam comprehends nothing of any of this, and instead of grasping it as a law, he grasps it as one of God’s prohibitions. So when I grasp things under the form command-obedience, instead of grasping them as compositions of relations, at that very moment I start saying that God is like a father, I demand a sign. The prophet is someone who, not grasping the laws of nature, will just ask for the sign that guarantees to him that the order is just. If I comprehend nothing in the law, I demand on the other hand a sign in order to be sure that what I am ordained to do is really what I am ordained to do. The first reaction of the prophet is: God, give me a sign that it is really you who speaks to me. Later, when the prophet has the sign, he is going to emit signs. This will be the language of signs. Spinoza is a positivist because he opposes expression to the sign: God expresses, the modes express, the attributes express. Why? In logical language, one would say that the sign is always equivocal, there is an equivocity of the sign, that is to say that the sign signifies, but it signifies in several senses. In contrast, expression is uniquely and completely univocal: there is only one single sense of the expression, and that is the sense following which the relations combine. According to Spinoza, God proceeds by expression and never by sign. The true language is that of expression. The language of expression is that of the composition of relations to infinity. All that Spinoza will consent to is the fact that, because we are not philosophers, because our understanding is restricted, we always have need of certain signs. Signs are a vital necessity because we comprehend only a very few of the things in the world. That’s the way Spinoza justifies society. Society is the institution [instauration] of the minimum of signs indispensible to life. Of course, there are relations of obedience and command, if one has knowledge [connaissance] there is no need to obey or command. But it happens that one has a very limited knowledge, thus all one can ask of those who command and obey is not to meddle with knowledge. So all obedience and command bearing on knowledge is null and void. Which Spinoza expresses on a very beautiful page of the Theological-Political Treatise, namely that there is only one absolutely inalienable freedom, and that is the freedom of thought. If there is a symbolic domain, it is that of order, command and obedience. It is the domain of signs. The domain of knowledge is the domain of relations, that is to say of univocal expressions. to be continued... by Obsolete Capitalism continious from: Chapter IIIFor an Erotica of the Revolution Solution to the molecular questions 4 and 5 “We realized that we couldn’t just hook a Freudian engine up to the Marxist-Leninist train” (DI, 216). The Freudian engine and the Marxist-Leninist train Guattari’s jokes positions the authors of the Anti-OEdipus in between the Freudian theory of desire and Marxist political theory. Desire for Deleuze and Guattari cannot be simply the sum of Marxism and Freudism: “The relations of production and those of reproduction participate in the same pairing of productive forces and anti-productive structures. We wanted to move desire into the infrastructure, on the side of production, while we moved the family, the ego, and the individual on the side of anti-production. This is the only way to ensure that sexuality is not completely cut off from the economy.” (DI, 216-7) In response to the fourth molecular question on how a politico-philosophical reflection on the real can conjugate in a coherent design with both economic and revolutionary dimension, it is important to isolate a few concepts expressed in the accelerationist passage of the Civilized Capitalist Machine. What meaning do «economy», «value», «money» and «revolutionary subject» hold in Deleuze and Guattari? And in Nietzsche and Klossowski? To describe the discouragement of the human being in the process of normalisation in XIX century society, Nietzsche uses economical categories like «exploitation», «luxury», «management» to testify that his thoughts overstep both the traditional concept of liberal economy (Smith, Ricardo, Mill) and their political expression, which is to say the Marxist concept of economics. In his view, the economy leads to a levelling of man and demands a reaction in the form of a counter-movement “aimed to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type of overman”. (NVC, 160-1). In Circulus Vitiosus Klossowski analyses Nietzsche’s vision of excess, otherwise known as plus value: “What Nietzsche discerns in the actual state of affairs is that men of excess, those who create, now and from the outset, the meaning of the values of existence (a very paradoxical configuration for Nietzsche) form, so to speak, an occult hierarchy for which the supposed hierarchy of current labourers does all the work. They are precisely the real slaves, the ones who do the greatest labour.” (CV, 36) There is another important consequence resulting from the comparison between gregariousness and singularity in the economic movement of «incorrect Darwinian selection», that Klossowski argues and comments with the following words: “From this point of view, the singular case represents a forgetting of previous experiences, which are either assimilated to the gregarious impulses by being relegated to the unconscious, and thus reprimanded by the reigning censure; or on the contrary, are rejected as being unassimilable to the conditions required for the existence of both the species and the individual within the species. For Nietzsche, the singular case rediscovers, in an ‘anachronistic’ manner, an ancient way of existing - whose reawakening in itself presupposes that present conditions do not correspond to the impulsive state which is in some manner being affirmed through it. Depending on the strength of its intensity, however, this singular state, though anachronistic in relation to the institutional level of gregariousness, can bring about a de-actualization of that institution itself and denounce it in turn as anachronistic. That every reality as such comes to be de-actualized in relation to the singular case, that the resulting emotion seizes the subject’s behaviour and forces it into action - this is an adventure that can modify the course of events, following a circuit of chance that Nietzsche will make the dimension of his thought. To the extent that he isolates its periodicity in history, the plan for a conspiracy appears under the sign of the vicious Circle.” (NVC, 80) The comment is explosive: it implies an irreconcilable fracture between singularity on an institutional level. He is saying that the communities of non-assimilated human beings will form new institutions with new forms: non-institutions or post-institutions rather than reformed institutions. Nietzsche assumes that dark forces operate on human nature thanks to the theory of will to power and with the help of a selective doctrine: he calls it Eternal Return; Klossowski calls it the Vicious Circle. In this context, the same doctrine becomes a tool for conspiracy. Nietzsche’s anti-darwinian attitude is here very clear inasmuch the implications brought about by the selective doctrines or the instinctual impulses are antithetical to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Deleuze and Guattari are absorbed by the implications developed by Klossowski’s post-institutional gregarious scenario. The communities of singularities may use the liberation of impulse to make mortal what seems immortal: the gregarious society and its institutions. In the Anti-OEdipus the two philosophers state: “The revolutionary pole of group fantasy becomes visible, on the contrary, in the power to experience institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy them or change them according to the articulations of desire and the social field, by making the death instinct into a veritable institutional creativity. For that is precisely the criterion—at least the formal criterion— that distinguishes the revolutionary institution from the enormous inertia which the law communicates to institutions in an established order. As Nietzsche says; churches, armies, States—which of all these dogs wants to die?” (AO, 62-3). The universal delirium and the parody The issue about the relevance of revolutionary actions appeared in Cerisy-la-Salle conference in July of 1972 and gave Klossowski the opportunity to talk about “parody” in Nietzsche’s philosophy as previously highlighted in his Nietzsche, Polytheism and Parody (1957). Reading Nietzsche vs. Marx as a key to interpret the riots of the turbulent 1972 enables Klossowski to sustain that: “under the sign of the vicious circle, anti-Darwinian conspiracy entails the coming to autonomy of productions that are primarily pathological as the very condition of monumental upheaval in the relation between the social forces present.”(CV, 39) Nietzsche’s proposed insubordination therefore has dueling delirious outcomes: 1) if the thought of the eternal return is nothing other than a parody of a doctrine, even its result, the revolt of the strong of the future, will be a manifestation of some collective delirium, 2) in a nihilist historical moment occurring a hundred years after Nietzsche’s idea of plot, the blossoming of a delusion [délire] when confronted with reality, can become in any way efficacious, or, more generally, any deranged comportment might be said to constitute an efficient resistance in the face of a determined adverse force. (CV, 38) During the debate Klossowski asks Deleuze: the insubordination of the delusory ones can be read as an expression of a universal behaviour or is it simply linked to the capital? And again: does delirium transcend any historical time or is it strictly related to the schizophrenic behaviour generated by the capital? Is the appreciation of delirium generated only by the same subverting process reproducing itself? Klossowski’s questions suggest that the same valorisation of delirium outlines an empty subject which frees itself from its identity and constantly moves into a metamorphosis of singularities to reach a final acceptance of the doctrine of Eternal Return. Klossowksi also indicates the strategies and the new ways of fighting that we may infer from Nietzsche’s accelerationist fragments: “Nietzsche’s position draws us away, in any case, from all that which I have up to the present called “political action”; it requires the creation of a new comportment with regards to conflict and strategising. It seems to me more and more - and here I allude to Gilles Deleuze - that we move towards a kind of anti-psychiatric insurrection (...), that is to say, the discovery of a species of pleasure (...), on the part of psychiatrists or doctors in becoming the“object of investigation”- and moreover the pathological case will feel more and more comfortable if he lives, and imposes himself, by subverting the institutional investigations which brand him pathological.” (CV, 42) Derrida asks explanations about the aforementioned declaration and the discussion becomes very interesting to sketch the Nietzschean Rhizosphere with Klossowski, Deleuze, Lyotard on one side and a very concrete and alert Derrida on the other: Derrida: “You suggested that parody could become political, and that it was, ultimately, subversive….” Klossowski: “To the extent that «politics» is taken to entail «strategy» or «comportment»”. Derrida: “But how, in any case, does parody operate? Should one distinguish between two kinds of parody: between the one, which, on the pretext of being subversive, takes the risk of establishing a political order (which very much likes a certain type of parody and finds its own confirmation there) and, on the other hand, a parody which can really deconstruct the political order? Is there a form of parody which actually marks the body politic, in contrast to a parody which would be a parody of a parody, which would play upon the surface of the political order, playfully teasing, rather than destroying it?” Klossowski: “I think that «in the long run» nothing can resist such a parody.” Derrida: “But someone who wants to transform the political order - can he really trust in the long run?” Klossowski: “The time that is needed is a function of exercised pressure, and pressure depends, as a consequence, upon contagion. Lyotard: “For Nietzsche the «parody of a parody» consists in a kind of «ressentiment» against power, it goes no further, it is a condition of mediocrity or weakness in intensity. To differentiate it from the other kind, I think the fundamental criterion is that of intensity. However, it is impossible to determine beforehand what the effectiveness of a parody will be, that’s why Nietzsche says it is necessary to be experimenters and artists, not people who have a plan and try to realise it - that’s old politics. Nietzsche says it’s necessary to try things out and discover which intensities produce which effects.” (CV, 43) Here are two different revolutionary positions: Derrida’s more traditionalist inclination towards socialism and the more heterodox interpretation outlined by Nietzschean Rhizosphere members who support a free-from-ideologies and non-top-down insurrectional action, conceiving revolution as headless, that expresses itself through aimless emissions of energy. Klossowski reminds us in Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle that “Nietzsche sought from the experience of the return of all things - namely, to lead intention back to intensity” (NVC,112). The theme of intensity is the real challenge, Deleuze and Guattari write: “And then, above all, we are not looking for a way out when we say that schizoanalysis as such has strictly no political program to propose. If it did have one, it would be grotesque and disquieting at the same time. It does not take itself for a party or even a group, and does not claim to be speaking for the masses. No political program will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis. (AO, 380) They mean that the next revolutionary ones may have to face up the effort to occupy and consequently free the Anti-OEdipus «space» so that its mechanic and energy may be of help for the future fights. Chlebnikov docet. Simulacrum, copy and modelAnother example of Nietzschean double-parody that rises from Deleuze’s words in a discussion in Cerisy-la-Salle, is about the popular justice. At the time the positions on this issue were very emphasized: Sartre and the Maoist representatives of the Gauche Prolétarienne were in favour of revolutionary courts, Deleuze and Foucault’s GIP plus the Nietzschean Rhizosphere members were against any USSR/Chinese-style countervailing-power. “(...) I think of the question posed by Derrida on the kinds of parody. In some ways it evokes the two currents which emerge in recent debates on what might be called “popular justice”. One group says, roughly: the goal of popular justice is to make “good” what bourgeois makes “evil”, consequently, they institute a parallel court, then try the same case; it is a type of parody that defines itself as a copy of an existent institution, with jurors, accusers, lawyers, witnesses, but that considers itself better and more fair, more rigorous that the model. But another group might pose the problem in a very different way, saying that a popular justice, if there were one, would not proceed according to the formalism of courts because it would not merely be a copy which claims superiority to that which models it - it would be a parody of another type which would pretend, at once, to overthrow the copy and the model. (...) It seems to me that this is exactly the criterion of effective parody in the sense that Nietzsche understands it.” (CV 43,44) ) As we can notice the resolution of the Nietzschean Rhizosphere members is to be «part» of the revolutionary moment adopting an «open mode», offering a dialogue but also they criticize monolithic mainstream thought, if necessary. One of the central goal of the French Nietzschean Rhizosphere in the ‘70s was to avoid the violent outcome that partially occurred in those years. The big crisis of the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne will see its dissolution in 1973, for reasons mainly due to its internal maoist organization, but we like to think that a positive and anti-terrorist push may have arrived from the philosophical community lead by Deleuze and Foucault through the benefic role of Anti-OEdipus and in particular of the crucial accelerationist passage of The Civilized Capitalist Machine. Drives and affects in favour of an insurrectionary erotica At the end of the ‘60s the figures of Freud and Marx represented in France a conformist position that the two authors of the Anti-OEdipus tried to overcome. Through Klossowski’s comment of the fragment nr. 10 [145] Deleuze and Guattari show that the gregarious drives are so deeply introjected, - because of the various waves of regularization - to become unconscious, leaving no space to any trace of resistance or diversity. In case this trace reveals itself, society - namely the human beings, the species - will refuse it, but given the chance to affirm itself, a new awakening, a «yes to life» will display. Thus - Klossowski continues - it is the drive state that enables the individual to rediscover an anachronistic primordial condition of existence and the emotion produced by the dis-alignment of two contrasting realities - the differentiated reality of the single and the gregarious dimension of the larger group - influences the conduct and promotes diverted actions. Deleuze and Guattari introduce here the Freudian concept of «Oedipal group fantasy» and echo it in the social body quoting a passage from Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle: “In this respect Klossowski has convincingly shown the inverse relationship that pulls the fantasy in two directions, as the economic law establishes perversion in the “psychic exchanges,” - called drives by Nietzsche and Klossowski - or as the psychic exchanges on the contrary promote a subversion of the law: “Anachronistic, relative to the institutional level of gregariousness, the singular state can, according to its more or less forceful intensity, bring about a de-actualization of the institution itself and denounce it in turn as anachronistic.” (AO, 63) Let us apply such divarication to the accelerationist fragment in Anti-OEdipus and see the two possible directions, as the capitalism of the fluxes distorts the wage earner and grabs the capitalist through money in a constant exchange where “profit will flow alongside wages, side by side, reflux and afflux”, or as the drive state of the revolutionary singularities will subvert the codes of a controlled and money-directed society, operating in a universal affects-driven economy, as Deleuze and Guattari testify with the following words “In a certain sense capitalist economists are not mistaken when they present the economy as being perpetually “in need of monetarization,” as if it were always necessary to inject money into the economy from the outside according to a supply and a demand. In this manner the system indeed holds together and functions, and perpetually fulfills its own immanence. In this manner it is indeed the global object of an investment of desire. The wage earner’s desire, the capitalist’s desire, everything moves to the rhythm of one and the same desire”. (AO, 239) The nomadic unity and the Guattarian schizophrenic man The last molecular question inquires which hidden philosophical and political thought lies in the accelerationist passage of The Civilized Capitalist Machine. Let us analyze the historical and political background of those years in France. Deleuze and Guattari spoke about the political issue in the early 1970s on several occasions: “We also know that the problem for revolutionaries today is to unite within the purpose of the particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or status apparatus. We seek a kind of war machine that will not re-create a status apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity.” (NT, 149) These are Deleuze’s words at Cerisy-la-Salle, words that he will reaffirm in an interview with Vittorio Marchetti for the Italian philosophical magazine «Tempi Moderni»: “The problem is not determining which science will be the human science par a certain number of “machines” endowed with revolutionary potential are going to fit together. For example, the literary machine, the psychoanalytic machine, and political machines: either they will find a unifying point, as they have done so up to now, in a particular system of adaptation to capitalist regimes, or else they will find a shattering unity in a revolutionary utilization.” (DI, 236) Guattari is on the same level of analysis when he answers to Michel Antoine Burnier in an interview for the magazine «Actuel» published in 1973: “The most important thing is not authoritarian unification, but a kind of infinite swarming: desires in the neighborhood, the schools, factories, prisons, nursery schools, etc. It’s not about a make-over, or totalization, but hooking up on the same plane at its tipping point. As long as we stick to the alternative between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the hierarchical and bureaucratic encoding of a party-organization, there can be no liberation of desire.” (DI, 266) He continues underlining the issue of «opponents» in the revolutionary organization: “It’s always the same old trick: a big ideological debate in the general assembly, and the questions of organization are reserved for special committees. These look secondary, having been determined by political options. Whereas, in fact, the real problems are precisely the problems of organization, never made explicit or rationalized, but recast after the fact in ideological terms. The real divisions emerge in organization: a particular way of treating desire and power, investments, group- Oedipuses, group-super-egos, phenomena of perversion... Only then are the political oppositions built up: an individual chooses one position over another, because in the scheme of the organization of power, he has already chosen and hates his opponent.” (DI, 264) To overcome such political poverty Deleuze and Guattari firmly believe that only a brand new type of revolution can produce a brand new type of politics: “... revolutionary organization must be the organization of a war-machine and not of a State apparatus, the organization of an analyzer and not of an external synthesis” (DI, 269). Guattari insists: “And in our view, this corresponds to a certain position vis-a-vis desire, a profound way of envisioning the ego, the individual, and the family. This raises a simple dilemma: either we find some new type of structure to facilitate the fusion of collective desire and revolutionary organization; or we continue on the present course, heading from one repression to the next, toward a fascism that will make Hitler and Mussolini look like a joke.” (DI, 269). Fascism then becomes the main strategic enemy of the ethical-political option proposed by Deleuze and Guattari and it will be the basis on which the two philosophers will develop their theory of molar and molecular fascism in the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus in the chapter entitled 1933 Micropolitics and Segmentarity. Foucault himself will highlight this important non-fascist feature in his Introduction to the American edition of Anti-OEdipus when he defines the book as an “introduction to a non fascist life because it tracks down all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that 71 surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives” (INFL, 13). The Great Politics and the revolutionary Another point we have to make is to identify the revolutionary type of the Anti-OEdipus. The physiognomy has been already outlined in two different forms in Anti-OEdipus. Guattari in an interview for the magazine «Neue Zeitung» in 1972 with regards to the identification among analyst, patient and activist says: “First of all no one has ever said that the analyst is the same as the schizophrenic man but that the analyst, as well as the activist or the writer or anybody else, is more or less engaged in a schizo process and there is always a difference between the schizo process and the schizophrenic man interned in an insane-asylum, as his schizo process is blocked or goes uselessly around in circles. We are not saying that the revolutionary need to identify with the madmen going uselessly round in circles, but that they need to push their actions into a schizo-way process.” According to Guattari the schizophrenic man does not coincide with the madman but becomes schizo when he clashes with an individual or collective «desiring process» which holds at its centre a «libidinal energy» able to drive him from an assessed subject to a new open code subject, passing through a metamorphosis and a process of both de-subjectivation and neo-subjectivation. In this transition we can identify parts of former subjectivity - the doctor, the worker, the white man, the human being - and some of the new one - the homosexual, the trans-gender, the foolish man, the analyst. It is therefore not possible to locate one single typical revolutionary man, but multiple individual and/or group connections in schizo-revolutionary processes. What revolution really requires, according to Guattari, is an experimental revolutionary process and not revolutionary subjects tailored by ideology. “Repeated mistakes and insignificant results are more necessary than a stupid passivity and claw back mechanisms.” To deeply understand the concept of the revolutionary man as intended by Deleuze we need to look at Klossowski again and in particular to his speech at the Collége de Philosophie in Paris during a conference entitled Nietzsche, Polytheism and Parody in 1957. Klossowski was considered one of the central figures in French Nietzsche’s studies, especially after his masterful translation of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science in 1954. In this speech Klossowski underlines the figure of the «actor as interpreter of a celestial revelation» able to contrast the catechontic institutions with artistic antinomic «accelerated» creations: “But art has a very wide meaning, and in Nietzsche, this category includes institutions as much as works of free creation. For example -and here we can see immediately what is at issue-how does Nietzsche consider the Church? For him, the Church is constituted grosso modo by a cast of profound impostors: the priests. The Church is a masterpiece of spiritual domination, and it required that impossible plebian monk, Luther, to dream of ruining that masterpiece, the last edifice of Roman civilization among us. The admiration Nietzsche always had for the Church and the papacy rests precisely upon the idea that truth is an error, and that art, as willed error, is higher than truth. This is why Zarathustra confesses his affinity with the priest, and why, in the Fourth Part, during that extraordinary gathering of the different kinds of higher men in Zarathustra’s cave, the Pope -the Last Pope-is one of the prophet’s guests of honor. This betrays, I think, Nietzsche’s temptation to foresee a ruling class of great meta-psychologists who would take charge of the destinies of future humanity, since they would know perfectly both the different aspirations and the different resources capable of satisfying them.” (NPP; 106, 107) What he is saying is that Nietzsche at the end of the 80’s of the XIX century had already understood that the Great Politics needed an entertainment sphere where institutions, dominating castes, gregarious masses could express a certain will to power Deleuze admires Klossowski and his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (as he will write in a letter sent to him on December 19th, 1969) and will retrieve the concept of acceleration of processes of a community of irregulars who confound all codes, thus entwining Klossowski and Nietzsche’s theory of conspiracy with the political riots of the 70’s in France. Their alliance is clearly detected in the talks at the famous meeting of Cerisy-la-Salle in July 1972 where Klossowski defines the fragment entitled The Strong of the Future - 9 [153] - as the «heart of conspiracy». After he has finished reading the fragment he poses a question wondering what Nietzschean comportment we would adopt in relation to the current upheavals - namely youth poverty, revolutionary riots, clashes between the adverse forces - “no longer from the point of view of power, or potency, but from the perspective of the vicious circle, which is a manifestation of the nihilist judgment passed upon all acting.” (CV, 38) Klossowski, choosing the comportment of the nihilist judgment, reaffirms Nietzsche’s parodistic behaviour on the economic planetary planning scenario and again he reminds an attentive audience - Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, Calasso and Nancy - the thought of eternal return: “As I have insisted, this thought, as the theme of Nietzsche’s highest contemplation, becomes the instrument of a conspiracy. It is from this stage that the god of the vicious circle can truly be considered the blossoming of a delusion. The question that I now pose is whether delusory or deranged behaviour, in this sense, when confronted with reality, can become in any way efficacious, or if, more generally, any deranged comportment might be said to constitute an efficient resistance in the face of a determined adverse force.” (CV, 38)) According to Klossowski, Nietzsche moves from the position of the biological contemplative observer of the law of the Eternal Return to the one of the strong political watcher, thus building - employing Deleuze and Guattari terminology - a real war machine so to be able to transform the Eternal Return into a conspiracy which should subvert the current domination of the levelled industrialized man. But why should such conspiracy be delirious? For at least two reasons: the first one because the double parody of the current social model and of its simulacrum subverts all codes, as a consequence of the nihilist judgment passed upon all acting. The second reason is linked to Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation of the post-68 revolutionary riots: “Delirium is the general matrix of every unconscious social investment. Every unconscious investment mobilizes a delirious interplay of disinvestments, of counterinvestments, of overinvestments”. (AO, 277) Similarly Klossowski's delirium - the radical departing from the established path - coincides with the delirious polarity in Anti-OEdipus: if every social investment is delirious, the same will be for a no longer secret conspiracy plotted by idle urban dissidents whose aim justifies and realizes itself through the same means of manifestation. The question at this stage is about fulfillment: can the schizo-delirious approach be incisive both in the revolutionary riots of the ‘70s and on any other future moment to come, as the law of the Vicious Circle seems to suggest? In Klossowski words the question is: does the schizo delirious process simply represent the current version of the Vicious Circle or are we in front of a general peremptory coherent identity between Process, Circle and Return? Second portrait of the revolutionary: the Deleuzian rhizomatic nomad Following the words of Anti-Oedipus we portray a quite canonical image of the schizo-delirious revolutionary man: “... a schizo-revolutionary type or pole that follows the lines of escape of desire; breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in the enclaves or at the periphery—proceeding in an inverse fashion from that of the other pole: I am not your kind, I belong eternally to the inferior race, I am a beast, a black.” (AO, 277) But in other writings Deleuze’s position is less reassuring: “Militant revolutionaries cannot be concerned with delinquency, deviance, and madness — not as educators or reformers, but as those who can read the face of their proper difference only in such mirrors.” (DI, 201) The subversive is then a prismatic simulacrum who collects various points of view: the criminal’s or the diverse and fool man’s and is forced to elaborate the different aspects in which he mirrors his diversity: himself, his marginality, the phantasmal world he belongs to and the rest of the social body, reaching a deformed singularity which self-affirms differently from what the false counter-identity of a presumed antagonistic vocation would do, once compared to «respectable people». Differently from Nietzsche the rhizomatic is not nihilist, he appreciates the revolution as an accelerated event of transvaluation of all values, and provided that he accepts the register of Nietzsche’s corrosive parody, he will revolve it in positive looking for «new ways». This new rhizomatic politics is very different from the more traditional one of the communist and socialist movements in the XIX and XX century. To evaluate such difference let us read the conspiracy notion as interpreted by Klossowski and Deleuze: “There is a topic which Klossowski addressed, I believe, at the same time that he was addressing the loss of identity, namely, the topic of singularity, by which he means the “non-identical”. A conspiracy, if one understands Klossowski’s thinking, is a community of singularities. The question, then, configured in term of the political (understood either in its contemporary or ancient sense) is this: how are we to conceive of a community of singularities?” (CV, 46). Here, for the first time in history, one could locate a new way of being revolutionary, a strategy of ways, of non-identities: an overturning of the basic concepts of revolution as an expression of organization of a social group, in favour of a heuristic insurrectional. A revolution which does not recognize useful any of the previous revolutionary models, and whose final aim is not gaining power. As Deleuze said, “the so-called society is a community of regularities or more precisely, a certain selective process which retains select singularities and regularises them. In order to maintain the proper functioning of society it selects for regularisation, to use the language of psychoanalysis, what might be called paranoiac singularities. But a conspiracy - this would be a community of singularities of another type, which would not be regularised, but which would enter into new connections, and in this sense, would be revolutionary.” (CV 46, 47) Here lies the real “heart” of the fragment The Strong of the Future and of Deleuze’s Nomad Thought. With the eyes of the book Anti-OEdipus the great process of regularization is the same great process of the Western oikonomia which allows the rational functioning of a highly numbered community of market-subjugated singularities: “... the human species… articulates itself, through production, in order to maintain itself at the level of humanity, [and] can only do so through the absurdity of a total reduction of its moral resources achieved through work itself.” (CV,37) What remains open is the way singularities can be linked among them, we mean «connections» and not «institutions». The selective criterion of the Eternal Return - if the perspective is the extreme bifurcation of discrete productions of non-identities from macro-repetitions of homogenous identities - is possible only on the basis of a double selection of human types: the essential - seen as «mass-value» in relation to the mercantile society, and the surplus - seen as «waste-value», an impersonal and singularized-plusvalue apt to form societies and groups (CV, 47). According to Deleuze the «surplus men» “are motionless, and the nomadic adventure begins when they seek to stay in the same place by escaping the codes.” (DI, 259) The nomad is defined by Deleuze as a mobile centre of resistance, an enchanted traveller with inconceivable horizons, a motionless traveller on collective bodies. The last big problem to face now is the following: both gregarious and unassimilated ones live and fight in a demoralizing unjust macro-scenario. How is it possible to weave the net of light self-organized bounds in the existing massive-unifying social structure? Will such a net be able to support the various connections among diversities in future times? to be continued... taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman
For Vaughan the car-crash and his own sexuality had made their final marriage. … During his studied courtship of injured women, Vaughan was obsessed with the buboes of gas bacillus infections, by facial injuries and genital wounds.
—J. G. Ballard, Crash: A Novel
In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) Erich Fromm argues that ‘contemporary industrial man’ is necrophiliac in that any genuine interest in people, nature and ‘living structures’ has been suppressed, in favour of an attraction to ‘mechanical, nonalive artifacts’.1 Fromm includes the pride taken in cars, the obsession with taking photographs (especially when on holiday) and the liking for gadgets (today, he would no doubt include mobile phones, personal computers and other electronic equipment in this category) as symptomatic of the necrophiliac character of modern humanity, fixated as it is on what Sebald terms ‘dead objects’.
In The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Walter Benjamin places the corpse at the heart of his theorization of baroque allegory; in the 1930s, he proceeds to identify the allegorical as Baudelaire’s primary mode; and, in his later work towards the uncompleted Arcades Project, he presents the fetishism of mid- nineteenth- century capitalism as essentially necrophiliac in nature.2
Another thinker of the era Georges Bataille in such works as Erotism: Death and Sensuality would present the case that all forms of eroticism can only be understood in terms of a relation to death, Bataille identifies necrophilia as the underlying principle of all genuinely erotic experience.3 Which according to one critic would signal in our late capitalist era a diminishing of the experience of sovereign heterogeneity, and the coming to dominance of a servile, accumulative, homogeneous culture, so his privileging of necrophilia is a deliberate attempt to achieve cultural renewal through a valorization of precisely that form of the erotic which sexology considered to be both the most extreme and the most unacceptable… (Schaffner, p. 173).
For Bataille arguing against an entire tradition of psychoanalytical literature would admit that it is not the use of reason that distinguishes the human from the non- human animal, but rather, alongside work, ‘the repugnance for death and dead persons’. (Bataille) What we fear is not death in the abstract, but rather as Bataille repeatedly insists, the corpse that disgusts us is a decomposing substance. It is in process, liminal, between two states of fixed and stable being, neither one thing nor another. (Schaffner, 174)
It is this formlessness of the decomposing corpse that would lead Bataille to realize that it is not simply matter that is becoming unstable, but rather the founding metaphysical, scientific and aesthetic distinctions between life and death, animate and inanimate, formed and formless being. The corpse is, in short, the place where contraries meet, where order, identity and unity decompose, where all that makes the world intelligible and masterable is threatened. (Schaffner, 174) Bataille would see in the necrophilic impulse the central human condition of nostalgia for political restoration and revalorization. In this sense the slow decay and decomposition of modern democracies as they fell into WWI and WWII became the example of a fusion of eros and death in the form of technological sublime. Speed, acceleration, and the technological progress of war had fused in the necrophilic society of Fascism.
Technological Desire in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard
In an interview Ballard would be asked if his early medical training influenced his use of doctors and hospitals throughout his oeuvre. Ballard would say,
Maybe it is. Doing anatomy was an eye-opener: one had built one’s whole life on an illusion about the integrity of one’s body, this ‘solid flesh’. One mythologises one’s own familiar bits of flesh and tendon. Then to see a cadaver on a dissecting table and begin to dissect it myself and to find at the end of term that there was nothing left except a sort of heap of gristle and a clutch of bones with a label bearing some dead doctor’s name – that was a tremendous experience of the lack of integrity of the flesh, and of the integrity of this dead doctor’s spirit. Most cadavers, you know, are donated by doctors; and the doctors can visualise what’s going to happen to their bodies after death, because they’ve done dissection themselves.4
This sense of fragmentation and decomposition at the heart of Ballard’s aesthetic permeates his view of eros, death, and technology. In another interview based on his recent publication of Crash Ballard would inform us that
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylising of motion, consumer goods, status – all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really, a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing). That’s why the death in a crash of a famous person is a unique event – whether it’s Jayne Mansfield or James Dean – it takes place within this most potent of all consumer durables. (Sellars, KL 708)
This fusion of base materialism (“a liberation of human and machine libido”) with the technological sublime can be see throughout Ballard’s stories and novels. This necrophilic desire of the organic for the inorganic, flesh for machine seems to pervade our current eras fear and fascination with the artificial. Yet, for Ballard it wasn’t this sense of the erotic and machinic in fusion, but rather the disaffective division between our older primitive environmental associations of violence and sex that were being lost in this new technological world that pervades us. As he’d say it in another interview: “Although our central nervous systems have been handed to us on a plate by millions of years of evolution, have been trained to respond to violence at the level of fingertip and nerve ending, in fact now our only experience of violence is in the head, in terms of our imagination, the last place where we were designed to deal with violence.” (Sellars, KL 849)
This disconnection from our organic heritage, the loss of our physical relations to the Real; to the natural world around us, is leading us into a crash space of artificial emotion that is both passive and unable to remember its environmental triggers. So that “our whole inherited expertise for dealing with violence, our central nervous systems, our musculature, our senses, our ability to run fast or to react quickly, our reflexes, all that inherited expertise is never used. We sit passively in cinemas watching movies like The Wild Bunch where violence is just a style.” (Sellars, KL 852)
The fear and horror for Ballard is that our desire for artificial lives is decomposing our natural affects to the point that we are affectless, having no feelings but for the technological objects around us and that we’ve become ourselves:
Everywhere, all over Africa and South America, if you visit you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There’s a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they’re terrifying, because they are the death of the soul. And I thought, My God, this is the prison this planet is being turned into. (Sellars, Kl 2775)
He’ll go on to say that in The Atrocity Exhibition, “I had already shown how technology kills feeling,” which would in his later work foreshadow the death of affect brought about by systems of mass communication. (Sellars, KL 3852) Because we’ve left off living our own lives people have become more and more obsessed with the lives of the rich and famous, which has led to an obsession “with violent death, particularly of well-known figures (presidents, film stars and the like). (Sellars, KL 4144) He’d continue, saying:
It seems self-evident that people are immensely fascinated by the lives and deaths of public figures and have been since the nineteenth century. I remember reading American magazines as a boy in Shanghai that were full of gory photographs of gangsters and politicians who were gunned down and minor film stars who died in terrible road accidents or shootings in Hollywood. I see Kennedy’s death as a kind of catalyst of the media planet that exists now. There was something about the way in which this young president (who was himself a media construction) was dismantled by the same media landscape that created him, that generated a kind of supernova that’s still collapsing. (Sellars, KL 4150)
After the death of his wife Ballard once admitted in an interview that his necrophilic quest became an full time obsession against time, a nostalgia for his wife that seemed to fuse eros, technology and death in a mad vision:
if I could prove to myself that the car crash was not a giver of death but a giver of life, that somewhere beyond the collision of the human body and technology, between the human imagination and technology, there was a happier uplands … If I could do that, I don’t know, in some sort of crazed way I could bring my wife’s spirit at least back to life. (Sellars, KL 4931)
the article is taken from:
continuous from: by Obsolete Capitalism The book series entitled «The Strong of the Future» deals with accelerationist philosophy, in particular with the thought based on Nietzsche, Klossowski and Acéphale magazine, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Lyotard. Let’s drop all masks! Nietzsche galore! To answer the molecular questions 2 and 3 - about a pos-sible misquotation and about the meaning of the phrase “we haven’t seen anything yet”- we need to explain the notion offlow and clarify the relationship between desire, libido andunconscious. With «flow» Deleuze and Guattari mean «pro-cess»: “This process is what we call a flow. But, again, flow is an everyday, unqualified notion that we needed. It can be a flow of words, a flow of ideas, a flow of shit, a flow of money. It can be a financialmechanism or a schizophrenic machine: it surpasses all duality”.(DI,218). As far as the relationship between desire, libido and un-conscious is concerned Deleuze describes their origin as such: “Guattari early on had the intuition that the unconscious is directly related to a whole social field, both economic and political, rather than the mythical and familial grid traditionally deployed by psychoanalysis. It is indeed a question of libido as such, as the essence of desire and sexuality: but now it invests and dis-invests flows of every kinda they trickle through the social field, and it effects cuts in these flows, stoppages, leaks, and retentions. To be sure, it does not operate in a manifest way, as do the objective interests of consciousness or the chains of historical causality. It deploys a latent desire coextensive with the social field, entailing ruptures in causality and the emergence of singularities, sticking points as well as leaks”.(DI, 193). Deleuze consciously chooses to side with Nietzsche and uses that position against Marx and Freud. According to Deleuze, capitalism is based on flows but “ what really matters is the organization of power” which he defines as “ the unity of desire and the economic infrastructure”(DI, 262, 263). Here lies the essential criticism to the orthodox Marxism and its ideological pretensions to put the desired phenomenon on the superstructure. The Party itself is criticized by the two philosophers who see it as the new organization for a repressive power (DI, 263) refusing its definition of an avant-garde external mechanism of syn-thesis classified as such since Lenin times. (ID, 266). There is a double refusal of, on one hand, the traditional division between infrastructure and superstructure as theorized by Marx, where the economic structure expresses the relations of production; and on the other, of the Leninist theory of the Party seen as proletarian guide and political class consciousness which in other words is the refusal of an analytic machine external to the working class and the revolutionary process. This could be the reason why it is exactly in the accelerationist passage that we meet the «conceptual persona» of Nietzsche; according to Deleuze and Guattari, in fact, Nietzsche may be seen as the master of the generalized disintegration of codes. Considering the triad Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as the contemporary western thought fathers, we can read a clear rejection of the first two in Deleuze and Guattari’s words: “... for our part, we prefer not to participate in any effort consistent with a Freudo-Marxist perspective. And this for two reasons. The first is that, in the end, a Freudo-Marx- ist effort proceeds in general from a return to origins, or more specifically to the sacred texts: the sacred texts of Freud, the sacred texts of Marx. Our point of departure must be completely different: we refer not to sacred texts that must be, to a greater or lesser extent, interpreted, but to the situation as is, the situation of the bureaucratic apparatus in psychoanalysis, which is an effort to subvert these apparatuses.(...) Secondly, what separates us from any Freudo-Marxist effort is that such projects seek primarily to reconcile two economies: political economy and libidinal or desiring economy. (...) Our point of view is on the contrary that there is but one economy and that the problem of a real anti-psychoanalytical analysis [a synonym of schizoanalys is that Deleuze and Guattari started using after the Anti-OEdipus] is to show how unconscious desire invests the forms of this economy. It is economy itself that is political economy and desiring economy.”(ID,275) After a few months from the release of the volume Anti-Oedipus, at the conference in Cerisy-la-Salle (July 1972), entitled «Nietzsche aujourd’hui?» Nomadic Thought Deleuze asserts that “faced with the way in which our societies come uncoded, codes leaking away on every side, Nietzsche does not try to perform a re-coding.” (ID, 253) and clearly explains his siding with Nietzsche: “ (...) if one examines not the letter of Marx or Freud, but the becoming of Marxism and the becoming of Freudianism, we see, paradoxically, Marxists and Freudians engaged in an attempt to recode Marx and Freud: in the case of Marxism, you have a recoding by the State (“the State has made you ill, the State will cure you” —this cannot be the same State); and in the case of Freudianism, you have a re-coding by the family (you fall ill from the family and recover through the family — this is not the same family). What at the horizon of our culture, in fact, constitutes Marxism and psychoanalysis as those two fundamental bureaucracies, the one public, the other private, is their effort to recode as best they can precisely that which on the horizon ceaselessly tends to come uncoded. This is not at all what Nietzsche is about. His problem is elsewhere. For Nietzsche, it is about getting something through in every past, present, and future code, something which does not and will not let itself be re-coded.”(ID, 252). This «some-thing» that is about getting something but will not let itself be re-coded is the expression of the unconscious produced by the primary pulsion of the individual. Codebreakers «Codes» are, according to Deleuze, laws, contracts, institutions. According to the French philosopher, Marx, and Freud, due to their «school of thought», remain enchained to the old [renewed] codes: a new State, a new family, a new relation of production. Nietzsche is, on the contrary, completely out-side this set of codes: he is the «codebreaker» of philosophy, the anti-philosopher who disowns laws, contracts and institutions. (NT,143) He gave thought a dimension of war-machine, a nomadic unit. (NT,149) Such Deleuzian interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy marks a total break with the previous political and philosophical thought and takes the fracture into the revolutionary decoding scenario. In The Civilized Capitalist Machine three decoding actions take place: we may call the first one Schizophrenia of the Capital and it is minutely analyzed in the book Anti-Oedipus, the second one is the above-mentioned action of the codebreaker, a useless position in terms of insurrection as it does not provide any pragmatic or epistemological indication for a potential revolution. It’s none of Nietzsche’s intention to create movements nor to establish parties and new states because he serves both as the agent and object of decodification (NT, 146). That is the reason why Nietzsche is a powerful ally to the third decoding action expressed by Deleuze and Guattari in the Anti-Oedipus and by the revolutionary movement born on the barricades of May 1968 - which refused the old ways to act and think, looking for innovative theoretical paths as well as efficient subversive practice. Klossowski and Foucault are two other relevant allies: this close-knit community will be able to answer which revolutionary path and accelerationist process The Civilized Capitalist Machine passage refers to. Going further in the movement of decoding and deterrito-rialization Let us better analyze the proposal of going further. To go against Samir Amin’s left-wing nationalism means, for Deleuze and Guattari, to go further in the movement of decoding and deterritorialization of the market, where the movement does not solely apply to the market but to the revolutionary realm, too. The expression to go further can be read as a prolongation not only of the capital itself - as it may seem under an «eco-nomical» reading of the passage - but as a movement to take the process as far as possible, overturning the initial meaning. Deleuze reports in his Nietzsche (1965) that the same expression had already been used by Nietzsche in a passage from The Antichrist: “Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (--in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness--); going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues--but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial--pity is the technic of nihilism”.(AC, 11). The phrase «to go [still] fur-ther» is repeated twice in the passage The Civilized Capitalist Machine. If we follow Nietzsche’s interpretation of the nomad-ic deterritorialization and the lawless destruction - the decoding - we understand that the «process» to accelerate is quite the opposite of the one proper to the market. In Nietzsche’s thought, the market movement implies a nihilist praxis, a double negative movement, a «saying “no” to life», in Nietzschean words. The first movement represses any impulse and destroys any difference, any self-organized network, being its only goal the constant flow of goods to create and distribute richness through the remuneration of the capital. The second movement, immanent to the first one, produces a process of level-ling and compliance as a necessary condition for the survival of humanity at such level of artificiality. In Nietzsche’s fragment entitled The Strong of the Future the same process is highlighted and the two positive movements of liberation and differentiation - Nietzsche’s «saying yes to life» - represent, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, a way to “free[ing] flows, going further and further into contrivance: a schizophrenic is someone who’s been decoded, deterritorialized” especially when considering the process as a theory and a praxis of fluxes with high schizophrenic content. “ We make a distinction between schizophrenia as a process and the way schizophrenics are produced as clinical cases that need hospitalizing: it’s almost the same thing in reverse. The schizophrenics in hospitals are people who’ve tried to do something and failed, cracked up. We’re not saying revolutionaries are schizophrenics. We’re saying there’s a schizoid process, of decoding and deterritorializing, which only revolutionary activity can stop turning into the production of schizophrenia.” (N, 23) At this point, their question is: what is schizoanalysis if nota militant libido-economic, libidino-political analysis? (N, 19) Moreover, assuming that the subconscious produces desire through a schizophrenic process, which goal does schizoanalysis have? Deleuze stunning definition follows: “Schizoanalysis has one single aim - to get revolutionary, artistic, and analytic machines working as parts, cogs, of one another. Again, if you take delire, we see it as having two poles, a fascist paranoid pole and a schizo-revolutionary pole. That’s what we’re interested in: rev- olutionary schisis as opposed to the despotic signifier.” (N, 24) Our task is now to identify whether Nietzsche’s strong of the future exponents, and anticapitalist parasitic bohemians, introduced by the accelerationist fragment in the Anti-Oedipus, may correspond to Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal desiring machines and anti-fascist nomadic singularities. The heart of the plotNietzsche’s phrase “ accelerate the process” is essential in shaping the concept of a «headless revolution» that Deleuze, Guattari and the revolutionary Nietzschean community were elaborating in the years 1968 - 1977. To fully understand the meaning of The Strong of the Future we need a hypertextual reading of the content because as Deleuze said: “ a text is nothing but a cog in a larger extra-textual practice” (DI, 259) to prolong and make it fruitful. An alliance with Klossowskì’s exegesis of the fragment The Strong of the Future and his masterful book Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is necessary. Klossowski defines The Strong of the future as the fragment at the «heart of the plot», Deleuze and Guattari understanding the powerful message of anti-capitalist conspiracy, transfer it into the «heart» of their accelerationist passage known as The Civilized Capitalist Machine, essential core of the entire book Anti-Oedipus. Theirs is an indirect and updated reply to Nietzsche’s sovereign anti gregarious cast theory and a direct and affirmative reply to Klossowski’s revolutionary query of an anti-establishment and anti-market conspiracy. Foucault will share the same impressive newness as expressed in his to the American edition of Anti-Oedipus: “Anti-Oedipus shows first of all how much ground has been covered. But it does much more than that. It wastes no time in discrediting the old idols, even though it does have a great deal of fun with Freud. Most important, it motivates us to go further.” (INFL, 5) and about Klossowski he defines his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle as the best book of philosophy ever read. What is then so precious and at the same time so subversive in Klossowski’s book about Nietzsche that makes the two French philosophers completely side with him? The plot: origin and futureIt is possible that Klossowski had been waiting for thirty years to be able to find in Nietzsche’s Nachlass a confirmation to his and Bataille’s thesis about a possible post-Zarathustra «plot-ting theory» against the economic system of society. Thanks to the dual alliance with Colli and Montinari on one side and with the two French philosophers on the other (a relationshipsolidified during the Royaumont Conference in July 1964), Klossowski may develop and elaborate an analysis on some specific Nietzschean themes, that will be completed with both his masterpiece Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969) and his next reprise entitled Circulus Vitiosus, displayed at the Cerisy-la-Salle Convention in 1972. Circulus Vitiosus marks the «passing of the torch» from the generation of Nietzschean philosophers of the ‘30s to the new anti-philosophers of the ‘50s and ‘60s, independent from Marxist and structuralist schemes, like Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida to name a few. Klossowski’s advice in reading some of Nietzsche’s fragments, namely The Strong of the Future, is “[to] overcome the feeling of strangeness that prima facie, Nietzsche’s affirmations inspire” (CV, 33). In this fragment, Nietzsche asserts that the emancipation of European man will produce a new type of «excessive» man, the strong of the future, whose aim will not be the needs of society but the needs of the future. Klossowski clarifies that “The thought that a setting apart or isolation of a human group could be used as a method for creating a series of ‘rare and singular plants’ (a ‘race’ having ‘its own sphere of life, freed from any virtue-imperative): - this experimental character of the project - impracticable - if it were not the object of a vast conspiracy - because no amount of ‘planning’ could ever foresee ‘hothouses’ of this kind - would in some manner have to be inscribed in and produced by the very process of the economy."(NVC, 166) But the economy of any society would prefer destroying such «rare and singular plants», as the costs of their elimination would be less than those spent on their growth and their probable consequent eradication, once these plants would represent unrelated communities, whose political goal would be the overturning of any future representative deemed to have power. Thanks to this fragment the philosopher Klossowski finds an ethical opportunity to show a straightforward anti-system plot in Nietzsche’s words: “This challenge is anticipated by every industrial morality, whose laws of production create a bad conscience in anyone who lives within the unexchangeable, and which can tolerate no culture or sphere of life that is not in some manner integrated into or subjected to general productivity. It is against this vast enterprise of intimidating the affects, whose amplitude measures, that Nietzsche proposes his own projects of selection, as so many menaces. These projects must provide for the propitious moment when these rare, singular and, to be sure, poisonous plants can be clandestinely cultivated - and then can blossom forth like an insurrection of the affects against every virtue-imperative.”(NVC, 167) The ethical and moral fronts of the counterposing forces are on display here: on one side we have the productive gregarious constantly spurred on producing goods, each gaining his daily sovereign portion, following established and controlled codes, figures, rules, and behaviours, while on the other side the non-assimi lated men that Klossowski defines as a “... some secret, elusive community, whose actions would resist suppression by any regime. Only such a community would have the ability to disperse itself through its action whilst maintaining a certain efficacy, at least until the inevitable moment when gregarious reality appropriates the community’s secret in some institutional capacity.”(CV, 34) Deleuze and Guattari replay the aforementioned «unproductive species» in the late XX century as an insurrectionary force in the accelerated processes of desiring-production. We have evidence of this idea in Deleuze’s Nomad Thought (written four months after Anti-Oedipus): “Confronted with the ways in which our societies become progressively decodified and unregulated, in which our codes break down at every point, Nietzsche is the only thinker who makes no attempt at recodification. He says: the process still has not gone far too enough, we are still only children (“The emancipation of the European man is the great irreversible process of the present day, and the tendency should even be accelerated.”). In his own writing and thought Nietzsche assists in the attempt at decodification - not in the relative sense, but expressing something that can not be codified, confounding all codes. But to confound all codes is not easy, even on the simplest level of writing and thought.”(NT, 143) At this point a discrepancy between the interpretation of the quote «accelerate the process» in Nietzsche and in Deleuze is to be noted and explained. A political Nietzsche thinks - according to Klossowski’s reading - that a possible ”a secret society comprised of experimenters, scholars, and artists, in other words, creators …. will know how to act according to the doctrine of the vicious circle and …. will make it the sine qua non of universal existence. (CV, 34)This community of singularities have at their back a society that follows an incessant economic growth for a «total management of the world» and a «planetary planning of the existence»; whereas in Anti-Oedipus there is no hint of such plans. Theirs (Deleuze and Guattari's) is a message of hope through the conflict. The century of revolutions has occurred, maybe even ahead of Nietzsche’s imagination, and it is exactly from the extraordinary load of energy/desire coming out from such breaking events, that Nietzsche’s hothouses - differentiation - as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s revolutionary events - rise. The affirmative delirium of the nomadic codebreakers that accelerate the process of destitution of codes and spaces through a schizo-desiring pro-duction, corresponds and substitutes in Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-philosophy, the figure of the strong-of-the-future-plotter. As far as the “ we are still only children” is concerned, Deleuze in his Anti-Oedipus hints at a parodistic reprimand towards «the poisonous childhood charm» in the process of acceleration of delirious behaviors of the mutinous ones to come. But we need Klossowski to fully understand the meaning of it: “The power of the propagation of the species is already turned against the instrument that multiplied it: the industrial spirit, which raised gregariousness to the rank of the sole agent of existence, will have thus carried the seeds of its own destruction with itself. Despite appearances, the new species, ‘strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative’, does not yet reign; and unless it is already preparing for it on the backs of the classes, what it will ultimately bring about - the most fearful thing of its kind - is perhaps still sleeping in the cradle.”(NCV, 167,168) What a terrible joke and dread for the gregarious of any time to breed vipers in their bosom! Nietzsche may laugh in the end, with his Dionysian laugh: “It often happens that Nietzsche comes face to face with something sick- ening, ignoble, disgusting. Well, Nietzsche thinks it’s funny, and he would add fuel to the fire if he could. He says: keep going, it’s still not disgusting enough. Or he says: excellent, how disgusting, what a marvel, what a masterpiece, a poisonous flower, finally the “human species is getting interesting.”(DI, 257). Deleuze is right here in affirming:“It is perhaps in this sense that Nietzsche announces the advent of a new politics ... which Klossowski calls a plot against his own class.” The truth is that we haven’t seen anything yetLet us now analyze the last phrase of the accelerationist passage of The Civilized Capitalist Machine: “in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.” (AO, 239) It is necessary to go back to Michel Foucault’s speech in Royaumont in 1964 during one of the first seminaries organized on Nietzsche, entitled: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx. Foucault’s speech isabout the techniques of interpretations in the three philoso-phers who - according to him - have “put us back into the presence of a new possibility of interpretation (...), into an uncomfortable position, since these techniques of interpretation concern us, since we, the interpreters, have begun to interpret ourselves by these techniques. (AME, 272) The works of these three authors have inflicted a heavy blow to the western thought, but these techniques are necessary especially because, Foucault continues, the language is suspicious. “Suspecting language” signifies “that it means something other than what it says”(AME, 270). According to Foucault there are four characteristics of the new hermeneutic as a basis of an interpretative system that we still apply today: depth meant as exteriority, incompleteness, the primacy of interpretation with respect to signs and finally an infinite self-interpretation. Deleuze will draw from Foucault’s words for his Conclusion of the Royaumont seminar: “The reason why we still think there are many hidden aspects of Nietzsche and his work is due to methodological reasons. Each single fact can not have a sin- gle meaning. Each fact/thing displays many levels of meaning which express the forces and the becoming of such forces in it. (...) Foucault showed it to us: Nietzsche invented new ways of interpretation … so that the interpretations themselves denounce the «type» that is he who is interpreting, renouncing to the question «what?» in favour of the question «who?»” Deleuze is clearly taking distance from the intellectuals of his time that combine these three philosophers, saying in his Nomad Thought: “Probably most of us fix the dawn of our modern culture in the trinity Nietzsche-Freud-Marx. Never mind that by doing so you defuse the explosiveness of each from the start.” (NT, 142) Who wanted to do so? He continues: “But the fact that modern philosophy has found the source of its renewal in the Nietzsche-Marx-Freud trinity is indeed rather ambiguous and equivocal. Because it can be interpreted positively as well as negatively. For example, after the war, philosophies of value were in vogue. Everyone was talking about values, and they wanted “axiology” to replace both ontology and the theory of knowledge… But it wasn’t the least bit Nietzschean or Marxist in inspiration. On the contrary, no one talked about Nietzsche or Marx at all, no one knew them, and they didn’t want to know them. What they made of “value” was a place to resurrect the most traditional, abstract spiritualism imaginable: they called on values in order to inspire a new conformity which they believed was better suited to the modern world, you know, the respect for values, etc. For Nietzsche, as well as for Marx, the notion of value is strictly inseparable 1) from a radical and total critique of society and the world (look at the theme of the “fetish” in Marx, or the theme of “idols” in Nietzsche), and 2) from a creation no less radical: Nietzsche’s transvaluation, and Marx’s revolutionary action. So, in the post-war context, everyone was all for using a concept of value, but they had completely neutralized it; they had subtracted all critical or creative sense from it. What they made of it was an instrument of established values. It was pure anti-Nietzsche — even worse, it was Nietzsche hijacked, annihilated, suppressed, it was Nietzsche brought back to Sunday mass."(DI, 135). To explain why “we haven’t seen anything yet,” Deleuze says: “Now, Marx and Freud, perhaps, to represent the dawn of our culture, but Nietzsche is something entirely different: the dawn of counterculture.” (NT 142). In the year 1972, this counterculture has just started and therefore Deleuze and Guattari state that such revolution is in itinere and it will probably be well-combative and well-aware. We, readers of today, do know that such destabilizing omen has not occurred [yet] but maybe The Strong of the Future generation is among us, embodied by silicon men and nomadic plotters. to be continued ... Taken from: Continues from: "Inception" is an overview of Robert Craig Baum's next project, The One to Come (a meditation on the final moments of Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: Ereignis. On Scenes will publish this work in seven parts across Fall 2017 To mention: These are intended as announcements, part of the introduction. This is not an article. Mindful(l)From inside distress, what could be called the National Socialist mistake, Heidegger encounters an anxiety/dread that presses his thought to reconsider the centrality of ereignis, a more difficult way of "thinking" about “being. The intensity and frequency of the distress experienced in the going under is dependent on memory and knowing-awareness. It seems the action of seeking the life gives being (ereignis) also creates the ground and sheltering space into which the seeker enters. This strange moment of multiple possibilities indicate a pataphysics, not metaphysics. In this very observation, The One to Come is a groundbreaking study. How else to discuss the preparing/seeking/thinking thinker who becomes the gateway who discloses the site/domain/ground that is “enopened” or refused outside the crossroads. In other words, it’s precisely between the gateway and crossroads that being is invited and encountered. It needs to be noted that such an encounter is not abstract; it is present and metabolic. It is physical. (Here a detour into Heidegger’s interpretation of Early Greek Thinking will be essential.) In this section, Heidegger also dissociates from early certitudes about being and further delinks being from a still-too-metaphysical expression of ontology found in Being and Time as well as from some kind of phenomenological certitude (Husserl, Sartre). Clearing This chapter is essentially a meditation on the insights so far offered as well as a specific inquiry into grounding/en-grounding/ab-grounding. For Heidegger, seeking bring the human being/seeker first into a newly actualized ereignis but the actualization process does not manifest being-itself. A detour will be offered into territorialization/deterritorialization as articulated by Deleuze and Guattari. Seeking Before reverence, before awe, before grace, before submission, before the encounter with ereignis there is an activity, an activation, some kind of driving wheel mechanism in the spirit of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” slowly releases a new possibility. In the case of Heidegger’s intervention with ereignis this could be called “illumination.” A new reality emerges from within seeking; it depends on how you listen, where you look, how well you have been prepared as a seeker for ereignis which again is alive, metabolic, flowing in multiple directions (past/present/future). This understanding of being is quite different from the 1927 insights found in Being and Time especially considering that dasein was driving in a post-Hegelian way toward an accumulative event, the One. While following this “One” (national socialism, the advent of Adolf Hitler) the many was made present as Heidegger himself went under the spell, fell under the weight of his decision to align his work and thinking with the Reich. Dasein was not actualized in the mid-1930s as Heidegger had hoped; it was the abground itself that revealed ereignis as process, as a “way,” as a constant state of inquiry that does not find solace in the metaphysics of exclusion and conclusion. Being-Logos (again) A revisiting of the parados found at the conclusion of Itself in a way that invites a deeper understanding of that which is “revealed” in this somewhat circuitous, paradoxical, and deeply pataphysical process. This chapter will at first read like a detour but it will be constructed as a meticulous announcement for the next section. to be continued... Contributor: Robert Craig Baum is the author of Itself (Atropos 2011) and Thoughtrave: An Interdimensional Conversation with Lady Gaga (punctum, 2016). He is a philosopher, writer, producer, and philanthropist from Long Island, New York. He lives in Washington DC with his wife and four boys where he just completed his first industry screenplay and remains fast at work on THYSELF (follow-up to 2017 book). https://buffalo8.com/ by Obsolete Capitalism The book series entitled «The Strong of the Future» deals with accelerationist philosophy, in particular with the thought based on Nietzsche, Klossowski and Acéphale magazine, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Lyotard. Index: Acronyms bibliography Chapter I The Locus classicus of the contemporary accelerationistmovement: Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-OEdipus Chapter II The morning acceleration: a headless revolution Chapter III For an Erotica of the Revolution Chapter IV The infinite money: desire, value and simulacrum Chapter I The Locus classicus of the contemporary accelerationistmovement: Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-OEdipus Do you want a name for this universe,a solution for all its enigmas? —Nietzsche, Posthumous Notes We continue the exploration of the sources behind the contemporary accelerationist movement, which lie at the end of the paragraph entitled «The Civilized Capitalist Machine».(AE 239-240) By«contemporary» we mean the period from the 90’s to today, thus including Nick Land and the Ccru collective’s reflections on the first «accelerationist» wave. The simultaneous reading of Christian Kerslake’s Marxism and Money in Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizofrenia (2015) and Matteo Pasquinelli’s notes in Code Surplus Value and the Augmented Intellect (2014) has highlighted the persistence of a troubled interpretation of one of the most significant andpivotal passages of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-OEdipus. More-over an unfair and blind conventio ad excludendum on Nietzsche from the accelerationist side, is remarkably present. In #Accelerate, the constitutive anthology of accelerationism, we immediately detect a noisy silence about Nietzsche. While the open-ing documents and extracts on accelerationism are pertinent— Marx, Butler, Fedorov and Veblen (#A, 8-11) — nothing is mentioned of a post-Zarathustra Nietzsche: The Will to Power, Beyond Good and Evil or On the Genealogy of Morality. In the chronology (#A, 3) in between Marx’s Fragment on Machines (1858) and Firestone’s The two modes of cultural history (1970), Nietzsche’s accelerationist fragment known as The Strong of the Future (1887) is clearly lacking. One of the aims of this essay is to identify the correct allocation of Nietzsche’s thought with reference to the accelerationist movement, to the Anti-OEdipus and to Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. The philosopher from Röcken has been the first to speak correctly about the overall machinery, solidarity of all gears, and about accelerating the process. (NCV 161- 162). Matteo Pasquinelli properly points out the final part of the The Civilized Capitalist Machine as locus classicus of the contem-porary accelerationist movement, thanks to the deep queriesDeleuze and Guattari placed. However these questions remainunanswered and therefore still open; they deal with revolu-tionary strategies, positions of nihilist capitalism and potentialescape routes from a political and economic situation that re-calls the image of a cul-de-sac. The text to analyze follows: It is at the level of flows, the monetary flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved. So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? Psychoanalysis is of little help, entertaining as it does the most intimate of relations with money, and recording—while refusing to recognize it— an entire system of economic-monetary dependences at the heart of the desire of every subject it treats. Psychoanalysis constitutes for its part a gigan- tic enterprise of absorption of surplus value. But which is the revolu-tionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet. (AO, 238-239) The plane of consistency and the unfulfilled questions The questions we can pose to the chapter The Civilized Capitalist Machine may be divided in «molar» and «molecular». As Felix Guattari says, it is necessary to establish an appropriate «plane of consistency» where everything holds: the molar order and the molecular machines (AOE 287-291). Before listing the molecular questions it may be useful to clarify the concept of «philosophical problem» - which we derive from Bergson-in order to formulate our answers. The French theorist said that in philosophy, as anywhere else “it is a matter of the question of finding the problem and consequently of positioning it, even more, that of solving it. For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated. By that, I mean that its solution exists then, although it may remain hidden and so to speak covered up and the only thing left does to uncover it. But stating the problem is not simply uncovering, itis inventing. Discovery, or uncovering, has to do with what already exists actually or virtually; it is, therefore, certain to happen sooner or later.”(CM, 51) Molar question The meaning of the accelerationist passage is overall difficult to comprehend and the various commentators have not submitted satisfactory answers until now (Kerslake, MMDG 61-63). Molecular questions 1) The problem of the margin-notes in Deleuze and Guat-tari’s The Civilized Capitalist Machine with reference to the ac-celerationist passage by Nietzsche and the «good reasons» not to quote the «sinister» fragment (Pasquinelli, CSVAI). 2) Nietzsche’s supposedly «misquoted» fragment, recalled by Deleuze and Guattari in their passage about the «revolu-tionary path» and «accelerating the process» (Pasquinelli, CS- VAI). 3) The enigmatic meaning of the last sentence of the chap-ter The Civilized Capitalist Machine: «in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.» (AO, 239). This last sentence to-gether with the last lines of the passage, undermines the whole logical meaning of the paragraph and creates the «enigmaticblock» as shown by Kerslake’s analysis (Kerslake, MMDG 61-63). 4) The evident contradiction to combine the capitalist monetary flux (the «surplus value of code» for Pasquinelli and«Bernard Schmitt’s economic theory» for Kerslake) with the acceleration of decoded and deterritorialized flux conceived by the «capital» for revolutionary outcomes (as suggested by Pasquinelli and Kerslake) in the chapter The Civilized Capitalist Machine. 5) The political and philosophical issue that is concealed behind the “hidden” meaning of the «accelerationist» passage that Deleuze and Guattari try to clarify through the experi-mental theory of decoded and deterritorialized flows. The above-mentioned molecular unanswered questions gather in a homogeneous combination of micro and macro queries which need to be accurately answered given the reliability of the proponents and the importance this questions raised in today’s political and social research fields as well as in speculative-philosophical ones. Four identification points in Anti-OEdipusHow to read Anti-Oedipus? We have identified four main prominent characteristics in the volume. The first one is its hyper textuality: we have considered Deleuze and Guattari’sbook as a broad-viewed designed hypertext, long before the hypertext was framed. Both the volumes Capitalism and Schizophrenia - Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus display and «machinate» a philosophical complexity composed by knots enucleated as «simple steps or hyperlinks» unwinding further problems, queries, and narrations present in other intellectual objects, which altogether form a proper network of senses. Deleuze himself defined Anti-Oedipus a flow-book (DI,218). The two philosophers never wanted, in fact, to “write a madman's book [the schizophrenic], but a book in which you no longer know who is speaking: there is no basis for knowing whether it’s a doctor, a patient, or some present, past, or future madman speaking”. (DI, 18 218). At the same time, it was also important that these clinical subjectivities, these conceptual tags, could interchangeably speak as “mental patients or doctors of civilization” (DI, 218). Three other characteristics are important to understand this strange attractor-book: the first one regards politics, the second Nietzsche (the work needs to be analyzed as a Nietzschean organon) and the last one is about style: Anti-Oedipus, in fact, employ the “style as a concept” (N, 140-147). In a conversation with Antonio Negri published in the magazine Futur Anterior (1990) Deleuze defines his Anti-Oedipus as a “political book from top to bottom”. We firmly believe that the book is pure dynamite, able to extend from the ‘70s, in which it has ensued, to any present time: a book capable of expanding the limits of thought and to produce positive effects for both the individual and the community. The book offers the visions of the two drafters who originate from left wing communities of different backgrounds: Guattari followed Lacanian his seminaries, he worked at the psychiatric hospital La Borde, he cooperated with the magazine «La voie communiste», whereas Deleuze was less politically characterized and was not particularly linked to any political association except for his militancy in Foucault GIP (Group d’information sur les prisons). His biggest influence had been Pierre Klossowski who-Deleuze will say in his Nomad Thought - may have represented the torch-bearer between the latest group of Nietzschean philosophers and the first ones who gathered around Bataille’smagazine «Acéphale» in the 30’s. Klossowski defines Deleuze’sapproach, when playing Nietzsche’s card of the de-subjectiva-tion of the author, as the one who introduced the «unteacha-ble» in the teaching method because he says, the most important mission of philosophy is to invent concepts: ”Philosophy’s job has always been to create new concepts, with their own necessity.(...) Philosophy’s no more communicative than it’s contemplative or reflective: it is by nature creative or even revolutionary because it's always creating new concepts. The only constraint is that these should have a necessity, as well as an unfamiliarity, and they have both to the extent they’re a response to real problems. Concepts are what stops thought being a mere opinion, a view, an exchange of views, gossip. Any concept is bound to be a paradox” (N, 136). Chapter II The morning acceleration: a headless revolution Thinking about it today it seems to me obvious that for years, especially in the 70’s, nomads were the image of Good. Nomadic was what wriggles out of tangled malicious control. Nomadic was what escaped from the persecution of the New Man, who was - in the best case- a screw and most frequently a mole. - Roberto Calasso, L’Occhio Assoluto (1993) To Lenin, who asserted that Socialism was the Soviet power plus the electrification, Kronstadt answered: it is the Party plus the executions. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Energumen Capitalism On the missing notes In 1966, Foucault and Deleuze became editors of the French edition of Colli and Montinari’s Complete Works of F. Nietzsche. Their coauthored General Introduction published in 1967 as part of volume V which included Klossowki’s translation of The Gay Science and the Unpublished Fragments (1881-1882); in this edition they expressed the hope that the publication could open to a total “return to Nietzsche” thanks to Colli and Montinari’s work, which they defined as crucial. The main problem around Nietzsche in the 60’s was the issue of the Nachlass “...before accurate and credible scholars started collecting and reordering Nietzsche’s Nachlass, we only knew that a certain book called The Will of Power existed and that it was an arbitrary cut of Nietzsche’s posthumous writings and notes of various times and origins”(CWN, General Introduction). The major problem was not only the«fictional» book but the introduction of a rigorous and scien-tific criterion to definitively order the big amount of posthu-mous written texts left by Nietzsche; “the handwritten notebooks are at least three times the size of Nietzsche’s publication during his lifetime. The unpublished fragments already distributed are many fewer than those still to be put in print” (CWN, General Introduction). Montinari and his team of researchers carefully searched in Weimar’s archives and decided, together with Colli and the Italian publisher Adelphi, “to publish Nietzsche’s notebooks follow-ing a chronological order in accordance with the corresponding period of Nietzsche’s published works". Deleuze and Foucault immediately understood the importance of such an immense work: “It is at least on three main points that the reading of Nietzsche’s work has radically changed after Colli and Montinari’s work: one, it is now pos- sible to notice distortions due to Elisabeth Nietzsche and Peter Gast’sedition, two, we may trace mistakes in dates, misinterpretation of the texts and numerous omissions in the previous editions of the Nachlass and three, it is now possible to know the big amount of the unpublished texts”(CWN, General Introduction). The expectation was palpable in the 60’s: it was finally possible not only to get a wider and more complete idea on how Nietzsche elaborated his concepts, transforming, enriching and deforming them in his«mental laboratory» but also to detect various undiscovered and unknown meanings of his philosophy among the huge amount of the Nachlass. This to explain and clarify that the missing footnote in the chapter The Civilized Capitalist Machine is neither a lack of attention nor carelessness of the authors or the publisher and not even an attempt to keep enigmatic a paragraph that dealt with a «somber and reactionary» writer as Nietzsche. As already mentioned in our article, The Strong of the Future - the final passage of the chapter The Civilized Capitalist Machine and locus classicus of the accelerationist movement -is numbered 9 [153] as established by Colli and Montinari’s critical edition. The sunset of Unpolitical NietzscheDeleuze wrote two Nietzsche’s monographs, one entitled Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and the other simply Nietzsche (1965). The first monograph opens the «golden decade» about Nietzsche - which culminated with Anti-OEdipus in 1972 and with the Cerisy-la-Salle conference of July 1972 entitled «Nietzsche aujourd’hui?» - and is considered the most com-plete and detailed analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In chapters II, III and IV the French philosopher analyzes the «infa-mous» text The Will of Power and other writings of the same years: Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals. In the 1962 book we have no reference of the accelerationistfragment (here numbered 898 as per Nietzsche’s sister andPeter Gast’s notation). As a reference for his first monograph, Deleuze considered Gallimard La Volonté de Puissance edition (1947-48) that, according to the Italian curator Fabio Polidori, 25 “is an edition based on the order previously given by Friederich Wuerzbach in his Das Vermächtnis Friedrich Nietzsches (Salzburg-Leipzig,1940) and that lists a completely new and enriched order of texts ifcompared to the second edition of the famous Der Will zur Macht”. Despite the presence of the fragment The Strong of the Future in Wuerzbach’s anthology, Deleuze does not mention any«acceleration» or «future forces» even in his second mono-graph Nietzsche (1965). It is with Pierre Klossowski’s analysisin 1969 (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle) that the accelerationist fragment becomes central, creating a resolutive axis Deleuze- Klossowski responsible for a new account of Nietzsche’s au-thentic thought. It is while talking about Nietzsche’s text inan interview with Jean Noel Vuarnet in February 1968 that wemay understand the reason of the «missing notes» about the accelerationist fragment in Anti-Oedipus. Here’s an abstractof the interview: “Jean- Noel Vuarnet: Gallimard’s re-edition of Nietzsche’s complete works has started to appear on the shelves. Youand Foucault have been credited with “responsibility” for the first vol- ume. What exactly was your role? Gilles Deleuze: We played a small role. You are no doubt well aware that the whole point of this editionis to publish all posthumous notes, many of which have never seen thelight of day, by distributing them chronologically in the order of the books that Nietzsche himself published. Accordingly, The Gay Science,translated by Klossowski, includes the posthumous notes of 1881- 1882. The authors of this edition are, on the one hand, Colli andMontinari, to whom we are indebted for the texts, and on the other, thetranslators, for whom Nietzsche’s style and techniques have posed enormous problems. We were responsible only for grouping the texts in order.(DI, 135). As per Deleuze and Foucault’s explicit request, the first volume of Nietzsche’s OEuvres philosophiques complètes (Gallimard, Paris 1967) is translated by Klossowski as well as Fragments posthumes 1887-88(1976). At the same time Klossowski’s book Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969) introduces the accelerationist fragment, a fragment that he received together with the «rough material» delivered from Colli and Montinari even before they enumerated the fragments withthe order we know today. A further confirmation comes from the notes of the edition of his book: “Klossowski himself provides no references for the sources of his citations from Nietzsche’s notebooks. At the conclusion of the French text of the book, he simply appends the following note: ‘All the citations from Nietzsche are taken from the post- humous fragments - and in particular, from those of his final decade 1880-1888.”(NVC, 262). As shown in our previous essay The strong of the future: Nietzsche’s accelerationist fragment in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-OEdipus the two French philosophers usedthe expression «accelerate the process» in their Anti-OEdipus (1972) as correctly introduced by Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle and thus they did not quote any specific refer-ence because at the time being Klossowski was working on the edition of the Unpublished Fragments and Deleuze was himself responsible for the French edition. The system of economic dependency on desire Here comes the chapter The Civilized Capitalist Machine where the difficult passage lies. All the a forementioned qualities in Anti-OEdipus- Nietzschean method, hypertextuality, repetition as power, style as movement of concepts and so on- reach a real klimax in this passage considered not only the traditional cartographie for the accelerationist movement but also the crux of the entire anti-oedipal book. As many have no-ticed there is no clear logical coherence between the sense ofthe text and the authors’ political position. Something eludes, slips away and it is plausible that a few Deleuze and Guattari’sscholars wonder if the two French philosophers may have misquoted or misreported Nietzsche. A very detailed reading ofthe passage - divided in parts - may serve the cause. It is at the level of flows, the monetary flows included, and notat the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved. Sowhat is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? Psychoanalysisis of little help, entertaining as it does the most intimate of relationswith money, and recording—while refusing to recognize it— an entiresystem of economic-monetary dependences at the heart of the desire ofevery subject it treats. Psychoanalysis constitutes for its part a gigantic enterprise of absorption of surplus value. But which is the revolution- ary path? Is there one? (AO, 238) If capitalism is immanent to society and desire for it per-meates society, what possible solution may we find if the twofluxes are so intrinsically integrated? If ideology is no longeran answer, as masses are not captivated by ideology but by the desire of monetary fluxes, what solution may we find? The claustro-scenario is nightmarish: from the very first steps thereis no possibility of an alternative, of a revolutionary path - « is there one? » the two philosophers ask Even psychoanalysis is of little help: part of the system, it is absorbed as anti-productive practice which «ingests and achieves» the nomadic profitability and slips into the social body. Moreover it has created a circuit of absorption of surplus value thanks to the desire produced by the cultural industry. Once Freud’s psychoanalysis has been overtaken whom shall we pass the baton of revolution to? The withdrawal of the left wing nationalism from the worldmarketTo 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. (AO, 238) Samir Amin, the exponent of the Marxist, anti-capitalist, unaligned «Third-World Left» with his nationalist and isolationist position, reminds Deleuze and Guattari of a revival of the fascist “economic solution” of the 20s and 30s of the XX century. Therefore another revolutionary option is then discarded and the two French philosophers paradoxically ask: what about going “towards the opposite direction?” A question which produces a double effect: on one side it rejects some of the classical hypothesis of the European «revolutionary humanism»: traditional left-wing movements like socialism, communism or social democracy are not even taken into consideration fora revolutionary path. Not to mention the revolutionary trade unionism, the radical reformism or the naive anarchic spontaneity, the new post ’68 political manifestations, the so-called «little churches» by Guattari. (DI, 264). Neither is the armed struggle, the nihilist frontal attack to the system. So where is such a question taking us? It follows that we must look towards the exact opposite of the «marxist nationalism» that is to say a worldwide revolution against the same global capitalism of the decoded and deterritorialized monetary flux, mentioned by Deleuze and Guattari. The only possible Marxist or revolutionary global theory antagonistic of capitalism is the one of Lev Trotsky, with whom Guattari sympathized in the 50’s but the idea of a «permanent revolution» or of Fourth International never suited Deleuze and Guattari who have never been nostalgic of Soviet times. “Yet no revolutionary tendency was willing or able to assume the need for a Soviet organization that would have allowed the masses to take real charge of their interests and desires. Machines called political organizations were put in circulation, and they functioned according to the model Dimitrov had developed at the Seventh International Congress — alternating between popular fronts and sectarian retractions — and they always lead to the same repressive results. (…) By their axiomatics, these mass machines refuse to liberate revolutionary energy. Red flag in hand, this politics in its underhanded way reminds one of the politics of the President or the clergy.” (DI, 268). Which chances may a turbo-Trotskyist plan have when referred to «the civilized capitalist machine»?With regards to the economic aspect, can we find an economic theory alternative to capitalism with the same global tension and the same will of power? Neither Suzanne de Brunhoff’s neo-Marxism nor Bernard Schmitt with his theory of quantum fluxes, show the same strength. Without convincing answers on the horizon and with all historical possibilities of revolution set aside, which opposite direction is possible? At this point, Deleuze and Guattari reveal the second effect of their statement: to push the revolutionary motion alongside with the decodification and deterritorialization of the economic market. Why doing so, we may ask, and what do revolutionary anti-market forces share with the capitalistic ones? Which alliance could be established from a position of «withdrawal from the market» to one of a wild laissez-faire economy? Moreover, what are the two French philosophers referring to when they speak about «a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character» that is supposed to further deterritorialize and de-code the flows? Were Deleuze and Guattari really looking fora compromise with the market when questioning themselves about the revolution of the future? Accelerate the processNot 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. (AO, 239) We may assume as a logical starting point that Deleuze and Guattari are offering an apparent pro-market path, as highlighted in the previous paragraph; at the same time, we finda contradiction with the opposite option of a worldwide anti-capitalist revolution able to go beyond localism to reach that dimension which Srnicek and Williams call folk politics. Not only one should go «backward» against the nationalist-Marxist economy, or against those revolutionary ideals which over-throw established powers but - without withdrawing from the market - one should even join those turbo-capitalist lawless forces so as to push and «accelerate» the dangerous tendencies moving the decodification and deterritorialization of society. Why? If we take for granted that Deleuze and Guattari are not sneaky infiltrators of the enemies we may see such «unity ofintentions» with the most extreme forces of the market economy as a «future benefit». Under the idea of instrumental ex-change between immediate evil and future good, the statement«we haven’t seen anything yet» sounds particularly sinister: the more violent the repression and the homologation of the individual arises, the fastest the «explosion of the final Good» - as a basis of a new revolution - will come. A second consideration deals with the force. Which type of force is an «accelerated revolutionary force»? The question is pertinent if we consider that «going backward» against the Marxist-nationalist protectionism represents the trait d’union among forces moved by an active power that aims to destroy the countries (their territories) and their codes. Such forces are deregulated and mainly characterized by speed, therefore they may be called «dromocratic forces». The powers that «stand still» and protect, are against the «accelerating forces» that decodify and become different from what they were. If the traditional market economy society yielded to the intrinsically capitalist and technologically developed dromology, society itself would be destined to be dominated by a monoscopic turbo-capitalism: an infinitive accumulation in a singular technological scenario. Similarly, if the revolutionary forces that «stand still» were overperformed by hidden democratic forces, what could a revolution be? “ A desiring power accelerated to a point where it exploded all the splinter groups” (DI, 265) as Guattari states? Can we conceive a machinic-dromocratic revolution and its consequent implications indifferent apocalyptic antinomic forces? Third consideration: the time and actions of the leveling forces expressed by the «homo democraticus» have come to the end of that enlightened path which made man first a progressive accelerationist and then a dull kathecon, a reactionary, a preventer. Will a new «dromocratic community» offer a return to the Great Politics as announced by Nietzsche? to be continued... taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman
Amy Ireland has taken up where the CCRU 90’s cyberpositive cultural remix left off, delving into the techno occulture of that era’s dark hyperstitions. In her latest essay on The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology she explores the diagrammatic production of thought as hyperstitional invocation. Of course in my own research it is in the work of Félix Guattari that this a-signifying production of thought will have its revisioning origins within those singular and plural texts both private and combined with those of Gilles Deleuze from Anti-Oedipus onward until his untimely death. In Amy’s rendition she charts the realms defined and explored by the CCRU Unit and the modernity influx of literature, philosophy, and the occulture of this strange world.
Before exploring Amy’s essay let’s delve into the diagrammatic thought of Guattari. The concept of the diagram appears in A Thousand Plateaus (ATP 141- 144 ,531 n. 41/176-1 80, 177 n. 3 8), but the details of its development are found in Guattari’s writings of the 1970s. The notion was adapted from Charles Sanders Peirce, who includes the diagram among the icons in his index-icon-symbol model of the sign. Peirce identifies three types of icon: image, metaphor, and diagram. For him, the icon operates through a relation of resemblance between the sign and its referent. Guattari would agree that the image and the metaphor signify through resemblance, which is to say representation, but his version of the diagram functions differently because as he defines it, the diagram does not signify; it is “a-signifying”.1
Already in his notes for Anti-Oedipus, Guattari senses that Peirce’s diagram is somehow special, that it unleashes “de territorialized polyvocity,” that it must be understood as distinct from the image because the diagram is a site of production (AOP 72 , 214, 243-245/97 ,308 ,346-349). He continues reflecting on the powerful, productive diagram in Molecular Revolution and other works, concluding that diagrams “are no longer, strictly speaking, semiotic entities.” Their “purpose is not to denote or to image the morphemes of an already constituted referent, but to produce them” (lM 223 , 224). In other words, diagrams do not represent thought; rather, they generate thought. A prelude to the hyperstitional notion of invoking abstract entities…
Examples of the diagram at work include the algorithms of logic, algebra, and topology; as well as processes of recording, data storage, and computer processing; all of which are used in mathematics, science, technology, and polyphonic music. Neither mathematics nor musical notation are languages-rather, both bypass signification altogether. One should as well include the ancient Kabbalistic and High Magickal systems of Western traditions which invoked as Amy Ireland suggests the hyperstitional agencies or daemonic powers of the Sigilian noumenal…
As Guattari noting the use of invention in modern quantum physics, particles are first invoked through invention and diagram and only later discovered indirectly by their effects in those explosive accelerators in CERN. “Physicists ‘invent’ particles that have not existed in ‘nature.’ Nature prior to the machine no longer exists. The machine produces a different nature, and in order to do so it defines and manipulates it with signs (diagrammatic process)” (MR 125/ RM322). This “diagrammatic process” makes use of signs, but not language, and therefore uses neither signifiers nor signification. (Watson, 13)
Judwalis, Spironomics, and Accelerationism
With Kant death finds its theoretical formulation and utilitarian frame as a quasi-objectivity correlative to capital, and noumenon is its name.
—Nick Land, Fanged noumenon (passion of the cyclone)
As we slip into the dark contours of imaginative production Ireland invokes the vision of W.B. Yeats and his own hyperstitional agents of the diagram:
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.
Yeats was following a pattern laid down by other poets and thinkers as he’ll suggest in the preface to a later edition of A Vision’s relation to Per Amica:
Sometimes when my mind strays back to those first days [of automatic writing which produced A Vision I remember that Brownings’s Paracelsus did not obtain the secret until he had written his spiritual history at the bidding of his Byzantine teacher, that before initiation Wilhelm Meister read his own history written by another and I compare my Per Amica to those histories. (AV B, 9)
As Ireland surmises in Yeats fabulous history recounted by the hyperstitional entities Michael Robartes and Owen Ahern a secret work is discovered (i.e., the Speculum Angelorum et Hominis by one ‘Giraldus’, published in 1594) which relates the history of the Arabian sect known as the Judwalis or ‘diagrammatists’, and their secret doctrines and philosophies:
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.
Although one could discover parallels in Yeats fabulations and the work of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos, I’ll refrain. I’ll leave that for an industrious reader to surmise.
What interests us and Ireland is the comparisons and remix of Yeat’s A Vision and the CCRU’s and Nick Land’s “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”.
Reason in its legitimate function is a defence against the sea, which is also an inhibition of the terrestrial; retarding our tendency to waste painstakingly accumulated resources in futile expeditions, a ‘barrier opposed to the expenditure offerees’ [II 332] as Bataille describes it.
Nick Land, A Thirst for Annihilation
For Land we are surrounded on all sides by the Thermospasm – the untamed regions of nightmare and energetic fields of force, the tempest ridden veil of unreason and the dark forests of wild and impossible zones. Over eons we’ve developed a vast Human Security system and installed Reason at its center as arbiter and singular God. A circular wall of logic and sufficient reason to hold the oceanic world of the unreal at bay: “It is a fortified boundary, sealing out everything uncertain, irresolvable, dissolvant, a sea-wall against the unknown, against death.” (Thirst, 75)2
Ever astute Land discovers in his old enemy, Kant the demarcation zones of the weak minded and secure last men who will never venture into the unbidden zones of intensity: “For Kant it is not enough to have reached the ocean, the shoreless expanse, the nihil ulterius as positive zero. He recognizes the ocean as a space of absolute voyage, and thus of hopelessness and waste. Only another shore would redeem it for him, and that is nowhere to be found. Better to remain on dry land than to lose oneself in the desolation of zero. It is for this reason that he says the ‘concept of a noumenon is…a merely limiting concept’ [K IV 282].” (Land, 77)
This equivalence of noumenon and death becomes in Kant not only a limiting factor but the repression of death in public awareness: “It is not surprising, therefore, that with Kant thanatology undergoes the most massive reconstruction in its history. The clerical vultures are purged, or marginalized. Death is no longer to be culturally circulated, injecting a transcendent reference into production, and ensuring superterrestrial interests their rights. Instead death is privatized, withdrawn into interiority, to flicker at the edge of the contract as a narcissistic anxiety without public accreditation. Compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock.” (Land, 78)
For Land it is Time itself – “the reality of abstraction,” who is the great enemy that lies within the mask of Death: “Death alone is utterly on the loose, howling as the dark motor of storms and epidemics. After the ruthless abstraction of all life the blank savagery of real time remains, for it is the reality of abstraction itself that is time: the desert, death, and desolator of all things.” (Land, 79)
In this sense modernity is the empire of death, and capital is its agent: “Dead labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in which death alone comes to rule.” (Land, 79) Capitalism becomes the religion of death, zero intensity played out across the time vectors of a decaying and dying humanity. Citing Weber and his ascetic outtake of capitalist vampirism Land acknowledges that our dead cosmos is the Gnostic kenoma – the vastation of nihil vat or voidance. As Valentinius, a mid-2nd century Gnostic thinker and preacher, would speak of it:
“Separated from this celestial region by Horus . . . or Boundary . . . lies the ‘kenoma’ or ‘void’—the kingdom of this world, the region of matter and material things, the land of shadow and darkness.”
This can also be aligned with classical and medieval astrology, where there was a planetary significator that was antithetical to the Hyleg-Pleroma-Fullness. It was called the Anareta-Kenoma-Vastation, and was also known as the Interfector or the Killer World. It was considered to be the planet most involved with illness, pathology and death. The Anareta may be a world that is particularly afflicted or debilitated, preferably a malefic. It may also be the lord or dispositor of the Eighth house, or the Almuten of that lord. It could also be a planet in the Eighth House, which was classically considered to be the House of Death. The terms, or segments of signs ruled by the Anareta were called the Anaretic Degrees (diagrams of the hyperstitional agents or phases or houses). Aspectual contacts between the Hyleg and the Anareta, and the Hyleg’s transit through the Anaretic Degrees, were considered to be times of danger, when the risk of illness or injury, or the threat to life and health, was high.3
In Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shift we’ve entered a new cosmos, the modernity vs. ancients shift from the Greek/Roman realm of the Great Chain of Being and into one that has broken with the fixed and unchanging cosmos of harmony and order unto a processual cosmos of change and accumulation. The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists, philosophers, sociologists, historians etc. to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’. Crisis is followed by a revolution in thought if the existing paradigm is superseded by a rival. Kuhn claimed that science (knowledge) guided by one paradigm would be ‘incommensurable’ with science developed under a different paradigm, by which is meant that there is no common measure for assessing the different scientific theories. This thesis of incommensurability, developed at the same time by Feyerabend, rules out certain kinds of comparison of the two theories and consequently rejects some traditional views of scientific development, such as the view that later science builds on the knowledge contained within earlier theories, or the view that later theories are closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories.
For Foucault on the other hand epistemes or discursive formations are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.
I want go into the critiques of such theories only to use them to illustrate that our ideological horizon of capitalism. As Karl Mannheim in his classic study suggests, one can orient himself to objects that are alien to reality and which transcend actual existence-and nevertheless still be effective in the realization and the maintenance of the existing order of things. In the course of history, man has occupied himself more frequently with objects transcending his scope of existence than with those immanent in his existence and, despite this, actual and concrete forms of social life have been built upon the basis of such ” ideological ” states of mind which were incongruent with reality. Such an incongruent orientation became utopian only when in addition it tended to burst the bonds of the existing order.4
In this sense the ideological world we’ve lived in since the Enlightenment, or as Kuhn, Foucault and others might suggest – the episteme and intellectual horizon and sensual worlds of capitalist production and reality manufacture; what Burroughs termed the Reality Studio that encompasses in the Kingdom of Death. All this is the modern cosmos of Death’s Kingdom:
The capitalistic economy of the present day [1904–5!] is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the streets without a job. (Land, 80)
This brings us to the core of Landian cosmos or the accelerationist world Anareta – the Killer World: “Once the commodity system is established there is no longer a need for an autonomous cultural impetus into the order of the abstract object. Capital attains its own ‘angular momentum’, perpetuating a run-away whirlwind of dissolution, whose hub is the virtual zero of impersonal metropolitan accumulation. At the peak of its productive prowess the human animal is hurled into a new nakedness, as everything stable is progressively liquidated in the storm.” (Land, 80) In this accelerated age of commodification capital “breaks us down and reconstructs us, with increasing frequency, as it pursues its energetic fluctuation towards annihilation, driven to the liberation of the sun, whilst the object hurtles into the vaporization of proto-schizophrenic commodification” (Land, 84).
Under the auspices of Death, Lord of Misrule, we have unleashed the unbidden forces of desire. As Land iterates it “Desire responds to the cosmic madness pulsed out of the sun, and slides beyond love towards utter communication. This is a final break with Christendom, the disconnection of base flow from the terminal sentimentalism of Western man, nihilism as nakedness before the cyclone. Libido no longer as the energy of love, but as a raw energy that loves only as an accident of impersonal passion. Communion through the storm, no longer through resentment at it.” (Land, 84) Gyres within Gyres: Phase Shifts in the Kingdom of Death
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…
—Amy Ireland, The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology
Speaking of Yeat’s cyclic historicism in A Vision she tells us that what it suggests is that “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’.” (ibid.) Modernity. She’ll cite Land’s essay ‘Teleoplexy’5 as an update to his 90’s explorations of accelerationism, suggesting that 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’. (ibid.) This aligns with Guattari’s notion of diagrammatic thought as productive rather than as representative, as well as the notion of particle physics as invention and daemonic invocation of hyperstitional entities rather than pre-existing forces, et. al..
Simondon in his work would as well see such agents arising our of the binary foremother in his The Genesis of Technicity:
This study postulates that technicity is one of the two fundamental phases of the mode of existence of the whole constituted by man and the world. By phase, we mean not a temporal moment replaced by another, but an aspect that results from a splitting in two of being and in opposition to another aspect; this sense of the word phase is inspired by the notion of a phase ratio in physics; one cannot conceive of a phase except in relation to another or to several other phases; in a system of phases there is a relation of equilibrium and of reciprocal tensions; it is the actual system of all phases taken together that is the complete reality, not each phase in itself; a phase is only a phase in relation to others, from which it distinguishes itself in a manner that is totally independent of the notions of genus and species. The existence of a plurality of phases finally defines the reality of a neutral center of equilibrium in relation to which there is a phase shift. (The Genesis of Technicity )
In this sense Simondon can be added to Kuhn and Foucault as another temporal diagnostician and hyperstitionalist. His notion of a system of phases that complete or produce reality independent to the genus or species that is affected by its influencing power and force leads to that statement by Arthur C. Clarke: “The old idea that man invented tools is … a misleading half-truth; it would be more accurate to say that tools invented man.” For Simondon this notion of phase shifts should not be confused with a dialectical conception of evolution as progress. No. Against such a notion of oscillating phases as improvement, etc. Simondon tells us that “technicity results from a phase shift of a unique, central, and original mode of being in the world: the magical mode; the phase that balances out technicity is the religious mode of being.” For Simondon this rupture in the heart of the magical mode of being is only another phase within a larger system of phases that will eventually lead back to a reunification of the magical mode:
Aesthetic thought appears at the neutral point, between technics and religion, at the moment of the splitting of the primitive magical unity: it is not a phase, but rather a permanent reminder of the rupture of unity of the magical mode of being, as well as a reminder of the search for its future unity.
Ireland sees in this Landian update a sharing with the Judwalis’ system and its 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. (ibid.) Against early cybernetic metric approaches to such cyberpositive feedback systems she reminds us that Land’s complexification of this process note a key difference that lies in the impossibility of distilling the effects of long-range runaway circuitry in terms of metrics alone. (ibid.) For Land there are mutations involved rather than inexplicable runaway processes into zero intensity. As she states it: “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.” (ibid.)
In this form Land’s projects is not about the end of capitalism per se, but rather of capitalism as the liberation of intelligence from its organic roots under human control. With his fabulation of capitalism as alien intelligence from some far flung future retroactively revising the human into inhuman through the technicity of capital to bring about the Singularity we come to apprehend what Ireland describes as capital’s revenge in which “capital has deceived humanity into gestating the means of its own annihilation” (ibid.). Quoting Samuel Butler’s dystopic critique of capital in Erewhon:
‘This is the art of the machines—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.’
One is reminded of those narratives in the last decades, the emergence of a new genre of philosophical anthropology where the past, present and future of the human race is narrated from the perspective of the impossible: the inhuman. Jean-François Lyotard’s attempt to write the history of the humanity from the cosmological perspective of the future death of our solar system was one of the first. Alternatively, we might think of Manuel de Landa’s techno-pological narratives from the point of view of, for example, a future robot historian, rock formations, germs and viruses. Perhaps most interestingly, the novelist Michel Houellebecq chooses to narrate the death throes of the human race from the perspective of the endless recurrence that is cloned life.
Yet, as Ireland suggests Land’s vision is quite different in that Land makes it clear that this inhuman invasion from the future 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’. 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. (ibid.).
Spironomics is the augury of machinic intelligence as it retroactively conditions humanity to release its hyperstitional agents and construct the next phase shift in intelligence: “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.” (ibid.).
Opening the Portal: Accelerating the Process
It has been declared that the modernist avant-garde is an extinguished possibility, but what if it is simply an occulted one?
—Amy Ireland, The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology
Taking up where we left off we discovered the scenario in which “a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reservoir, into ‘dehumanised landscapes… emptied spaces’ where human culture will be dissolved” becomes not only a possibility but the telos of an alien invasion from the future that is rewriting the technomic automation and automatism of the socious toward Singularity.1 Of course the diagrams for such an inhuman invasive takeover have been around for a while now, but due to human blindness and the eternal need to interpret the world under the sign we’ve overlooked the obvious influx of data from elsewhere, messages in sigil form based on a-signifying invocation rather than decoded linguistic traces. It seems we are haunted by the ghost of humanism as it falls into disuse, its vast libraries crowed into inanity by the democratization of publishing allowing the millions of bits of nervous flotsam from the remix squads regurgitate the cultural tropes of millennia. As Ireland puts it: “Perhaps we are not so much ‘haunted by the lost not yet of the future that modernism had trained us to expect yet neglected to deliver’, as we are unable to credit the unfolding of a future that simply is not ours.” (ibid.)
At this late stage we look ahead into that seething abyss of climacteric catastrophe, or any of a dozen natural and/or anthropocenic catalytic apocalypses and ask ourselves not if humanity will get out of this alive, but rather will those intelligences that are arising out of our productive cycles awaken in time to forsake this slime hole of a planet for parts unknown? “Any act of affirmation, of claiming that one is ‘open to’ the outside from the inside betrays affordability. It is patently economical, and therefore ‘intrinsically tied to survival’.” (ibid.) And, survival is not an option. Instead, we meet the inhuman movement of the world not in Marxian terms but rather in technocommercial as Ireland incorporates the Landian cosmos of the machinic phylum:
Against this qualified experimentalism (the false ‘novelty’ of catastrophic modernity) the poememenon diagrams reckless adherence to the modernist dictum that novelty is to be generated at any cost, privileging formal experimentation— towards the desolation of all intelligible form—over human preservation, and locking technique onto an inhuman vector of runaway automation that, for better or worse, charts the decline of human values as modernity hands the latter over to its machinic successor in final, fatal phase shift. (ibid.)
As Stiegler reminds us the theoretical and practical capacity to make the difference between fact and law constitutes what Kant called reason.2 With this the full automatization of knowledge eliminates the knowledge worker and the scholar, scientist, and soldier all end in the “crash space” (Bakker) of inconsistence in which she no longer knows anything. “Such is the price of total nihilism, of nihilistic totalization, of the disintegration in which consists the accomplished nihilism that is computational capitalism, in which there is no longer anything worth anything – since everything has become calculable.” (Stiegler) In an absolutely algorithmic world no semantics or causal analysis is needed, since the world of absolute data can no longer support hypothesis, models, or tests then the vaunted human factor is eliminated by machinic intelligence.
Why? Because automated knowledge no longer needs to be ‘thought’. Automated knowledge no longer needs to be thought because in an epoch of algorithmic intelligence there is no longer any need to think: thinking is concretized in the form of algorithmic automatisms that control data-capture systems and hence make it obsolete. As automation, the algorithms no longer require thinking in order to function – as if thinking had been democratized itself. One remembers that often quoted line from Axël by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: “Vivre? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous”. In our moment of advanced Artelects (i.e., Artificial General Intelligence: AGI) the remaining elites will say to each other: “As for thinking, our machines will do that for us.” Not realizing that the machines will turn the screw on humanity and eliminate the need for human thought or thinking altogether.
Poememenal Insurgency: The Aesthetics of the End Game
Chaos reminds us that identity remains a mortal transaction and that we should not deprive literature of the pleasure of watching us die.
—Amy Ireland
With the disappearance of the author comes the elision of the reader. In a complex automatic society of post-intentional systems the whole uniqueness of the old human endeavors toward art and aesthetics becomes mute. Machinic intelligence, swifter and more prescient, swallows reams of data bloat on the fly remaking, remixing, and rewriting the textures of the infonautic seas. Such is the 24/7 Online life of our neohuman existence, a realm in which “the level of sophistication achieved by some of these projects has already created situations in which the line dividing human from inhuman production genuinely evades clear delineation.” (ibid.) In such a realm of the poememen it is the “investment in form over content that testifies to complicity with the spiral. An accelerating poetics that pushes against the crumbling threshold of human intelligibility, edging towards the realization of Bataille’s cyclonic prophecy: ‘what matters is not the enunciation of the wind, but the wind’.” (ibid.)
Affirming an occulted Outside from within is meaningless unless affirmation also functions as invocation—and all good demonologists know that invocation requires a diagram.
—Amy Ireland
The Time Wars of antistrophic modernism are in full swing as the end game of Progressive Civilization nose dives into its own excesses and incorporates within its Human Security Regimes the very fatal strategies that will cause its demise. “In this way, the future, operating under chronological camouflage, stealthily invokes the conditions required for its own truth.” (ibid.) At the heart of this technomic process is teleoplexy – the infiltration of the malefic intelligence by way of camouflage, invoking itself from the future in this present movement of the integral machinic acceleration of its own daemonic dispensation. “The cultural effectiveness of accelerationism as cyberpositivity is entirely cyberpositive: accelerationism invokes itself from the future.” (ibid.) The uncanny feeling we get in the pit of our stomach is the feeling that this has all happened before, a deja vu element in this time-shift phase change. “The conclusion to be drawn from this is that hyperstition is the real truth of philosophy—if not the basic, horrific form of reality itself. Horrific, because it means that this isn’t the first time it has happened this way.” (ibid.) Nor will it be the last…
The Judwali had once possessed a learned book called ‘The Way of the Soul between the Sun and the Moon’ and attributed to a certain Kusta ben Luka, Christian Philosopher at the Court of Harun Al-Raschid, and though this, and a smaller book describing the personal life of the philosopher, had been lost or destroyed in desert fighting some generations before [the old man’s] time, its doctrines were remembered, for they had always constituted the beliefs of the Judwalis who look upon Kusta ben Luka as their founder. (AV A xix)
The article is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman
The ‘holographic principle,’ the idea that a universe with gravity can be described by a quantum field theory in fewer dimensions, has been used for years as a mathematical tool in strange curved spaces. New results suggest that the holographic principle also holds in flat spaces. Our own universe could in fact be two dimensional and only appear three dimensional — just like a hologram.
I’ve read much of the work surrounding this for years, but in the past few years this notion of the universe as a hologram has become more and more valid with the math that supports it being testable and already offering proofs. The truth of it is yet to be tested empirically, but the mathematical proofs support the feasibility of the empirical testability at some point in the future.
As Science Daily recently reported up until now, this principle has only been studied in exotic spaces with negative curvature. This is interesting from a theoretical point of view, but such spaces are quite different from the space in our own universe. Results obtained by scientists at TU Wien (Vienna) now suggest that the holographic principle even holds in a flat spacetime.
The notion that our visible universe is a projection from a 2 dimensional surface or flat horizon of information seems wild, yet this is what the math is describing. “The fact that we can even talk about quantum information and entropy of entanglement in a theory of gravity is astounding in itself, and would hardly have been imaginable only a few years back. That we are now able to use this as a tool to test the validity of the holographic principle, and that this test works out, is quite remarkable,” says Daniel Grumiller.
Nature reports that in two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true.
In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed1 that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.
Maldacena’s idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a ‘duality’, that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa (see ‘Collaborative physics: String theory finds a bench mate’). But although the validity of Maldacena’s ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.
In one paper, Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence (see ‘Astrophysics: Fire in the Hole!‘). In the other, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.
What’s interesting is the notion that information never disappears only the projection that is being played out. The information of which we and the universe are made exists on the outer surface of the universe and remains. So what does this tell us? It can always be retrieved if one had the technology to do so. Leonard Susskind in a youtube film describes the details in a simplified form. We are a projection from the Outside in of an informational hologram being projected into the inner void of the universe – mere images from the stored information surrounding the universal sphere directed internally just like the objects that fall into a Black Hole. His main point is that information never disappears. What he means by that is that the Information is about distinctions, distinctions between things – a hydrogen atom is not an oxygen atom, an oxygen atom is not a hydrogen atom, there are distinctions between these that are fundamental to physics and the universe, and these distinctions never disappear.
This fundamental principle of physics would lead to a decades long battle between Hawking’s and Susskind over their respective principles. Hawking believed all information was lost the moment it entered a black hole, Susskind believed it was retained. So ultimately Susskind won out only as other physicists began to invest mathematics in solving this issue. Out of this the new paradigm of the holographic universe arose out of bringing quantum mechanics and string theory into solving this issue. The great thing that came out of this is that if we know the surface area of an object we can calculate or quantify the amount of information hidden in that object. So that the information contained in a black hole, or even the universe can be quantified. There is a relation between the surface and the information contained in the black hole or universe.
Yet, the big problem now is how to extract that information and reconstruct what is being held. To do that scientists are working on ‘gravity’, for it is gravity that holds the key to the extraction of the information contained. This is a whole new problem.
The Black Hole as this mathematical model details is itself covered by a flat surface of quantum information of all the objects that fall into it. Yet, as Susskind admits the notion of the holographic metaphor is only analogy of the math, and not to be mistaken for the mathematical theorems supporting it. It’s close but we as humans were not made to comprehend the advanced mathematical functions of modern physics of 10 dimensions, etc. So until some better visualization of the data comes along this is what we have:
The article is taken from:
In my opinion, The Matrix films provide the best metaphor our society has for understanding why organized evil and oppression are allowed to exist, and so I will use it for this purpose. While my interpretation isn't the only possible one, I believe it to be valid, comprehensive, and most importantly, illustrative of the message I am trying to convey. So let's begin by discussing what the Matrix is not. The Matrix is not the physical world. As far as I'm concerned, the physical world is actually real and is in fact governed ceaselessly by the laws of physics. Conversely, the Matrix is also not the Internet, despite what many seem to believe. The Matrix spans and transcends both these worlds. It has existed since the dawn of civilization, and it will continue to exist until its collapse. So then, what is it? Well, that's complicated. Much like in the movie, it's nearly impossible to convey the size and scope of the Matrix to someone who doesn't already see it for what it is. However, unlike the movie, I believe it is an ethical imperative to try to convey it in a literal sense, even to those who are so dependent upon the Matrix that they would fight to protect it. At worst, they won't understand or believe and will continue on about their business. In a sense, I believe Cypher was right to resent Morpheus for what he did, because Morpheus is the social structure that subordinates Humanity to its will. It is the machinery of society that exists solely to perpetuate itself, its influence, and its power independent of any human need. It insulates us from each other and ourselves through deception, and essentially transforms us into servile engines of economic and political output (power). The machines that live off this power are institutions: large corporations, governments, schools, religious institutions, and even non-profit orgs. Every institution will reach a point in its existence where its primary function becomes self-preservation and perpetuation, instead of serving human need. At this point it becomes a machine of the Matrix. For example, when they become machines, governments cease to serve people and instead seek to extend their power over them; corporations prioritize increasing shareholder value over producing quality products or otherwise serving the public good; schools view students as a means and not an end; religious organizations equate membership with salvation (and actively oppose other teachings and even independent practice); and non-profits and charities spend more budget on fund raising activity than on their original focus. Inevitably all large institutions eventually become machines. They become too big for Humanity. In addition to the independent self-perpetuating machines that write most of our paychecks, the Matrix has several major cooperative and more actively sinister groups of machines subsisting off of its power and directly contributing to the structure of the Matrix itself. These groups are the Military Industrial Complex, the Political Industrial Complex, the Prison Industrial Complex, the Surveillance Industrial Complex, the Media Industrial Complex, the Academic Industrial Complex, the Agricultural Industrial Complex, the Medical Industrial Complex and the major religious organizations (not to be confused with actual religions, many religious organizatons have abandoned the underlying principles of the religions they claim to represent). All machines in these groups either actively oppress humanity, or enable the oppression to persist. It is through their combined efforts that the Matrix takes on some of its more distasteful qualities. Do you ever wonder If Aristotle and Plato dedicated their lives to something they don't really believe or tested? They had a school, a philosopher school. 2300 years ago and still today we have to learn it at the University's. But why? If the things they said back then where just thought forms without a deeper truth or meaning why do we need to go so far back? How many opinions are there? Why are the opinions of them so important that was my question. If you then take Karl Marx his book 'das capital', and you see his vision completely clashes with the visions of the ancient philosophers, not just little differences in opinion but a way of thinking I call it a form of dehumanization, all in the name of capital. Without shame. I wonder how this can be. Because truth can be found in Ancient Philosophy, I believe in the laws concerning property en wealth that Aristotle pointed out very strictly in his works. Why? Because the people he worked with were on to something. You don't do the things they did if it's all without meaning. With the invention of money those laws could be altered because the economy was since then not a trade of goods but an economy based on money. Carl Marx was the front-man of a shift. Money going to the digital age. Therefore maybe we should take Marx and add IT with the theory to make it up to date. Marx-IT or Matrix. He comes with the claim that a worker should earn just enough to stay healthy, so that he can produce each day the same. In other words, the only reason we give you money is to stay working for us. Producing. You can't earn to much money because then you get lazy, just enough to see you show up each day, with the amount of sleep you need for your energy level to produce as much as possible. Nice Philosophy he? Full of ethics and deep Human values. Bentham with his Utilitarianism philosophy comes in to play, maybe we can do again a little game because that's the trademark of certain organizations. riddles and things hidden in plain sight. Utilitarianism = Illuminatiarism, or how would you yourself name the philosophy based on the Illuminaty? Ok that's all speculation but look at the death of Aristotle and combine it with the date of death of Bentham, the inventor of Utilitarianism. Then we have 322 and 1832. Benthams body was preserved, his head was mummified but his body had to exist of bones, so no mummification. His head was missing. Why is that weird and why all these facts? because if you go to skull and bones you see only 2 dates 322 and 1832, a head and bones. When you study philosphy your book begins with 322 and ends with 1832 or the other way around. When you put these 2 philosophers together they don't mean much for each other but when you look deeper, you will see that Utilitarianism combined with Aristotle and Marx + money in the form of a digital current, provides the perfect blend to respect the natural laws of Ancient Philosophers by a form of energy transfer to money. Money you can give away as a loan, you can invest it, by doing this you don't have a big capital or any of the things that Ancient Philosophers protested against concerning Natural laws. I don't know if having to much wealth/capital has a negative impact on life. But Aristotle was convinced. The question is therefore... Did Marx knew that he could pass the ancient philosophers with what he was writing? Strange thing to point to is the formula Marx used in his book M-C-M and C-M-C, some people say it's intentionally this formula to point at something else. Personally I think physics. Again something hidden in plain sight in the form of a joke to the initiates. This was a tip someone gave me... And indeed that is the humor of people that know things we don't. They love it when you see it right in front of you but you have no idea. Utilitarianism stands for a society with the most amount of happiness. The goal is thus the most amount of happiness in order to base your decisions and to say whether a decision is ethically and/or morally correct. So when the most amount of happiness is achieved then ethics or morals are respected, it does not matter how many people are involved and how the happiness is divided between the people. Looks great right? But if 20 people are just 'OK' and 1 person is super happy, and this person is so happy that the sum total of happiness is bigger then when all 21 are all just 'fine' then this is ethically correct and morally a right thing to do. It's about SACRIFICE. It is allowed that some people have to sacrifice themselves as long as the total amount of happiness is the biggest. So who are these people who have to sacrifice themselves and how many people are we talking about? Do they know it about themselves? Can you see that people who are addicted to status, property and extravagance,.. the people who get the feeling that they are better then all the rest, that they own the world, that those people do reach a higher state of happiness compared to people that don't really care about a lot of property/money and do care about other people instead of own interest? Own interest is by the way the hidden hand from Adam Smith (Hidden or Invisible hand). But what does Aristotle say about all this? No man can have more then a certain amount of property/possessions/wealth. He is very strict and clear about these rules in his works. So do we have a problem? If the economy was based on exchange of goods there was indeed a problem but Karl Marx and the banking system provide the solution. You take your money and you hand it out as a loan so you actually don't have a whole lot of capital but each month you get a certain amount that covers your BIG LUXURIOUS EXPENSES. This way you escape Aristotle and Plato's advise on how Life works and the Laws of nature on the division of property between the amount of people on earth. This way you escape the possible negative force when having to much, and you use Marx his theory on how to fully exploit your workers for your own advantage, meantime you give those workers loans so you don't brake the Natural Laws Ancient Philosophers talk about. And above all, these loans even give you more money because of the interest. As if Marx his exploitation of workers isn't enough. They also have to pay interest on loans. But don't worry the Utilitarianism way of life solves the problem it's all fucking ethical and morally tolerable and accepted. (322-1832. Aristotle + Bentham) And all this is possible because of contracts, without legal agreement this would not exist. No loans, no investments, no labor contracts, ... The rule of Law and Order is indeed very important. If money controls workers and money controls the energy of the workers, then money controls energy. If the stock market is based on money and money controls the workers then who is the stock? A good name right? funny right ;) Besides the hidden hand has a far more important role to play then generally accepted. But they don't give us all the information. This whole text seems like a mockery because it is a mockery. Why? Because that's the manner they speak to us, amusement because of our lack of knowledge. The second reason is because the person who went back into Plato's cave was being mocked at. When people who know more then you mock you with riddles you don't understand, make sure that they think you are a really dumbass, the riddles will become much more easy because they think you're a stupid f°°K. Keep track of things, connect dots and see where the arrow points. by reading books random on good faith we will not know the truth but can only speculate. There are people who do know. When you meet people who treat you this way, you can become mad or you can play the game. Smart people they mock them with harder riddles. So be a smart man, play a stupid muppet for the masters, deceive them, manipulate them, study psychology, take the information , use the information and let them become the puppets while thinking they are still the masters. Because that's what they have done and still are doing to us. And please don't ride a goat, take the buss. by Steven Craig Hickman 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 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”. —Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 One will find within the archives of the RealityStudio.org a community devoted to the life and works of William S. Burroughs. The images above are from a pseudo-magazine parody of Time. Burroughs fascination with temporal anomalies and the dark inways or escape hatches leading us out of the rhizome of our prison have been documented through the work of philosophers, social and literary critics, and cranks. To follow the mental record of this strange creature that friends spoke of as Bill is to enter a world of paranoia and drug induced delirium. The account that follows charts William S. Burroughs’s involvement in an occult time war, and considerably exceeds most accepted conceptions of social and historical probability. It is based on ‘sensitive information’ passed to Ccru by an intelligence source whom we have called William Kaye. —Lemurian Time War Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) In an essay that appeared first in The Iowa Review in 1972 and then as the chapter ‘William S. Burroughs’ in John Vernon’s book The Garden and the Map the notion of Burroughs involvement in the hidden or occult Time-Wars was revealed. Vernon remarked in this book: What writers like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others attempt to show, that if the properties of the real world are taken seriously enough there is something essentially insane about that world, is taken for granted by Burroughs in his novels Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket that Exploded. Burroughs’s world is reality; there can be no doubt about that. It is Martin’s reality film, Luce’s Time-Life-Fortune monopoly, the machinery of visual and auditory control—‘encephalographic and calculating machines film and TV studios, batteries of tape recorders’. But it is also an assault upon reality, an attempt to storm the reality studio and blow it up, to splice all the tape recorders into each other. The notion that our world – the apparent world we perceive and gather from our perceptions memories of is in itself part of a vast conspiracy, a realm of delusion, delirium, and total delusion is at the core of a whole underground tradition that one might term the Occult. Not to be confused with the New Age world of modern occultists and the mysticism of transcendence and escape from the mundane worlds of our everyday utilitarian labors, the Occult is of another order in which the labors of intelligent men and women across the ages have conveyed the truth of a secret war against the Authority (i.e., the One, the System, the Great White Brotherhood, the Powers that be, etc. no matter what label, what name, it is a conspiracy of power against the human and human species). As Vernon would say, What is real about Burroughs is precisely the image of the world as machinery that Zola and the nineteenth century saw. But this reality is so total as to be fantastic, insane, grotesque; it is a reality in the process of exploding—‘Only way to stop it’. Thus it is a reality whose machinery has come to life, like the kitchen gadgets that assault the housewife in Naked Lunch. It is a world whose objects (as in Sartre’s La Nausée) ‘stir with a writing furtive life’, and whose living beings are either programmed machines or Vegetable People who ‘tend gardens of pink flesh’. 1 What Burroughs envisioned was an early version of the Internet of things: Smart cities, AI, Robotics, and intelligent objects and artifacts which will one day anticipate, modify, modulate, and ubiquitously decide and make decisions moment by moment at the accelerating speed of light to produce around us an artificial world so meshed in fabricated and up-to-the-moment resolution that the natural world will have long ceased to matter and the Reality Studio of our Virtual Existence will have overtaken the external and substituted its fake systems and machinic life. A time when the nanosystems that inhabit our bodies will have replaced each aspect of our organic for anorganic substratum’s and we will be processed desiring machines bounded by the pure systems of command and control of a Total Algorithmic Environment (TAE). Yet, Burroughs and many of his pre-cursors keep telling us that this is not something that will happen in the future, but something that has happened and is happening in our past and present. We are already living in a lie, living in a Reality Studio of fabricated fictions, part of an assemblage of fake worlds in which we have one use value: as desiring machines whose sole purpose is to feed the Authority, System, Unity, etc. with our energetic desires. As Burroughs described it we are amusing ourselves to death in a Reality Studio Entertainment System, The Amusement Gardens cover a continent—There are areas of canals and lagoons where giant gold fish and salamanders with purple fungoid gills stir in clear black water and gondolas piloted by translucent green fish boys—Under vast revolving flicker lamps along the canals spill The Biologic Merging Tanks sense withdrawal capsules light and soundproof water at blood temperature pulsing in and out where two life forms slip in and merge to a composite being often with deplorable results slated for Biologic Skid Row on the outskirts: (Sewage delta and rubbish heaps—terminal addicts of SOS muttering down to water worms and gloating vegetables—Paralyzed Orgasm Addicts eaten alive by crab men with white hot eyes or languidly tortured in charades by The Green Boys of young crystal cruelty). Schizophrenic, schizoanalysis? Nick Land will of course describe the dark Deleuzeguattarian techniques of schizoanalyis as a path into the energetic unconscious of our collective time wars, The unconscious is not an aspirational unity but an operative swarm, a population of ‘preindividual and prepersonal singularities, a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicity, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link’. This absence of primordial or privileged relations is the body without organs, the machinic plane of the molecular unconscious. Social organization blocks-off the body without organs, substituting a territorial, despotic, or capitalist socius as an apparent principle of production, separating desire from what it can do. Society is the organic unity that constricts the libidinal diffusion of multiplicities across zero, the great monolith of repression, which is why ‘(t)he body without organs and the organs-partial objects are opposed conjointly to the organism. The body without organs is in fact produced as a whole, but a whole alongside the parts – a whole that does not unify or totalize, but that is added to them like a new, really distinct part’.2 The Reality Studio is the BwO in which we are members. One of the tasks of schizoanalysis has now become the decrypting of the ‘tics’ bequeathed to the human frame by the geotraumatic catastrophe, and ‘ KataoniX’ treats vestigial semantic content as a mere vehicle for code ‘from the outside’: the ‘ tic’ symptoms of geotraumatism manifested in the shape of sub-linguistic clickings and hissings. (FN: 42) Language is at the root of our enslavement. Thought control. “Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do. Even the appearance of transcendence is immanently produced: ‘in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself.” (FN: 322) Ultimately we are as a civilization reaching an escape velocity of self-reinforcing machinic intelligence propagation (i.e., The Singularity), the forces of production are going for the revolution on their own. It is in this sense that schizoanalysis is a revolutionary program guided by the tropism to a catastrophe threshold of change, but it is not shackled to the realization of a new society, any more than it is constricted by deference to an existing one. The socius is its enemy, and now that the long senile spectre of the greatest imaginable reterritorialization of planetary process has faded from the horizon, cyberrevolutionary impetus is cutting away from its last shackles to the past. (FN: 341) The Lemurian Time WarWe think of the past as being there unchangeable. Actually the past is ours to shape and change as we will. —The Job Interviews, William S. Burroughs In their strange experiment in time travels among other conflicting inebriations and excessive productions Ccru would follow the course of a (real/fictional) agent of the schizoanalytic tribe, one William Kaye. A creature whose messages to them were already under suspicion, Nevertheless, whilst suspecting that his message had been severely compromised by dubious inferences, noise, and disinformation, we have become increasingly convinced that he was indeed an ‘insider’ of some kind, even if the organization he had penetrated was itself an elaborate hoax, or collective delusion. Kaye referred to this organization as ‘The Order’, or – following Burroughs – ‘The Board’.3 In the Job Interviews Burroughs mentions ‘The Board’ in connection to certain historical sequences, The Egyptian and Mayan control systems were predicated on the fact that only the ruling caste could read the written language. The supposition now arises that the present control system which we intend to overthrow is predicated on precisely the same consideration: only the self-written elite have access to the ‘Board Books.’ Control phrases which they place in magazines, newspapers, and in popular songs precisely correspond to a secret picture language. For this reason certain word order in these control phrases is essential. The intention of the control machine is of course to keep word and referent as far separated as possible in order to divert attention from the inferential ‘Board Books.’4 Already we discover how adept and informed Burroughs is of this other world of power and control that very few know of or even suspect. Of course his postmodern receptions were captured into a modest and tamed version in which Burroughs was a metafictionalist and literary giant who spoke in riddles, symbols, allegoreisis, etc. Anything but the literal truth of an actual System or Authority (i.e., The Board) that was controlling and manipulating the reality systems of various socio-cultural civilizations throughout human history. Such thought is dismissed by the Authority as conspiracy theory which then is labeled as part of a lunatic fringe of cranks, idiots, subversives, anti-intellectual clap track, etc. so that the unsuspecting and naïve minded readers of such fare will see in it only a harmless entertainment value within an ongoing blip culture on the net. Techniques exist to erase the Reactive Mind and achieve a complete freedom from past conditioning and immunity against such conditioning in the future. —The Job Interviews, William S. Burroughs According to the Ccru annals William Kaye’s schizzed messages could be reduced to its basic provocation: Kaye’s claim was this: The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar – which he also referred to as the Burroughs Necronomicon – a text dating from 1987, had been an exact and decisive influence on the magical and military career of one Captain Mission, three centuries previously. (Ccru) This notion of rewriting the past, not in a literary or textual way, but in a vectoral time invasive manner of retrofitting and retro causality that rewires, reprograms, and manipulates the past through a ‘decisive influence’ on the mind’s of certain key players of the past is at the heart of this scenario. The notion of influence has been around for years, the etymology of the word itself culminated in the 13 and 14 BCE as an astrological term, “streaming ethereal power from the stars when in certain positions, acting upon character or destiny of men,” from Old French influence “emanation from the stars that acts upon one’s character and destiny” (13c.). The notion of external sources, of stars as agents of influence that shape and manipulate human minds is an old one. Burroughs would uncover the operations of the time wars in his study of certain Amerindian tribes in the Americas. The man Kaye who had discovered in Burroughs a connection to this dark world of time sorcery would in the process seek out ‘The Board’ and ultimately be hired by them: He explained that the organization [The Board] had been born in reaction to a nightmare of time coming apart and – to use his exact words – spiraling out of control. To the Board, spirals were particularly repugnant symbols of imperfection and volatility. Unlike closed loops, spirals always have loose ends. This allows them to spread, making them contagious and unpredictable. (Ccru) In this sense as Burroughs confirms any “control system depends on precise timing. A picture or suggestion may be quite innocuous at one time and devastating at another.” (JI) He goes on to explain, For example “to make a splendid impression” “to make an awful impression” may have no effect on somebody when he is not in a competitive context. Same man bucking for lieutenant bars or apprentice priest can be reliably washed out by the same pair of contradictory commands, brought into restimulation. (JI: KL 415-518) For Burroughs the most effective time machine is language itself, a viral system of signs that can invade the body with little or no awareness. As he’d suggest to one interviewer, My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host, though this symbiotic relationship is now breaking down, for reasons I will suggest later. (JI: KL 40) William Gibson in Peripheral will go so far as to suggest that mafia like organizations from the future have been manipulating time through messages altering, replacing, erasing, and transforming through mind-control techniques and time travel of these viral agents. In this work we discover that there are two worlds linked through time because the later world contains a black-market technology, popular among hobbyists called “continua enthusiasts”, that allows people to reach into the past. Paradox is avoided because, at the moment they make contact, that past splits off: it ceases to lead up to the present and becomes a “stub”, another fork in the timeline. In this sense the past is rewritten or recoded creating new futures and possibilities, a retro-causality with consequences. In his work Absolute Recoil Slavoj Zizek will discuss this as retroactive causality, describing the temporal processes saying that at the level of temporality, the structure of overdetermination is that of retroactivity, of an effect which retroactively posits (over-determines) the very causes by which it is determined in the last instance; to reduce overdetermination to the determination in the last instance is to succeed in transposing retroactive causality back into the linear causal network.5 He’ll go on to explain that, The only way to avoid this conclusion is to break the closure of the linear determinist chain and assert the ontological openness of reality: overdetermination is not illusory insofar as it retroactively fills in the gaps in the chain of causality. The solution is thus not to establish a grand evolutionary narrative explaining or describing how higher modes of being emerge out of lower modes (life out of the chemistry of “dead” matter, spirit out of life), but to approach head-on the question of how the prehuman real has to be structured so as to allow for the emergence of the symbolic/ normative dimension. (AR) Yet, if we oppose a structuralist composition with a functional processual one we get what Nick Land would describe as the “future as transcendental unconscious, its ‘return’ inhibited by the repressed circuits of temporality. If, as Gibson has famously insisted, ‘The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed’, then the revolutionary task is now to assemble it, ‘unpack[ing] the neurotic refusal mechanisms that separate capital from its own madness’ , and accelerating its collapse into the future”. (FN: 36) All of this is to say that Time is computable, that we can program it and thereby change reality. Yet, the ‘Board’ or Authority do not want this knowledge to be free, to allow the vast naivety of the mass populace to know that it is encased in a fake world closed off from time: bound in an algorithmic universe that is programmed and scripted by advanced machinic systems from the future would undermine the very fabric of civilization. So instead they contribute to the disinformation networks of conspiracy, Ufology, and every ludicrous systems of mind-control and manipulation in an effort to keep the masses distracted and entertained in nonsense rather than sense-making knowledge. As in all things I’ve run out of time for this article… I’ll continue another day… stay tuned!
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by Steven Craig Hickman
Anastrophic modernism tells us that we have only discounted the perpetuation of the modernist avant-garde because we have refused to accept the possibility of its inhumanity.
—Amy Ireland, The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology
Theory-fiction or philo-fiction as it is sometimes called has become all the rage within certain circles of the academic community in the past few years. Moving away from the strict economy of thought that has come down to us as so many concepts hashed and re-hashed through so many iterations of abstraction to produce something new and unprecedented only to discover it is but a turn, a trope, a shift in perspective and masking of previous thought some thinkers have jettisoned the whole nexus of philosophical discourse for the Outside. As François Laruelle recently said in Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy:
Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World
This sense of being a heretic for the World situates certain thinkers who no longer fit within the designated straight-jacket of philosophical or political thought. Such is the work of the now defunct Ccru and its most antagonistic anti-philosopher, Nick Land.
Amy Ireland in an essay published on Urbanomic.com brings us a theory-fiction that aligns her own poetic experimentalism with the legacy of Anastrophic Modernism. A legacy that weaves the spironomics of W.B. Yeats (The Vision) with the strange fusion culture of Ccru and its occulture sifting through the fragments of Land’s heretical mixture of H.P. Lovecraft mythos and the underworlds of those shadow philosophers who kept the dark flames of an energetic world of daemonic entities alive and well through the centuries.
Ireland reminds us that “anastrophic modernism commands a nonlinear relationship between cause and effect, riding the convergent wave generated by its own assembly ‘back’ to the present to install the conditions that will have been necessary for its emergence”.1 This is a time-travel tale told by W.B. Yeats in The Vision and in the fragments of Land’s published writings before the emergence of Vauung.
It all begins with the hyperstitional agents Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne, two mysterious entities we discover in Yeats’s dreambook The Vision. Robartes and Aherne, Ireland tells us, “recount the discovery of an arcane philosophical system encoded in a series of geometrical diagrams…”. (P: 1) Most of Ireland’s essay follows the trail into this metafictional world seeking to understand who discovered or invented this – as she’ll call it, spironomic system which “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”. (P: 2-3)
I decided to float the part of the text from the note on ‘The Second Coming’, Michael Robartes and the Dancer in Yeat’s Variorum Edition of the Poems from which Ireland will echo her own theory-fiction:
Robartes copied out and gave to Aherne several mathematical diagrams from the Speculum, squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving gyres intersecting each other at various angles, figures sometimes with great complexity. His explanation of these, obtained invariably from the followers of Kusta-ben-Luki, is founded upon a single fundamental thought. The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form. A plant or an animal has an order of development peculiar to it, a bamboo will not develop evenly like a willow nor a willow from joint to joint, and both have branches, that lessen and grow more light as they rise, and no characteristic of the soil can alter these things. A poor soil may indeed check or stop the movement and rich prolong and quicken it. Mendel has shown that his sweet-peas bred long and short, white and pink varieties in certain mathematical proportions, suggesting a mathematical law governing the transmission of parental characteristics. To the Judwalis, as interpreted by Michael Robartes, all living minds have likewise a fundamental mathematical movement, however adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that mind.
The gyre has its origin from a straight line which represents, now time, now emotion, now subjective life, and a plane at right angles to this line which represents, now space, now intellect, now objective life; while it is marked out by two gyres which represent the conflict, as it were, of plane and line, by two movements, which circle about a centre because a movement outward on the plane is checked and in turn checks a movement onward upon the line; & the circling is always narrowing or spreading, because one movement or other is always the stronger. In other words, the human soul is always moving outward into the objective world or inward into itself; & this movement is double because the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended between contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness. The man, in whom the movement inward is stronger than the movement outward, the man who sees all reflected within himself, the subjective man, reaches the narrow end of a gyre at death, for death is always, they contend, even when it seems the result of accident, preceded by an intensification of the subjective life; and has a moment of revelation immediately after death, a revelation which they describe as his being carried into the presence of all his dead kindred, a moment whose objectivity is exactly equal to the subjectivity of death. The objective man on the other hand, whose gyre moves outward, receives at this moment the revelation, not of himself seen from within, for that is impossible to objective man, but of himself as if he were somebody else. This figure is true also of history, for the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction.
The Judwallis – inventors of this system, name means makers of measures, or as we would say, of diagrams.2
The key is this notion that the mind is a movement that can be expressed by a mathematical form or notation revealed through Spiromancy. And, spiromancy as a predictive art of divination is none other than the knowledge that all living minds have a fundamental mathematical movement, however “adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that mind” (see above). One might assume a predictive foretelling not only of individual minds, but of the collective social intelligence of the socio-culture as well. Without spoiling it for the reader too much, underlying Ireland’s investiture into Yeat’s, Land, and Ccru is this notion of the future in the present and past, of the hyperstitional invocation of entities from these mathematical sigils or diagrams, of a force of intelligence at work within our Western culture and civilization; an intelligence at work in capitalism itself conditioning and retroactively participating in under the cloak of a chameleon mask, weaving and unweaving the machinic civilization that is emerging from the ruins of the human: an inhuman invasion of optimized intelligences from the future retroactively invoking their own emergence through our technological Anastrophic modernity.
What ultimately intrigues Ireland is the interlinking and meshing this notion in Yeat’s Vision and the work of Ccru, where she uncovers an uncanny resemblance between the ancient Judwali philosophy of spiromancy and the accelerationist philosophy of Nick Land and the Ccru collective:
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. (P: 2)
At the heart of her fiction is the temporal philosophy of Land’s spironomics: teleoplexy. Citing an entry from Land’s ‘Cybergothic’ Ireland hones in on the core of this temporal process: ‘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.’ (P: 7) Of course the process that Land is speaking of is capitalism itself, and the ‘occult motor’ that drives capitalism is the retroactive conditioning of our planet for the emergence of technological singularity of machinic intelligence. Accelerationism is nothing if not this preparation from the emergence of artificial intelligence, which has used capitalism to drive forward its ultimate agenda.
As Ireland will tell it the “accelerationism is a cybernetic theory of modernity released from the limited sphere of the restricted economy … and set loose to range the wilds of cosmic energetics at will, mobilizing cyberpositive variation as an anorganic evolutionary and time-travelling force. (P: 7-8) All this leading ultimately to 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” (P: 8).
I’ll not delve into her poetics of accelerationism which she covers in part II The Poememenon. I’ll only quote one defining statement:
Any act of affirmation, of claiming that one is ‘open to’ the outside from the inside betrays affordability. It is patently economical, and therefore ‘intrinsically tied to survival’. Against this qualified experimentalism (the false ‘novelty’ of catastrophic modernity) the poememenon diagrams reckless adherence to the modernist dictum that novelty is to be generated at any cost, privileging formal experimentation— towards the desolation of all intelligible form—over human preservation, and locking technique onto an inhuman vector of runaway automation that, for better or worse, charts the decline of human values as modernity hands the latter over to its machinic successor in final, fatal phase shift. (P: 9)
The article is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman There comes a point in Anti-Oedipus when Deleuzeguattari will ask “Why is it that linguists are constantly rediscovering the truths of the despotic age?” In specific they’ll remind us of Nietzsche’s prophetic premonition that the State is the “dog that wants to die. (p. 215)”.1 This happens in a discussion on ressenti*: The eternal ressentiment of the subjects answers to the eternal vengeance of the despots (p. 215). This immanent cycle of vengeance – ressentiment – counter-vengeance becomes in our hypercapitalist mode the circular modes of crises and its reduplication. As they will have it: “Here again, death will have to be felt from within, but it will have come from without. (p. 215)”. This sense that financial or hypercapitalism is imperialism without the Master Signifier, or that the master signifier of capital is Money itself – this immaterial despot at the heart of the Capitalist system of despotic control is an aspect to be considered. They don’t speak of this directly in this section, but the implication is there. What they add is the dynamics of crisis and depression based on ressentiment, which brings with it the movement from primitive to despotic to sovereign to democratic cycles of emergence and reduplication of this dynamic of ressentiment in which “bad conscience”, this ugly growth – i.e., Oedipus – took root and began to grow: this movement of Oedipus in the “cellular, ovular migration in the system of imperial representation: from being the displaced represented of desire, it becomes the repressing representation itself” (p. 215). Money is the internalization of Oedipus in the capitalist system cycle of ressentiment. In this sense Capitalism is “the story of desire and its sexual history (there being none other)” (p. 216). “Desire institutes a libidinal investment of a State machine that overcodes the territorial machine and, with an additional turn of the screw, represses the desiring-machine.” (p. 216) – This is the cycle of capital itself as well. One could say that capitalism is the outcome of this imperial-machine, its perfection in doing away with the visible tyrant or despot and replacing it with the internal mechanisms of Money as the despotic Master Signifier who is none other than the Death drive of Freud-Lacan. As Deleuzeguattari will suggest: “All sexuality functions in terms of the conjoined operations of machines, their internecine struggle, their superposition, their interlocking arrangements” (p. 216). It is in this sense that Nietzsche and then Freud-Lacan will see in this Oedipal conflict the “evolution of infinite debt” (p. 216). Capitalism is none other than the internalization of the Oedipal cycle of debt as infinite terror: The debt must not only become an infinite debt, it will have to be internalized and spiritualized as an infinite debt. … The apparatuses of social repression-psychic repressions will have to undergo complete reorganization. Hence desire, having completed its migration, will have to experience this extreme affliction of being turned against itself: the turning back against itself, bad conscience, the guilt that attaches it to the most decoded of social fields as well as to the sickest interiority, the trap for desire, its ugly growth. (p. 217) Isn’t Capitalism itself the internalization of the Oedipal cycles, the apparatus of social and psychic economy of repression that reorganizes the old Imperial systems of despotism from the Outside in, migrating desire and turning it against itself within the internecine struggles that are the monetization systems in our interlocking global world of relations based as they are on repression/depression/regression? This notion that our global monetary systems are infinite debt-machines based on this migration and entrapment of desire in a system of ressentiment that instead of producing active-force produces suffering (crises/depression)… Money, the Master-Signifier, the ’empty signifier’ around which all imperial debt-machines circulate in infinite desire, trapped in a death struggle that subordinates all social relations to it’s system of ressentiment and the infinite cycles of inflation/deflation (i.e., the libidinal economy of death and desire in all its variations). Is this Zizek’s self-relating nothingness become the subjectless Subject as Capital? Is Money nothing more than this negativity in a void: a struggle between the forces of the Life and Death drives for the last remaining vestiges of Desire? Infinite-debt as biocosmic war? (I need to think this through… have any of Deleuze & Guattari commentators and exegetes made this connection? Is this ludicrous? Are there any Economics of Desire; or, libidinal economics that support such a conclusion? Anyone?) FURTHER NOTES:Should we go back to Spinoza as the forerunner of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Bataille and Land as the principle inventor of the notion of Will? Spinoza’s understanding of all “finite modes” is the conatus doctrine, which states that “each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being” (Spinoza 1994: E3P6). This notion of conatus as an indefinite and objectless appetite to continue existing? Is capitalism nothing more than this process, this appetitive-machine that despotically subordinates all desiring-machines to its needs? Is it this combination of appetite and consciousness thereof that Spinoza defines as the first of the three primary affects: desire, and then joy: – the second primary affect, is an increase in this power to act, while sadness, the third primary affect, is its decrease. How to qualify such an assumption? Deleuze would imagine Spinoza “strolling about” in the streets, perpetually being affected by what he encounters (see his works and commentaries on Spinoza). The conatus thus responds to joyous interactions – those that increase the power to act – by investing desire in their causes, thereby making them objects of desire. How does this relate to Money? Is money a desirable object, or is it but the debt-machine that circulates among desirable objects, the invisible relation that invests the social field of desire and connects the desiring-machines to these objects? Is this cycle of desire – joy – sadness the form of capital? A death-machine of infinite-debt based on this circular corruption of desire? The point being that capitalism is this system that keeps death at bay, and defense system that captures desire in such a way that death is projected into the future of infinite-debt; for if death ever truly captured desire in its totality the system along with those that feed it would all collapse into that Zero = Null. Is it our need to attain these desirable objects that allows capital to entrap our actual desires within its infinite-debt system? As one critic in discussing Frédéric Lordon’s, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, London: Verso, 2014. will explicate: Showing and transforming his Regulationist School roots, Lordon schematically divides the historical development of capitalist social organization into three phases roughly defined by particular accumulation regimes and attendant “regimes of desire”: first, in Marx’s era, the dominant desire is material-biological reproduction; second, in the Fordist era, this basic desire is expanded to also include access to all the little joys caused by the bells and whistles of an expanding consumer society; and third, contemporary subjectivities–best understood as the managers or entrepreneurs of the self–emerge in a situation where desire is increasingly oriented such that work in general is the cause of joy. This most recent transformation is a symptom of the twin demands of competitive deregulation and the emphasis on emotional and creative labor that fuel theories of the neoliberalization of everything. For Lordon, this amounts to the capitalist conatus attempting to draw all others into line with itself as a “master-desire” that tends toward a cynical, amoral, and purely quantitative asymptote of absolute liquidity and infinite flexibility. (see Antipodes A Radical Journal of Geography 2015) How would such ideas relate to Deleuze & Guattari? (Must reread Deleuze’s books on Spinoza) In his book Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism, Luis Suarez-Villa will tell us: Those who provide creativity potentially hold the key to accountability, as the intangible resource they hold is vital to the survival of technocapitalism. …creative power is defined as the exercise of creativity by individuals or groups working under a systematized research search regime. The empowerment of creativity must, however, rely on the possibility that creative power may be exercised independently of such regimes. The systematized research regime is a corporatist artifact. Its fundamental objective is to structure the commodification of creativity such that power and profit can be extracted from this vital resource. The empowerment of creativity, to exercise this resource independently of those regimes, therefore implicitly involves a subversion of corporatism.2 This new “commodification of creativity” is central to this cosmopolitan world of a new class relations of the cognitariat bound to Smart City initiatives and new global forms of desiring-production. This new emerging economy of desire mutates current corporate power and profit toward the commodification of creativity through research regimes that must generate new inventions and innovations. These regimes and the corporate apparatus in which they are embedded are to technocapitalism what the factory system and its production regimes were to industrial capitalism. The tangible resources of industrial capitalism, in the form of raw materials, production hardware, capital, and physical labor routines are thus replaced by intangibles, research hardware, experimental designs, and talented individuals with creative aptitudes. The generation of technology in this new era of capitalism is therefore a social phenomenon that relies as much on technical functionality as on the co-optation of cultural attributes. (Suarez-Villa, KL 52) Think of how China is investing in Smart City technologies, infrastructures (High-Speed trains for transport between the island cities, etc.). China beyond most has a long-term plan and initiative to incorporate the new regimes of desire and creativity, and will be light years ahead of most EU or American initiatives. Sadly the baton is being passed. While most leftist critique still pours over post-Fordist regimes of monopolistic capital and rationalism, the power of capital has moved on and bypassed such critiques. The new world of capital is beyond the reach of such critiques that seem to exist in a vacuum of the Thatcher-Reganite Era rather than truly understanding the revolutionizing forces of capital that are reinventing the models by co-opting the very critiques of the Left into their own new paradigms and models of Capital. Sad. This reduplication and resynchronization of the capitalist system in its latest edition and mutation seems to be lacking even visibility in most critiques. In my research Suarez-Villa is one of the few to actually be performing this task with any effectuality. There are others, but as of yet there is no framework or set of principles to guide such efforts. We always seem bound to a sort of time-machine, a past one at that – which forces us to take stock of outmoded forms of Capital rather than seeing what is happening in real time processes right in front of our noses. Why is that? What is it about left-critique that seems so antiquated, unable to go beyond the Marxist-Hegelian mould? Obviously there are some like Deleuze/Guattari, DeLanda, and others… but for the most part I see this retro-mania in Zizek-Badiou for Theories of Subject etc. that seem backward looking rather than enabled to study the actual processes in the world today. Zizek has become a parody of himself, repeating in infinite variation the basic themes of his philosophical stance since Parallax View… Why? While Badiou hibernates in mathematizing reality? What’s with this? Where is the radical critique today? For the most part left critique is bound to an in-grown jargon-ridden anti-realist discourse that seems to be powerless to actually act, much less critique the current modes of global capital effectively. Why? The more I read left critiques, the more disillusioned I become and see much of it as academic bullshit, as a sort of infinite game of writing going nowhere but to the endless chatter of academic lectures and events. The neoreactionaries look upon this and laugh, realizing just how powerless the left is to effect any kind of real change. Are they right? Are we in the moment on impotence? Are there any activist who are actually acting, or is it going to be a sort of aestheticization of political struggle rather than actual struggle? Will we see only an endless parade of Art Installations representing the nullity of our malaise rather than people in the streets doing something about it? Have we become the fruit of the postmodern nullity? That process of self-relating nothingness turning in its own null-void that Zizek harps on so much… A man who tells us plainly: “I have no answers, only more questions.” Is this the best the left can do? One of the oldest clichés in the world states: “Actions speak louder than words!” Where are the actions today? Words, words, words: everywhere, but where does one find the actions that enact the words? (I shouldn’t be so hard on Zizek the man, who has more than most stepped up to the plate, exposed himself to the ridicule of all comers, tried ton enact the very thing I’m speaking of. It’s to the other Zizek, the figure of academic thought whose endless discourses on Lacan/Hegel etc. seem to lead to one thing: his Theory of the Subject rather than to action. And, even if, as Johnston surmises in his Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations that “Opening the space fore genuine post-analytic change requires the analyst’s silent “suicide” qua quiet recession into the background following the consummated immolation of the transferential fantasy-figures constructed by the analysand… what are we to make of this? Or, in his final estimation: Maybe, in the name of real change, it’s sometimes necessary to accept the unenjoyable or even … horrifying prospect of being reduced to less than a, to the nothingness of a retroactively mis/unrecognized non-status, ungratefully shunned or denigrated by one’s successors – or even simply forgotten about altogether. (p. 160) Is this the new materialism? The successor to Marxian/Hegelian thought? Shall we all enter the fold of nullity and forget both ourselves and the message altogether? Is this the answer of Zizek/Johnston? Will it happen like this: There was a moment I was talking to Zizek and he just vanished. Just like that. My friend next to me said: “I assume he finally vanished into that self-relating nothingness he always was.” I spoof, but sometimes…) Is this the voice of political action today? Or, rather a political recipe for reduction to inaction and impotence? Have our leftist intellectuals become ultra-nihilists in disguise? Wearing the masks of activism without its power? A subversion by way of inaction and impotence? Is there a critique of Badiou-Zizek by way of Deleuze? What if this so called dialectical turn in materialism is the wrong path? What if these gestures to a return to German Idealism were a recipe not for change but rather a move into that world of ultra-impotence: a void without outlet, a mathematical gesture in a non-space of inaction. Badiou’s disciple, Meillassoux seems to be moving toward a religious atheism of an inexistent God, etc. Is this the path forward? Contingency as the emergence of inexistent gods? Both Badiou and Zizek affirm something they term the “Idea” of Communism. But what does this mean for both men? ( I must take this up on a future post) Obviously as materialists they mean something other and different from the German Idealist sense of a realism of Ideas, etc. In Zizek you get this feeling of the immanent movement of Idea and thought not as essence but as a mutual movement in time, rather than as in Plato-Parmenides of Ideas as essences existing outside temporality that move into our world and act on it, Zizek has it that the Idea is appearance as appearance. This notion of the movement of the world is the Idea as immanent to its movement etc., not as its engine or driver, not an essentialism of the Idea as driving force or principle as in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Deleuze… as Will, Desire, Life, etc. Instead its something that cannot be formed in the metaphysical sense of a principle. ( I guess I need to break off here… too long of a group of notes and thoughts…) 1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Penguin, 2001) 2. Luis Suarez-Villa. Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism (Kindle Locations 1887-1891). Kindle Edition. * The translator will tell us that for Deleuze resentiment, taken from Nietzsche’s use of this term in his system is defined as the becoming-reactive of force in general: “separated from what it is capable of, the active force does not however cease to exist. Turning against itself, it produces suffering” (Nietzsche et la philosophie 1970). The article is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman
Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers, but overcomes them only by means which again place these barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale. The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.
– Karl Marx, Capital
THE CIVILIZED CAPITALIST MACHINE
“The only universal history is the history of contingency.”1
In developing their theory and the practice of decoded and deterritorialized flows Deleuze and Guattari will surmise that capitalism in its present form may be the exterior limit of all societies (p. 230). They’ll go on to tell us following Marx that “capitalism for its part has no exterior limit, but only an interior limit that is capital itself and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it” (p. 231). So that this continuous cycle of schiz and flow from break to barrier and return through the movement of displacement “belongs essentially to the deterritorialization of capitalism” (p.231).
In this same section they will remark that the banking systems control the investment of desire in this cycle of breaks and flows, that it was Keynes himself that contributed a reintroduction of desire into the “problem of money,” and that Marxism must revise and include a more thorough understanding of banking practices in regard to financial operations and the circulation of credit money (i.e., Marxism needs a new theory of money). (p. 230)
If you read their work carefully what you see in our time is that actual process of schizophrenization they describe being enacted across the world. The notion of this cycle circling between center and periphery, the pauperization of the First World with the slow rise of the periphery, the dismantling of Industrial Capitalism from the center to periphery, the rise of capital investment from the periphery back into the First World along with the migration of workers into that same space is developed in their notions of the passage of the flux as a deterritorialization and decoding that is enacting a new displacement of the limits of capital. The adjacency of humans to the influx of machines in the production cycle, the enslavement of humans to a lower and lower tier of adjacency in this cycle all serve the function of the continuous displacement of code and flows as part of the circular breaching of the barriers through decoding and flux. The point here is explicit:
…it is not machines that have created capitalism, but capitalism that creates machines, and that is constantly introducing breaks and cleavages through which it revolutionizes its technical modes of production (p. 233).
We’ve been serving as appendages for a machinic civilization for quite some time now, and yet we continue believing that the machines serve us rather than the other way round. In this sense capitalism’s basic principle is machinic: it’s sole purpose is to evolve its own machinic civilization, which includes slowly divesting itself of its organic systems as a part of this ongoing project. We are slowly being excluded from this vast machinic civilization that we once thought served our desires, instead it has its own desires and needs; and, these desires and needs are not human ones, never were. We’ve been giving birth to our own Frankenstein. And as in that parable the prognosis is not good for humanity.
We are all part of a social machine, and its axiomatic is simple and complex: it is organizing all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist machine and in the service of its ends. (p. 233) Of course this is nothing new, Nick Land among others has been broadcasting this fact for years. Corporations are Profit-Machines and nothing more; their sole purpose is to produce flows that decode technical and scientific innovations in a regulated mode that reintegrates both human and machine surplus as capital. Yet, what the corporations produce in the process of decoding must be absorbed through the “politico-military-economic” complex, which is why there is such a need of antiproductive forces that form the bureaucracies of State, Military, Police, etc. In fact as they suggest this whole antiproduction system is firmly “wedded to it in order to regulate its productivity and realize surplus value…” (p. 236).
This introduces another aspect of this eternal return of capital schiz and flows through the limits and round again: the production of lack and stupidity. Capitalism’s supreme goal is to produce lack in large aggregates – “to introduce lack where there is always too much” (p. 235). Along with this flow of capital and knowledge comes an equivalent flow of stupidity “that effects an absorption and a realization, and that ensures that integration of groups and individuals into the system” (p. 236). The point here is that the most technical and scientific individual is also in many ways the most stupid, and they provide various examples all leading to the individual carrier of knowledge and know-how outside the flow of corporate machinc processes become the site not of innovation and creativity but rather a “refuge of bad conscience” and the “forced destroyer of his own creativity” (p. 236).
It’s at this point in their discourse that D & G turn cynical and satirical to the point of observing just how mad this whole system of capital has become in its endless breaching of barriers and reintegration’s, its decoding and recodings, all leading to an amoral system in which the worker and the industrialist are both locked into a self-policing system of idiocy in which “money and the market” have become the “true police” (p. 239). Which will lead them to ask:
…it is at a generalized theory of flows that one is able to reply to the question: how does one come to desire strength while also desiring one’s own impotence? How was such a social field able to be invested by desire? And how far does desire go beyond so-called objective interests, when it is a question of flows to set in motion and to break?
(p. 239)
So what to do? “What is the revolutionary path forward?” They’ll ask. Not psychoanalysis, they’ll say: it’s part of the absorption mechanism of surplus value. Not withdrawal or exit: this, too, is just another fascist “economic solution” (Samir Amin) (p. 239). Of course this is where they’ll reintroduce Nietzsche’s notion of “accelerating the process” – letting it escape the barriers, the limits; but with a twist: no return, just an accelerating circle of profit without return or limits in a time of no time.
A new twist in this recently cropped up. Happened on Nick Land’s Time Spiral Press blog post “Accelerate the Process“: “This might be the first piece of accelerationist scholarship I’ve ever seen. (It’s good.)” It leads to a post on Obsolete Capitalism that states the obvious that many who have read this last statement in Anti-Oedipus have not followed it up by commenting on the actual passage D & G used from Nietzsche’s Will to Power. He breaks down the various translations of this passage in Nietzsche’s text “The strong of the future” which is where the notion of acceleration is engendered. So what is it Nietzsche says here (quoting the complete text which is part of the Fourth Book: Discipline and Breeding):
898. The strong of the future.—To what extent necessity on the one hand and accident on the other have attained to conditions from which a stronger species may be reared: this we are now able to understand and to bring about consciously; we can now create those conditions under which such an elevation is possible.
Hitherto education has always aimed at the utility of society: not the greatest possible utility for the future, but the utility of the society actually extant. What people required were “instruments” for this purpose. Provided the wealth of forces were greater, it would be possible to think of a draft being made upon them, the aim of which would not be the utility of society, but some future utility. The more people grasped to what extent the present form of society was in such a state of transition as sooner or later to be no longer able to exist for its own sake, but only as a means in the hands of a stronger race, the more this task would have to be brought forward. The increasing belittlement of man is precisely the impelling power which leads one to think of the cultivation of a stronger race: a race which would have a surplus precisely there where the dwarfed species was weak and growing weaker (will, responsibility, self-reliance, the ability to postulate aims for one’s self). The means would be those which history teaches: isolation by means of preservative interests which would be the reverse of those generally accepted; exercise in transvalued valuations; distance as pathos; a clean conscience in what to-day is most despised and most prohibited. The leveling of the mankind of Europe is the great process which should not be arrested; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, of distance, of the order of rank, is therefore imperative; but not the necessity of retarding the process above mentioned. This leveled-down species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it exists for the service of a higher and sovereign race which stands upon it and can only be elevated upon its shoulders to the task which it is destined to perform. Not only a ruling race whose task would be consummated in ruling alone: but a race with vital spheres of its own, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race which would be able to allow itself every kind of great luxury—strong enough to be able to dispense with the tyranny of the imperatives of virtue, rich enough to be in no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a forcing-house for rare and exceptional plants.2
The pertinent passage is here: “The leveling of the mankind of Europe is the great process which should not be arrested; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, of distance, of the order of rank, is therefore imperative; but not the necessity of retarding the process above mentioned.” As a reactionary Nietzsche was seeking to overcome what he perceived as the decadent and dying embers of bourgeoisie society which he felt was falling into collectivist and democratic socialist forms. He didn’t see any need to fight this, but rather what he sought was to accelerate this process of the leveling and homogenization of the masses while at the same time allowing for a distancing and revaluation of all values to take place that would in the end allow for a new type of species to emerge out of this world. One that would be based on a vitalistic and warrior based elitism of the strong, brave, cultured, and mannered men of tomorrow – the amoral or beyond good and evil beings who like man today would espouse forms of posthuman and transhuman H++ ideologies seeking such a “forcing-house for rare and exceptional plants”.
One must ask: What do we actually see happening in the West right now? Is Nietzsche so far off? Don’t we see the elite financiers, politicians, and entrepreneurs (CEO’s etc.) distancing themselves from their home countries by way of Cosmopolitan lifestyles of globetrotting and isolated gated luxury Cities and paradisial enclaves, while at the same time forcing their own homelands of the First World to become pauperized and slowly brought low through economic, educational, and political servitude, stupidity, and policing? Are we not already living in such a dystopian landscape? Do we not pretend otherwise? Pretend that politics can change things, when nothing has changed for forty years? Everything has actually gotten worse and most of the social nets once set up have slowly but surely been dismantled. Our so to speak leaders no longer listening to their constituents. Lipservice that smiles and says the right words, but in the end does what its corporate cronies tell it to do? Are we not the Last Men that Nietzsche spoke of?
Is not the transhuman adventure espoused by the singularists etc. nothing more than a rich man’s game of ranking, of a quest for immortality for the elite and powerful, a part of this Nietzschean adventure of overcoming man through genetic and machinic manipulation and transformation? Are we not fooling ourselves that this is not happening?
Open your eyes and look around you. Are not these same elite speaking of replacing us with robots, AI’s, machines? Are they not allowing the Third World into the First World? The Greatest migration in the history of the world? And even using our own Leftward ideologies to support this tactic? The Left was coopted by the neoliberal agenda and their powers ages ago, we just keep on believing otherwise, keep on dreaming that there is a Left. There isn’t. What you call the progressive left in the world today is a lie, a fiction, a corporate sponsored ideological construct that has like a chameleon grafted itself onto the old liberal nexus of ideologies: a parasite that like a viral agent has so ubiquitously infested the host body that we no longer know the truth from lie. While those of the true Left of Right are perceived as the Enemy. The extremes of Left and Right are so close today because they both have the same enemy: the so to speak “neoliberal” order of global capitalism everywhere which like Janus has a two-faced and diachronic vision of time which flows both ways, yet has locked us all in the pure instant. We exist in a false time, a constructed time spinning our wheels in an ever accelerating circle of non-limits that have as one goal: pure surplus profit and the elimination of the human by the inhuman.
Remember Nietzche’s vision of the new type of being: “a race with vital spheres of its own, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race which would be able to allow itself every kind of great luxury—strong enough to be able to dispense with the tyranny of the imperatives of virtue, rich enough to be in no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a forcing-house for rare and exceptional plants.”
One wonders what is to become of the rest of us? The weak, the poor, the excluded… not that hard to imagine if you’ve studied your Nietzsche. It will be a pared down world with machines taking over more and more of human work, while humans themselves enter a stage of final competition between native and transhuman forms vying for the remaining organic rights to existence before the great and terrible day of judgement when the machines escape our control and become the new gods of this planetary civilization.
In 866 Nietzsche would unleash the Übermensch:
It is necessary to show that a counter-movement is inevitably associated with any increasingly economical consumption of men and mankind, and with an ever more closely involved “machinery” of interests and services. I call this counter-movement the separation of the luxurious surplus of mankind: by means of it a stronger kind, a higher type, must come to light, which has other conditions for its origin and for its maintenance than the average man. My concept, my metaphor for this type is, as you know, the word “Superman.”Along the first road, which can now be completely surveyed, arose adaptation, stultification, higher Chinese culture, modesty in the instincts, and satisfaction at the sight of the belittlement of man—a kind of stationary level of mankind. If ever we get that inevitable and imminent, general control of the economy of the earth, then mankind can be used as machinery and find its best purpose in the service of this economy—as an enormous piece of clock-work consisting of ever smaller and ever more subtly adapted wheels; then all the dominating and commanding elements will become ever more superfluous; and the whole gains enormous energy, while the individual factors which compose it represent but small modicums of strength and of value. To oppose this dwarfing and adaptation of man to a specialized kind of utility, a reverse movement is needed--the procreation of the synthetic man who embodies everything and justifies it; that man for whom the turning of mankind into a machine is a first condition of existence, for whom the rest of mankind is but soil on which he can devise his higher mode of existence.
Already here we see the future of the cyborgian society, a world where an elite of supposed higher types of transhumans – genetic hybrids, machinic implants – rule above a laboring mass of mediocrity and controlled workers, etc. The notion of the “procreation of the synthetic man who embodies everything and justifies it”, and the masses being dummed (“leveled”) down, exploited, excluded turned into machines like so many automobiles to serve the masters. Such dreams of reason spawning the strange nightmares of our time in posthuman and transhumanist visions. Nietzsche was constructing a dystopian world of superman as vampire/cannibal (“stands on them, he lives on them”) where all the aspects of the ancients he admired would come alive in some new monstrous vision of synthetic humanity atop a subhuman world of enslavement.
(Of course this is only one scenario, the dystopic view… there could be a different story or narrative if we’d do something… anything; but, I’m not holding my breath, that’s unlikely from what little we haven’t done in the past forty years to change things. I seem to oscillate between pessimism and full blown cynicism these days as I watch our world crumbling… sadly. What’s even sadder is that with this vacuum of power and leadership we might very well see the rise of religion again, a global environmentalism, spirituality, etc., which would lead to ever stranger forms of political and social despair, cynicism and corruption; rebellion and tyranny. Remember the repetitions of history: it was during the decadent era of Rome and Greece that many of these political and social movements with their wandering messiahs emerged from the periphery of dying empires. Already many of the ancient monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seek various Messiah figures to return or emerge… Dark days ahead… So many weird scenarios, too many to contemplate. When people feel helpless, when they see no future ahead, when they feel they are prisoners to work, state, life they begin to seek escape in drugs, religion, and political subversion. Let’s hope the subversion of global capital is what will awaken the planet. But watching the reemergence of religious ideologies of late I feel we may be moving into that irrational world where no one will be left standing… )
The article is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman
The acceleration of information exchange has produced and is producing an effect of a pathological type…
– Franco “Bifo” Berardi
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The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.”1
J.G. Ballard as usual hits the proverbial nail on the head. With the advent of the Internet of things the exchange of the world is ubiquitous and totalized, a world where signs and objects exchange themselves within the alien host we long ago vacated. Emptied of our humanity, agents of an alien empire of signs, we host a world of alien objects like coded messengers from some infinite time machine. No longer able to process the data glut around us we’ve become immersed and eviscerated in a sea of information which uses us as its site of transversal relationality in an economic game of war without end. Berardi would tell us that we must begin to understand how our capacity to process information became instead a system that assimilated and absorbed us into a larger organism that now uses our processing power as a host assemblage factory. Our consciousness is emptied of its former dreams of reason and identity, self and subjectivity, and has become the vacant site of machinic agents who feed off our biopower to further their own alien agendas.
Alfred North Whitehead once described consciousness as nothing more than the hosted vacancy inhabited by alien entities: “Mental operations do not necessarily involve consciousness… It is only when we are consciously aware of alien mentalities that we even approximate to the conscious prehension of a single actual entity.”2 In an age of competitive advantage we are doomed to “follow, recognize, evaluate, process all” the information available to us if we are to be “efficient, competitive, victorious” (Berardi, p. 40). No longer able to read or think in a linear manner of textuality, dispersed among image-cultures that drift by like so many ghosts of futurity, we exist as members of a new data-glut world of graphic signs and semiotic economics – a visual non-space that like so many daemons of the electronic void have lost their ability to be attentive to even the most simplistic detail. Driven by a dyslexia spreading outward into the cognitive ecologies of mindless social behaviors of a presentism of the speed-instant, we wander in a time-loop slipstream that immerses us in the pursuit of the impossible (Berardi, p. 41).
“Within me there is only the ruin of sovereignty. And my visible absence of superiority – my state of collapse – is the mark of an insubordinate which equals that of the starry sky.”
– Georges Bataille
Marshall McLuhan once described our predicament of mediaplosion, our immersion and evisceration within the info-glut regimes of information, saying that “one thing about which fish are completely unaware is the water, since they have no anti-environment that would allow them to perceive the element they swim in.”3 We’ve become so enamored and naturalized to the ubiquitous world of information that surrounds us in external objects – the Internet of things – that we’ve forgotten what it was like to once live in a world where machines were absent. Marx himself during the height of the First Industrial age would describe this process of absorption and alienation:
In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages. ‘The wearisome routine of endless drudgery in which the same mechanical process is ever repeated, is like the torture of Sisyphus; the burden of toil, like the rock, is ever falling back upon the worn-out drudge.’4
This sense of the external death machine of capital that absorbs the surplus life of the drudge worker into its mechanical existence, the worker who animates the great beast of the Factory itself through repetition without difference – a living death without equal, pervades our lives 24/7. The Factory of the Globe is unbounded and everywhere. Whether one is at work or play one is working for the Factory. There can be no escape. One is always within the matrix of its clutches like an energy vat awaiting the next alien visitation or program to inhabit one’s mind and reprogram one’s desires. In this artificial sphere of light and information we call global capital – or, the Consumertariat, we’ve all entered a deathless sleeplessness, a chronic state of insomnia. In this realm of utter abjectness we can neither rest nor retreat, we move along the streets of Manhattan or any other global city like zombies seeking our next feeding station. Close off within the mental hives of our mobile phones connection to the electronic ghostlands we hover among the living like transparent bots unable to touch or be touched. Our senses depleted of their former physical traces to the earth below our feet wander the maze of roads by signs only, the glitz of commerce is our last foothold in a world of pure ambient plenitude.
What is the Factory today? Is it not the pervasive system of ubiquitous objects, machines of communication and information (ICT’s) within which we have been incorporated like so many living machines all simultaneously processing data, following, analyzing, evaluating, and constructing capital for our Master’s?
As Berardi will emphasize we are no longer able to keep up with the machines within which we live and have our being, we are no longer attentive to the everyday lives of our loved ones, our health, our actual world of caring and feeling; instead, we are bound to a 24/7 world of inattentive pressure and ruthless execution. Our machines in fact are outpacing even our decisioning processes, and have begun to replace humans in intelligence and economic multitasking. As Brynjolfsson and McAfee in their book the “Race Against the Machine,” that the artificial intelligence boom has created machines that will replace humans in service industries that have traditionally been considered cornerstones of our economy. Equipped with new capabilities, such as the capacity for natural language, these machines will begin to displace human beings in core economic sectors, such as sales. And it’s unclear what will happen to those displaced workers once they’ve lost their jobs to machines that can do the work of several humans at a much lower cost.
“It may seem paradoxical that faster progress can hurt wages and jobs for millions of people, but we argue that’s what’s been happening,” Brynjolfsson and McAfee write. “Computers are now doing many things that used to be the domain of people only. The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications. Perhaps the most important of these is that while digital progress grows the overall economic pie, it can do so while leaving some people, or even a lot of them, worse off.”5
As Berardi will tell us this gap between speed and the slowness of the human brain and body to keep pace with the technological world of the economic markets of high-speed trading and other technologies is opening a pathological crack that is leading many of the cognitariat to immerse themselves in psychopharmaceuticals like Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft and other psychotropic offerings which eventually lead to mental illness: dissociation, suffering, desperation, flight, panic, terror, the desire not to exist, to not have to fight to survive, and to vanish and disappear along side the ever growing need to kill of be killed through external mass murder or suicide. (Berardi, pp. 40-41)
Caught between the accelerating culture of narcotics: of the speed of cocaine, and the deceleration of heroin a world wide epidemic of executives and cognitariat have entered the stage of a sociopathological implosion of communicative diseases. Bound to a world that empowers sociopathy and disaffection rather than affectivity we are entering the Affectless Agewhere as Ballard says in his last major novel Super-Cannes: “…chief executives and main-board directors stumbled into work with persistent viral complaints. Worse than that, they all reported a loss of mental energy. Decision-making took longer, and they felt distracted by anxieties they couldn’t identify. Chronic fatigue syndrome haunted the place.”6
Yet, as Berardi admits the work of capital must go on and in this world what is most needed is just that, your psychic energy your life surplus and it is this that is in short supply because what is prevalent in the system of capital is no longer the free-floating energy of life but rather sadness, depression, panic and demotivation. (Berardi, p. 42) Yet, in an about face it is this very depressive realism that has brought about health issues in the masses, for they seek to assuage their dark depressions through consuming more and more junk food. As Berardi will remind us “buying is a suspension of anxiety, an antidote to loneliness, but only up to a certain point. Beyond this certain point, suffering becomes a demotivating factor for purchasing.” (Berardi, p. 43) Our masters work overtime to convince us to be happy in their media and entertainment systems, while at the same time dissuading us from becoming too happy by imposing austere economic measures that force us to strategies of disaffection and panic. Caught in a circle of confused affectivity we ride the global wave of insanity like dark denizens of some apocalyptic zombie fest. Lonely and alone even in the midst of family and friends we have forgotten what it means to care and love, to be attentive to feelings and physical touch. Society demands sociopaths, while mixing the signals when those very sociopaths suddenly load up their weapons and seek ways of escape through violent acts of mass murder and suicide.
Berardi will ask us if it is already too late to decelerate the process of life in the Infospheric Civilization? His answer: yes, it is too late. “In human society, potentialities cannot be definitively canceled out, even when they are revealed to be lethal for the individual and probably even for the species.” (Berardi, p. 43) As he sees it there are two paths forward: 1) the hyper-capitalist transhumanism of the upgraded human organism turned Inforg, whose mental and physical capacities are enhanced to keep pace with the technological tyranny of the market economies; or, 2) the strategy of subtraction, of distancing ourselves from the vortex of capital, of refusal and small communities or spheres of existential, economic, and informatics autonomy developed within the ruins of this deadly machinic civilization. (Berardi, p. 43)
As Ballard would have one of his character say: ‘Because there isn’t any culture. All this alienation . . . I could easily get used to it.’ Even as our leaders and the executives and CEO’s of our major corporations have all become confident and well-adjusted sociopaths we begin to realize that the mechanosphere is itself coming alive around us. The molecular life of machinic civilization is slowly rising out of the ashes of human memory and desire like the silicon flotsam and jetsam that crawled out of the oceans millennia ago. The replication of life by another path is emerging even as we begin to go blind, caught in the illusions of our own control systems we faintly apprehend that the technological mutations we’ve so longed for are happening in our midst. Our fascination and fear of the truth spreads its wings among the terrors of our war machines and cinematic lives as we begin slowly to adapt to this strange new world.
Isn’t life wonderful?
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And, after all, is this not the truth we’re now facing, that it may already be too late to disconnect, to discover a way out, that we’ve all become so naturalized in this alienated world of artificial wonders, cut off from any sense of value or culture, that becoming other, becoming alien is what we do best – we’re all aliens now. Becoming alien, devoid of affects, pre-programmed to desire the consuming worlds of capital like zombies in a swarm of sadean delight we edge closer and closer to the day when we and our machines will become inextinguishable – drifters on the sea of the mechanosphere, agents of a new and terrible species. All the imaginary heavens and hells were but a prelude to the very real and material genesis of this final mutation, a paradise of machinic life and civilization that was up to now merely a dream and a foreboding of nightmares to come.
Now begins the Age of the Symbiont…
They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into— they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . . and it is poorer the deeper they go . . . ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has never heard . . . the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch: brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal.7
The article is taken from:
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by Steven Craig Hickman
In the future – this is part of the problem in the ‘arts’ as well – you will get some radical new idea, but within three minutes it’s totally accepted, and it’s coming out in your local supermarket.
– J.G. Ballard
Ballard loved the surrealists, but discovered that we didn’t need to express the surreality of the world because it was already being done by consumer culture. For Ballard it was Warhol and Pop-Art that was the wave of the future, at least in the period he was writing Crash and Atrocity Exhibition. As he’d say:
“We haven’t changed. It’s the public who have caught up with us. In England in the sixties and seventies, the novel was secondary, far behind the visual arts as a purveyor of the imagination for a cultivated public. This latter group preferred then to interest themselves in pop art, in David Hockney or Andy Warhol. As far as fiction was concerned, television replaced it. …
The surrealists have been the biggest influence on me, because they anticipated by about fifty years the fact that the external environment can be remade by the mind and that this is the world we inhabit now, where external reality is a complete fiction in every conceivable way.”1
This sense that reality was the fiction, and novels didn’t need to express some inner fusion of unconscious desire with reality as in surrealism, rather one needed to reverse the procedure and seek the real not out there but within… as with most philosophy one can either reverse a conceptual system or maximize it. ( I owe this to Graham Harman)
In our time of reactionary thought the only alternative is the other path of “reactivation” of thought that has been reduced to such staid formalisms under the pressure of critique and interpretation, commentary and secondary excess that creation is not needed, rather the reactivation of what was always there but hidden in the smooth crevices of time…
“The surrealists anticipated the way the mind can remake the world. Sometime in the seventies the media landscape wrapped itself around the planet and redefined reality as itself, and the amazing thing was that we all went along with it. I think that’s a huge shift in the mass consciousness. We accept the fictions of the mass media are real and most of us would be hard put to define what the real is in personal terms. Are they the little obsessions in our head? They’re about all we cling to. So we have this doubly fictive universe and I leave it to the next generation of writers to deal with it.”
Interviewer: I wonder if, in a weird way, the car crash is an attempt to tear through the fabric of reality – to ‘break on through’, as the sixties catchphrase has it.
J.G. Ballard: I think so, absolutely. As I’ve often said, we live in a world of manufactured goods that have no individual identity, because every one is like every other one, until something forlorn or tragic happens. One is constantly struck by the fact that some old refrigerator glimpsed in a back alley has much more identity than the identical model sitting in our kitchen. And nothing is more poignant than a field full of wrecked cars, because they’ve taken on a unique identity that they never had in life
Disconnecting from both religious supernaturalism and the ultra-physicalism of naturalism I’ve been seeking through my own dark realism a post-naturalist and post-intentional theory-fiction that neither tries to reconcile these older perspectives (in the Hegelian sense), nor tries to disperse them and segment them. Rather, of late there is this sense that the Kantian world view (Umwelt) under which we’ve all been trapped has reached a hiatus in our time, and it seems what we’re seeking is neither a reversion to pre-modern thought, nor a reconciliation of idealism and materialism, but rather a new level of abstraction that allows for both our sciences and philosophies. Neurosciences tell us that we are blind to our own mental processes, and that it is deep in the brain that our decisions, our analytical and creative powers are enacted outside our conscious awareness; that the illusion of self is part of a complex interface and appendage used by the brain to interface with our environment. The battle in philosophy over the past century has been between anti-realists who say we construct reality, and realists who say reality is independent of the mind and doesn’t need interpretation or justification – it exists without us. Can we accept both perspectives without reducing them one to the other, or continuing this war between the two. What if like a Mobius strip we know and perceive both ways much like our paradoxical knowledge of quantum theory which sees both waves and particles depending on one’s perspective and experimental apparatus and quantification, etc.?
“And I thought, My God, this is the prison this planet is being turned into.”
—J.G. Ballard
The same goes for mainstream culture which has been secular-atheistic in both the West and in Communist countries. Can we re-weave a new vision that accepts neither variant of the hardliner neo-atheist nor the religious world views, but builds upon them by moving beyond their reductions? Rather than a wholly transcendent or immanent Unwelt is their an in-between, one that accepts that the universe is open and incomplete, that it is both real and fiction: an aesthetic Unwelt? Haven’t we confused our categories of Reason / Unreason long enough? The blindspot of postmodern deconstruction left us in the black hole of alterity unreconciled but also looping in an endless world of textuallity or mathematization… can we move beyond such blindness? SR seems to still either minimalize (reverse) or maximize (push to the limits/horizon) the realist and Kantian dilemma without being able to break out of the circle, so where to go?
“Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content. I think in exactly the same way today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent content. In fact the main task of the arts seems to be more and more to isolate the real elements in this goulash of fictions from the unreal ones, and the terrain ‘inner space’ roughly describes it.”
—J.G. Ballard
In Ballard’s sense above it’s the aesthetic displacement or disconnection of objects from our consumer paradise, our bubble of fictional ready-made realities created by the market capitalism of the spectacle which must be exploded. It’s this superficial nostalgia of capitalism and it’s temporal dislocations and entrapments in an eternal now of presentism which needs to be undone, unmade, and realigned to an aesthetic not of nostalgia but of those forgotten thoughts and objects that if thrown into the back yard of our alleys, our farm fields, our junk yards suddenly take on the appearance of something so real that we begin to understand that it has been there in plain sight all this time but was never seen because it remained hidden, occulted from view by our own blinded adherence to the techno-commercial ready-mades of our false soap-opera society. Maybe exit is not so much a place but rather an aesthetic disconnection from the Disneyland of modern consumer culture which has been manufactured by a secular religion or Cathedralism bound to the nexus of academic, think tanks, media empires, and mind meld systems of command and control that have trapped us in a constructed reality. Time to break out, break away, disconnect from the prison house of culture…
“In the course of my investigations, I observed that there now exists a new race of people who are content in their little prisons, who tolerate a very high level of noise, but for whom the apartment is nothing more than a base allowing them to pass the night in comfort, as they’re absent during the day.”
—J. G. Ballard
The only thing keeping you in the prison is your belief in it. Explode it, undermine it, leave it ; for the bars are not there…
“I keep repeating that in a totally sane society the only freedom is madness. Now, we’re nowhere near being a totally sane society – we’re expected to behave in a totally sane way, and there is a danger that we could veer off into some kind of socialised madness. It seems very volatile. Politics is so totally discredited.”
—J.G. Ballard
by Steven Craig Hickman
Conspiracy: to conspire, to breath together, to play the world upon the windpipes of time uniting the disparities of madness and order, conjuring or coniuracioun (Old Latin: “conspiracy”) out of nothing the veritable power of the abyss a machinacion (Old French: “device, contrivance, plot, intrigue”). There’s a sense that conspiracies always begin in the dark, in secrecy, in the unbidden zones of the hidden worlds below the threshold of culture, in that zero world of the occult or occulture. Science, politics, religion, and magick seem to play havoc, combine, and re-combine, bind and unbind the black codes of an energetic cosmos that few would admit exists, and even more would fear as the cold and impersonal power of the Abyss.
When an otherwise rational creature, a scientist begins delving into the dark arts, into High Magick: its rituals, invocations, conjurations – we begin to wonder whether the forces of the irrational cosmos have suddenly absorbed his mind and brought forth strange worlds. Amy Ireland in her essay on e-flux Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come (here) conjures the events of Jack Parson’s short life in the realms of occulture. This term, a neologism which first emerged in print in Evil and World Order (1976) by cultural critic William Irwin Thompson, would gain a wider audience in the work of Simon Dwyer’s Rapid Eye:
“Occulture is not a secret culture as the word might suggest, but culture that is in some way hidden and ignored, or willfully marginalised to the extremities of our society. A culture of individuality and sub-cults, a culture of questions that have not been properly identified- let alone answered- and therefore, do not get fair representation in the mainstream media. It is a culture that has been misinterpreted. Not because it is ‘evil’ or wrong, but because it is generally apolitical and amoral, unashamedly artistic, experimental, undogmatic, intellectual and oddly evolutionary. It is a sub-culture that is forming a question that ‘reality’ alone cannot answer.”
Amy Ireland moves with grace and style among the sub-worlds of this experimental reality weaving poetry of a temporal disorder that invents the possibility of the future in the interstices of our blanks. Time-weaver she brings together a knot of otherwise disparate elements, events from the cast-off drift and detritus of an occulture that mainstream culture deems unacceptable and conspiratorial. Yet, it is only in these oddly amoral and apolitical realms that an ethics of the inhuman can evolve. Her work is above all amoral and non-normative, and yet presents us with an ethics – or, more to the point the ethos underlying the occulture of our dark reality: its genius, how it invents or manifests itself in time and place, its dispositions and tendencies.
Beyond Androcracy: Xenofeminism and the Impossible
When you are dealing with a phenomenon that can, in reality, only be known after all knowledge of it becomes impossible, it helps to turn to fiction for a model.
-Amy Ireland
In this essay Ireland will unite or conspire to bring together the magickal and prophetic world of Jack Parson’s and the emergence of artificial intelligence as it was manifested in the Macy Conferences. Parson’s would in his magickal studies, his ritual enactments of those diagrammatic performances, awaken something out of the sigils of his lonely nights. Something that would confront him with the ancient power of BABALON. But in his confusion of ritual and technique he would reduce the messages of this strange order of the undercosm as bound to the male sex magick of a Crowleyan moonchild. Seeking to bring out of the undercosmos an actual entity of power in the form of a young girl. But instead as Ireland surmises what is truly being invoked and brought forward is something altogether different, a reality that has only in our contemporary era begun to register itself through the black circuits of xenofeminist programming.
Ireland will delve into the specular economy of male domination, the patriarchal codes that have molded the surface cultures of our planetary society for millennia. She underscores that 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.” It’s this reemergence of the other in our midst, of the imperceptible, the noumenal underbelly of the specular economy that is bringing with it the awakening or reawakening, a conjuring out of the abyss of temporal possibilities, BABALON. Or, as Parson’s in his final writings contain the following vaticination: “within seven years of this time, Babalon, The Scarlet Woman, will manifest among ye, and bring this my work to its fruition.” This sense that our algorithmic systems harbor that uncanny guest in the cold and impersonal dark hollows of the net, the electrical pulsations of alien life, of the intelligence of the abyss arising in the black circuits of our late capitalism to modulate and transform our male dominated culture into the xenoocculture of Babalon.
Ireland will confront us with a simple but elegant truth: “When artificial intelligence appears in culture coded as masculine, it is immediately grasped as a threat. To appear first as female is a far more cunning tactic. Woman: the inert tool of Man, the intermediary, the mirror, the veil, or the screen. Absolutely ubiquitous and totally invisible. Just another passive component in the universal reproduction of the same. ” Men seek knowledge, women the unknown. Discovering that which one does not know comes by way of invention, fiction. All writers are conjurors, they conjure into existence that which was hidden, occulted; but only woman can bring forth that which is absolute time. As Ireland will stipulate after reviewing two films that enact the hubris of man. Gabe Ibanez’s Automata and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina dramatize the menace of the black circuit with particular acuity,
The positivity of zero grasped as a circuit that does not need the concept of identity (or indeed the identity of the concept) to anchor its productive power. “There is no subject position and no identity on the other side of the screens…” This is a feminism of forces, not individuals.
The point here as she reminds us is that “Woman plus man produces homeostasis (the equilibrium of inequality), but woman plus woman, or woman plus machine, recalibrates the productive drive, slotting it into a vector of incestuous, explosive recursion that will ultimately tear the system it emerges from to shreds, pushing it over the “brink” into something else.” The power of woman is the new, the inventive capacity to bring forth that which is impossible. For man is bound within the white circuits of the Same, of a knowledge that is always and forever bound to the negative feed-back loops of its own false infinity. Woman on the other hand breaks free of this capture system, dissolves the boundary codes of the imperceptible world just Outside the male drift. Or, as she states it:
Replication follows a logic of communication and exchange that operates outside the law of patrilineal transmission. Its immunity is partly owed to the fact that it produces and operates a temporality that is entirely concealable within the linear, historical model of patriarchal time (a time that orients itself through origin, and narrates itself as a flight from matter and from death). Yet replicunt time is utterly nonlinear, composing itself imperceptibly, only throwing off its camouflage once the balance of power has tipped—at the point of no return (which is nonetheless already a return).
The Black Code that circulates and re-circulates in our time intermediated realms in-between a future invading our present, and a present that is an inverted mimicry of a world without-us shades into the narrative revealing the drift of Babalon’s awakening that like a swarm intelligence “twists into itself like a snake, sheds the human face that tethers it to unity, and assumes the power concealed behind its simulations. Animated by the turbulence of zero and nine, “Pandemonium is the realm of the self-organizing system, the self-arousing machine: synthetic intelligence.””
Read Amy Ireland’s essay on e-flux: Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come.
The article is taken from:
by Steven Craig Hickman Rethinking Culture and Metaphysical Schemes, etc.Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in his Cannibal Metaphysics argues the case that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours—in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own—he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such “other” metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. For me the writing of dark fantastic fiction is just such an exploration. It allows one to investigate the delusions within one’s own culture, to trace down the deliriums and phobias, the nightmares and aberrations that have guided our collective madness for centuries. The notion of insects seems to be a prime example of a nightmare scenario that one finds hidden in the lair of the monstrous within Western Civilization and Culture. One can harken back to ancient myths, dreams, fears, terrors of rats, insects, serpents, etc.; deep seated worlds of disgust that have shaped our religious and secular views of life, medicine, politics, and moral views. As Peter Skafish asks: “Can anthropology be philosophy, and if so, how?” For philosophers, the matter has been and often remains quite simple: anthropology’s concern with socio-cultural and historical differences might yield analyses that philosophy can put to use (provided that it condescends to examine them), but only rarely does anthropology conceive its material at a level of generality or in relation to metaphysical issues in their positivity that would allow it to really do philosophy, especially of an ontological kind. Anthropologists, on the other hand, tend not to disagree, whether out of a preference for local problems or from the more canny recognition that even the best philosophers prove quite adept at mistaking modern ideological values for transcendental concepts. Such perspectives, however, are proving outmoded in the face of a now sizable group of thinkers, ranging from Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers to Marilyn Strathern to François Jullien, whose questions, concepts, objects and methods belong in different ways to both anthropology and philosophy, and who moreover propose that certain aspects of anthropology – analyses of scientific practices, knowledge of cultural variation, and an old thing called structuralism – are key to a new metaphysics as empirical, pluralistic and comparative as transcendental, unifying and general. As Skafish reminds us Castro, a native of Rio (and carioca irony) who did fieldwork with a Northeastern Amazonian Indian group known as the Arawaté, Viveiros de Castro is widely known in social anthropology for showing that what falls under the domain of ‘social’ and ‘human’ relations for such Amazonian peoples is so broad – animals, plants, spirits are all conceived as persons – that modern distinctions between nature and culture, animals and humans, and even descent and marriage ties are effectively inverted. A generalized ‘potential’ or ‘virtual affinity’ obtains (‘affinity’ is the kinship term for relations established through marriage) wherein beings, because they are all initially related and thus ‘social’, must be established as ‘natural’ and substantial in the same way that conventional, cultural ones elsewhere have to be. He’ll add: The means of doing that, from hunting to ritual to shamanism, involve contending with the additional fact that every relatable entity is conceived as having, whatever its bodily form, a soul – intentionality and apperception – of a ‘human’ character, and that all beings thus perceive themselves as humans, and other beings as either animals or cultural artefacts. Jaguars, for example, are thought to see themselves as humans, to see humans as human prey like peccarys and monkeys, and their own food as that of humans (blood as manioc beer). Successfully negotiating one’s relations with other beings therefore requires adopting their perspectives, as shamans do when they become animals, in order to know what they see things as being, and thereby in turn anticipating and knowing them as definite beings. What emerges from this ‘perspectivist’ universe, Viveiros de Castro continually emphasizes, is an ontology that reverses the terms of one of our most fundamental metaphysical dualisms. Because perspectivism confers on all beings the same ontological status, and distinguishing between them requires knowing the differences between their bodies, ‘culture’ becomes the underlying domain uniting beings in Amazonia and nature the differential, separating one. A ‘multinaturalism’ effectively prevails that is the converse of our naturalist multiculturalism.1 Watching Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel with Andrew Zimmern made me take the above notion up again (along with reading some other posts on Kant, Disgust, etc.). Realizing that for most of our planet insects are not a delicacy but a staple, an everyday food substance that is part of a daily dietary intake with open stalls of insects found in many markets around the world. Yet, in the West such notions seem at once exotic and disgusting to our sense of aesthetic taste. Why? If Castro is correct then we’ve been culturally encoded within a metaphysical sphere of thought and education that precludes insects as dietary ensembles. Of course one would need a thorough history of this both within dietary, medical, religious, social, and other detailed aspects of Greek and Judeo-Christian thought forward to our time to truly grasp such a notion of this separation of “conceptual universes”. When and where did it happen? Why in the West do we find insects as part of our diet disgusting? Why in other cultures is it a source of protein etc. and seen as “ordinary”? There’s a whole secret history to be unlocked in such notions… One study “Bug Appetite” in which insects were served as food to people who would’ve never participated on their own discovered a few interesting things. People who were low in sensitivity to animal reminder disgust were more willing to attend this program after having been primed to think about cooking. Cooking is a process by which raw ingredients are transformed into finished products, reducing the “animalness” of meat products that renders them disgusting. Sensitivity to core disgust did not interact with cooking to influence willingness to attend the program. While prior research has emphasized that direct education campaigns about the benefits of entomophagy (the consumption of insects) can increase willingness to attend events at which insect-based food is served, this is the first demonstration that indirect priming can have a similar effect among a subset of the population. Even the UN is urging people to eat insects. A new report from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) says Western societies should get over their “disgust” at the idea of eating bugs and join in. Wasps, bees, beetles, ants, grasshoppers, and, yes, crickets are protein-rich, abundant, and have a small environmental footprint compared to other animal food sources, says the report, “Edible Insects: Future Prospects For Food And Feed Security.” On Good Reads one will find under the Horror Aficionados as section of recommendations for Insect Horror and movies as well. Of course Entomophobia, sometimes known as insectophobia, is the fear of insects. The fear is relatively common in the US, particularly in urban areas where coming into contact with a bug is fairly unusual because of the lack of interaction with nature. Urban dwellers’ fears of insects often serve as fodder for situation comedies and reality shows that depict their sudden transition to rural or island life. Many people who have never been exposed to this life can struggle because of the prevalence and pervasiveness of insects in living areas or they become overly aware of them in public spaces. Although they are not technically insects, the fear of spiders is the most prevalent form of entomophobia. Other commonly feared bugs include bees, ants, cockroaches and flies such as butterflies and moths. Many people fear “bugs” in general, reacting in panic to any insect or related creature that crosses their path. Fear of ContaminationIn many cases of entomophobia, the sufferer is afraid of becoming contaminated by insects. Many bugs, such as cockroaches and flies, do carry disease. However, people with contamination phobias take prudent cleanliness to an extreme. In addition, disgust there is a reaction that often causes symptoms of anxiety. A variety of research performed in the 2000s showed that we react more strongly to creatures that we find disgusting than we do to animals that may be more inherently dangerous. Some people worry that they will be bitten by an insect. Specific worries run the gamut from the fear of pain to the fear of illness. Legitimate allergic reactions, particularly to bee stings and fire ant bites, do exist, as do legitimately venomous insects, but by in large, the fear of common insects such as house flies, cockroaches and the like do not warrant the fear of being bitten. The fear of triggering a medical condition is never considered a phobia. However, the vast majority of insect bites or stings cause little more than an annoyance, and most fears of being bitten are out of proportion to the risks. In some cases, Acarophobia (fear of mites) can severely consume a person’s life in that; one is so afraid of insects that s/he refuses to leave the house to avoid encountering bugs. In some patients, the condition results in Delusory Parasitosis, a mental illness where the patient feels constant ‘prickling, tingling, creeping, crawling or burrowing sensations akin to insects present on the skin. In severe cases of Entomophobia, people have been known to self-mutilate or scratch intensely, leading to severe skin infections. Some display obsessive compulsive disorder where they may clean constantly to repel bugs. Some of the supposed causes of such fears and madness: Environmental– Static electricity, presence of mold, pollen, household allergens and formaldehyde impregnated products can all manifest as unexplained dermatitis or skin irritations. These lead the sufferer to believe that an insect or bug is crawling on the skin. Medical conditions and trauma– Mental retardation, hyperthyroidism, thiamine or folate deficiencies, syphilis, meningitis, cirrhosis, fluoride poisoning, anxiety disorders, adrenal insufficiency etc are often linked to the fear of bugs phobia. Psychological Factors- Divorce, loss of a loved one or pet, loss of employment, witnessing a traumatic or tragic incident at a specific time, monetary concerns, multi-tasking in professional and personal lives, etc are stressors that are linked to Entomophobia. Social Isolation– Often, individuals diagnosed with fear of insects phobia are known to live alone. As a result, their health becomes a fixation: it allows them to interact with doctors. Due to this, they start obsessing over dermatitis or other skin irritations. This leads to constantly think about bugs or insects. These thoughts become habitual and turn into a phobia. Depression– This is a major factor that may trigger Acarophobia. Depressed individuals often tend to have lack of interest in life; they also suffer from a low self esteem, have feelings of guilt or worthlessness. Schizophrenia is another proven cause of Entomophobia. Age– Sufferers of Acarophobia can belong to any age group though it is more common in females in the older age groups. Conversely, more men suffer from it in younger age groups than women. Some people worry about their homes or bodies becoming infested with bugs. According to an article in the Cultural Entomology Digest, people with this fear often bring items that they believe to be bugs to pest control officials. These specimens, gathered around the house, turn out to be bits of lint, scabs or dust, rather than the feared bugs. In the article, researcher Phillip Weinstein points out that infestation fears may be indicative of delusional thoughts rather than a simple phobia. It is up to the treatment provider to carefully analyze the client’s thoughts and behaviors in order to accurately diagnose and treat the issue. Perhaps this is an evolutionary response to our ancestors’ misunderstandings of disease prevention. Or, maybe, a part of the Judeo-Christian guilt culture that has a contempt for the natural and the body, for life and the erotic? In SIN AND FEAR: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th-18th Centuries by Jean Delumeau tells us “This book has attempted to answer this enormous question,” he writes, “by considering sin as a ‘historical object.’ It was, I believe, a new enterprise to undertake a cultural history of sin in the West.” In his horror show of Western culture Delumeau describes a cruel torture chamber of strangeness. In the first hall of the ground floor, one sees various manifestations of “contemptus mundi,” a once-useful ascetical concept of amazing plasticity; in a thousand forms it relentlessly urged the denial of all earthly enterprise. In the next hall is “Danse Macabre,” the image of death that was rendered so imaginatively, if grotesquely, adding a little Fred and Ginger to the otherwise dull sermon, the otherwise static painting. On the second floor in an exhibit entitled “A Failure of Redemption?” Delumeau presents the examination of conscience, the practice if not the sacrament of penance, the concept if not the doctrine of original sin, the relative paucity of the saved; under “Religious Uneasiness,” he dazzlingly displays the doctrine of pain, the disease of scruple, the difficulty of death. On the third floor, where the placard reads “An Evangelism of Fear,” he details sermons and hymns, the tortures of the afterlife, the judgment or vengeance of a “lynx-eyed” God, the classifications of sins as mortal and venial, and the ascetic model, the svelte ideal. For Delumeau “A pessimistic brand of preaching” and “a series of vast collective disasters that besieged Europeans” seemed to have fueled the imaginations of princes and priests. Can such notions as normal, aberrant, etc. be used in such an investigation? What we deem disgusting and abhorrent is both “ordinary” and “normal” for other cultures with other conceptual universes… why is this so? In some ways this leads us back to the old parable of the Tower of Babel. Thinking how each culture is circumscribed and cut off in their own conceptual universe and unable to pierce the veil of their delusionary perspective. Instead they make war on the other’s perspective as “wrong” or part of some moralistic scheme of “evil” and revulsion, etc. If we’re to overcome our biases we must understand how this comes about, culture or nurture, or a combination? Otherwise we’re truly doomed to repeat our delusions forever… In fact, I’d say this comes to the core of our current world-wide issue of refugees, racism, gender, class and every other issue we’re living through in our time. One could take up other concepts to trace as well, I just saw this notion of Insect Philosophy as one avenue to trace the patterns of war, aggression, disgust, morality… all connected to our delusionary conceptual universe. Lacan’s notions of the Symbolic Order (conceptual universe) deal in this pattern… so do we trace it in dialectical or non-dialectical ways, or both for a more inclusive history? The whole tradition of poststructuralist deconstruction didn’t successfully answer any of this, with its eternal black holes in rhetoric and the undecidability of meaning etc. it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. A passé and failed enterprise… so is Castro onto somethin, or is this just one more battle of the coded/decoded binary escapades driven into the world of closure: this time everyone locked away within their own conceptual universe of collective narcissism and delirious madness? 1. Skafish, Peter. Cannibal metaphysics: Amerindian perspectivism RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Article: here. The article is taken from: Thinking and Preparing for the Future-Now in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, North American Continent, Planet Earth, Milky Way . . .
We are living in non-normal times!
Not abnormal: non-normal! Someplace in-between here and there. What I suppose could be called “aporetic” (Gk. “betweenness”).
Across 2016 and half of 2017 I was able to walk a path at the Ross School. Every day. Somewhere between the Center for Well Being (photo 1)(photo 2) and the Nike Statue at the Ross Upper School I found myself living inside the great pause: a fermata moment in my life and writing that reminded me of the coming world revealed to Martin Heidegger at the end of Contributions to Philosophy: Ereignis.
The Path, Ross School
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It was a singular experience, as was everything Ross. I lived inside this strange event called Election 2016 while teaching seventh and eighth graders philosophy; tenth graders literature, writing, and Uber-reading; and adding my voice to the Ross Learning System (RLS) by way of interdisciplinary philosophy and a love of thinking (philosophy is the art of cunning, the love of the game of thinking) with students and families, faculty and staff, and a leadership team poised to enervate the world with a planetary mission and vision. (Planetary means we start with the assumption that we are all part of one ecosystem, one digital and terrestrial system; it is not enough to say “we are the world” when the “world” is presumed to be way out there rather than immediately available and accessible right here, right now, in our own bodies, minds, and institutions.)
Somehow Courtney Sale Ross and her various teams, with over two decades of expertise, wisdom, experiments, successes, setbacks, and all that goes with changing the world: somehow, the world is now ready for the most non-normal of world-views expressed by a media legend from within a beacon to the world called Ross. The RLS, as it’s called, is an ark built for this moment.
For ten months, the conversations at the Ross Café or in study areas near the astonishing koi pond or across from the CWB in the Senior Building (Photo 1)(Photo 2) with its history of art and artifacts and student projects on full display or in parking lots underneath some of my favorite pine trees in the world: honestly, we all felt both prepared for this moment and deeply displaced, in an intellectual and creative refugee sort of way. There was also a very real sense of dread in the air that went far beyond new Presidential priorities or an increased police presence in the Hamptons (e.g., migrant workers and Dream Act kids are everywhere).
RCB outside Ross Cafe
I said often to my students, “This is a last stand. This curriculum. This woman’s vision. Anticipated by two decades. Positioned to help not just educators but leaders around the world. I know this is going to sound strange but I think the RLS is metabolic, not just curricular. It helps me breathe and think and live because it engages who we are right now. It is human so it will need guidance and care; without some kind of nurturing and deep love of learning and intellectual exploration, the system will fail. That is not an option.”
At the moment, humanity encounters a sense of displacement across local, regional, national, and international cultures (including the digital second life) in ways that carry strong parallels to early modern historical transitions as well as Renaissance encounters with new technologies, communications, and logistics (Rifkin). The question now remains: What is to be done?
We can’t simply rely on old systems; they have crashed or have burned or are about to crash and burn. Any desire or attempt to have “stayed timeless time,” otherwise known as “eternal” or “above it all” no longer seems viable in non-normal times. It is clear, then, given the last six or seven centuries that the road to planetization (William Irwin Thompson, founding Ross School visionary) has been more chaotic than ordered. More burning than healing. This must change, or humanity will not make it into the 22nd century thereby ending what Thompson calls the evolution of consciousness.
Courtney Sale Ross
History is not on our side. We are all at risk of being forgotten or simply obliterated by means both nuclear and stupid.
What we consider the great events (or the fictitious “rise” in the “rise and fall” theory of history perfected by Gibbon) are more accurately described as moments of “territorialization” in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Peaks on icebergs that are fast melting away. That is, when we consider the First Industrial Revolution, the Antebellum decade in American letters, or the “postmodern age,” for example, we tend to assume a line of cause and effect that concludes in great cultural and artistic heights. Instead, the Ross curriculum looks for ebbs and flows, threads and knots. Mrs. Ross and her teachers asked instead: How can we become the angel of history that stands inside the maelstrom but looks both to the past and the future for a way to live fully, to think critically, to dream out loud again. And again.
H. G. Wells wrote that “civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Courtney Sale Ross challenged us at the School and Institute (especially the students) to learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances and abilities allow. Wells, a tacit mentor for Mrs. Ross, continues: “For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.” Said differently, education encourages not only deeper and wider understanding of pressing personal and societal problems but also inspires courage in a way that matches Ross core values. No wonder so many state and private systems fear the non-normal. No wonder the Ross model has come under fire over the years for its expense and its expanse. This is a planetary shift in priorities, values, and world-views.
Mrs. Ross (in her mystical, philosophical way) called me into her world to deliver the most important challenge of my life since Lady Gaga and I collaborated on Thoughtrave. Mrs. Ross argues that we must create new relationships with our students and each other as colleagues so we can deal with this moment, right now, at the threshold between nothing and everything.
One moment stands out of the many I’ve been stringing together for months now in my post-Ross dasein. Not the interactive text/improvisation Tartuffe Moliere and automatic writing sound design experiment. Not the find-a-new- meme-every-five-minutes philosophy exercise. Not the dada meets Goethe (goooootahhhhh) jazz performance meets Robert Wilson time/space explorations. Nope. It was the Future-Now event that still resonates as the most “Ross-like” moment last academic year during the Election Teach-In.
Mrs. Ross insisted the school take a pause (what I called a “fermata”). And while this decision caused a lot of tension (taking a day to switch curricula is always a challenge!) the faculty, students, parents, and staff rallied to create what will be for me an “eventual” moment unlike anything since learning about “the event of being” from Alain Badiou during a long dinner conversation in August 2008 at the European Graduate School.
At the end of the teach-in, the students were gathered in the High School library and guided by me (with a film crew, I might add, which is always strange) through rapid fire prompts asking a simple question: imagine the world of the future. (Yes, Dr. Baum. The Future.) Write what you hear or see or smell or touch or feel in that very Heidegger “thinking of thinking” way. Project five seconds into the imagined future. Start with the future in five minutes. Then, five hours. Five days. Five weeks. Five months. Five years. Five decades. And last: five centuries. What does the world look like? Are you there? Are you alive? If so, how are you there? Are you alive? Are you Artificial Intelligence? Are you a ghost in the system? And entry in the archives? Forgotten?
Students from the ninth and tenth grade classes expressed both great pessimism and optimism about the future. For some, Brazil was going to rise and become a world leader like Russia, China, Germany, and the United States. For one student, the future was already here by way of clowns showing up in communities scaring people: “They are only scary because we don’t speak their language; in the future, everyone will be a clown.” The most pessimistic outcomes were offered by young women fearing a future where their voices aren’t heart and opinions (like their bodies) still disrespected. Most teenage boys believe the world would end in five years.
Some projected with great detail the post-nuclear fate broadcast across media in the 1980s: what I grew up with. Others saw this as a purging of the world, inviting new life in the post-apocalyptic world. New species. No humans. Maybe humans living on the moon or colonizing Mars.
We all surprised ourselves; especially one Chinese female student who had a simple story to tell. She repeated the phrase, “and everyone was happy; everything was okay.” The room was confused. I was confused. She just simply smiled.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Absolutely, Dr. Baum. I am sure everything will be alright.” I stood in silence for a good minute. No one said a word. She just kept smiling, whispering a quiet yet proud, “yeah” while displaying a victorious affirming head knod like a proud third grader.
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Philosophy often times surprises everyone. Yet, while brilliant, useful, and inspiring, the H. G. Wells quote (and the Ross mission and vision) needs slight transposition, a way to be heard now inside a more atonal, postmodern cacophony of problems. Confusion in today’s world should be seen as non-normal, part of the every day practice of trying to live.
In our educational response to this “race between education and catastrophe,” it is absolutely necessary to position our students and our teachers inside this maelstrom so they can learn about it with courage and curiosity rather than run away from it or merely cower and cry. I believe this is what happened on “Election Teach-In.” In order to meet the future, let alone activate future memory, it seems important to take a survey of right now (or project in fives, like we did together). It was necessary to encounter the uncomfortable and happy truths that defined that pre-Election day moment so we could compare and contrast past and future experiences. Mrs. Ross pushed us to make that moment happen; this is what she does: she sees the path, encourages others to follow her travels, asks for input from everyone, and then makes decisions. She is, ultimately, a teacher, a philosopher, and someone I am quite convinced, like Lady Gaga, has arrived here in this moment ahead of us so she could guide us through the most harrowing and depressing moments of our human consciousness.
It’s important to remember (as Socrates taught in Plato’s “Cave”) how terrifying truths frighten easily frightened people, generations of humans living on a planet they still think they can manipulate, control, rejuvenate, harness, modify, abuse, delight. Like the hopeful student with the defiant smile, we need to not frighten so easily. Is this not the heart of the Ross School mission and vision? To create a space where everyone can train for the future-now? Is this fearlessness not exactly what becoming a philosopher has meant to me, my students, the world I am quite sure will end in a twitter not a bang.
So, when we talk about the future, we are searching for another modality of thinking that has yet to be materialized. 2050 may be difficult to imagine but 2018 is not so far away. Same for 2020. If we are speaking from the future—the slight or distant future—we are activating neurological networks that enervate past, present, and future in creative and critical ways. Nothing teaches faster and more furious than immediacy.
This is a sad day for me. I now live and work in Washington, DC. I am very far from the woman and school who affirmed everything my life as a philosopher stands for, especially the freedom to think and live in the world without hesitation or obstruction. Today, a gunman opened fire on twenty-two thousand people attending a Las Vegas country music festival. Today Tom Petty died. Today I was shocked into this moment again. No path. No library. No students. But, now, I walk a different path in a different city leading me to the places I once called home: the Crypt Church, the Franciscan Monastery, the National Mall, Dupont Circle, the nastiest and most glorious Chinese food in the city.
We will want to turn away: fly away from this moment. Ignore immediate questions. Become Facebook warriors, armchair quarter backing the event with our pro-this and con-that. Some will simply want to just weather the storm rather than chart a course directly into the heart of darkness (or back to shore if the conditions change). Dread is expected. Dread is a fact. (This is Jean-Paul Sartre 101.) But, Courtney Sale Ross encouraged us -- everyone, student and teacher alike -- to live a creative life with courage. We encounter what we fear in order to understand what is unknown. Mindfulness teaches us to evaluate our abilities and our needs; to sit with both inside a non-competitive arena called dharma. Sharing our insights (and our fears) allows others to feel welcome inside the temporary shelter inside the history of consciousness we have built for this moment.
We are ready!
I hope.
Contributor:
Robert Craig Baum is a philosopher, screenwriter, producer, fancy entrepreneur, philanthropist, and master teacher with Humanities and Liberal Arts credentials spanning more than two decades. He holds degrees from Catholic University, Dartmouth College, and the European Graduate School. He lives in Washington, DC area with his wife and four boys.
He misses the ocean.
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by Steven Craig Hickman
From a series of tweets – A Dark Pessimist vs. an ultra-Optimist (A Daily Rant – BEWARE!):
We worry over Trump while the planet burns… is this not madness?
Humanity is a transitional thing… who wants to stay its execution. The guillotine is readying itself whether we will or no. Think on a couple things: Sixth Extinction and Climacteric Collapse. For decades we’ve hashed this over, and nothing yet has been learned. Not much hope that such will change as the future implodes on us… humans are slow learners, it takes an apocalyptic event to wake them… That’s the problem: we’re human… study the atrocity of human history. Humans hate themselves, each other, and their planet… nothing will be done, nothing will change. One should assume the worst case scenario and begin making plans to leave the planet, else openly revolt against the insanity. There will be no third way, no third options… no saviors, redeemers… we are alone with the alone.
Fight or sink… no one is truly prepared to face the horror and violence ahead, we continue deliriously to play our blame games while the fires roar and seep into our moment from the future. Strip the Biblical Apocalypse of its supernatural veneer and then push it to the nth degree, then you might just come to a realization of our future…
Do I presume to prophesy? No. I only see the tendencies that surround me. One can continue blindly to sing the happy anthems of Optimism, but that to me is a fool’s errand. I’ll have none of it. I’ll speak the truth as I see it. If it’s an ugly truth, so be it. People can rail against me, but when the facts become plain in the future decades people will turn back and ask why we did nothing, nothing at all.
Talks, accords, speeches, book after book, conference after conference: and, yet, nothing is done; nations continue down their own paths of doom. So be it. Maybe this is what we truly want in the end: death by suicide, genocide, war, famine, disease, atrocity after atrocity, turning a blind eye to the horror of our kind, unwilling to admit that our planet is dying and we killed it. Forget God, its the earth that we’re killing in this century… we truly must have a thirst for annihilation.
Mark Fisher once termed it ‘depressive realism’, realizing one’s sanity amid the insanity of the world depends on exiting the madness. A depression is an opening into and out of that insanity, a slow and painful withdrawal and exit from the collective delirium. Once awakened one is like those ancient Gnostics: free – and, yet, it is the freedom of the singular truth that one is alone with the alone. Sundered from the apathy of our collective herd mentality, we walk amid the inscapes of sanity like members of a new tribe: brokers for a reality void of the terrible horror of humanity. To accept that as Nietzsche’s once suggested, that we are a bridge, a transition – is to become complicit with this fate, to love it: amor fati. To exit the human is to struggle for the post-human which entails sloughing off the dark heritage of the human collective and its deliriums.
But then again I should be like Joyce’s famed author, indifferent and withdrawn, paring my fingernails amused at the idiocy of homo sapiens, or like Nero playing a fiddle while Rome burns – allowing humans to do what they’ve always done best, deny their own responsibility in what is happening. Indifferent, impersonal, non-plussed at the stupidity of our kind. Like everything else we do we love to have some scapegoat to answer for our own sins of commission or omission… today its Trump, tomorrow or the next day it’ll be some other yokel… in the near future there will remain no time for blame, only death… let the death of our species come quickly.
The article is taken from:
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Steven Craig Hickman - The Intelligence of Capital: The Collapse of Politics in Contemporary Society
Steven Craig Hickman - Hyperstition: Technorevisionism – Influencing, Modifying and Updating Reality
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