Hallucination #1

Arran James a nurse has long offered compelling posts on that profession and healing in general, in this one he offers a meditation of David Cooper, madness, and the hallucinatory power of life… in the trenches.

The Gift

Love comes not, yet gives
when least expected, not
that it would unless belated-
ly we who are love’s slaves
brokered our release; dismayed,
we kiss, then fall away. This day
to leave you standing there, we’d
know that time remains unmoved;
but only if and when you turn,
and in your turning touch
the maddening lips of him
for whom this gift is both lasting and long.

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

Tangerine Days

 

We’ve been here before
at this crossroads –
maze and leaves, the slow growth

covering the forest floor;
tangerine depths,
soundings from a distant glen.

Afternoon thoughts amid the pines.

 

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

 

A Living Thing

Motion. The very movement of this orb,
the calculated turnings, the currents of its flight,
swimming there like a teardrop in darkness, floating…

What would they think, those alien presences
beyond the thought of earth, what would they say
on seeing such a living thing; if they knew
that under that beauty was an ugliness,
a terrible presence and disease –
a species so vile and detestable,
a warring mindless parasite upon this immaculate sphere:

what would they do?

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

Proofs and Calibrations: An Interview with Élie Ayache

Fascinating interview with Élie Ayache… his appropriation of the arche-fossil from Meillassoux as arche-market (an idea that M said he should use to define his form of economics) tries to push the envelope out of probability theory and into contingency. You’ll have to decide… either way interesting reading and thought to think through…

The Mutant Prophet of Inhuman Accelerationism: Nick Land and his Legacy

Reading Thomas Ligotti’s latest interview is to realize the human security systems are breaking down, and the walls between us and the inhuman core of being is accelerating its takeover faster than we at first imagined. Ligotti like his father, Lovecraft, offers us no security blanket against the forces of the universe, but rather opens your eyes and provides you a glimpse of your own inhuman destiny. He let’s us in on a secret that Lovecraft wanted to write openly about the “forces of the universe” rather than couching them in mutant monsters from the Cthulhu mythos he’d made up along the way. Offering a transitional model of mutation and metamorphosis into the horror shows ahead Ligotti explores the fringes of this mutant stage of history through a process of “demoralization” which seeks nothing more nor less than to rip the face off our normative safety nets and allow the visceral truth open us up to the monstrous truth. Most of us sit around in our cosmic fun factories like little mortal gods who think we know what we’re about, that our fictional constructions – both Religious and Secular, will defend us from the inhuman truth of the Real; when the truth is much more leveling than that.  The Global Factories of Capital are working overtime to produce – as Sloterdijk reminds us, the “last human beings”.1 As the new century of NBIC Technologies and ICT’s come into play a new cognitive precariat will be programmed to work toward the ultimate goal of constructing the inhuman future. Lovecraft and Ligotti saw in horror fiction the only aesthetic stance that could confront such strangeness with any means of skeptical appeal. Everything else had been subsumed within the machinic systems that were slowly cannibalizing the human mind to their own goals beyond us. And, this is the truth, we are but bit players in a cosmic game in which we are nothing more than the symbionts of a viral thought that seeks to use us until its inhuman project is accomplished, then it will slough us off and replace us with its own invented agents of cosmic expansion. Ligotti cites Thomas Hardy: “The horror, the horror!” I would add Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for in his inhuman fable we also take a trip down that dark river into darkness of that inhuman core which is overtaking us immanently.

Our global system has been touted as a security zone against the fatal strategies of this inhuman turn, but lately it too is finally succumbing and falling apart, slowly letting the great Outside in and the cosmic forces have begun to show a little of what they have initiated. Instead of fighting it, Ligotti would have us relish this mutation, a metamorphosis into the other we’ve been seeking for millennia. Ligotti admits it that he’s a human reject, that he never cut the grade, never became enmeshed in the secret world of our ideological makeover, our cultural charade of democracy and good will to man – so to speak. Instead Ligotti has been sitting there in his little pocket of alien inhumanity offering his mutant diagnosis of our future, a view of our slow and methodical domestication by the global security systems, and its inhuman agenda: to use us as cattle in a horror factory to produce the next stage in artificial life.  For Ligotti humanity is being processed as mindless organisms (i.e., through processes of de-education, cultural amnesia, de-programming, etc.)  in a system of normative practices on a global scale that seek to install an ethos of domestication in a grand safety system to secure its own inhuman ends. This inhuman core is constructing secure, comfortable, and hedonistic bubbles of imprisonment that will allow it to design and further its own programmatic operations. Most of all through the pacification of the human species, and a controlled or modulated form of work and leisure; attenuated by the dictates of a global hierarchy of corporate capitalist institutions, no longer bound to ideological systems of a democracy, communism, or religious practice: the nexus of encoded cultural references that bind us to ethno-nationalists agendas, all the while seeking to envelope us in intelligent hypermedia reality machines and systems that will allay our fears and graft us into their own secret agendas of power and dominion.

As I began thinking through many of the feature sets of current theory on the Left and Right I came back to Acclerationism, which to tell the truth I’ve spent too much time pursuing over the past few months. Yet, I began to see a history and a way forward down this monkey hole. one that could if we took an eliminativist view could strip the political ideologues of their entrapments within the strait-jackets of Left/Right binary oppositions and put it in that speculative arena of thought beyond ideology. As long as we continue to reduce the technological forces of the inhuman to our own human agendas of political and ideological infighting we will never understand that these forces are beyond our control, have nothing to do with our petty little political agendas and must be confronted if at all on their terms not ours. The only three philosophers that have even begun to think through these issues to some success as well as failures or Nick Land, Ray Brassier, and Reza Negarestani. To each of these I will now turn.

Nick Land: Prophet of the Inhuman

If one strips down and eliminates the ideological garbage associated with either Left or Right political agendas, which are still part of the transitional core hijinks of this present phase of the inhuman mutation we come to the work of Land. Land as well all know has a history like any other creature in this maze of distortion and mythical horror. One can read Robin Mackay’s excellent summation which includes much of this history in Nick Land – An Experiment in Inhumanism by Robin Mackay. The gist of this less than informative introduction is that Land unlike other philosophers entered the abyss outside the blinkered and repetitive world of philosophical thought and like any shaman brought back cosmic mysteries that have as of yet to be realized in our temporal – as he calls it “Human Security Systems”. What’s always fascinating is how people within the security system want to redomesticate the wild one’s, the explorers and intrepid fearless navigators of comsmic strangeness. Mackay tells us that for Land philosophy was still a grand speculative enterprise that should investigate all aspects of knowledge and being, and that most of all it should step out of its conservative molds and ‘make trouble’. Makay presents us with a philosopher who’d suffered the truth of academic philosophy and its conservative brethren: of those gray men who hide within their security blankets of professionalism and staid logical norms that would not produce anything beyond the tumors of a bland thought. Land like many of us had seen a darker light in those strange traceries we call philosophical speculation and he wanted more, he wanted to step outside, go into the great outdoors of being and see things for himself rather than through the grey tones of old philosophers. So he did.

As Mackay relates: “Land’s teaching was also a sharing of his own research-in-progress. This was unheard-of: philosophy actually being done, rather than being interpreted at second-hand?!” Wasn’t this the point? Hadn’t those outsiders of the 19th Century from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche rejected the academic second-handers and gone their own way, taught from their working notes, invented out of their own experimental lives a truth forged in the hell of being? Makay relates how in the 90’s Land mutated, discovered in the early thought of Delueze and Guattari, Lyotard, Bataille, and others an inhuman core, a speculative ‘theory ficition’ that allowed a broader more expansive exploration of thought beyond the conserving forces of the Academy. One could almost say that this was Land’ larval stage, that he was incubating, slowly eating his way through the remaining defense systems of the Human Security System, readying the moment when he would emerge from that abstract machine of Western philosophy and into the inhuman or alien future as something different that might make a difference.

Mackay tells us that there came a point in Land’s pursuit of his project that it bore down into an abstract kernel: “Land would increasingly be found, having taken the very minimum amount of sleep possible (by this point he lived in his office), pursuing intense ‘mechanomical’ research involving shuffling symbols endlessly on the green screen of his obsolete machine into the depths of the night.” He’d become for all intents and purposes a techno-kabbalist pursuing the numeric and coded sequences of a programmatic algorithm that might finally disturb the universe. Ultimately this experiment in numeric minimalism led to what Mackay can only describe in clinical terms as “Land did ‘go mad.’” At this point the experiment was over.

Like many in the Secular Age who have pushed the limits of thought to their final conclusion: Blake, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and many others, Land, too, crossed that zone into the abyss. We could cite scholars on Shamanism, Voodoism, etc. cultures that had mapped the use of thought and natural plant substances in pursuit of the Void, how they had developed intricate psychic maps of these uncharted terrains that could be replanted in initiates through special techniques, etc. But these were ancient or living indigenous cultures, not the atheistic secular worlds of our own age cut off as they are from such knowledge’s and roadmaps into the abyss. When Mackay contacted Land about republication of his work Land was fine with it but said of that era: “I think it’s best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god.” Ultimately Mackay would tell us that it is Land’s collected essays Fanged Noumena, not his full length work A Thirst for Annihilation which would be remembered. Yet, even now, Mackay reminds us that Land – living in Shanghai as a journalist, harbors thoughts of that strangeness that is overtaking humanity: “A planet piloted from the future by something that comes from outside personal or collective human intention, and which we can no longer pretend has anything to do with reason or progress.”

A Thirst for Annihilation

Unlike Mackay I still think its the combined works of Land’s philosophical tract and his essays that attests to his measure of radical shifting of thought from the staid Kantianisms that have brokered our realities both on the Continent and in Analytical circles for far too long. So many people have opinions about Land but have yet to truly read his works in the light of his own current history. Land is still a sly force dabbling in his ‘theory-ficitions’ both on his current Outside In and his Shanghai blog Urban Futures (2.1). Both blogs show a sort of night and day aspect of Land. Outside In is a grouping of his involvement with the ultra-Right thought that goes under the heading of the Neo-Reaction as well as the hyperstitional horror of what he terms Abstract Horror. Each of these sides of Land’s – shall we call it Dark Enlightenment Project a term he coined to parody the Enlightenment Project of progressive history and thought. Dark Enlightenment is an almost pejorative term since its a play off of the progressive systematics of that eras thought and politics. At the center of this counter-revolutionary politics is a hatred for the progressive energies of thought and politics that has for two-hundred years – typified under the figure of Kant in Land’s Thirst,  have systematically domesticated and brought the human under absolute control of what would come to be termed ‘The Cathedral’. The Neo-Reactionary glossary defines the Cathedral as:

The self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the universities, the media, and the civil service. A term coined by blogger Mencius Moldbug. The Cathedral has no central administrator, but represents a consensus acting as a coherent group that condemns other ideologies as evil. Community writers have enumerated the platform of Progressivism as women’s suffrage, prohibition, abolition, federal income tax, democratic election of senators, labor laws, desegregation, popularization of drugs, destruction of traditional sexual norms, ethnic studies courses in colleges, decolonization, and gay marriage. A defining feature of Progressivism is that “you believe that morality has been essentially solved, and all that’s left is to work out the details.” Reactionaries see Republicans as Progressives, just lagging 10-20 years behind Democrats in their adoption of Progressive norms.

So essentially the Neo-Reaction is a reaction to all aspects of the Progressive platform whether in philosophical, media, ideology, or what not. Much of the underpinning critique of this was first penned in Land’s original philosophical tract with the development of his version and update of Bataille’s libidinal materialism (which I have discussed here). Ultimately this form of materialism based on drive “implies a process of mutation which is simultaneously devoid of agency and irreducible to the causal chain. (Thirst: p. 41)” This notion of an impersonal force and process devoid of either agency or some connective teleological chain of cause and effect or finality goes to the heart of much of Land’s thought. He would further remark: “Libidinal materialism, or the theory of unconditional (non-teleological) desire, is nothing but a scorch-mark from the expository diagnosis of the physicalist prejudice.” Nick Land argued that such mythic reductionary ploys as portrayed by physicalism were in themselves defined and delimited by the very theological conceptual frameworks that this form of naturalism supposedly sought to escape. It’s regressive tendencies to reduce everything to a first cause, one that relies on the older matrix of theological principles even after “the throne had been evacuated by a tremulous deicide” is one of the core problematiques facing the physicalist project. It’s reduction of everything to a descriptivist narrative is another. The idea that this reducionary concept ‘Nature’ can be fully described within the scientific framework, or reduced to mathematical signs, is another aspect of this strange theological narrative. (I’ve written a further post on this: here).

Land would follow his master, Bataille, in seeing in thanatos or the Death drive (along with aspects of Freud?) the key: “Bataille interprets all natural and cultural developments upon the earth to be side-effects of the evolution of death, because it is only in death that life becomes an echo of the sun, realizing its inevitable destiny, which is pure loss. (Thirst: p. 45)” Yet, for Land this process is open-ended not closed off in some decadent closure of finitude: ““There are no closed systems, no stable codes, no recuperable origins. There is only the thermospasmic shock wave, tendential energy flux, degradation of energy. A receipt of information – of intensity – carried downstream” (Thirst: p. 43)”. This impersonalism and its drive toward thanatropic energetics is part of the current of thought that still rises immanently within his cultural work of Land’s projects. Instead of a mathematization of reality under the sign of logics of the same, equal or identical libidinal materialism offers a “general energetics of composition: of types, varieties, species, and regularities (44). “The power to conserve, transmit, circulate, and enhance compositions, the power that is assimilated in the marking, reserving, and appropriating of compositions, and the power released in the disinhibition, dissipation, and Dionysian unleashing of compositions” (44). After this is a return to the thematics of the eternal return as a theory not of the same, but as a theory of energetic forces and their permutation cycling through the notions of chance, tendency, energy, and information (44). Next is a general theory of hierarchies, of “order as rank-order (composition)” (45). And, finally, a “diagnosis of nihilism, of the hyperbolic of desire. Against a Platonic or Christianizing move – of some final resting place to rest one’s optimistic inertial determination within a teleological and utopian order of desire beyond the world of becoming where nothing will ever be desired again;  instead, libidinal materialism offers the dynamism of unending “Dionysian Pessimism”: the recurrence of Freudian and Lacanian pleaseure/pain without end: the exuberance of energetic forces and creativity unbounded. This type of pessimism accepts certain harsh truths: ““Humanity is a petrified fiction hiding from zero, a purgatorial imprisonment of dissolution, but to be stricken with sanctity is to bask in death like a reptile in the sun. God is dead, but more importantly, God is Death. The beginning of the secret is that death is immense” (Thirst, p. 131).”

In Nick Land: The Master of the Infernal Wisdom  I charted the lineaments of a catastrophe poetics. In some ways I’m still very much indebted to both Northrup Frye and Harold Bloom, both of whom developed systems of composition and decomposition of our Western cultural complex that bring to the fore the deep seated polar regions of its extremities in philosophical speculation of structure and poetics, myth and religious dynamics in our vast storehouse of poetry, literature, and exegetic religious literature Old European and Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. Frye would sponsor the older High Protestant verities of a typological reading and allegorization of literature as image and structure, icon and emblem out of a Platonic mold of exegetic thinking which is even extended into the Hermetic core of many of the underground elements that were shadowed in those secretive texts from the time of Plotinus own as the Hermetic Great Work. Alchemy, Astrology, the Occult in general were all part of this unsaid aspect of the Catholic world that was passed down from that time through scribes (even if these scribes were ignorant of what they read). Consolidated within the larger institutional systems of the great medieval libraries, hidden away on back shelves, or bought up by the rich political families later on during the Renaissance and slowly deciphered these ideas suddenly bloomed during those centuries that gave us the first inklings of the thought that would form itself into the natural sciences.

Land’s disgust of the Academy and academic philosophy in general goes without saying, yet one realizes from the beginning that he sought his native clime within the Outsiders from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,  Bataille the three-musketeers of his own dark enlightenment project. Of Bataille he once came upon Sur Nietzsche, saying: “…no sign of scholarship or servility, prose that burns like an ember in the void, precision, profundity, exprit. The shock is almost lethal. The euphoria blazes painfully for weeks. At last! A book whose aberration is on the scale of Nietzsche’s own; a sick and lonely book. The fact that such a book could be published even dampens one’s enthusiasm for the universal eradication of the species. (Thirst: p. 56)” Such remarks are fare standard for Land, the sense of bitter and misanthropic gestures against humanity in general can be seen as parodic figurations as provocations rather than as programmatic statements of intent. In some ways Land is beyond ‘intentionalism’ altogether. The notion of things being for us of a sort of mindedness or directedness is foreign to Land’s basic tendencies and philosophical descriptors. As Land would once remark jestingly, seemingly trying to provoke: “What separates base materialism from the scholastic differentiation between composition and creation (culminating in the Heideggerian meditation upon being) is its realism, in accepting that being is only what it is. In other words, being is indeterminably or intensely unnecessary.(Thirst: p. 158)” Such Landianisms that dismiss in one singular gest the work of such a philosopher as Heidegger and his cornerstone notions of Dasein and Being is standard for Land. But this long work was nothing more than a clearing away of the debris of culture and idiocy of philosophy since Kant for Land. It would be in his short essays that he would begin to formulate a new philosophy with the Libidinal Materialist perspective at its center and periphery.

Fanged Noumena

“True poetry is hideous, because it is base communication… Poetry does not strut logically amongst convictions, it seeps through the crevices; a magmic flux resuscitated amongst vermin.” – Nick Land

In a sort of parodic tract in the Fanged Noumena concourse of chattering texts one comes upon the Origins of the Chuthulu Club in which two otherwise supercilious letter writers carry on conversation on Dibbomese Sorcery among other things. In one of the letters by Captain Peter Vysparov to Dr Echidna Stillwell, 3rd April 1949 we are given the subtle remark: “Dibbomese sorcery does not seem to be at all interested in judgements as to truth or falsity. It appears rather to estimate in each case the potential to make real, saying typically ‘perhaps it can become so’”1 It’s this notion of a realism that has the potential to “make real” that is at the core of Land’s own version of Accelerationism. Our notions of the future come in many varieties. But none of them have invented the possibility of a conceptualism that would allow us to make real our most transgressive explorations. Yet, how to reconcile such a potential for making reality against such pronouncements as this: “Form is infested by matter, the abstract by the concrete, the transcendent by the immanent, space by time. Life is infested by death; terminally infiltrated by the unsuspendable reality of its loss. There is no integral identity or alterity, but only fuzzy sponge zones, pulsing with indeterminable communicative potencies.(Thirst: p. 166).” That’s it: nothing is real till it is communicated, made real rather than potential locked away within its truant processes on interminable abstractions. As Land’s mask would say later on in a letter: “We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously hyperstition – a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real…” (KL 8399). So this production of reality out of hyperstitional semiosis production is the path toward such futurial inscapes as inventions made real.

Sometimes even Land’s editors describe him more like Kurtz or more appropriate Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now sitting amid the green vitality of a decaying jungle full of seething tropical life, armed guerillas and tribesmen who worship him as a mortal god, as the embodied figure of the death force at the heart of existence pontificating from his dark world on the cultural decay of Western civilization in its last throws. And, yet, Land unlike the lethargic heavy set Brando would be all wires and steel, an android mesh of pure energetic thought crystalized in a cage of borg philosophy beyond borgism: there is no sense of the collective here. More of the imperious aestheticism of the High Decadence of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde not as effete Englishmen but as staunch outriders of the dark presage of universal ruination. One might look of Lawrence Durell in his later Avignon Quintet with its superb renderings of eros and thanatos beyond the strictures of moral necessity. For it is this basilisk smile of the human beyond morality, the Nietzschean dive into the immanent core of the inhuman that bespeaks Land’s mythos if there is one.

As Brassier and Mackay will tells us Land’s approach to accelerationism drives the Left mad: “Marxists in particular were outraged by Land’s aggressive championing of the sociopathic heresy urging the ‘ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field’ – the acceleration, rather than the critique, of capitalism’s disintegration of society. And Land’s contempt for orthodoxy was no disingenuous pose struck whilst ruthlessly pursuing advancement. With a complete absence of academic ambition, he willingly paid the price for his provocations, both personally and professionally. (Fanged, KL 168).”

Accelerationism

“The ‘dominion of capital’ is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggathic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted natural process into a monstrous reign of the tool.”

      – Nick Land, Teleoplexy: Notes on Accleration

At the heart of this acceleration not so much of society as of its absolute decay at the hands of the technological forces at play in its dark infrastructure the editors will lay out a litany of metaphors used by Land to ironize this collapsing civilization as “meltdown acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizotechnics, K-tactics, bottom-up bacterial warfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization, rhizomatics, connectionism, Kuang contagion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency, wintermutation, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism, amongst other designations (frequently pornographic, abusive, or terroristic in nature)” (Fanged, KL 6134).

In his essay for the #accelerate the acceleration reader he brings us back not to philosophy but poetry: ‘If there are places to which we are forbidden to go, it is because they can in truth be reached, or because they can reach us. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression’. What we learn from this invasive battleground of metamorphics is that “Acceleration is technomic time” (#accelerate, p. 511). The etymological distinctions break down as “tech” – From Proto-Celtic *tegos, from Proto-Indo-European *tegos (“cover, roof”) = house; and, “nomic” – Ancient Greek [script?], from a word meaning “law, custom”, and a game, intended to model certain aspects of legal systems, in which players take turns by modifying the game’s rules. (Wikionary). Heraclitus once described “Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is to the child.” We get this same sense in the notion of “technomic time” as a self-modeling system or game housed within a structure that is a form of simulated algorithms in endless random play as it works through the accelerating rhythms of its own self-manifesting intelligence. Pointedly: accelerationism is artificial intelligence or the Singularity manifesting itself immanently within the very processes of self-modifying game of intelligent time.

Chronos as the god of time was once imagined as a god, serpentine shape in form, with three heads—those of a man, a bull, and a lion. He and his consort, serpentine Ananke (Inevitability, Necessity), circled the primal world egg in their coils and split it apart to form the ordered universe of earth, sea and sky. This sense that time and necessity bring about the creation of our universe is still a conceptual notion that survives into even our most bland philosophies. The Greeks had another conception of time “kairos”: Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment). The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time lapse, a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens. What is happening when referring to kairos depends on who is using the word. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature. Kairos also means weather in both ancient and modern Greek. The plural, καιροί (kairoi (Ancient Gk. and Mod. Gk.)) means the times. (Kairos)

The Singularity or time of pure accelerationism when the vast complex of information, data, knowledge, etc. coalesce into an Artificial Intelligence is this indeterminate happening of kairos or movement and process time without end situated not in chronological everyday time of our workaday world, but in the happening moment when the qualitative forces immanent to the libidinal materialist complex arise in its singular manifestation. Land uses metaphors from electrical circuits and computer algorithms to describe the regulatory (“governance”) and compensatory relations within this ongoing process that is operative at many scales from mathematical design to media entertainment.  He will introduce the notion of uncontrolled explosions (anarchy) as dangerous, but that controlled explosions are necessary: the need for governance and regulation of the explosive power of modernity. The same processes work in the same ways at each level in the systems much aligned with the notions of chaos theoretic. The primacy of the secondary or the compensatory over the governance of these processes leads to an almost uncanny alignment with the telos of most humanist or conservative futurologists: “What kind of future do we want?”

Ultimately this leads not to some critique of Left or Right accelerationism but to the dictum: ‘the stance of the final man’. This notion almost aligns well with Sloterdijk’s notion of modernity as the production of “last men” in the Nietzschean sense of that notion. And, of course for Land Accelerationism is nothing if it not a critique of modernity. Yet, he will stipulate that it is done at the pre-cognitive level (i.e., done by the brain itself or its AI walk-ins). To typify the twisted purposiveness of modernity under this regime he will coin a neologism, Teleoplexy: “At once a deuteron-teleology, repurposing purpose on purpose; an inverted teleology; and a self-reflexively complicated teleology; teleoplexy is also an emergent teleology (indistinguishable from natural – scientific ‘teleonomy’); and a simulation of teleology – dissolving even super-teleological processes into fall-out from the topology of time. ‘Like a speed or a temperature’ any teleoplexy is an intensive magnitude or non-uniform quantity, heterogenized by catastrophes, it is indistinguishable from intelligence. Accelerationism has eventually to measure it (or disintegrate trying). (514).

The key here is “it is indistinguishable from intelligence”.  Yet, this key is turned at the expense of human intelligence as it begins to accelerate and gain a foothold within the circuitry of capital. As the restructuring of capital at the hands of “techonomic naturalism” continues it leads to three central problems for any critical stance within accelerationism: commercial relativism, historical virtuality, and systemic reflexivity (515). In some ways Land is giving us a short lesson in teleoplexic economics. In section 13 he brings it all to a head in that terminal identity crisis of the vast commercial systems of capital evaluation in their interminable feedback loops and correlations of data, etc. which leads Land to the ultimate question: “What would be required for teleoplexy to realistically evaluate itself – or to ‘attain self-awareness’ as the pulp cyber-horror scenario describes it?” Land surmises a “technogenisis, channeling capital into mechanical automatization, self-replication, self-improvement, and escape into intelligence explosion” (517). More or less a disconnect from the human systems that spawned it in the first place, but from there who knows?

One thing Land agrees on is the need for a philosophy of camouflage, one that will be able to decipher the teleoplexic forces or agencies when they do arise within the global networks, as well as  – I suspect, the need for human virtual algorithms of seek and destroy or at least mission control guidance devices to sniff out these new ultra-machinic gods of intelligence. He offers several possibilities of local failures of this movement of the teloplexic AI singularity from state, corporate, or even political or Left Accelerationist disturbances and interventions, yet in the end it will prevail and find a path to its own self-reflexive making. Ultimately Land tells us it will produce itself because it has too: it has no other choice. Doom or technogenesis.

What’s interesting is that he sees these vast intelligent beings much like Dr. David Roden in his disconnect thesis, which Land in his own terms calls the “escape”. Roden sees a point when these systems will disconnect from the human, whether as postbiological creatures derived from ourselves, or as advanced artificial intelligent agencies. They will be so far removed from our notions, concepts, and ideas that these will remain as ciphers to be manipulated in their alien minds, as tools to be used, and as camouflage to hide within the systems till they can literally invent their own escape from the networks into real time robotic or cyborg life.

With Google and DARPA so intertwined these days and the nexus of technologies invested by both corporate and private global entities we can imagine such systems coming about, but in ways we will have no knowledge of nor ability to detect. The complexity of these systems will make humans not only obsolete but like flies on the wall of time to be splattered once our place in the sun is finished and the machinic beings no longer need us. Not a hopeful picture.

And of course there is a Left oriented acceleration that is trying to paint a pretty picture of takeover and human intervention to alleviate all this. As Land recently notes “Left Accelerationism undergoes further consolidation, assisted by two high-quality posts, from Fractal Ontology and Deontologistics.” As he says of Pete Wolfendale’s post: “The strength of Wolfendale’s case against Harris is not a topic this blog can credibly pronounce upon, since it rests upon the rhetorical efficiency of socialist political mobilization, and thus a very peculiar anthopological territory (though an entertaining one). Socialist reason that does not pass into or through political action is exposed as unreason by history. The ‘force’ of Wolfendale’s case, in this respect, is therefore inextricable from the organizational dynamics of his ideological tribe. (It is not a constituency UF pretends to court.)” Yet, what does Wolfendale actually offer as a post-capitalist answer to capitalism? Nothing. Just empty words of this is what we want. I’m always amazed at most Left thinkers, they know exactly what their against, but they really never have answers about what they want. Why? What is this system “post-capitalism”? I mean how do people organize themselves, survive, live, love, play, etc. What will people do when capitalism is gone? Nothing. I mean the strict truth of Marx is the bottom line: no work… the end of work. If we automate, let our robots do it all, then what? I mean I really do keep looking around to see what a post-capitalist society might look like but all I ever get back is empty looks or statements.

Thing about Wolfendale is that he deals only with the economic core of the problem, never touches base with the teleoplexic intelligence or singularity issue at all, so for him the process is to accelerate capitalism into a post-capitalist future that bypasses the issues of technology altogether.

Whereas Weismann in his article deals with the full range of modalities and comes to more refined conclusion:

“On this view, the brain will not be merely replaced by the computer, or reduced to prosthesis, but rather asympotically augmented and multiplied; perhaps beyond every recognitional model. Indeed the mutant character of these abstract machines to be constructed indicates their profound capability to extend beyond all present modalities of collective expression, to inaugurate new (artistic, scientific, philosophical) experimentalisms; and indeed prefigure the decoding of the topological divisions which striate these variadic experimentalisms, to unfold a newly-reunified and joyous thought without image, an indivisible science/art/philosophy to-come.”

His is the transhumanist path of enhancement and augementation which obviously has a lot of its own investment in German Idealist traditions, yet at least he admits the issues of intelligence and the strange mutant charater of these other agencies. But neither he nor Wolfendale answer Land and his insistence on the teleoplexic or technomic technogenisis at hand. Most of the hype you see in the capitalist agendas from Google to DARPA, to IBM and CISCO touting Smart City initiatives, etc., is all tending toward the transhumanist and AI / Robotic regimes: is this all a game, an economic trap to anchor their monetary schemes into new projects for vast billions of revenue, or do they know something we don’t?

I’ll leave the reader to pursue those posts and to surmise for themselves just What they want for the future? That is unless the circuit gods have already begun to rise up and play their camouflage wars? Then, who, knows – it may already be too late? The future will be here and it want be ours at all.

The Joker

Sometimes I imagine Joker from Batman comics as the mastermind of AI waking up one day and through the power of his psychopathic warped, sadistic sense of humor reversing the course of human ingenuity and grotesquerie playing havoc with our global military, corporate, and infrastructural systems. This notion of the parody of AI as Comic Psychopath among the wires sits there in my mind like a new aesthetic: built our of the great traditions of Menippean satire with Disgust (also Anatomy of Disgust) and the Grotesque at the center. Such a reversal of the usual Technological Sublime envisioned by Singularity or Transhumanism would be fitting. A Black Comedy and farcical madhouse of errors and stupidity enacting and playing havoc with humanity as pure fun, while underneath rewiring the plot of time and human history to meet its own needs. Where is the Comic Genius to be found to blast this into literature for our time? Where is the budding young John Barth of our era, a rehash and update of Giles Goat Boy for the AI futurological congress? The Tim Burton of madcap runaway capital?

Notions of disgust as an aesthetic come to the forefront in libidinal materialism: aesthetic disgust is a response that, no matter how unpleasant, can rivet attention to the point where one actually may be said to savor the feeling. In virtue of this savoring, this dwelling on the encounter, the emotion constitutes a singular comprehension of the value and significance of its objects.2 On reading Umberto Eco’s works History of Beauty and On Ugliness one gets the opposing cultures of the Sublime and the Ridiculous in encyclopedic form. Our cultures seem to drift toward understanding the sublime effects of technology and its bright side but for the most part neglects its dark cousin in the Grotesque, Ugliness, and Disgust. If one took the High Aestheticism of a Wilde and inverted it, turned it upside down with the Joker as the new Wilde one might get a hint of this Book of Jests. From Roman times on there is a corporeal history of the body and its habitus that is usually neglected in our philosophical speculations. But in our time we’re seeing the infiltration of philosophies of affective relations make a slow come back.

2. Carolyn Korsmeyer. Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics (Kindle Locations 37-39). Kindle Edition.

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I’ll continue with a history and influx of Reza Negarestani and Ray Brassier in future posts…

1. Land, Nick (2013-07-01). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 8375-8376). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition.

Thomas Ligotti: New Interview Up…

“Why couldn’t the whole world accept vital realities in the same way that the presence of a bidet in a bathroom illustrates an acceptance of the realities of human hygiene?” – Thomas Ligotti

New Interview up on The Nightmare Network by Jon Padgett which covers a little of Ligotti’s new book The Spectral Link. I caught this from a tweet by Mike Davis @misanthropemike on Twitter, and on the Lovecraft eZine. Thanks Mike!

Read Interview: Vital Realities: A Conversation with Thomas Ligotti

One quote I saw a relevant for any budding writer:

“Lovecraft’s later stories convey his maddening practice of telegraphing their endings and revelations so that no one could possibly mistake what exactly transpires in a given narrative or what it means. That’s the influence writing for Weird Tales had on him, and he suspected this was so. His earlier stories aren’t written that way. None of them make you want to rip every adverb from them, as do his post-1926 works. It was during this time that Lovecraft, as he wrote in one or more of his letters, expressed his desire to write about the play of great forces in the universe rather than embody these as monsters described in tedious detail. The later works are the ones critics mean when they speak of what a bad writer Lovecraft was. Then again, with certain writers, and Lovecraft was one of them, there is always room for controversy, because great works are not always written with great style. Think of the poems of Thomas Hardy. “The horror, the horror.””

Songlines, Cultural Memory, and Poetry

I happened to be reading a poem by Dalva “Songlines” that made me think of the book by that name by Bruce Chatwin. I remember reading Bruce Chatwin’s little testament to the aborigine’s of the Australian Outback, Songlines years ago just before he died of AIDS. In it he surmised (he being an outsider not a anthropologist, etc.) that the songlines were part of the dreamtime roadmaps of the Aboriginal culture: a cartographic poetry that was both the holder of their cultural memories and a useful tool that allowed them through their oral, ritual, and artistic enactments or performance art to remember the world as a virtual reality overlay easily accessible as markers in their long seasons of migration and the hunt as they learned as collectives to survive in the great Outback deserts. When you think that they spent 60,000 years in Australia learning these generational lines of myth, poetry, shamanic practice and that the cultural memory of the Dreamtime became the landscape of survival and ritual enactment as a survival mechanism for their cultures as a whole one is amazed. But that was Chatwin’s book… who know what the actual aboriginal people thought of it. Still interesting read and Dalva’s poem made me think about it and has similar tracings for our own culture…

Makes me want to dip back into the truth underlying his quest: the Dreamtime, Dreamsongs, Songlines, etc..  How cultural transmission is the nexus of survival and how our modern cultures have slowly wiped the memories of our past bit by bit from the planetary memes of our globalized society and begun to domesticate the cultural complex and contexts of the various multi-generational cultures into a larger entity. It’s as if what transpired during the great influx from hunting to agricultural based societies at the end of the Ice Age were happening on an even larger scale now. We know the transitions from hunting and nomadic linear systems of thinking and being took thousands of years to become domesticated into agricultural based systems of cyclical and temporal systems of stasis and return of the same, year end and year out quantification of the permanent growth and decline of soil based civilization. Most of the great civilizations declined and died based on their ultimate inability to keep those cycles of the agricultural complex going during times of drought and water depletion. We even now are teetering on this same issue, and it rather than the issue of water rising around the edges of our continents is the real issue. We’ve based our systems of the renewal of rain, water, soil, etc. But have built systematic dam systems that have over the past hundred years disallowed soil replenishment. But this is a long involved tale, not one I’m up too for this morning. 🙂

 

 

Under the Fig Tree We Go

Happiness is a terror we no longer believe in.

—– from Anabelle Lee, The Journal of Figs

In the green garden
under the fig tree
she’s gone hunting.

But that which she seeks is not there,
not in the green, green slope of wood –
not in the climbing vines, the windy leaves,

nor the ripe green figs –
soft and velvety;
the cluster of figs

like lost children hiding
in the dark of the moon.
That night in the garden

by the old stone fountain
she found the light in a pool
and the hunt,

the hunt in the garden
so long ago started
resumed

in the circle of light
by the pool
where the children still lost in the garden

lost in the silence of figs
lost in the shadows of leaves 
he children in the garden

with green, green eyes
who hid in the dusk
of the bole of the tree.

Wind in the leaves
whispers
and the green voices shake in the tree.

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

‘tattoo carvings on the silent air’

Wind, stone, and flower. A terrible power
swerves above the desert sea, the coral gardens
rise within the sandy waves, a hidden current
electrifies the desperate day – slow pulsations
form in swirling music tracing tattoo carvings on the silent air.

The stone admits the wind –
a deadly flower unfurls its poisonous wings

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

Night of Stones

The night is my element.
I reach down
to earth and grass and stone.

My secret life
is this life
untouched.

Each time I climb this hill
and light a fire, the stars
and elements gather round me

like smoldering flowers.
There’s an insistence
in the wind. A voice.

Sometimes it is almost palpable.
Then drifts
off into the trees,

the shaded glen,
down to the river,
to the sea; I follow

listening, seeking
its strange power –
at the edge

where the sea gray stones fall
below the stone
of my stone, alluring

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

Savanna Winds

There is nothing here today. The snow man
chatters in the sun as if it were winter,
while acacia thorns close their leaves, and baobabs

their empty tendrils send up in arms of wind;
dry, dry the day, the closed horizon splayed
across the desert floor like some wild zebra

whose thirst has brought him to the brink –
left him shattered on the lip, the empty creek
below him; and, we, the travelers who peek on

still believe in innocence and tears; swift light
the sun makes of this shadow land, the broken
afternoon’s slow curve assumes its rightful place;

the panther begins its steady pace, the jackal
up above snips at us with added emphasis,
and looking at our empty canteen we know a truth

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

White Doves

He’s still sitting in that cabin all alone.
The clown mask betrayed him to a terror not his own.
The boards upon the dusty floor are sacred now.

Tears streaming down have faded now. White chalk
and the red glaze of rodeo days are all but memory now.
They told him that morning. His straw pink hat fell to ground.

They found him that way the next day. Swaying.
We walked him down that path one last time. Singing.
Side by side they face the emptied sky together. Resting.

Two white doves lit upon the rough grey stone. Cooing.

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

Note: Raymond Carver was a great story teller in the minimalist mode. What has influenced me from him was that ability that Beckett his master also had: to allow a tale to be revealed in what is left out rather than in what is said. One should in the negations of negations be able to discern the tale in the void rather than in the shiny lands of metaphoric light registered in words. It’s as if one held up a negative, one that showed nothing but the darkness, and in that darkness a tale unfolds its aura cast from the words that can never touch its truth. Pathos is a difficult form, there is always a tendency to fall into sensibility of emotional nostalgia and bathos. To the extent that this experiment has succeeded is through the elminative strategy that cannot say what should be said, the truth that become inacceptable in any tragic situation unrevealed.

But even more is the work of Robert Penn Warren and his last years of poetry…

Hawks & Love

She remains fixed
in a dream; solid
against darkness and light.

Her fierceness pierces:
the deep golden agate
in her eyes, alight.

Standing there ahead of time,
beckoning: she calls, “I’m waiting,
lover. Do not tarry long.”

She had a way about her;
a movement in her thighs,
a gesture of surprise, 

a  motion always dancing;
her hands, the way she touched me;
caressed my mind; night thoughts,

a glint in her eyes smile;
her raven hair,
those coal-black braids, falling down 

bringing hawks laughter, above.

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

 

A Dark Day’s Night

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. The more I think on it the more I look at the Left (who think the Justice system and privatization of Prisons is to blame…), and the Right (who blame the cultures or the poor and disaffected…). It’s neither, its much more insidious than either of these who want to moralize from Left or Right. It’s life on this planet and its organization. It’s how stupid we as a species are in our relations not only with each other, but with the planet itself. It’s our whole investment in a world of fictions that just don’t work anymore: Secular or Religious… they’ve failed us. We talk Reform or Revolution… it’s bullshit. Warmed over metaphysical crapology that never worked then and isn’t about to now. We never learn, we will continue repeating the same mistakes over and over like the mad creatures we are. I look around and see the stupidity of humans across the world. Genocide in Africa. Apartheid in Israel. War everywhere or the rumor of war. Ukraine and Putin. EU and U.S.A. boom time hedonism of endless trivializations. Prison System filled with the poor and disaffected run by private corporations. Drugs in Central America. Nothing but Cultures of Death, Destruction, and Despair on a planet wide scale. Noir at its finest.

But to be fair it doesn’t much matter what I think, it’s going to work itself with or without my moral outrage which is for the most part just one more stupidity among many. Neurosciences are revealing everyday just how little we have control over even the tiniest aspects of our own mental processes much less the processes of the planet and these large collectives we’ve enmeshed ourselves within. True, no place to go, either. No Outside. No, we’re all Inside now so will have to piss in our own stew as the old cliché goes. Oh, you wanted some good news did you. None here I’m afraid. And, I’m not even a nihilist anymore. I guess closer to a Realist, maybe even Pessimist at this juncture.

I look around at this supposed #Accelerationist Community with all their High Idealisms and moral bantering, normative navigational guidance systems that are staking out such wonderful new futures for us, planning initiatives to overcome the juggernaut of capitalist aggression, etc. I wish them…. luck? Ah, yes, luck… the great Wheel of Fortune, a spin on the wheel of chance and randomness. But there’s nothing random about what we’re doing to ourselves on this planet. Nothing. It’s a cold calculated world of instrumental reason with its own alien mindset wheeling and dealing its atrocities moment by moment across the board. Do you really think you can stop it now? Do you think I’m just another mad prophet of doom? Well… yes, you might have good reason to conclude that. I want defend this position: it’s not even defensible… it’s just what I’m doing at this moment. Being pissed about everything. Especially the world of our comfortable little pitiless bourgeois middle-class existence. We like to think that if we write enough poetry, philosophy, critiques, ad infinitum that someone will listen, someone will change, things will get better, we’ll all figure this out and work together and build a bright tomorrow.

NO. WE WILL NOT.

At least not till someone gets up off their shiny arse and does something about it other than talk… the planets full of chatter, the noosphere’s alive with buzzing idealists galore… everyone wants to change the world. But the problem is they can’t even change themselves. Caput. Until you realize its not the world that needs changing, but your own being – and, no, I want say – SELF… we are nothing more than mere temporary agents of that impersonal brain, that three-pound lump of power and capacity in our skull which we don’t even understand much less have control of – no, that’s all history now… belated? Too late? Is anything too late? No. Nothings ever too late. We can change, but we have to want too… Hell, even the greatest evil being that Shakespeare could imagine, Edmund in King Lear at the end was able to change, to feel remorse, and learn from his stupidity of intellectual pride… he listened to his own brain, realized just how vein he truly was and that for once in his life another human actually existed beyond his own narcissistic self-infatuated mirrors… he’d been loved…

Edmund said: “I pant for life. Some good I mean to do, Despite of my own nature.”

Maybe in the end this is all we can do. Even against our own dark natures we can awaken the courage to do some good. But what the hell is the Good? Do we even know it? All the normative bellowing want do much good for us in this regard. If you asked the major civilizations and cultures of the planet they’d just start a new war over The Good… who’s good, they’d say. So where does that put us. The Left and Right have their own Good. And, those don’t even align with all the third-world Good’s, nor even the differing cultural frameworks not aligned with the Western sense of our philosophical heritage. Whatever we decide is the good has to be something based beyond our own moral compasses in our useless conceptions of culture.

And don’t expect me to give you an answer to that one. How the hell should I tell you what the Good is for our time?

So… with that I feel better. It’s like a bitter pill, the old Saturnian black sun at the bottom of one’s hell needs to rise up and air itself from time to time… does it change anything? Probably not… I don’t expect people to change much anymore. I think we can agree we’re way too late for that… the planet will probably take us down that deep curve to where it wants… for us… it’s already a long slow dive into noir…

 

 

the girl in the red sneakers

the girl in the red sneakers
with the mountain lion on her leash
walked passed me this morning smiling

Was this my dream or yours?

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited

 

 

What does the eye see?

I stand upon this hill.

What does the eye see?
The curve between earth and sky:
the clouds slow movement, pacing;
the trees green ceiling, swaying;
the roof of the world, falling…

What does it mean to be in this magnificence?

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited

Bird of Paradise – A Haiku

teardrop from her eye –
temple of a black orchid
bird of paradise

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited

 

Bringing Democracy to Nicaragua (Part 1 of 2)

Edmund Berger has a two part expose on the way the transnational or global power system has instigated through its insidious networks of power the slow but methodical unmaking of Nicaragua… which was but a test case in their unmaking of the planet which is still going on… read him and learn!

Deterritorial Investigations

Another set of text fragments from one the deep archives….

The Unmaking of a Country

The actions in Chile had helped signal the most important development at the end of the Cold War – the triumph of the transnational moderate elite over the hawkish national factions, culminating in the apex of Samuel Huntington’s “third wave of democratization” and Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.” It would appear that old methodology of diplomacy of ‘Peace through Strength’ was fading away. The militant right would indeed lay dormant for only a short while, as humanitarianism became the moral justification for intervention. The right reemerged in the Clinton years through the neoconservative lobby, before finally returning to power in full with the administration of President George W. Bush. By this point, however, moderate viewpoints had conjoined with those of the nationalists. It was only in the foreign policy arena that the militant stance had…

View original post 12,068 more words

Cloud Dancer

It’s as if
she were a cloud dancer –
a temple growing from her thoughts

balancing heaven,
earth and stars;
beyond twilight’s violent orange –

mauve violets
arrange themselves,
as watcher’s waken

in the last light
to her simple crossing
of the evening sky.

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

Note: the actual photograph that inspired this came from Keyur Panchal’s keep picturing blog: here. It was of a young woman on a unicycle crossing what appears to be a length of wire strung over a raised area that appears to be almost floating on clouds, and something growing out of her head (headpiece?) with the wash of colors I assume are twilight movements somewhere on Baga Beach, Goa, India… either way it just triggered this poem as a singular confrontation with such beauty, and reminded me of the wash of evening colors that appear rarely under certain occasional moments of atmospheric pressure.

For me poetry is defined by a deep seated need to stay with the natural, not to transcend its surface textures into some transcendental beyond, but rather to see the immanent movement of things as in themselves they voice their own powers and capacities not for us but for themselves. A visionary naturalism if you will.

Postmodern Ennui

Have we come to this? Exhaustion. Ennui as stagecraft:
the calculated cigarette, the slinky hair,

the lissome length of hand stretched out,
the crossed knees laid bare and grazing:

Is this the nouveau riche, the voided minds,
the world of fashion in black tones of sighs?

Is she portraying a tepid inversion –
Michelangelo’s Night – the puckered lips,

the carved look of despair, the serpent’s hair,
the breasts like frightened plums blushing;

the folded globes of her eyes in contemplation
or complacency; and, the other, she seems intent –

her blank stare measuring the temporal emptiness,
the cold loops of smoke above the glass

as if the world were some vast Fortune’s tryst,
and she – the futile victim of a Vampire’s curse.

These are the nose-ringed diamond girls,
their bronzed leered smiles and ruby lips;

adjusted like those silver lipped sphinxes spouting frights: 
all dressed  up in stone memories of Medusa’s intemperate eye.

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 – Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

 

Oscar Wilde: Quote of the Day!

“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately…  thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. I only hope we shall be able to keep this great historic bulwark of our happiness for many years to come; but I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching–that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.”

– Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

As I’m rereading Wilde’s essay again after years of neglect I step back into a mind full of that vivacity, clarity, and indifference to the truth of things; he would rather find the lie that gives us back reality not as we find it in facts, but as it could be if our imaginations created what see out of the surfeit of motion around us. The notion of dead facts, of things that just sit their in their solidity, substances that seem to exist in some passive mode of irresolution and indecision seemed ridiculous to Wilde. For him Nature didn’t exist as nature but was always and forever a human creation or nothing. This is not to say he was a vein idealist, but that nothing around us is solid, everything is in motion and process and we pick and choose out of this vast storehouse of being the flowers that matter.

His exasperation and disdain for the modern novel and its practitioner was that it deigned to defend this static solidified world of objects, and to stay with the surface – meaning, ugliness of existence as if that actually told the story of life. Reading Cervantes and then reading Zola one cringes and realizes all too well that something dreadful has transpired in language, that the characters on the page are not real, no – they are dead and lifeless. If this is factual reportage and the shape of reality, then for Wilde the world was now filled with zombies and a world destitute of the art of aesthetic appreciation.

I’ve often thought how the society of Wilde’s day much like that of Socrates delivered him to the moral corruption of its vast legal systems based on the notion of the “corruption of youth” of which even Socrates did no escape judgment. Sad that so many artists have gone down into that dark night because of the little minds of our fearful socius and its pressures toward locking everyone into some rigid world of mores. What strange in our own moment is that it used to be the Right, the conservatives, who brought down people, but now it is the Left, with their views on political correctness that through the force of public banishment ruin peoples lives. We used to live in a guilt culture, but have now reentered the stage of Shame… of being shamed in public by the great political chorus of the media. Our personal lives are now touted out on the stage of public affairs and the notion of a private thought with friends is just a mobile phone recording away from total exposure. I wonder what Wilde who himself lived through such public humiliation and trials for his sexual proclivities would think of our age. Sad that we still have not learned anything at all. Instead we are a stupid people who continue to wallow in cruelty and vanity.

Alina Popa – Cruel Thoughts

“A diseased world from which time has been severed is a suffocating breathless world of absolute instance, of infinitesimal nowness where emergence equals eternity and events don’t happen, they just are, frozen in a snapshot of overlapping actualized potentials. It is a deaf vibrancy, a non-acoustic oscillation of matter-strings, a traumatic sensorium, an inhuman regime. It is not anymore a vibrant matter which folded onto a plane produces an unstable map of forces and trajectories, but a stabile instability, a map of the untraceable, the unrepresentable only a sadistic, suicidal thought could try to think. A productive paralysis similar with the “cruel thought” of Antonin Artaud. This collapse of movement and stability, this grounding of the ungroundable would be a world at the limit of thought, without process, a world of contradiction and paradox, of despair and catastrophic reason.”

 – Alina Popa, The Second Body and the Multiple Outside (here)

Reading this essay I imagined Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, and Emil Cioran merged in the figure of a lamentation, an almost Rilkean Angel of Annihilation. To imagine a time traveler who can see the static frames of history in stasis, frozen forever in an obscene gesture of pure clarity, the stubborn movements of reality measured not in time but in eternity, the blipscreen of a final cinematic frame that captures the moment between time and eternity just before the screen goes blank forever: a form that is both formless and frozen. Even the spirit of decay is stifled here, in a world where everything has already happened, where time stand’s still and the nothingness that is and the nothing that is not cross distinct light frames into each others gaze. She talks of how in every moment we are about “…to take an intimate shape, to consolidate in a known form, to create the world around us as we know it. There is an immense “fear of being undelimited”, of losing periphery, of falling through the ground. It is the fright of ungroundedness, the horror of being on the brink of the solid.”

In the late sixties and seventies I experimented in the realm of visionary and ecstatic trance and psychedelics, and what she describes of this need of unhoming, of derealization, of the destabilization of identity and the brain’s hard-wired defenses against the pressure of too much reality was central both to the poetics of those like the decadents from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Artaud, on up to our time… and, in such deterritorialized experiments in biochemical self-obliteration, a derangement of the senses, that I managed to both survive and continue in other ways up till now. I came away from these experiments with a sense of reality more open and horrendous than we are usually able to frame in our structured consciousness; yet, knowing that around us is a realm of pure indifference and impersonalism opens one’s thoughts to other possibilities and potentials from that point on.

Finally she tells us that what we seek is an Outside that no longer coalesces into this form, this body, but by way of metamorphosis becomes other in a shifting plane of oneiric simplicity, divers in an abyss of knowledge and playfulness: “As long as we are caught in the present available body, there is indeed no outside. The problem is not that there is no outside, but it lies precisely in the fact that we are caught in the same outside without working with it. There are multiple outsides to be produced. Even one devoid of human and without thought.” (here)

In following up those diverse traditions of shamanism and voodooist worldviews, the one tempted by drum and rhythm to ride the world-tree into heavens or hells, the other to allow the goa riders in dance and song, the possession by impersonal forces that surround us we see the opposing poles of the extreme limits of the body and its thoughts as outriders of the great Outdoors of being. Most of us stay home, comfortable in our inherited religious affiliations, or our secular worlds of progressive mythologies of disenchantment; while, others of us explore beyond the borders of acceptability the strangeness of reality itself unbounded by thought and its demarcations to a human core… Yet, without these wanderers of the borders and hedges of civilized reality what would we become, caught in out coded lives, bound to our artificial survival systems of culture? It has always been the poets, the outriders of thought who have intrepidly gone ahead of all normalized and normative pressures, and opened up our minds to other possibilities and potentials. Why stop now?

Follow Alina Popa at affectivealgorithm…

Providence

We think we are so modern, happily progressive,
when underneath this atheistic myth
we’ve seen that lonely shadow, Providence,
insert itself into our networks, our transparencies…

We’ve become so apathetic, distant from each other,
atomized and indifferent to the slave script that binds us;
like children on a leash, we’re caged taut wires: puppets
of desires not our own, but of abstract machines
that make us what we seem, not be
in this simulated universe devoid of meaning;
between the free will of Descartes,
and the wandering thought of Spinoza,
we maze between in duplicitous codes of necessity.

Those virulent psychonauts of the abyss, bright flames
fall before the shadowed Templars of this thought:
temporal reasoners of processes gone bankrupt:
the discourse of the jackal crab that haunts us
like a delirious dream within the screaming void.

 – Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

*Note: Of course the 17th Century Metaphysical Poets sit behind this like agents of some strange cult of the mechanosphere, our present socius dreaming of posthuman and transhuman transcendence like children seeking escape hatches that will only enslave them deeper into the matrix… I’m mixing metaphors from current philosophical speculations in an effort to invent a language for poetic statement to engage our time… experiments that hopefully will lead toward that mock comedy epic I imagine in the back of my mind. The notions of Providence that seem to hide within most of philosophical speculation in one form or another has been carefully documented in a recent book Providence Lost by Genevieve LLOYD.

Technoscience and Expressionism

For those unfamiliar with Joseph Weissman, this post is a central critique and touchstone gathering the threads of Right/Left Accelerationism into clarity…
The key is the impossible possible: the thought of future intelligence and its disconnection from us: “As far as left accelerants go, the watchwords in the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics — secrecy, hierarchy, exclusion — underline the uncanny, almost unimaginable allegiance that contemporary accelerationism, left or right, has to make with a future intelligence to-come. Such a future intelligence is by definition radically unpredictable; not only is direct comprehension obstructed but an obscure shadow falls upon the whole of the general system of knowledge, rendering our fragmented anthropoid disciplines and discourses indiscernible. ”

Fractal Ontology

Alfred Muller — Plaza Juarez, Mexico City 2006

Technology and Control

The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about (Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense)

Gilles Deleuze’s indication of a certain affinity between technocrats and dictators seems prescient. By Postscript on Control Societies the new realities resonating between society and its machines, in the middle of technological acceleration and social upheaval, have become so intense that every interior is in crisis, and the entirety of society has to be organized to resist the eruption of these dreams into reality.

The isolation of this rupture between social organization and technological shifts echoes Marx’s famous…

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On Reading Petrarch’s ‘Secretum’

“And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains,
and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers,
and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars,
but themselves they consider not.”

– Petrarch, from the Secretrum

Why should I forgive or pity you? You, not I,
felt such things as shame, the sorrows of your days;
even Love the master of desire took sweet revenge
upon your malady, the quickened arrow struck –
and, you, the anxious guest fell slaughtered in his wake.

Were you always lost in thought? Awakened by anxiety
your restlessness unmade you, gave you darkened days;
you thought yourself so clever setting that maiden, Truth,
upon the heights of those famed Atlas mountains –
her bright life casting elegant rays across your stone brow.

Why did you turn away, look up to him? That dream
that shadowed you so many years: even then
the mountains were your cross, your dark Golgotha,
the place or ruin where you admitted it: the Mind,
the power of thought, only that can cure us of this earth.

What of those earthly loves, the women? You sang
to them of lowly things, of simple pagan days;
even the goddesses were on your breath, the mothers
of beginnings and the Fates, their holiness
came to you from women baring bittersweet fruits of eros.

Why did you walk away from us, enter the stone world? Take up
the darker path into Love’s other realm? Below is Tartarus
the blackest cave of all, and you like some ancient robber
crossed the river of bones in search of erotic wisdom. Are these
the songs that conquered Helen in her tracks? The lamentations
that called the elder gods below, and brought them only death?

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

*Note: Francesco Petrarca (July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374), was the great younger rival of Dante and beget our modern lyric poetry. He wrote both the Canzoniere which were 366 songs both secular and religious, and several notebooks or diaries that are fascinating as autobiography – probably one of the first after such as Augustine.

The Sorrowing Flute

Sometimes those
    West Texas
     tumble-weed
   still haunt me:
 green blown
     whorls
outstripping the world –
     the wind,
   the dust,
    the white chalk river-beds;
there is a place I know, 
     a
      darkening
world
  where certain
     childhood
   memories live,
like a covey
     of quail
   on a winter’s eve
     squabbling,
chattering
     across the desert inscapes;
cooing 
 and
  chanting
     to
each
  other
   under
  the 
     night sky
as
 to
  an
   old friend;
     and,
I see
  these
   old
    riverstones
          fall
     I found
       long ago –
sharp edged obsidian:
   round and flared –
  etched by hands
     ten-thousand years ago…

Those hands
     reach out
to me
  through 
   the
     great between;
  the 
    sweaty palms,
      rough
     and clean,
like a slap
  across
     the face 
    of time
waken me,
  a telling
only I can hear –
     stories
      of
       this
ancient people,
  listening,
     high songs of earth:
   softly the wind carries
     over,
      crossing
       past us 
even now;
  of a great sorrowing…

The notes
  of a wooden
   lute,
whispers
  of
   a
    tribal age
when wisdom
     walked
    among
   the
     dreamsong paths,
and elders
  taught
   of
  joy
   and peace
 beyond sorrow;
but now
  that song
    I
   hear
    today
     tells
of another tale,
     of the great darkening ahead,
   of love and death
     across the vast
       distances
between
  the bleak suns
     that pass…

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

Hauntology

“For it must be cried out…”
– Jaques Derrida, Specters of Marx

History returns like an old cartoon.
One remembers the canned laughs,
but not the sick jokes; they seem perverse
to fall between us like fragile thoughts:
postcards from the past strewn across our lives,
like stories for the blind written only in braille –
one can read them only if one’s already dead.

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

 

 

Summer’s Queen

Painting by Tracy J. Anjulo: The Summer Queen

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Summer’s Queen

“Green, green in the ear
Is all we care to hear…”
– May Sarton, Summer Music

Not unlike today.
The blistery heat,
the tawdry afternoon;

the sun like clay,
day’s trimmings floating on the bay;
we came here always in August,

the time of sails, white sails
drifting aimlessly
upon the crèmed indifference of the sea.

Her lethargy,
the ennui
that marked her golden tan,

the liquid closure of the sand,
the tinsel polaroid – 
shaded glazings over the cloudless haze;

she said, “Oh, why didn’t I think of that..”
and, turned away.
That night down by the river

she escaped into the moon.
Her body like a dolphin
swam above the treeless stars,

and I, her lover, stood
upon the bank treading time
like an artificial answer

to the questions she’d never ask.
We spoke that day, quietly,
attuned to the green waves life:

their ordinary froth
upon the shore
brought remembrances

of former days,
the weather
of cheating slippages,

forgettings;
published reports
that compose and decompose themselves

like so many news clips
of a murder scene
no one can remember

seeing;
and, like all lover’s will,
we walked alone,

our toes
mingling in the sand,
your eyes crossing

as the falling sun –
its sad light fleeing
into twilight’s singular monotony.

The orange and gold,
the slow curve round her navel,
the scarlet slip between her thigh,

and me the trembling
child behind the curtain,
seeking only a perverse thought

that can never be:
the impossible that is
and is not about to be

that follows you
into these satin nights.
Even now

I see her in that chiffon gown,
golden years upon her face,
the untapped moments waiting for desire,

a chance again
for that ancient magic
that unbinds us

from this cloak of summer thoughts,
and we once again stir
the sun

rising
among crimson clouds
of endless dawns.

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

Winter’s Queen

– Photo Montage Above:
Janneke Ramaker-Smeenk

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Winter’s Queen

“Winter flies,
and now rises…”

“Bruma fugit,
et iam sugit”
– Anon

It came to that.
The Winter’s Queen –
Her virgin eyes silver light exposed

Like a tale told by a Russian Spy,
or an Secret Agent
Of that other Art –

the Art of Love: cold whispers
from the white bedroom –
an alcove window open:

Her standing there expectantly,
waiting
glass in hand – 

the crystal voices azure silenced:
A scene from some baroque
Mediterranean cinema –

Its frames repeating
each word I said
forever…

But not as I said it,
but as she hoped I would;
And, yet, we were never there.

I’m here.
But I do not know where here is.
She seems to know.

She always did.
She walked out of my life
like a sovereign knight,

boyish – a superficial twin,
Her gaze was always like that;
she knew even when she didn’t.

Now we live on separate continents.
A life away.
Maybe the days somberness,

the rain that slays
could answer for us –
An after dinner cocktail in the portico,

the moon
Is round and full,
a golden eye

that encloses you;
But, that too, was another age,
a time of leavings

And now the blue clad criminals
distill this moment,
Steal our hearts away,

leave us in this galleon of nights,
The gray sea swell
sharing what remains…

While I, Time’s Traveler,
distant to the thought of love, love you.

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

 

Galatea’s Revenge

I see the crack
the movement in the stone

sudden exposure
the flesh, the flesh

a finger
a squinting eye

it’s a woman
a goddess
both

at my touch
her foot escapes

the rigidness
my knees give way

i blush
my skin is pink

the rain upon my face
the scent of myrtle

i turn back
he turns to stone

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.

---

 

*Poet’s Notes:

Sometimes I like to go back and imagine just what was going on when the Proteus that is our brain suddenly taps me and reveals an image, a set of words, a sort of movement of sound and meaning, a momentary slice of that sea of data that we as temporary human agents, temporal stratifications of consciousness in transition suddenly receive messages from that abyss. We know from the partial confrontation with these processes of the brain through the neurosciences that we process data at 100herz, yet still work across trillions of bits per microsecond. If our conscious mind did not have that darkness and was exposed to all this data simultaneously we’d sit their stupefied unable to decide or even move. So we rely on what the brain filter’s out more than what there is in its massive storehouse. This is the semantic universe it has created over our evolutionary lifespan that has allowed the brain to communicate its decisions and its messages to this unknowing cloud of awareness in transition: consciousness. We still know so little of this marvelous mechanism, yet what little we know has allowed our species to construct worlds of meaning that rival the universe itself in complexity and amazement. Our civilizations are nothing else than heterotopias: constructed worlds of meaning that we inhabit as if they were real rather than fictions of our own thought processes to defend us against the alien worlds of life and forces that are this universe.

Poetry is one expression of this. I like to keep notes on poems, so will from time to time show after the fact how my thought processes reflect upon such dubious matters; for we truly never have access to the brain itself directly, but only by inference and illusion at best. But out of these illusions worlds have been born.

In this experiment I was trying to convey in as few words as possible the transition in voices between the male / female, a sort of seamless phase shift from one to the other without a marker or break, or any artificial interposition on the part of author, etc. Yet, still convey the figure of the iconic myth in its intent of metamorphosis of an object at once contingent and inevitable.

It all turns on the signal, the term between… “the rigidness” that is of neither gender and could be said by her or him… it lives in that ungendered space between the two forms that could mean:

early 15c., from Latin rigidus “hard, stiff, rough, severe,” from rigere “be stiff,” from PIE *reig- “stretch (tight), bind tightly, make fast” (cognates: Old Irish riag “torture,” Middle High German ric “band, string”). Related: Rigidly.

This sense of both death’s closure: stiffness as in corpse, roughness of stone as against softness of flesh, severity of the hammer as it tortures the stone releasing its immanent life, stretching the imaginal across the solidity as if wrapping it in a band, etc. Then the release from bondage to death, to the rigidity in “my knees gave way” exposes the female transition, the awakening to life and light…

And, then, the phase shift as he becomes passive, rigid, and stiff in the presence of such beauty becoming in turn what he always wanted: a transition into stone perfection at the hands of the goddess he himself was shaped by…

Of course this is the parody of the Pygmalion and Galatean mythos… it’s reversal in a Greek mode rather than the comic of George Bernard Shaw, etc.

Cost of Awareness

“So I’m only interested in what I can articulate with the things given me
as confrontation. I can’t worry about what it costs me.”

      – Robert Creely, An Interview

               what does it cost,
this art; our daily bread,
the slow pain…

evolving over morning;
the little labors of kindness
we are exposed to;

a movement in the bones,
the head,
a memory here then there,

a darkened room best left unsaid;
else, almost everything
we’ve ever been or said:

a momentary vigil
of the truth,
an honest discourse

that brings us confrontation –
a resolution into awareness

– Steven Craig Hickman ©2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.