The Principle of Accelerationism: The De-territorialization of the Socious

The Principle of Accelerationism = extreme de-territorialization:

Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flow of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flow of labor in the form of the ‘free worker’. Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius.
(Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus: 33)

Unlike the social morphologies of antiquity and feudalism, capitalism strives to absorb, overcode and subsume every population and loyalty on earth. Now ‘we can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States, forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto supranational power untouched by governmental decisions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 453).

Instead of asking like Kevin Kelley does: What does technology want? We should be asking: What does Capital want? For it is the intelligence of capital that has escaped our human systems of command and control, and is even now reformatting the very systems of human and geo-resources toward an algorithmic governmentality beyond the human; or, the becoming non-human of capital.

The Emergence of a New Technocracy?

Khana Parag, author of Connectography’s  new book Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State  supplies us with the emergence of – to take the title of a recent novel, Infomacracy, or the combination of algorithmic compliance and governmentality by experts:

Technocratic government is built around expert analysis and long-term planning rather than narrow-minded and short-term populist whims. Technocrats are not to be confused with the complacent establishment elites that were just stunned by Trump. Real technocracy has the virtues of being both utilitarian (inclusively seeking the broadest societal benefit) and meritocratic (with the most qualified and non-corrupt leaders). Instead of ad hoc and reactive politics, technocracies are where political science starts to look like something worthy of the term: A rigorous approach to policy.1

The notion of technocracy is not new but that people are actually contemplating this form of governance in our moment when both the Left and Right are in the extreme modes of embitterment, and the common man is fed up with both, and the populist revolt that sparked Trump and brought both the Left and Right into an end game for Democracy is. Are we staging a new Technocracy in our time? With the looming sense of catastrophe, climacteric collapse, Sixth Extinction events, and the immersion of most of the world in drought, famine, and austerity the mobilization of a technological fix is being hyped in all quarters. Where do we go from here?

Revolutionary Violence: Libertinism, Rationalism, and the New Barbarism

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle the ‘question about the sense of being’ has ‘fallen into oblivion’ (BT, 1f.). ‘Oblivion’ is Vergessenheit , ‘forgottenness’, from vergessen , ‘to forget’.

—Martin Heidegger: The Question of Being

Many know my involvement in the study of ancient and modern forms of gnosis and Gnosticisms, but few realize that there is a dark and revolutionary impetus to this world view which harbors at its heart a violence against the human. For the Gnostics the enemy was the natural order the Greeks termed heimermene. The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus considered that “the cosmos is permeated and given life by the Pneuma, the same…makes a man a living, organic whole.” They considered *Pneuma* (Spirit) as an all-pervasive intelligent force that mixes with “shapeless and passive matter” and “imbues it with all its qualities.”1 The Stoics also referred to *heimarmene*, an orderly succession of cause and effect. To quote: “Heimarmene is the natural order of the Whole by which from eternity one thing follows another…[and] embodied in the definition of heimarmene follows its meaning as *Logos* (Eternal Reason), as the divine order and law, by which the cosmos is administered.” [Ibid, p. 58.]

Against this natural order the Gnostics would judge it as absolute evil. Most scholars of Gnosticism have identified the rebellion against the idea of cosmic order (Heimarmene) as its essential characteristic. The Gnostics do not deny to the world the attribute of order, but they interpret it as an abomination rather than a good. They do not say that the cosmos is disordered, but that it is governed by a rigid and hostile order, by a tyrannical and cruel law. Their God is not just outside and beyond the world, but against the world, and this is where they break away from Christianity. Moral rebellion reflects a metaphysical rebellion. Therefore, the Gnostic position leads to the obliteration of ethics, as refusal to respect being and to be faithful to objective norms. This refusal was the common root of two opposite attitudes, libertinism as desecration of reality and asceticism as its radical rejection.

Gothic Futurism: Decopunk, Templexity, and the Shadowlands of Modernity

The strongest counter current in Europe to modernity’s embrace of light, linearity and evolutionary advance was the Gothic Revival. The movement began in England at the heart of the industrial age. Its emergence and subsequent spread posed a dramatic challenge to the ideology of reason and progress that seemed so married to the machine age. The Gothic expressed the dark side of reason, the anti-enlightenment, the unconscious of modernity.

—Anna Greenspan,  Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade

Cities of the future are shaped by intense competition, because tomorrow is a tight, fiercely contested niche.

—Nick Land, Templexity

Michael Lewis cited by Anna Greenspan in her book Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade noting the emergence of Gothic style, says: ‘During its years of greatest influence, it subjected every aspect of art, belief, society and labour to intense intellectual scrutiny, using the Middle Ages as a platform from which to judge the modern world … In the broadest view, [the Gothic Revival] is the story of Western civilisation’s confrontation with modernity.’1

She speaks of Horace Walpole and his gothic novel The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story which emerged from his fright at his own life lived in the haunts of his monstrous gothic mansion, its ‘vast distances and ramblings, deserted or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends’ (SF: 75). As the foundational novel of the weird this emergence of the past in the present with its return of the daemonic and unconscious elements of former epochs would impact the shadows of modernity, and as Greenspan remarks that the Gothic revival with its nostalgic recollection of the past, would like modernity itself, immerse itself not in some return of tradition but seek its identity through a futurist orientation. (SF: 75)

The Technocommercium: Assemblages of the Mechanosphere

Everything becomes imperceptible, everything is becoming-imperceptible on the plane of consistency, which is nevertheless precisely where the imperceptible is seen and heard. It is the Planomenon, or the Rhizosphere, the Criterium (and still other names, as the number of dimensions increases. At n dimensions, it is called the Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere. It is the abstract Figure, or rather, since it has no form itself, the abstract Machine of which each concrete assemblage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration. And the abstract machine is the intersection of them all.

—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Over the years my interest in technology, capitalism, and philosophy have lead me into some very strange territory, territory of thought that has for the most part deterriotorialized my assumptions, prejudices, and beliefs in what it means to be human. Lately this convergence to technology and commerce have begun reformatting the very structures of political economics and the liberal world view that have since the Enlightenment Age been the cornerstone of modern society and civilization. Our universalists pretensions which guided most of the globalization of commerce during this era of expansion have led us into war, climacteric devastation, and the collapse of the very value systems that once embedded us in the world.

The Oligarchic Principle: A World Without Humans

Illustration depicting a green roadsign with a paradise concept. Blue sky background.

What we exclusively aim at are machines, the functions of which, make us superfluous, turn us off, and liquidate us. It is irrelevant that this target condition is only ever approximated. What counts is the tendency, and this is ‘without us’.

—Günther Anders (1902-1992)

Karl Marx in one of those insightful passages which would earmark the underlying contradictions within capitalism would say in the first volume of his classic critique of political economy:

there is an immanent contradiction in the application of machinery to the production of surplus-value, since, of the two factors of the surplus-value created by a given amount of capital, one, the rate of surplus-value, cannot be increased except by diminishing the other, the number of workers. This contradiction comes to light as soon as machinery has come into general use in a given industry, for then the value of the machine-produced commodity regulates the social value of all commodities of the same kind; and it is this contradiction which in turn drives the capitalist, without his being aware of the fact, to the most ruthless and excessive prolongation of the working day, in order that he may secure compensation for the decrease in the relative number of workers exploited by increasing not only relative but also absolute surplus labour.1

The tendency in capitalism is to increase profits while at the same time eliminating the need for workers, which as automation and assembly lines began to incorporate Taylorist principles of efficiency and production would slowly replace the workers with machines while at the same time enforcing long hours for the remaining workforce.

That was then, in our own time with the rise of network societies and the digital age what we are seeing is that the more our lives, production processes and intellectual and cognitive activities configure themselves around machines, the less humans are needed as machines become more capable.2 One might say that intelligence itself is migrating from the human to its anorganic rivals, that the optimization of intelligence in material artifacts is becoming the entry into an Inhuman Age of Machinic Life.

Günther Anders: Prometheanism in an Age of Accelerated Possibilities

I will provisionally call it ‘Promethean shame’ for myself. I understand this to mean the ‘shame when confronted by the “humiliatingly” high quality of fabricated things (selbstgemachten Dinge).’

—Diary entry, Günther Anders

Technics and Technology have been a force in human existence from the beginning, a notion Günther Anders reminds us is because we are born unfinished, as beings who need to make themselves with the help of artifice in order to be at home in the world.1 Anders who in the wake of Martin Heidegger, a man who was for a short time married to Hannah Arendt, would remain for the most part an unknown in the English speaking world (and, even now, one is hard pressed to find translations of his works from German into English). And, yet, his work is slowly gathering a following and resurgence, a man whose works align with such luminaries as Zygmunt Bauman, Thierry Bardini, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Veit Erlmann, Roberto Esposito, Maurizzio Lazzarato, Jean-Luc Nancy and Bernard Stiegler. A man who wrote on the impact of technology and technics in the lives of humans.

As Christopher John Müller in his study of Anders work Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence  remarks it is in the world of Anders that the challenge to which our present philosophical turn to technology in responds, and consists in ‘taking conceptual account of the extent to which, in increasingly explicit ways, technology defines and redefines the human and does so downstream from the point at which a given technological creation was brought into effect’.1 That humans have been torn out of nature and the natural environment, developed artifice and artificial habitations to defend themselves against the dangerous environmental worlds surrounding it. Devising artificial prosthesis, tools, and appendages to support its own lack and nakedness in the face of a hostile and chaotic environment is part of what Stiegler following such thinking as Anders terms the denaturalization of the human: “this means that ‘“human nature” consists only in its technicity, [only] in its denaturalisation’. And with this notion we have, in effect, arrived back at our point of departure: Anders’s suggestion that ‘artificiality is the nature of human beings and their essence instability’. (P: KL 310)

Dare to Mutate!

[Neil Gershenfeld] is accelerating a set of connections that packs computer intelligence into materials and materials into self- reproducing things.

—Future Mutation: Technology and the Evolution of Species

Some of us remember the old Star Trek series which introduced the Replicator into the minds of a whole generation in the late 60’s. At that time it was a fanciful idea of replicating anything in the universe out of thin air. A cup of coffee, a meal, a martini… Of course there were under the hood complex theoretical physics and engineering involved which went untold and unexplained in the TV series.

The notion of a replicator works by rearranging subatomic particles, which are abundant everywhere in the universe, to form molecules and arrange those molecules to form the object. For example, to create a pork chop, the replicator would first form atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc., then arrange them into amino acids, proteins, and cells, and assemble the particles into the form of a pork chop.

This process requires the destructive conversion of bulk matter into energy and its subsequent reformation into a pre-scanned matter pattern. In principle, this is similar to the transporter, but on a smaller scale. However, unlike transporters, which duplicate matter at the quantum level, replicators must be capable of a large number of different materials on demand. If patterns were to be stored at the quantum level, an impossible amount of data storage (or a set of original copies of the materials) would be required. To resolve this, patterns are stored in memory at the molecular level.1

Mutant Culture: Metamorphosis and the Dividual

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

—William James, Pragmatist and Philosopher

Algorithmic governmentality, by its perfect ‘real time’ adaptation, its ‘virality’ and its plasticity, makes the very notion of ‘failure’ meaningless…

—Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers

There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere.

—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

With the advent of the Digital Age time has been out of joint, “the symptoms of a sort of dissonance and of temporal unbalance are multiplying in the sphere of aesthetic sensibility”.1 The rhythm of life is haunted by a sense of acceleration that fragments living experience and sensory perception itself. Time is out of joint—disjointed. As more and more humans in the past twenty years have become netizens, joining with hundreds of millions of others across the planet in the virtual environments of our networks the power of the mind, the cognitive activity coupled to the linguistic machines (i.e., interfaces, computers, mobile devices, etc.) has brought about a disjunction between our natural and artificial environments, allowing us to mutate and metamorphically decouple ourselves from our animal heritage and reliance of age old mental categories that over tens of thousands of years naturalized the mind. Whereas we for thousands of years developed mimetic techniques of memory to internalize information for recall, we now rely more and more on external devices and artificial intelligence to do our memory work, gather our information, search and index the world of knowledge that our ancestors used to do at the pace of attention.

Attention is the key.

“My experience is what I agree to attend to,” as my epigraph from William James suggests, attention serves as a gatekeeper for consciousness. It determines what one is conscious of. Our brains only ever give us what it needs to survive or reproduce the organism within which it is housed. So that most of what we term reality is blurred, excluded, and ill-defined for us. We come upon reality by way of accidents, stumbling upon aspects of this unruly world and cosmos as it acts upon us. And, yet, we do not know it, it is not an aspect of our attention, our awareness, our visible knowledge, our memories or experience stored or datafied. Reality is the excess that escapes our tools, our lives, our minds. All we have is the reflections grafted from this cosmic stream that our brain has forged for us over eons of evolutionary trial and error: our sex and survival depended on it, our natural environment as a hostile force that put pressure on us to block out everything but what was essential. Reality became essentialized, reduced to the bare minimum of sex and survival. Later the early philosophers would codify this process without every fully understanding the underlying mechanisms, nor realizing that what we think we know and the wider spectrum of the unknown within which we are encompassed is something of which we are blind.

Hyperstition: The Apocalypse of Intelligence

“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” 

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

Accelerating Capital: Completed Nihilism and The Indebted Man

In his book Data Trash (1993), Arthur Kroker writes that in the field of digital acceleration, more information means less meaning, because meaning slows info circulation. In the sphere of the digital economy, the faster information circulates, the faster value is accumulated. But meaning slows down this process, as meaning needs time to be produced and to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration of the info-flow implies the elimination of meaning.

—Franco Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End

The pursuit of profit is the engine of Capital, accumulation is its outcome. Profit is from the Latin profectus, meaning  “advance, increase, success, progress,” out of which the need to benefit or provide income derived. This sense that progress and success drive the need for profit, that the goal of capitalism is this abstract movement toward increasing and advancing one’s success in the world has always been at the heart of the competitive spirit. To compete or strive against others for the foremost place, this sense of the competitive spirit that has been with us at least since the first Greek Olympics. The term itself “compete” is etymologically to enter or be put in rivalry with an other,” from Middle French compéter “be in rivalry with” (14c.), or directly from Late Latin competere “strive in common,” in classical Latin “to come together, agree, to be qualified,” later, “strive together,” from com “with, together” (com-) + petere “to strive, seek, fall upon, rush at, attack”.  A sense of violent taking and war against all comers for the top prize, the best or foremost place in the Sun.

As Berardi reminds us in the old industrial economy described by Marx, the goal of production was already the valorization of capital, through the extraction of surplus- -value from labour. But, in order to produce value, the capitalist was still obliged to exchange useful things, so he was obliged to produce cars and books and bread.

When the referent is cancelled, when profit is made possible by the mere circulation of money, the production of cars, books and bread become superfluous. The accumulation of abstract value is made possible through the subjection of human beings to debt, and through predation on existing resources. The destruction of the real world starts from this emancipation of valorization from the production of useful things, and from the self-replication of value in the financial field. The emancipation of value from the referent leads to the destruction of the existing world. This is exactly what is happening under the cover of the so-called financial crisis, which is not a crisis at all, but the transition to the self-referential financial capitalism. (A: 125-126)

The Neohuman Transition: Forgetting, Erasing, Becoming New

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

—Nick Land, Meltdown

So entropy is the wrong word to describe the process at work in both The Ultimate City and Hello America. The clock stopped, but the machine is still there.

—J.G. Ballard, Extreme Metaphors

As I’ve read scholars such as Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Bernard Stiegler, and others of late there has emerged in my thinking a sense that homo sapiens sapiens is transitioning and migrating out of its natural environment which has tied its brain and patterns of behavior and thought for tens of thousands of years, and into a new world of artificiality which is fusing and transforming our synesthetic senses from our animalistic cunning intelligence into a abstract form of thought and feeling unbound from the natural world. Of course the literary visionaries of the second half of the twentieth-century such as William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and so many others have all explored this new experimentalism, this neohuman transition we are undergoing from various perspectives, knowing that the human realities constructed by our socio-cultural blinkers and frames of thought and rhetoric were becoming unraveled, unhinged, and unmoored from their age old mythologies and traditions. Nothing new here, and yet it is the power of the new that has and still does pervade the emergence and reemergence of modernity into neomodernity that is bringing us a new vision of neohumanity.

We’ve been going through this process for some time now, and its effects upon our collective and personal psyches has been one of horror and dread. A sense of homelessness, of not belonging, of a disaffiliation with the culture and the world around us pervades many thinkers, writers, and artists since the Enlightenment. Modernism spoke constantly of seeking the new, of becoming other, etc., but in fact was always looking to the past to define its future, holding on to the myths and fictions of that decaying and dying world to shore up its own discomfort at the process it was undergoing. Postmodernists would ironize the process, try to distance themselves from it, make it more abstract and fictional, and even metafictional, playing with the patterns of our ancestral thought forms as if we could just tinker with the past; a cynical ploy that left a mere distaste in one’s mouth. Distance ourselves from our animal heritage and its psychic hooks bounded by a natural mind that would not transcend its mud and slime investments. Such thoughts would lead some to suicide, others to the reactionary worlds of authoritarianism, and still others into a cyberpunk era of street gothic futurism.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

There has never been a protracted war from which a country benefited.

—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Reading many of the headlines of late and the constant buzz in the media feeds one becomes apprehensive that we are entering a dangerous age (if we ever left it?) again. The rhetoric of militaristic societies has forever been a form of male boasting, a sort of I’m ‘King of the Hill’ pattering. Yet, this male dominated romance of war has in the modern age brought only shame and misery, ashes and holocaust to the fore rather than the glories of warriors. In our age we’ve seen the automation and mechanization of war to a point that it has become remote control drones and robots that mediate the destruction of anonymous targets of an ill-defined “terrorism”.

The promises of the Obama administration of ridding ourselves of our Middle-East campaigns went awry and we became more enmeshed. With the rise of Trump we’re seeing an even more immediate global threat of extreme war as the rhetoric to overthrow dictators across the world becomes part of another fictional grab to control oil, power, and patriarchal pride. Chemical threat in Syria, Nuclear threat in North Korea… the media is abuzz of leaders willing to sacrifice themselves and their people to maintain power and domination over their territories. Russia, China, Iran and other third nations align against the U.S., Japan, and Europe and their allies in a new cold war of rhetoric all blaming each other for the disorder being promoted around the globe. None taking responsibility for having brought this new sense of insecurity and uncertainty to world stability.

Howard Zinn years ago in his personal history would say,

 There is a sense of desperation and helplessness in the land. There is the feel of a country occupied by a foreign power, not foreign in the sense of coming from abroad, but rather foreign to the principles we want our country to stand for. The “war on terror” is being used to create an atmosphere of hysteria, in which the claim of “national security” becomes an excuse to throw aside the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, to give new powers to the FBI. The question not asked is whether the war itself creates great dangers for the security of the American people, and also for the security of innocent people abroad, who become pawns in the game to expand American power worldwide.1

In his book Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War Andrew J. Bacevich who’d seen and lived through the policymaking years of much of the past fifty years of American Empire came to the conclusion that many have come before him that as Lord Acton once iterated: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He’d go on to say,

The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor.2

Bacevich’s worldview of a positive and ideal America presented and undermined by this shattering of his idealism led him to the conviction that the nation that he’d once dreamed of as a place in which “American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation’s enduring devotion to its founding ideals.” That this dream America had “during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not— to me, at least— in any way contradict America’s aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United States had amassed an arsenal of over thirty-one thousand nuclear weapons, some small number of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with our belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats to life and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an arsenal and maintain it in readiness for instant use”. (WR: 7)

He’d go on to speak of two aspects of this myth, the American Credo and Trinity:

The credo summons the United States— and the United States alone— to lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world. In a celebrated manifesto issued at the dawn of what he termed “The American Century,” Henry R. Luce made the case for this spacious conception of global leadership. Writing in Life magazine in early 1941, the influential publisher exhorted his fellow citizens to “accept wholeheartedly our duty to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.” Luce thereby captured what remains even today the credo’s essence. (WR: 12)

While the trinity is an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism. (WR: 14)

This sense that American had become the World’s policeman, the power that had to maintain order and democracy, had turned into the nightmare of corporate takeover of the global economy through both economic and military interventionism and pre-emptive warfare. Tearing up our contracts, our Bill-of-Rights, and instituting emergency powers the U.S. Government had essentially taken on the role of world dictator under the façade of democracy.

Even now as I watch the daily news it seems we are once again preparing for some kind of major confrontation or event in the world, one that will once again bring war and violence. Looking back at the legacy of American interventionism since WWII one is left with the notion that we alone have created the opposite of democracy in the world, that we have brought nothing but human suffering and degradation to millions of people around the globe through our economic and foreign legacy of both Government and Corporate malfeasance. Nothing justifies war, not even the need to oust blatant and evil dictators across the globe. Yet, American politicians goaded by the profits and power of the great global corporations seem forever bent on enacting war during times of social unrest at home and abroad.

A trite and colloquial cliché of my childhood that usually comes out at such moments is that “What goes around comes around.” This sense that repetition of war brings terror to the homeland can and will be manifested repeatedly unless we can achieve some kind of balance of power in the world today. I don’t believe we will ever achieve lasting peace, it’s another myth we have to get over. The human animal is irrational, no matter all the pretense of Reason we can muster, we are driven creatures ruled by passion not logic and harbor hate, fear, and utter madness in our affective lives as animals. If we ever rid ourselves of passion and emotion we would no longer be animals or human, rather machines and psychopathic murderers who feel nothing but nothing. Death has its own world, the world of the disaffective.

---

1. Zinn, Howard. You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (Kindle Locations 136-141). Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.
2. Bacevich, Andrew J.. Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (American Empire Project) (p. 3). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Philosophy of the Bulldozer: Or, The Modern Art of Creative Destruction

urban decay

“In their creation of the modern city, Le Corbusier, Haussmann and Moses shared the conviction that the older urban centres that had stood in their way had to be destroyed. They viewed the pre-modern city as riddled with slums that needed to be cleared away. Small, dense, crowded lanes were condemned as a cumbersome relic, unsuitable for the coming new age. In this lineage of modern urban planning, the bulldozer has always been the most important tool in the creation of the future.

—Anna Greenspan,  Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade

The Master Builders

There’s a sense that modernity and modernism not only disowned the past, but literally and figuratively destroyed it to make way for the new. Studying the great architects and engineers of Paris and New York Le Corbusier, Haussmann and Moses, Anna Greenspan gazes upon the bewildering delirium that is modernity. Not a modernity that is a repetition but rather a movement that never stopped modernizing, progressing forward powered into the uncharted future,  accelerating technics and technology, enforcing an engine of dynamic planning, innovation, and creativity to empower a world that sloughs the encrusted ruins of a dilapidated and out-of-date metropolis and projects a new world as a blank slate for the geometer’s gaze. Modernity is a temporal engine of creation and destruction born of both the geometer’s dream of perfection, and the dark undertow of a volcanic and energetic thermospasm at the heart of creation itself. This war between Platonic perfection with its top-down planning, modeling, and simulated artificiality,  and the unruly titanic forces of the street life of cities where the unconscious power of a delirious intelligence emerges from the shadows would and still is driving our world.

Citing Edward Glaeser’s book Triumph of the City Greenspan reminds us that Georges-Eugène Haussmann ‘evicted vast numbers of the poor, turning their homes into wide boulevards that made Paris monumental. He lopped off a good chunk of the Luxembourg Gardens to create city streets. He tore down ancient landmarks.’ SF: 35) The great city of medieval and renaissance Paris would become rubble in the path of this architect become engineer of grand and monumental roadways. As another architectural historian Peter Hall remarks ‘Haussmann had little concern for the heritage of the past; it simply got in the way.’ (SF: 35)

Robert Moses of New York, a student of Haussmann comments Greenspan “projects and roads rammed through neighbourhoods, dislocating hundreds of thousands of people, obliterating much of the existing urban fabric. Seemingly oblivious to the destructive path that lay in the wake of his developments, Moses appeared to delight in his particular form of ‘creative destruction’. ‘When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis,’ he notoriously maintained, ‘you have to slash your way through with a meat axe.’”(SF: 36)

Dark Cities of the American Psyche: 24/7 Death American Style

The American Psyche: A Noirish History of the Industrial Era

Which of us was willing to turn, to look the future in the face, to mutiny if necessary and oblige the Captain to put about, return the thing to where we had found it? The last of our mean innocence tolled away ship’s bell after bell. Even if we could not predict in detail what was about to happen, there could have been no one among us, not even the most literal-minded, who did not feel that something, down there, below our feet, below the waterline where it lay patient and thawing, was terribly, and soon to be more terribly, amiss.

—Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

There has always been a fine line between reason and madness, logic and affect, one that once crossed can lead into strange and bewildering worlds. The Left prides itself on critiquing capitalist social and cultural systems to the point of resistance, revolt, and total destruction. As Andrew Culp in his manifesto for destruction of our current civilization tells us, what we need is to enter that realm of destructive “polemics, recovery, and creativity” of which Deleuze and Guattari’s work was both a sign and a promise: “I argue against the “canon of joy” that celebrates Deleuze as a naively affirmative thinker of connectivity. Second, I rehabilitate the destructive force of negativity by cultivating a “hatred for this world.” Third, I propose a conspiracy of contrary terms that diverge from the joyous task of creation”.3

Against connectionism, a reaffirmation of violence and destruction of “worlds” in which hatred (a strong affect) suddenly blossoms, and a dark turn toward conspiracies against the “joyous task of creativity”. Read this against the long note left by A. Joseph Stack III, who on February 19, 2010,  a fifty-three-year-old software engineer, crashed a private plane into the Internal Revenue Service offices in Austin, Texas, killing himself as well as one worker inside the building. He left behind a statement that was six single-spaced pages long. It had clearly been worked on for a long time. As Stack himself stated: “The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken.” At the same time, he acknowledged “the storm raging in my head.” Unlike the manifest conspiracism in Richard Poplawski’s Web postings, Joseph Stack’s final statement, lengthy though it is, implied a conspiracy rather than stating it directly. In his polemic against the tax system, his real enemy was what he saw as a larger political structure rigged and operated by the wealthy for their own benefit. George W. Bush is “the recent presidential puppet.” The law comes in two versions, one “for the very rich, and one for the rest of us . . . and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws.”4

A sense of utter futility and despair pervades these texts, a hate that would destroy all external supports to the point of annihilation. The Left seems prepared to annihilate the world if need be to create a new one. Why? How have we come to the point of willilling the sacrifice of all life on the planet in the name of some ideological system of abstract thought? Some seem to be already doing this on a personal scale (i.e., Berardi’s work), but the big question is if this turns to collective action will we begin a course toward total annihilation from which there is no escape?

Mayhem in the Streets

In his recent book Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide Franco “Bifo” Berardi reminds us that we are living in the ruins of capitalist civilization, a global civilization and multiplicity of cultural complexes all meshed in establishing an era of a completed nihilism. As he tells it in his “book is not merely crime and suicide, but more broadly the establishment of a kingdom of nihilism and the suicidal drive that is permeating contemporary culture, together with a phenomenology of panic, aggression and resultant violence”.5

A sense that something terrible has happened already, that the apocalypse is already begun or over or in-between, that the drift of the world into the sinkhole of a timeless void has indeed replaced the two-hundred cheery eyed optimism of progressive dreams, idealism, and hopes of a better Tomorrowland. As I was reading Anna Greenspan’s book on neomodern revivalism in Shanghai with its glitz and glamour worlds of retro-futurism in which the city becomes an assemblage of time vectors leading into an absolute time without beginnings or endings I was reminded of the rest of the planet of slums and decay, crime and dark collective suicidal madness. I could not even with the help of Zizek’s notion of the parallax gap bring these two worlds together, enframe their strangeness, their weirdness. It’s as if most of the planet is not only bent of self-destruction and collective suicide but that the very denialism of this fact has sponsored a new world of hope on the far shores of an artificial island world beyond time.

How to reconcile the seemingly two worlds of dark and light we seem to live in? Maybe this is just where the power of the negative, the dialectic falls short and begins to implode in its own vicious circles of hate and destruction. Isn’t it more to the point that the whole Hegelian and Marxian tradition is washed up, useless in diagnosing the problems of our neomodernist era? Didn’t we learn from a Sartre (Critique of Dialectical Reason) or an Adorno (Negative Dialectics) that the extremes of the negative always lead back to God (i.e., a stand in for the great unknown and unanswerable, the darkness that will not go away, the unity that will not be subsumed: the Absolute)?

One can read thousands if not tens of thousands of critiques of capitalism that have been published since the death of Marx. What impact have they had in solving the problems we face on this planet? We’ve seen both enactments of Marx’s inverted idealism in both Soviet Russia and Maoist China fail in their bid to oust Global Capitalism. Why? Why such a failure if communism was to be the shining light of the progressive mind and its inheritance? Citing Fredrich Jameson’s remark (?) that postmodernism is the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, the late Mark Fisher in his Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? tells us that Jameson “argued that the failure of the future was constitutive of a postmodern cultural scene which, as he correctly prophesied, would become dominated by pastiche and revivalism. Given that Jameson has made a convincing case for the relationship between postmodern culture and certain tendencies in consumer (or post-Fordist) capitalism, it could appear that there is no need for the concept of capitalist realism at all. In some ways, this is true.”6

Pastiche and revivalism? Fisher citing the example of Kurt Cobain’s suicide as the outcome of this dark turn tells us that this Rock Star found himself living in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, where all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the dead like puppets in a Was Museum. Fisher says: “Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed. But the high existential angst of Nirvana and Cobain belongs to an older moment, what succeded them was a pastiche-rock which reproduced the forms of the past without anxiety. (CR)

Berardi twenty-years after Cobain’s death will uncover the darker side of this pastiche culture of mimicry, puppets, and repetitive time travel scenarios to nowhere:

I don’t care about the conventional serial killer, the brand of secretive sadistic psychopaths who are attracted to other people’s suffering and enjoy seeing people die. I’m interested in people who are suffering themselves, and who become criminals because this is their way both to express their psychopathic need for publicity and also to find a suicidal exit from their present hell. I write about young people like Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and Pekka-Erik Auvinen, who killed themselves after trying to attract the attention of the world by ending the lives of innocent people. (H)

This sense that ultra-violence of mass violence from the lone wolves among us is more about a desperate last ditch cry from the void of hate and despair, a final narcissism of the lost soul seeking to be recognized knowing full well that the soul does not exist, that nothing exists, that we are all dead in a world of death. This is the pit of hell and noir in our age.

American Cities: Or, How the Violent Die

Something about crime and noir fiction brings to life the sociopathic and psychopathic, street level view of American Cities that nothing else can. One can read sociology all day long and not get descriptions like this from James Lee Burke:

I had a whole file drawer of misery to look at, too: a prostitute icepicked by a psychotic John; a seventeen-year-old runaway whose father wouldn’t bond him out of jail and who was hanged the next morning by his black cellmate; a murder witness beaten to death with a ball-peen hammer by the man she was scheduled to testify against; a Vietnamese boat refugee thrown off the roof of the welfare project; three small children shot in their beds by their unemployed father; a junkie strangled with baling wire during a satanic ritual; two homosexual men burned alive when a rejected lover drenched the stairwell of a gay nightclub with gasoline. My drawer was like a microcosm of an aberrant world populated by snipers, razor-wielding humanoids, mindless nickel-and-dime boost artists who eventually panic and kill a convenience-store clerk for sixty dollars, and suicides who fill the apartment with gas and blow the whole building into a black and orange fireball.1

From Hammet to Ellroy to the Irish wonder, Ken Bruen, or any number of the countless works from the early pulp era to our own one enters the dark psyche of our age. Philosophers of late have spent a great deal of time on horror and science fiction, but as I’ve been reading Frank Ruda’s work on fatalism and freedom where he tells us:

Today freedom has become a signifier of oppression. In this historical situation fatalism is the only possible stance that allows us to think freedom without being indifferent. We must affirm the position of a comic fatalism, whose slogans are: Start by expecting the worst! Act as if you did not exist! Act as if you were not free! Act in such a way that you accept the struggle you cannot flee from! Act in such a way that you never forget to imagine the end of all things! Act as if the apocalypse has already happened! Act as if everything were always already lost! Act as if you were dead!2

As I reread such noir authors as Joe R. Lansdale, Ken Bruen, James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, Megan Abbott, Patricia Cornwall, Charles Wiilleford, Daniel Woodrell, Jim Thompsan, C.J. Box and many others this comic fatalism pervades their fiction with explorations of how humans negotiate freedom and fate in our difficult times. These fictions portray the underbelley of life, the worlds of those left out in the cold, the rejected, the angry and violent, the people who do not fit into the perfect world of Capital’s Neomodernity. Marginal, transgressive, outsiders who walk in the shadowlands below the surface of our consumerist paradise these fictions open us to that which we want to forget about ourselves, the darker side of our own affective lives that we like to sweep under the rug of civilized sublimity.

Freedom can be a form of oppression, a false belief system that locks us into notions of free-will that are actually traps that keep us caged in mental prisons that control our minds and guide our lives along carefully scripted and habitual tracks laid out by a dark socio-cultural dynamics that produces what we know and believe about agency and self. We are the fictions of a demented civilization, locked into a suicidal pact that will ultimately lead us to the utter destruction of both humanity and our planet unless we wake up from this mad dream. When will the sleepers awaken?

The Private Dick: Pulp Culture Explosion of the 50’s

As America dreamed of a future that would wipe out the memories of war torn Europe, Fascism, and the Nuclear winters of its own death machines dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a new culture of fantasy and optimism arose in the birth of consumerist society. Yet, even as Television suddenly captured the minds and hearts of the American psyche, reformatting and manipulating the collective mind set toward a future fantasia filled with gadgets and technological wonders, something was brewing in the dark cages of our inner cities. As Woody Haut, exploring the pulp cultural worlds below the surface of our glitz and glamour society would tell us, enclosed within a political strategy consisting of containment abroad and repression at home, pulp culture private eyes were rarely at ease negotiating the rapids of post-war political waters. As investigators drifted towards privatization — typified by secrecy, enclosure and financial agreement — their emblematic ‘eyes’, no longer open as they had been when the insignia of the strike-breaking Pinkerton Agency, had begun to wink in the direction of the state. With the Cold War contributing to an atmosphere of fear and suspicion, public investigation was best avoided. Amidst a shrug of the shoulders and a shot of rye, private eyes plying their trade on anyone who failed to represent the interests of the state risked engaging in a subversive activity. As for private eye writers, their precarious situation meant following one of two paths — the classicism of Raymond Chandler, or the manic right-wing fantasies of Mickey Spillane.7

Speaking of Raymond Chandler Fredric Jameson in his remarks that it was during this period that the postmodern turn, the turn toward a new cynicism and metafictional desperation came to the fore:

Language can never again be unselfconscious for him; words can never again be unproblematical. The naive and unreflective attitude towards literary expression is henceforth proscribed, and he feels in his language a kind of material density and resistance: even those clichés and commonplaces which for the native speaker are not really words at all, but instant communication, take on outlandish resonance in his mouth, are used between quotation marks, as you would delicately expose some interesting specimen: his sentences are collages of heterogeneous materials, of odd linguistic scraps, figures of speech, colloquialisms, place names and local sayings, all laboriously pasted together in an illusion of continuous discourse. In this, the lived situation of the writer of a borrowed language is already emblematic of the situation of the modern writer in general, in that words have become objects for him.8

The writer would use language as a form of pastiche mimicry rather than as the medium of defining or creating a world of parallel or parallax vision onto society and the lives of its inhabitants. Bound by the thick fantasies of a rising Technocommercium that would reframe the modern American psyche, Chandler and others like him would be hard pressed to create or invent narratives that would inform and entertain us about the bottom feeders or even the hidden corridors of power, sex, and violence hiding behind the façade of its pop cultural glitz and glamour.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Artificial

As Virginia Postrel in The Power of Glamour comments:

Glamour. The word itself has mystique, spelled even in American English with that exotic u. When we hear “glamour,” we envision beautiful movie stars in designer gowns or imagine sleek sports cars and the dashing men who drive them. For a moment, we project ourselves into the world they represent, a place in which we, too, are beautiful, admired, graceful, courageous, accomplished, desired, powerful, wealthy, or at ease. Glamour, the fashion writer Alicia Drake observes, offers “the implicit promise of a life devoid of mediocrity.” It lifts us out of everyday experience and makes our desires seem attainable. Glamour, writes the fashion critic Robin Givhan, “makes us feel good about ourselves by making us believe that life can sparkle.”9

Since the 1950’s America has pursued this world of glamour, sought the Good Life – a specifically American Utopia that yearned for both beauty and things. In some sense America sought to become the first completely artificial nation, created ex nihilo (“out of nothing”). During this early age of consumerist society modernist art and its techniques would enter the arena of the ad men and mediatainment complex to rewire the psyche of men and women toward the endless vistas of technological progress. Money. Power. Things. All would bring you happiness if only you would accept the promise we offer you, work hard, become that which is potentially residing in your own life.

Yet, all was not light and roses, there was a dark world laying in wait, a realm of madness and violence, paranoia and fear situated in our night of zombies, Twilight Zones, and the broken worlds of the noir silver screen. For the patriarchal and Freudian mindset of a male dominated economy where men ruled the world and women stayed at home and became good little Stepford Wives, the world below the surface of the glitzy streamlined decopod realms was more sinister.

It was in this pulp world that the lure of the femme fatale – the deadly woman of the noir screen would become the symbol and icon of this illusive world of beauty and nightmare in the American psyche. As Camille Paglia reminds us it all began with Medusa. The permanence of the femme fatale as a sexual persona is part of the weary weight of eroticism, beneath which both ethics and religion founder. Eroticism is society’s soft point, through which it is invaded by chthonian nature. The femme fatale can appear as Medusan mother or as frigid nymph, masquing in the brilliant luminosity of Apollonian high glamour. Her cool unreachability beckons, fascinates, and destroys. She is not a neurotic but, if anything, a psychopath. That is, she has an amoral affectlessness, a serene indifference to the suffering of others, which she invites and dispassionately observes as tests of her power. The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms. I will speak at length of the beautiful boy, one of the west’s most stunning sexual personae. However, the danger of the homme fatal, as embodied in today’s boyish male hustler, is that he will leave, disappearing to other loves, other lands. He is a rambler, a cowboy and sailor. But the danger of the femme fatale is that she will stay, still, placid, and paralyzing. Her remaining is a daemonic burden, the ubiquity of Walter Pater’s Mona Lisa, who smothers history. She is a thorny symbol of the perversity of sex. She will stick.10

As Robert B Pippin in his Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy  comments, on the black and white screen the femme fatale entrances in noirs often suggest the extreme view of a magical spell or mysterious erotic power that can render the male forever afterward a mere dupe, a passive victim of such power, a nonagent. The femme fatale theme is far and away the most written-about issue in film noir criticism, and there is much more to say about it, but at least these entrances do demonstrate how utterly a life can be altered in a single moment. Even doing nothing about what one feels still alters everything, because doing nothing now becomes a fateful decision, an event that then shadows everything else one does. One cannot now act in complete indifference to how one’s fate has been altered, where “cannot” in this one of its many fatalistic senses means that such indifference would make no sense in one’s life. The depth of the feeling is such that one could not recognize oneself in any such picture of indifference and so cannot act indifferently.11

The notion that noir is more about the conflicts of a male dominated society based on power, mastery, and dominion in both the spheres of public and private life of capitalism come to the fore in such critiques. Between fatalism and freedom the world of male domination is played out over the dark secret that men are not truly in control, that under the façade of this bright and glitzy even glamourized realm is all fantasy and mime. That in truth the artificial worlds men have built full of glamourous architecture, stylized automobiles and perfect women dressed in the latest fashions, situated against the Hollywood facades of yachts, skyscrapers, and internationalism is the stark reality of the Medusa.

Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai would become the epitome of such femme fatales. In her entrance in this classic noir film Hayworth sparkles with that dark sensual allurement. “It has been said that the most extraordinary quality of the dance number is that Hayworth seems to be dancing wholly for herself, luxuriating in herself, almost in indifference to and with contempt for the pathetic males around her, who we can see are both rendered screaming adolescents by the boldness of the number and, for some, quite angry at its freedom and its contempt for male standards of conduct.” (FAF) This sense of the unknown power of woman that plays itself out in the male psyche of the American seems almost a pure adolescent reversion to ancient mythic cycles based around the natural order of creation and sacrifice that have their basis in a temporal order of which America and Capitalism are the opposing system. America and Capitalism have always been artificial rather than natural environs, a society that has sought to rid itself of the dark undertows of ancient European spectres and ghosts, both political and religious. And, yet, in this puritanical riddance it pursued a course of authoritarian male domination through its Puritan heritage that is still with us.

Puritan Reform and the Politics of the Pure

In 1630 John Winthrop and a band of Puritans would migrate to America. As the historian Francis J. Bremer tells us

They had decided to uproot themselves and their families in order to found a colony where they could not only preserve the religious reforms they had managed to achieve in their native land, but also further advance the purification of worship and belief.  (The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism: p. 135)

Some have seen within this incipient world of reform and purification the beginnings of an American Enlightenment.  In their ultimate bid to purify worship and belief of the rituals and traditions of Catholicism in an extreme form the modern world of capitalism would unleash its atheistic credos and begin to purify the world of religion itself. Reformism would become liberal reformism and become the new political religion of America, shaping and regulating its psyche and collective will, determining its future and the scope of its spiritual capital.  Money and success, glitz and glamour: the American Dream of rags to riches, western expansion, and the power of modern industrialism would empower this new born land and its fantasy life.

Yet, by the end of the millennium it was apparent that something dreadfully had gone wrong with this dream turned nightmare, that America had failed its children and become not the land of promise but the land of mass suicidal psychopaths and bedlam. As Berardi expounds, ours is a world appended to the kingdom of nihilism, this “form of nihilism assumes that the conceptual activity is based on the ontological nihil”. (ibid.) He goes on to say,

In this conception, this form of nihilism has a positive and constructive implication, as the condition of moral freedom and of conceptual creation. Nihil is the starting point of the conceptual and practical process, and from this starting point the conceptual and historical activity of men is responsible for the creation and meaning of the world as we know it. The form of nihilism that seems to prevail in the culture and practice of the ruling class today is quite different from this constructive, hermeneutic nihilism. We could call it a form of ‘annihilating nihilism’, since it actively produces nihil as its effect. (H: KL 1096)

Anna Greenspan would ponder the notion of modernity. Modernity is a notoriously difficult concept to define. Inextricably bound to the interlocking and revolutionary processes of globalisation, urbanisation and mechanisation, it also encompasses the cultural impulse to express, process and understand these vast material transformations. Yet, in addition to these socio-economic and cultural conditions, modernity can also be apprehended philosophically, as a particular conception of time. Martin Jacques, in his book on China’s rise, adheres to this definition. Modernity, he writes, quoting the sociologist Goran Therborn, marks ‘the arrival of an epoch turned to the future’.  To be modern, according to this understanding, is to be in the present just on the cusp of its erasure, to be necessarily and always, at the most urgent edge of now. In a piece entitled ‘Neomodernity’, Shanghai-based philosopher Nick Land elaborates on this conception:

Modernity dates awkwardly, and intriguingly, because it positions itself upon the leading edge of time expressing an infusion from the future. In its vital, colloquial sense, the ‘modern’ is an indexical term that describes what is happening now, or recently. It is in this sense that modernization remains irrepressibly up-to-date, anchored, indexically, to the contemporary. To slip unanchored from the ‘now’ into the dead waters of history is thus to forsake the claim to modernity. What is distinctively past cannot be modern, and the modern cannot be simply past.12 (SF: p. 3)

In this sense we are always entering the modern, a process rather than a static time zone, a temporal movement that is always making and unmaking the world, erasing the past and making way for the new. Ultimately modernity as Land testifies “resists absorption into accomplished history, because it relates to an absolute future. The dynamized now of modernity is irreducible to a period or moment in time. What modernity discovered, and perpetually recalls, was not just the next thing up the road, but the road ahead in general, and perhaps even the road”. (ibid.)

Maybe in the end our love/hate relationship with America comes down to its overly male dominated and puritanical systems based as they are in a world of make-believe and artificial technological wonders and escapism.  We are a nation of escape artists and braggarts, carnivals and popcorn, a world where from its beginnings civil strife and mayhem pervaded its public and private spaces.  Our literature is more comic fatalist than romantic.  As Frank Ruda reminds us “Comic fatalism affirms such an impossible position of articulation as both absolutely necessary and impossible. Only such a gesture liberates us from all givenness, from all possibilities of realizing a given capacity. Only such a gesture can provide a precondition for thinking and enacting freedom.”13

This interplay of Freedom and Justice have played themselves out in our democratic politics floating between those who seek an extreme freedom from social and political constraints and regulation or reform, and those who seek social justice for the weak, poor, and excluded. There has never been a happy medium, a balance of forces. There has only been armed peace among warring parties, a world where crime and violence live in the dark streets while in the Hollywood stage sets of the rich and famous a world of glitz and glamour virtualize life purified of its tainted realities. At the core of the American Psyche is a denialism of the Real or the unknown, a need to stall the course of progress in an eternal wonderland of disneyfication, while at the same time denying the noirish underworlds of its own repressed perversities, sexual and power based politics and lifestyles. We ritualize our violence in arenas of violence: Football, Saturday night car races, World-wide wrestling, mixed martial arts…. etc. all to codify the male psyche and its need for start and unadulterated aggression and dominion over all competitors. We are a nation of gamblers, pirates, thieves, and scoundrels all dressed up in the glitz and glamour of Wall Street Tychoons, philanthropist software moghuls of Californian neomodernity with the streamlined high-speed loops and ray-gun gothic entrepreneurship. We are a multiethnic multiplicity of diverse and rich intercultural hates and fears, a realm where day to day tribalism and ultra-modern escapism intermingle. Coke and heroin, pharmaceuticals and paraphernalia tease us out of street and skypad into the heart of an accelerating voyage into the void. We have no destination only a hellish need to get there in style, wherever it is we’re going… and, no one knows exactly if that is the myth of the Open Road or some Pynchonian time spiral into chaosmosis.  As one of the characters in Thomas Pynchon’s tells us,

Randolph had a sympathetic look. “At least they tell you where it is you’ll be sent off to. After the closing-day ceremonies here, our future’s all a blank.”14

This sense that the future is unwritten,  unscripted, blank and incomplete and open is at the bottom of neomodernity.  A need to open the door and let the sun in again, to allow reality to break into our fantasy worlds and give us back all that we fear with such horror that we’ve enclosed ourselves in a horror show of abstraction and pure fantasy. Until we can step through that door into the Real we will wander in a realm of night and noir till all that is left is the pitch black screen of a final dark gesture of noise. It’ll be the sound of your brain imploding. The notion of modernity as unfinished and incomplete, always beginning, and beginning again. This openness to the past in the future, of the unbidden worlds of creativity and innovation within us.

Conflict and change will always be with us, the universe is not a friendly place but rather full of violence and changes that can at times be catastrophic. Our home on planet earth is one of continuous eco-catastrophe, and we ourselves have contributed to this in ways we have yet to fully understand or document much less analyze and interpret. We term it the Antrhopocene, but such categories only hide what is bound to their reductions rather than opening up a way out of the problems they present. There are and never will be any fast easy solutions to our earthly problems. Trying to repress or forget the past we create and recreate it in misery and detail over and over again. Seeking a future through some linear fantasy has driven us to create a world filled with annihilation and nuclear wastelands. Even now our American leaders seek to dominate the world through rhetoric and fantasy that might suddenly open up a nuclear nightmare and apocalypse the likes of which might bring about the end game fantasies of our Puritan ancestors. End times? A mix of biblical madness and modern politics meshing in a global melt down? Only time will tell… and time isn’t speaking.

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1. James Lee Burke (1987-01-02T08:00:00+00:00). 01 The Neon Rain (Kindle Locations 154-160). Pocket Books. Kindle Edition.
2. Ruda, Frank (2016-05-01). Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Provocations) (Kindle Locations 76-83). UNP – Nebraska. Kindle Edition
3. Culp, Andrew. Dark Deleuze (Forerunners: Ideas First) (Kindle Locations 72-74). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
4. Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society) (p. 195). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.
5. Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Futures) (Kindle Locations 54-55). Verso Books. Kindle Edition. (H)
6. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Zero Books) (p. 7). NBN_Mobi_Kindle. Kindle Edition. (CR)
7. Haut, Woody. Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (Kindle Locations 1167-1174). 280 Steps. Kindle Edition.
8. Jameson, Fredric. Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (p. 2). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
9. Virginia Postrel. The Power of Glamour (Kindle Locations 67-73). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
10. Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae (p. 15). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
11. Pippin, Robert B.. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Page-Barbour Lectures) (Kindle Locations 481-488). University of Virginia Press. Kindle Edition. (FAF)
12. Greenspan, Anna. Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (p. 3). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
13. Ruda, Frank. Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Provocations) (Kindle Locations 2688-2690). UNP – Nebraska. Kindle Edition.
14. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day (p. 52). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The Roots of Rage

Utopia or Dystopia has an interesting piece on Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger.

Hit the nail on the head: “… gives an outsized place to intellectuals and the ideas that inspire them, people and their works like Mishra and his books, and as consequence fail to bring to light the material forces that are such idea’s true source.” In some retrospective futurial work a hundred or two hundred years from now the neo-historian of that era will see in our time the enactment of a transitional phase shift for planetary life in total as plant, mineral, and animal kingdoms coalesce and diverge, bifurcate into multiplicities and other forms. As machinic civilization arises and the Age of Man is completed and the devolutionary consequences of the Anthropocene play out.

Either intelligence and creativity will emerge and reconstruct the world toward more order and negentropic states or there will be a great dying off of organic life on the planet due to many causes: climacteric catastrophe; overpopulation brining famine, pestilence, infestation; global civil war; and resource depletion, etc. Either way as in all things the weak and innocent (read: stupid and uniformed, poor and excluded) will be the first to fall, while the rest will war among themselves in every tightening threads of death and destruction. Elsewise we will actually learn to cooperate and tame our dark and bitter raging drives for power, sex, and survival and create a wholesome and caring society based on the acknowledgement of our fragility and unknowing.

Some believe that matter and energy will ultimately be converted into each other in peaceful ways rather than through destructive and planet killing forms (nuclear war). The notion that matter is itself part of an invisible nexus of energetic and unconscious intelligence, a transcendental unconscious that empowers all things from thermospasm to the Great Wall of Light that houses millions of galactic clusters. Spinonza’s God or Nature? Truth or lie? Will we break through or break down? Will we learn to live together in harmony and peace or will we end in one long protracted war to the death? No one can answer such things. We hope, we despair… neither is of use.

Religion was born of our irrational need to know and have an answer to the ultimate dilemmas of our ignorance in the face of an inscrutable universe. Philosophy was born of those who needed reasons for this inscrutability, an answer that could satisfy the logic and reason of men rather than the blind faith of religion. Neither have ever answered these questions, only give us more questions. The universe may be incomplete, a botched experiment, one of a multiplicity of experiments in a bubble multiverse without end or design or purpose. No one knows… and, yet it is this very unknowning that drives us forward, challenges us, goads us to know to live to become… those who rage are those who have given up the ghost, given up the quest to know, who have given over to hate and bitterness, seeking to blame others for not knowing the answers of their irrational hearts. They would rather kill off every other living creature than accept the responsibility for their own miserable failure to continue the quest…

So many speak of an ‘economy of caring’ rather than the current ‘economy of hording’ (accumulation) these days, an economy that takes into account the quality rather than quantity of life. The older forms of potlatch systems at least understood the need for expenditure of excess, the utter destruction of what had been accumulated as a gesture of trust and acknowledgement that we are all in the end born equal and without power or dominion. Sacrifice was always an acknowledgement that we are beholden to the impersonal and indifferent sources of power and energy that sustain us through the natural cycles of our lives on this planet. We’ve done away with that bloody institution, but have opted for continuous sacrifice in war instead. War is the bloody continuation of a great potlatch supper without end. That in the end the earth itself is the source of our power, and the sun is the creative engine of our destiny and lives on this planet. If we unbalance the cycles that have stabilized organic life for millions of years there will be no return, no rebirth of plant, animal, or mineral worlds; no movement or becoming or processual change. It will all end. We have yet to accept such consequences as real.

Utopia or Dystopia

Perhaps the main problem with the case made by Pankaj Mishra in his Age of Anger is that it gives an outsized place to intellectuals and the ideas that inspire them, people and their works like Mishra and his books, and as consequence fail to bring to light the material forces that are such idea’s true source.

It’s one thing to be aware that today’s neo-liberalism, and the current populist revolt against them have roots stretching back to the Enlightenment and Rousseau’s revolt against it and to be made aware that there’s a contradiction at the heart of the Enlightenment project that has yet to be resolved. It’s quite another thing to puzzle out why even a likely doomed revolt against this project is taking place right now as opposed to a decade or even decades ago. To do that one needs to turn to insights from sociology and political…

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Saying Goodbye to all That: Progress, Engineers, and Modernity

In his path-breaking short story The Gernsback Continuum, William Gibson dubs this style ‘Raygun Gothic’, explicitly marking its time-complexity. He thus coaxes it into the wider cultural genre of retro-futurism, which applies to everything that evokes an out-dated future, and thereby transforms modernity into a counter-factual commentary on the present. This genre finds an especially rich hunting ground in Shanghai.

—Nick Land, A Time-Traveler’s Guide to Shanghai 

Cities are not homogeneous blocks of consistent identity, rather spaces of continuous negotiation between differences, temporal zones that mesh or collide, disperse or penetrate. Cities are fluid and dynamic processes that arise out of the creative vectors of unimagined intensities. The city breaks the barriers, undoes the boundaries of time, allowing all times: past, present, future to co-exist in a space of differences that make a difference. The City is a Time-Machine.

A hundred years ago Patrick Geddes speaking to a friend about the mutation and transformation of the old Roman gridiron format of cities would offer surgery and re-adaptation to regionalism as the modern way:

City Planning is not mere place-planning, nor even work planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk planning. This means that its task is not to coerce people into new places against their associations, wishes, and interest, as we find bad schemes trying to do. Instead its task is to find the right places for each sort of people; place where they will really flourish. To give people in fact the same care that we give when transplanting flowers, instead of harsh evictions and arbitrary instructions to ‘move on’, delivered in the manner of an officious policeman.1

He would also typify the architect as the Chief Workman and Regional Engineer: “As the former period may be characterized by the predominance of the relatively unskilled workman and the skilled, so this next incipient age by the development of the chief workman proper, the literal architektos or architect; and by his companion, the rustic improver, gardener, and forester, farmer, irrigator, and their correspondingly evolved types of civil engineer.”2

Architect as Engineer: Progress and the City

Yet, it is Le Corbusier in his The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning who would bring the Engineering workman metaphor to its modern and penultimate perfection, saying,

The great city determines everything : war, peace and toil. Great cities are the spiritual workshops in which the work of the world is done. The anachronistic persistence of the original skeleton of the city paralyzes its growth. Industrial and commercial life will be stifled in towns which do not develop. The conservative forces at work in great cities obstruct the development of transport, congest and devitalize activity, kill progress and discourage initiative. The decayed state of these old towns and the intensity of modern toil lead to physical and nervous sickness. Modern life requires the recuperation of the forces which are used up in pursuit of it. Hygiene and moral health depend on the lay-out of cities. Without hygiene and moral health, the social cell becomes atrophied. A country’s worth can be measured by the vigour of its inhabitants. The cities of to-day cannot respond to the demands of the life of to-day unless they are adapted to the new conditions. The great cities determine the life of a country. If the great city is stifled, the country goes under. In order to transform our cities we must discover the fundamental principles of modern town planning.

—Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning

This sense of the architect as the planner, of the engineer modeling and computing, calculating and adapting form and content from the Outside. For Le Corbusier modernity is above all progress, improvement, adaptation to the new and out with the old and musty, dark and medieval. “Now that the machine age has let loose the consequences attaching to it, progress has seized on a new set of implements with which to quicken its rhythm; this it has done with such an intensification of speed and output that events have moved beyond our capacity to appreciate them; and whereas mind has hitherto generally been in advance of accomplished fact, it is now, on the contrary, left behind by new facts whose acceleration continues without cease ; only similes can adequately describe the situation ; submersion, cataclysm, invasion. This rhythm has been accelerated to such a point that man—(who has after all created it with his small individual inventions, just as an immense conflagration can be started with a few pints of petrol and one little match)—man lives in a perpetual state of instability, insecurity, fatigue and accumulating delusions. Our physical and nervous organization is brutalized and battered by this torrent; it makes its protest, of course, but it will soon give way unless some energetic decision, far-sighted and not too long delayed, brings order once more to a situation which is rapidly getting out of hand.”3

The notion of the Architect as Chief Engineer and Workman who will put his stamp upon chaos and bring out of it order, one who has seen modernity as a temporal time-machine in which the forces of capitalism and progress have moved at such an accelerating pace that the life of cities and regions has begun melting down under the pressure of its unformed relations.

Le Corbusier once said, in a statement usually turned against him, “You know, it is always life that is right and the architect who is wrong.” This was not a confession of error. It was the recognition of the validity of process over the sanctity of ideology. Few architects are capable of making that observation, because it speaks not to some fixed ideal, but to the complexity and incompleteness of architecture, to how life and art accommodate each other. (Huxtable 163) The modern movement is a story of high hopes, boundless optimism, (not so) innocent social idealism, and considerable hubris in which the artists, architects, and artisans of the world would make it a better place through a radical new kind of design. Change was necessary to reinvigorate a corrupt, exhausted, and war-weary society. “Architecture or revolution!” Le Corbusier proclaimed, not surprisingly settling for architecture to improve people’s lives. The machine was to be the symbol and instrument of salvation; mechanization and standardization would serve humanity through progressive political systems. Everything would be stripped down to its functional essence and reinvented, and this would lead to an aesthetic as modern as the message was messianic. Clear out the mess. Banish the past. Design for the future. Modernism was the original extreme makeover. Painting, sculpture, architecture, furniture, tableware, interiors, graphics, photography and film, theater, costumes, and clothing are all here to prove it. There are familiar icons and the unexpected from Paris, Berlin, Moscow, the Netherlands, the United States, and eastern Europe. These are the masterworks of modernism by Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Kasimir Malevich, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Duchamp, Wassily Kandinsky, Naum Gabo, and Hans Arp, with buildings and furniture by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto, Erich Mendelsohn, and Gerritt Rietvelt, and photography and film by El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, and Man Ray.

Le Corbusier sought something specific, geometric precision and a simplification of measure: – a universality that he could apply as engineering and architecture. So  he devised a workable unit of measurement, which he called the Modulor, or Golden Section. It was based on the height of a man with his arm upraised, and according to Le Corbusier, any structure based on multiples of this unit of measure would be beautiful and have a human scale. His own use of the Modulor, however, proved to be as personal as everything else he did. (Huxtable 56) Le Corbusier described it as a “range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things.”

Turning to the progenitor of phenomenology in its modernist form under the work of Edmund Husserl who would affirm this transformation from the older forms of geometry and its reception to the new world of modernity, saying, in The Origin of Geometry:

THE INTEREST THAT propels us in this work makes it necessary to engage first of all in reflections which surely never occurred to Galileo. We must focus our gaze not merely upon the ready-made, handeddown geometry and upon the manner of being which its meaning had in his thinking; it was no different in his thinking from what it was in that of all the late inheritors of the older geometric wisdom, whenever they were at work, either as pure geometers or as making practical applications of geometry. Rather, indeed above all, we must also inquire back into the original meaning of the handed-down geometry, which continued to be valid with this very same meaning-continued and at the same time was developed further, remaining simply “geometry” in all its new forms. Our considerations will necessarily lead to the deepest problems of meaning, problems of science and of the history of science in general, and indeed in the end to problems of a universal history in general; so that our problems and expositions concerning Galilean geometry take on an exemplary significance.4

Both in architecture and in philosophy it is both progress and universality which would come to the fore under a new and intensified abstractionism based on a transformation of the wisdom of the geometers in that age.

“On or about 1910,” just as the automobile and airplane were beginning to accelerate the pace of human life and Einstein’s ideas were transforming our perception of the universe, there was an explosion of innovation and creative energy that shook every field of artistic endeavor. Artists from all over the world converged on London, Paris, and other great cities of Europe to join in the ferment of new ideas and movements: Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Acmeism, and Imagism were among the most influential banners under which the new artists grouped themselves. It was an era when major artists were fundamentally questioning and reinventing their art forms: Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso in painting, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in literature, Isadora Duncan in dance, Igor Stravinsky in music, and Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture. Artists of every stripe and persuasion would suddenly move away from figuration and representation into a realm of pure abstraction. A handful of artists—Vasily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Arthur Dove—presented paintings that differed from almost all of those that had preceded them in the long history of the medium in the Western tradition: shunning the depiction of objects in the world, they displayed works with no discernible subject matter. As Vasily Kandinsky would ask “Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?“. Observers of these new forms of art spoke of the exhilaration and terror of leaping into unknown territory, where comparison with the past was impossible. This evacuation of the object world was, to be sure, hardly a silent disappearance, but rather was accompanied by a shower of celebratory manifestos, lectures, and criticism, a flood of words flung forth perhaps in compensation for their makers’ worry about how the meaning of these pictures might be established.5

Abstraction: Networks, Rhizomes, and Mutants

Abstraction’s network was fostered in the years immediately before World War I by a new modern culture of connectivity. It was the rise and transformation of capitalism out of its factory model in the old Fordist systems into a new slicker world of global markets, connectionism, and networks of telecommunications that would usher in the Abstract Age of Modernism. In trains, automobiles, and steamships, people were travelling internationally in numbers far greater than ever before. National boundaries became porous as people crossed them with new ease—and until the outbreak of World War I, most European countries had minimal passport requirements. Telegraphs, telephones, and radio relayed news of events quickly across the globe. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912, thanks to wireless telegraphy, was not only followed achingly by those on ships just out of reach of the ocean liner but was also one of the first news stories to be reported virtually simultaneously with the event. These same communication technologies allowed for the synchronization of times and clocks across distance, which facilitated the establishment of coordinated international markets and set the stage for the vertiginous growth of a modern speculative economy and commodity culture. In Paris in 1912, Henri Poincaré hosted an international conference that established a method for transmitting accurate radio time signals around the world, and on July 1, 1913, the first time signal to be broadcast globally was sent from the Eiffel Tower, a key step in adopting a universal standard time. All of this fed a more international, global sense of one’s world. The network of sociability built by transit pathways, the proliferation of print media, and new forms of communication allowed for the movement of ideas and images across a broad terrain, a development crucial in abstraction’s incubation.

Alberto Toscano citing  Italian Marxist phenomenologist Enzo Paci tells us that: “The fundamental character of capitalism … is revealed in the tendency to make abstract categories live as though they were concrete. Categories become subjects, or rather, even persons, though we must here speak of person in the Latin sense, that is, of masks. … “Capitalist” means a man transformed into a mask, into the person of capital: in him acts capital producing capital. … The abstract, in capitalist society, functions concretely’ (Paci, 1979: 160-1, 153).6

In his Abstraction and Empathy A Contribution to the Psychology of Style  (1908) Wilhelm Worringer would describe the modern movement toward abstraction:

We regard as this counter-pole an aesthetics which proceeds not from man’s urge to empathy, but from his urge to abstraction. Just as the urge to empathy as a pre-assumption of aesthetic experience finds its gratification in the beauty of the organic, so the urge to abstraction finds its beauty in the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in all abstract law and necessity.7

Abstraction as the perfection of the artificial and anti-life forces of the anorganic: the crystalline perfection of law and necessity.  Deleuze and Guattari would speak of Abstract machines. The Abstract Machine is a universal concept introduced so as to ground a manifold ontology: ‘The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 254). The notion of the network, the rhizome, the infinite seething sea of connections within a labyrinthine assemblage, all this would situate the movement of abstraction into a non-figural or asemiotic field where society, culture, and its agents – organic or anorganic would all mesh in a realm at once virtual and actual, real and abstract.

Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millennium would describe this movement between the crystal and the flame:

Crystal and flame: two forms of perfect beauty that we cannot tear our eyes away from, two modes of growth in time, of expenditure of the matter surrounding them, two moral symbols, two absolutes, two categories for classifying facts and ideas, styles and feelings. A short while ago I suggested a “Party of the Crystal” in twentieth-century literature, and I think one could draw up a similar list for a “Party of the Flame.” I have always considered myself a partisan of the crystal…

The crystal, with its precise faceting and its ability to refract light, is the model of perfection that I have always cherished as an emblem, and this predilection has become even more meaningful since we have learned that certain properties of the birth and growth of crystals resemble those of the most rudimentary biological creatures, forming a kind of bridge between the mineral world and living matter. (SM: 15)

Among the scientific books into which I poke my nose in search of stimulus for the imagination, I recently happened to read that the models for the process of formation of living beings “are best visualized by the crystal on one side (invariance of specific structures) and the flame on the other (constancy of external forms in spite of relentless internal agitation).” The contrasting images of flame and crystal are used to make visible the alternatives offered to biology, and from this pass on to theories of language and the ability to learn. One will even find in the implications for the philosophy of science embodied in the positions stated by Piaget, who is for the principle of “order out of noise”—the flame—and Chomsky, who is for the “self-organizing system,” the crystal. (SM: 15)

In his book The Ego Tunnel, Thomas Metzinger has framed the so-called psychopathologies of the digital age with these words:

The Internet has already become a part of our self-model. We use it for external memory storage, as a cognitive prosthesis, and for emotional autoregulation… Clearly, the integration of hundreds of millions of human brains… into ever new medial environments has already begun to change the structure of conscious experience itself… Today, the advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking the very foundations of our capacity for experience, drawing us into the vast and confusing media jungle… We can see the probable result in the epidemic of attention-deficit disorder in children and young adults, in midlife burnout, in rising levels of anxiety in large parts of the population… New medial environments may create a new form of waking consciousness that resembles weakly subjective states—a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, and infantilization. (Metzinger 2009: 234)

Geotrauma: Psychopathology and Inhumanism

This sense that for two hundred years of modernism we’ve been undergoing a plastic change in consciousness, rewiring our natural brains under the acceleration and transitional phase shift of a total artificialization (abstract machines) of organic into anorganic perfection has barely begun to register on the human animal and its environs. Nick Land would coin the term geotraumatics to intensify Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of schizoanalyis:

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.8

Speaking of this transcendental unconscious Land remarks “Non-agentic, lacking the intentional intelligibility of Kant’s ‘will’, and with no regard for architectonic order, this transcendental unconscious is an insurgent field of forces for whose cunning – as Nietzsche would discover – even ‘reason’ itself is but an instrument. Anticipating the psychoanalytical conception of ‘desire’, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche consummate the collapse of intentional transparency into the opacity of a contingent and unknown ‘will’, a ‘purposiveness without purpose’ whose unmasterable irruptions are in fact dissipations – pathological by definition – of energy excessive to that required for (absorbed by) the ‘work’ of being human. At once underlying and overflowing the ‘torture chamber of organic specificity’, or ‘Human Security System’, this inundation creates ‘useless’ new labyrinths, unemployable new fictions that exceed any attempt to systematise knowledge or culture.” (FN)

This is the realm of impersonal and indifferent, almost demiurgic blind creativity and innovation arising out of Spinoza’s God or Nature. Matter (Mother) as intelligent and intelligence itself. This is not your old materialism of the passive inert stuff of a dead world of matter, but rather of an energetic world of forces and powers at once daemonic and demonic arising unbidden into the universe out of the voids of dark energy and dark matter creating the visible light spectrum of our universes seemingly ordered systems of modern physics. A realm of pure abstraction and artificiality, virtual becoming in an endless oceanic realm of entropy and negentropic movements. As Land continues,

The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the Real, the production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the Real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the Real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring-production of Deleuze-Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us) . Within the framework of social history the empirical subject of production is man, but its transcendental subject is the machinic unconscious, and the empirical subject is produced at the edge of production, as an element in the reproduction of production, a machine part, and ‘a part made up of parts. (FN: 321-322)

In this sense we have always been artificial products of a machinic unconscious, parts of an infinite abstract machine or assemblage. For Land Kant’s correlational circle of the for-itself bounded by the epistemic house of for-us is overcome through the power of this putting intelligence and thought back into the things themselves. Nothing is for-us, rather we are mere appendages and parts of some vaster anorganic process of creativity and innovation that may or may not even be aware of us in its blind becoming, impersonal and indifferent, intelligence. Matter thinks itself without a Subject. This is not vitalism either. As Brassier and Mackay say in their intro to Land’s Fanged Noumena:

Fuelled by disgust at the more stupefying inanities of academic orthodoxy and looking to expectorate the vestigial theological superstitions afflicting mainstream post-Kantianism, Land seized upon Deleuze-Guattari’s transcendental materialism – years before its predictable institutional neutering – and subjected it to ruthless cybernetic streamlining, excising all vestiges of Bergsonian vitalism to reveal a deviant and explicitly thanatropic machinism. The results of this reconstructive surgery provide the most illuminating but perhaps also the most disturbing distillation of what Deleuze called ‘transcendental empiricism’. In Land’s work, this becomes the watchword for an experimental praxis oriented entirely towards contact with the unknown. Land sought out this exteriority, the impersonal and anonymous chaos of absolute time, as fervently as he believed Kantianism and Hegelianism, along with their contemporary heirs, deconstruction and critical theory, were striving to keep it out. (FN: 5)

This notion of the absolute Outside as Time, as the realm of thermospasm, where the thanatropic machinism of an massive energetic unconscious powers the forces that arise in our universe is at the core of Land’s cosmology. As Land would describe it in A Thirst for Annilhilation, the thermospasm is reality as undilute chaos. It is where we all came from. The deathdrive is the longing to return there (‘it’ itself), just as salmon would return upstream to perish at the origin. Thermospasm is howl, annihilating intensity, a peak of improbability. Energetic matter has a tendency, a Todestrieb. The current scientific sense of this movement is a perpetual degradation of energy or dissipation of difference. Upstream is the reservoir of negentropy, uneven distribution, thermic disequilibrium. Downstream is Tohu Bohu, statistical disorder, indifference, Wärmetod. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that disorder must increase, that regional increases in negentropy still imply an aggregate increase in entropy. Life is able to deviate from death only because it also propagates it, and the propagation of disorder is always more successful than the deviation. Degradation ‘profits’ out of life. Any process of organization is necessarily aberrational within the general economy, a mere complexity or detour in the inexorable death-flow, a current in the informational motor, energy cascading downstream, dissipation. 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.9  (TA: 30)

In this life produces anti-life, entropy, decay. We are all producers of death and waste. As we heat up, swarm, enter into network algorithmic necessity and energetic participation, accelerate the processes of hyperintelligence we are accelerating the expulsion and entropic waste of the earth and sun. We make a sacrifice of life and the organic substance of the earth, animals and plants, so that we can produce death as a commodity in a universal order of intelligence.

Technics and Technology: Enframing the World

In the Question of Technology as Steven Shaviro tells us Heidegger warns us against the danger of technological “enframing,” with its reduction of nature to the status of a “standing reserve.” He demonizes science, in a manner so sweeping and absolute as to be the mirror image of science’s own claims to unique authority. But you can’t undo what Whitehead calls the “bifurcation of nature” by simply dismissing one side of the dichotomy. Whitehead’s account of science and technology is far subtler than Heidegger’s, in part because he actually understands modern science, as Heidegger clearly does not. For Whitehead, scientific and technical rationality is one kind of “abstraction.” This, in itself, is not anything bad. An abstraction is a simplification, a reduction, made in the service of some particular interest. As such, it is indispensable. We cannot live without abstractions; they alone make thought and action possible. We only get into trouble when we extend these abstractions beyond their limits, pushing them into realms where they no longer apply. This is what Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” and it’s one to which modern science and technology have been especially prone. But all our other abstractions—notably including the abstraction we call language—need to be approached in the same spirit of caution. Indeed, Whitehead’s reservations about science run entirely parallel to his reservations about language. 10

In Absolute Recoil Slavoj Zizek would comment on “enframing” saying, In this precise sense, Heidegger is the ultimate transcendental philosopher: his achievement is to historicize the transcendental dimension. For Heidegger, an Event has nothing to do with ontic processes; it designates the “event” of a new epochal disclosure of Being, the emergence of a new “world” (as the horizon of meaning within which all entities appear). Catastrophe thus occurs before the (f) act: the catastrophe is not the nuclear self-destruction of humanity, but that ontological relation to nature which reduces it to techno-scientific exploitation. The catastrophe is not our ecological ruin, but the loss of our home-roots, thus making possible the ruthless exploitation of the earth.  The catastrophe is not that we are reduced to automata manipulable by biogenetics, but the very ontological approach that renders this prospect possible. Even in the case of total self-destruction, ontology maintains its priority over the ontic: the possibility of total self-destruction is just an ontic consequence of our relating to nature as a collection of objects for technological exploitation— the catastrophe occurs when nature appears to us within the frame of technology. Gestell, Heidegger’s name for the essence of technology, is usually translated into English as “enframing.” At its most radical, technology designates not the complex network of machines and activities, but the attitude towards reality that we assume when we engage in such activities: technology is the way reality discloses itself to us in modern times, when reality has become a “standing-reserve”:

Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.

Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.  The paradox of technology as the concluding moment of Western metaphysics is that it is a mode of enframing which poses a danger to enframing itself: the human being reduced to an object of technological manipulation is no longer properly human, it loses the very feature of being ecstatically open to reality. However, this danger also contains the potential for salvation: the moment we become aware of and fully embrace the fact that technology itself is, in its essence, a mode of enframing, we overcome it … Giving such priority to the ontological over the ontic dimension leads Heidegger to dismiss gigantic human catastrophes (like the Holocaust) as mere “ontic” events; it leads him to dismiss the differences between, say, democracy and fascism as secondary and ontologically irrelevant (and some critics have hastened to add that this obliteration of ontic differences is not only the consequence but also the hidden cause of his emphasis on the ontological dimension— his own Nazi involvement thus becomes an insignificant error, etc.).11

The realization that we are both products and producers enframed within an ontological organization of transcendental forces of an energetic unconscious that is at once technics and technology is both a catastrophe and a creation.  As Slavoj will continue: “In our most elementary phenomenological experience, the reality we see through a window (our bodies: senses) is always minimally spectral, not as fully real as the enclosed space we inhabit while looking out. The reality outside is perceived in a weirdly de-realized state, as if we were watching a performance on screen. When we open the window, the direct impact of the external reality causes a minimal shock, as we are overwhelmed by its proximity. This is also why we can be surprised when entering the enclosed space of a house: it seems as if the space inside is larger than the outside frame, as if the house is bigger on the inside than the outside. A similar frame, conceived as a window onto another world, appears in Roland Emmerich’s 1994 film, Stargate. The “stargate” is a large ring-shaped device that functions as a wormhole enabling people to teleport to complementary devices located cosmic distances away. No wonder the world they enter through the stargate resembles Ancient Egypt— itself a kind of “stargate culture” in which the pharaohs organized gigantic public works to secure their passage through the stargate to Orion after their death. And, in science itself, is not the ultimate stargate the idea of a black hole, conceived as the passage into an alternative universe?” (AR)

Shanghai Futures: Temporal Invasions from the Future

The game Shanghai plays, or the story it tells, is endlessly re-started in the dieselpunk cityscape of the 1920s and ‘30s, where everything that anybody could want exists in dense, unexpressed potentiality – global fortunes, gangster territories, proletarian uprisings, revolutionary discoveries, literary glory, sensory intoxication, as well as every permutation of modest urbanite thriving. It is a city where anything can happen, and somewhere, at some time, everything does.

—Nick Land, Shanghai Times

Anna Greenspan in her book Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade tells us that “Shanghai is a city hungry for the future. To get a taste, head to the heights of the financial district in Pudong’s Lujiazui. At dusk, the view from the ninety-first floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center is fantastically alien. Outside the enormous windows, the metropolis stretches out like an off-world fantasy; a film apparition of a science-fiction city.”12 Nick Land in A Time Travelers Guide to Shanghai will remind us that if “the modern defines itself through the present, conceived as a break from the past and a projection into the future, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower unquestionably installs itself in modernity, but only by way of an elaborate path. It reverts to the present from a discarded future, whilst excavating an unused future from the past.”13 Greenspan will add that Shanghai is not so much modern as a future without a past, a realm where the old progressive ideologies no longer hold and something else ill-defined has enframed itself in a new world,

it is the spirit of futurism itself that seems so remarkably out of date. The progressive presumptions embodied by Futurama induce— together with images of jetpacks and robot maids— a wistful, tragi-comic nostalgia for a future that never arrived. Autogyros, in particular, seem to taunt us as a broken promise. ‘Where are the flying cars?’ ask writers disappointed by the dreams left unfulfilled.  ‘A rich legacy of failed predictions has accumulated over a century (or more) of science fiction, futurology and popular expectations of progress, covering topics from space colonisation, undersea cities, extravagant urban designs, advanced transportation systems, humanoid domestic robots and ray-guns, to jumpsuit clothing and meal pills,’ writes Nick Land in his blog on Shanghai time.  This apparent gap between what is and what we once thought might be has left us wracked with doubt about the world to come. ‘We don’t have the same relation to progress as we used to,’ claims author Michael Specter. ‘We talk about it ambivalently. We talk about it with ironic little quotes around it—“ progress”.’  In our cynical, postmodern age, ‘retro-futurism’ is the only form of futurism that survives. (SF)

And, yet, as Land will remind us we are still bound by Modernity’s duration, its calendric dominion (cited in Anna’s book):

‘It is an intriguing and ineluctable paradox of globalized modernity,’ continues Land in a blog post entitled ‘Calendric Dominion’, ‘that its approximation to universality remains fundamentally structured by ethno-geographical peculiarities of a distinctly pre-modern type’.  A culture’s rhythms, history and aspirations are rooted in their calendars. This is why calendars have always been so important to both rulers and revolutionary groups. Calendars are the surest means through which a culture can separate itself both from their immediate past and from their existing surroundings. Thus, calendric change has frequently been recognised as a culture’s first and most crucial step in establishing their autonomy and solidifying their traditions. As author William Burroughs noted, if you want to change a culture, you have to change its calendar. (SF: xv-xvi)

In Shanghai Times Land comments: ‘Modernity’ describes an unprecedented cultural enterprise, which is that of leaving the nursery of eternal recurrence, propelling history onto an inconclusive path between cyclical and progressive time. The conceptual step taken here is a modest one. It directs little attention to the crucial possibility that modernity is something that happens to time (and not only within it), and still less to the guiding figure of the spiral, which cyclicity and progression compose together. In a later short essay (‘ Moore and More’, May 2011), this last element is explicitly indicated:

The trend of modern time to Cycles cannot be dismissed from futuristic speculation (they always come back), but they no longer define it. Since the beginning of the electronic era, their contribution to the shape of the future has been progressively marginalized. […] Whilst crystallizing (in silico) the inherent acceleration of neo-modern, linear time, Moore’s Law is intrinsically nonlinear, for at least two reasons. Firstly, and most straightforwardly, it expresses the positive feedback dynamics of technological industrialism, in which rapidly-advancing electronic machines continuously revolutionize their own manufacturing infrastructure. Better chips make better robots make better chips, in a spiraling acceleration. Secondly, Moore’s Law is at once an observation, and a program [which is to say, a self-fulfilling prophecy].14

Ultimately Shanghai is unbound from the temporal philosophy and pragmatic intrumentalism of the West. As Greenspan maintains Shanghai is situated in an absolute future:

absolute futurism does not belong to linear history. It is not a temporal destination that can be defined relationally. Rather, the absolute future exists today precisely as it has existed before, as an atemporal presence, a virtual realm that ‘infuses the present retroactively with its effects’.  Viewed in this manner, Shanghai’s recollection of yesterday’s modernity is not being driven by a compulsion to repeat. Rather, the city is attempting to reanimate a lost futurism that is just as unpredictable today as it was in the past. What will ultimately emerge is impossible to predict, plan or project, since, by definition, it is utterly unforeseen. We do not yet know what China’s most future-oriented city will be like or what future this city will create. (SF: xvi-svii)

So against the planned and controlled cities of Le Courbsier or Geddes and their progeny in the modern architecture of cities we are moving into an absolute time where the future is always now and compressed, an energetic and unconscious realm of creativity and negentropic forces in movement. A realm where the virtual and actual intermingle in an ongoing simulated modeling process without end. Welcome to the pure city as abstraction.

The Street View: Cities on the Move

As Anna relates it in 1961 the self-taught urbanist Jane Jacobs published her most famous work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which presented itself as a critique of the thinking surrounding modern cities. (SF: 37) According to the high modernist tradition, urban development needs to be mastered through the implementation of top-down plans. Jacobs’ critique rested on the counterargument; cities are too complex to be comprehended from on high. She railed against the arrogance— and impossibility— of imposing a single abstract ideal on the diverse multiplicity that was essential to urban innovation and growth. The cities’ complexity meant that unforeseen consequences would always, invariably, upset the plan. Tear down slums and build new public housing and what you ultimately end up with are projects so derelict and dangerous that the only solution is to blow them up. Build more roads and, rather than solving the problem of congestion, all you do is attract more traffic. These unfortunate consequences are not accidental. Plans go wrong because planners do not think on a neighbourhood scale. Instead, they view the city as a whole, try to comprehend it from on high and seek to impose order from above. Jacobs, who was attentive to and immersed in the micro-rhythms of daily life, argued for bottom-up emergence, or order from below. Cities are built from the emergent order of individuals not the oversight of all-powerful planners. They work, not because they adhere to the neat lines of a well-ordered plan, but rather due to the vital everyday entrepreneurialism of the street. (Sf: 38-39)

In fact as Anna surmise there has always been the open conflict in cities between the old sedentary rootedness of the agricultural civilizations against the nomadic lifestyle of the uprooted and mobile horse cultures of the Steppes. All culminating in the conflict of Gothic and Classic styles which would intermingle in the modern era. “One explanation for the difference between the Gothic and Classical style is that the Gothic has a Northern nomadic heritage while the Classical Age has sedentary roots. The Northern, or nomadic world, which lacked comfort in an organic nature, did not treat the cosmos as something that could be known, mastered or contained by the limited realm of human beings. On the contrary, it perceived a universe filled with ‘gods and ghosts, spectres and spooks’, in which ‘everything becomes weird and fantastic’.  The Gothic, writes Worringer, was ‘distressed by actuality, debarred from naturalness’.  This drew it to the transcendental possibilities of the abstract line. It is through the expression of this transcendental abstraction that the Gothic ties together the intricacies of its architecture with the terror of its tales. (Sf: 78)

This movement from natural to unnatural, organic to anorganic, human to artificial has been a part of the  inner life of cities from the beginning. Greenspan will mention the steampunk work of Neal Stephanson’s The Diamand Age which “contains one of the most fully elaborated portrayals of Shanghai futurism” (SF: 155). She goes on to tell us that the book is set in the twenty-first century and depicts a world entirely transformed by a revolution in nanotechnology. The colossal technological mutation has caused a radical transformation in the socioeconomic landscape. Nation States have disappeared. The only territories left that matter are hyper-dense urban concentrations. At the centre of the novel is Shanghai. In Stephenson’s vision, the city has been virtually cut off from the rest of China, which is being ravaged by a Boxer-like rebellion led by a group called ‘the Fists’, whose deeply regressive aim is to search out and destroy the ‘nanotech feeds’. Shanghai’s Old City has undergone a cultural implosion and now forms its own separate district, which is exclusively Chinese and is ruled by strict adherence to Confucian law.(SF: 155-156)

Outside these borders, however, Shanghai has continued on its trajectory as a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis. The city forms part of a new entity called the ‘Chinese Coastal Republic’ and is oriented ever more outwards, towards the sea. With The Diamond Age, Stephenson thus allows, at least virtually, for Shanghai to finally fulfil its (not so) unconscious desire and follow the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau in unleashing itself from the country and becoming its own autonomous entity that plugs directly into the rest of the world. The story is set in a nanotech landscape, in which a ‘causeway’ links Shanghai to a cluster of artificial islands that hovers just offshore. These belong exclusively to certain tribes— or phyles— the groups that form the basis of the new social order. Instead of being brought together by a shared ethnicity or a loyalty to the state, people gather according to a shared culture. It was realised, reflects one of the main protagonists, describing the evolution of the new socio-political arrangement, that ‘while people were not genetically different they were culturally as different as they could possibly be’. (SF: 155-156)

Autonomy from the natural environment, an intelligent entity, a City that thinks… we’ve come a long way from those early cities of the great river complexes in the Middle-East where the security of a thriving agricultural world were first beginning to arise. The movement from natural to artificial, virtual to actual and back again, and the movement of abstraction into the Real has taken us on a long journey that has of yet no end in sight. Where too? For Land the drift is clear the retrofuture is Shanghai a realm that “escalates the topic of historical nonlinearity towards its culmination, in which massively-accelerated urban process crosses over into a systematic scrambling of the time-line. At an escape threshold of cybernetic intensity, feedback circuitry produces such extreme causal torsion that it unsettles the historical order of connections. Past and future are twisted from succession to the brink of interactivity, with explosive cultural consequences. The city operates as the analog of an elaborate time-travel scenario, in which an obscure labyrinth of fate is taking shape, and has always been taking shape.” (ST)

(Already too long… I’ll take this up in tomorrow’s post on the Intelligent cities, swarms, diesel punk, retro-futurism, and Time-Machines…)

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1. Geddes, Patrick (1947). “Report on the Towns in the Madras Presidency, 1915, Madura”. In Jacqueline Tyrwhitt. Patrick Geddes in India. London: Lund Humphries. p. 22.li
2. Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities. Harcout, Brace, Jovanavich 1938
3. Corbusier, Le. The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (Dover Architecture) (Kindle Locations 1146-1154). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition.
4. Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. University of Nebraska, 1962
5. Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925 How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. Hanjin Shipping, 1992
6. Toscano, Alberto.  Real Abstraction Revisited Of coins, commodities, and cognitive capitalism. Scribd: here.
7. Wilhelm Worringer. Abstraction and Empathy A Contribution to the Psychology of Style Elephant Paperbacks (Kindle Locations 231-234). Kindle Edition.
8. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Urbonomic, 2011) (FN)
9. Land, Nick. A Thirst For Annihilation. (Routledge, 1992)
10. Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Technologies of Lived Abstraction) . The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
11. Zizek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism (pp. 93-94). Verso Books. Kindle Edition. (AR)
12. Greenspan, Anna. Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (p. 1). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. (SF)
13. Land, Nick. A Time-Traveler’s Guide to Shanghai (Part 1) July, 22, 2011
14. Land, Nick. Shanghai Times (Kindle Locations 30-41). Urbanatomy Electronic. Kindle Edition. (ST)

The Dense City: Creativity, Innovation, and the Near Future

Editorial Use Only. No stock, books, advertising or merchandising without photographer’s permission Mandatory Credit: Photo by Romain Jacquet-Lagr

Conceive the histories of cities, therefore, as the initial segments of trajectories that curve asymptotically to infinite density, at the ultimate event horizon of the physical universe. The beginning is recorded fact and the end is quite literally ‘gone’, but what lies in between, i.e. next?

—Nick Land, Event Horizon

One imagines a future without roads, without automobiles or combustion engines filling the air with pollutants and smog. High-speed trains or tubes, the urban density of a world where time implodes and the cycles of eternal return push past the light barriers of the event horizon. Where to?

William Gibson once dreamed up the Sprawl where the ruin of civilization was spread across the wastelands of the earth like ratholes for a subspecies of technos,

Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence. Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places.1

But this is the old world of progress and reform, a land of industrial waste and depletion guided by regulations and the planned cities of the Sanctuary planet. Gates, enclosures, slums, a place that Mike Davis once described in Planet of Slums where the “delusionary dialectic of securitized versus demonic urban places, in turn, dictates a sinister and unceasing duet: Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.”2

Extrapolate and imagine Mumbai, India; Mong Kok, Kowloon Peninsula; Santa Cruz del Islote, Island, Colombia; Dhaka Kotwali Thana, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Rocinha favela, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya; Tondo district, Manila, Philippines; or any number of other systems of decay populated by the dregs of a dead world of Capital. This is the sprawl densified to the point of obliteration, where the outcast, the excluded, the misfits of society and civilization that live just beyond the technocommercium enjoy their zombie existence.

As Dirk Kruijt and Kees Koonings tell us in their book Megacities,

The concentration of large segments of urban poor and excluded in capital cities and metropolitan areas but also in so-called ‘secondary cities’ (many of which will grow considerably in size) will have fundamental socio-economic and political consequences and will involve the possibility of destabilization of the economic, social and political order.3

Yet, there are defenders of density and densification of cities who tell us just the opposite, that as Chakrabarti, author of A Country of Cities and an Associate Professor of Practice at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, tells us “As people live in denser circumstances, more innovation happens, more patent creation happens, and it is because people are running into each other, and there is serendipity as a consequence.”4  Architecture plays a critical role,” he said. “Because if you look at the three challenges of our time — of climate change, of social inequity and technological processing power —  all of that is playing out in the platform of the city.”

The controversial architect Patrick Schumacher who would do for architecture what Nicholas Luhmann did for sociology, provide a framework of communication within which cities could begin the task of developing the future:

Interaction is defined as communication between participants who are physically present, as distinct from remote communication via writing, telephone, Internet etc. All communications, and thus all interactions, are embedded within social systems understood as systems of communications. All social interactions take place in designed spaces filled with designed artefacts. Architectural artefacts – as well as other designed artefacts such as furniture, appliances and clothing – thus participate in the reproduction of social systems of communications. Architectural artefacts frame virtually all social communication systems, with the exception of those systems that exclusively reproduce outside the interaction between physically present participants. The designed environment matters: it frames all interactions. Only on the basis of the designed environment as complex system of frames can society be reproduced on the level of complexity it has attained.5

Parametricism is the key word. Originally coined by Patrik Schumacher— who takes his work with Zaha Hadid Architects to be the ultimate representation of the term—“ parametricism” refers to a type of design process characterized by the interrelation of design variables (or, parameters) through computational tools and techniques; a definition that allows it to encompass the work of other well-known figures and firms as well as emerging practitioners in contemporary architecture and design. Beyond this very general technical definition, however, parametricism has also accrued currency to refer to a whole variety of ideas that animate design culture today, from those concerned primarily with aesthetic questions, to others that are more philosophical, and yet others with strong political agendas.6

The key here is the use of computers and algorithmic encoding/decoding bounded only by parameters that adjust and bind or unbind the functional encasement of the design process. In fact Schumacher has high hopes for parametricism. He considers parametricism to be the “epochal style” of the “post-Fordist network society”  that emerges after his so-called “transitional periods” of postmodernism and deconstructivism. In this teleological scheme of styles corresponding to the “grand epochs” of Western civilization, parametricism is, according to Schumacher, poised to become the new hegemonic movement for the twenty-first century, replacing Modernism as the new contemporary “International Style.”  He thus considers himself and his project— and others like it— to be the transformational avant-garde of the discipline that will usher in this epochal change. (PP: 5)

In his work the connection between technology and social organization, resonates — indirectly, for now — with architecture’s role in the advanced economies and geographies at large, such as in the way architectural services are embedded in supply chains, the construction industry, the status of design as an “immaterial” service, as well as with theorizations around the possible repurposing of capitalist forms (like corporations) toward more cooperative arrangements. These theoretical and practical experiments, of which parametricism has so far been relatively disengaged, pose new challenges for the discipline as such, opening up design to a broader realm of cultural production that might be variously combined with fabrication, entertainment, community services, learning, curatorship, publishing, academic discourse, and many other activities, both in physical urban space and organized entirely through shared digital infrastructures. (PP: 14)

In his work Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers Stephen Graham speaks of the new class warfare society, of the dense city as a dual system for poor and rich where in such vertical environmental contrasts are compounded by the ways in which private, vertically segregated pedestrian systems can become progressively delinked from surrounding sidewalks. Actual access from the public street often becomes increasingly tenuous as the self-perpetuating logic of extending interiorised commercial walkway systems grow horizontally over time. Entrances to the walkway system from the street below are mediated by access to securitised corporate office buildings, elite condominiums or upmarket hotels. Commercial imperatives and a politics of fear, in other words, can result in pulling up the ‘ladder’ connecting the skywalk city to the street system.7

This verticalization and polarization of society in the dense cities of the future is a two-edged sword. As Graham speaking of contemporary Hong Kong tells us of this city’s multileveled access systems fully securitized:

It is the dazzling system of walkways in Hong Kong, however, that is most internationally famous. The city – the densest and most verticalised in the world – offers a startling system of over 500 vertically raised walkways snaking between the huge, raised podium structures at the bases of upmarket hotels, residential blocks, malls and corporate enclaves. In many ways, the stacking of walkways in Hong Kong echoes the city’s long history of pioneering innovations in using space extremely intensively and vertically… Hong Kong has become, in effect, a connected complex of megastructures. These construct accessibility and interconnection within a three-dimensional field that extends from deep subterranean space to several hundred metres above the ground. Such a development makes the city a global capital of innovation and building in escalators, elevators and people movers – as well as mass rapid transit, raised walkways, podium decks, vertical housing towers and multi-deck ferries. (PP)

Yet, with verticality the pollutants and ruination, the waste and excess get pushed down into the subterranean realms where the worker and the excluded mingle in dark enclaves with little access to goods and services, light and air. While the rich and their minions reach above the clouds in luxury skyparks, and open vista pools where plantlife and culture blossom in a skyscape of planned intensity. Verticality will bring our old enemy hierarchy to the fore again in these dense cities of the future. While academics, sociologists, and city planners see nothing but the moon of an accelerating capitalism jetting upward against the gravity of earth, the masses below will eek  out an existence in a subrodent world of damp and decaying systems of underground connections: mole lives in a world of utter darkness and unpleasure.  As Mike Davis would say in Evil Paradises: In the larger perspective, the bright archipelagos of utopian luxury and “supreme lifestyles” are mere parasites on a “planet of slums.”8

And, yet, there are those who promote the merger of heaven and hell in a dynamic mix of density and openness, incompleteness and the unbounded spaces of the virtual city of intelligence. As Luciano Floridi tells it we have moved inside the infosphere, the all-pervading nature of which also depends on the extent to which we accept its interface as integral to our reality and transparent to us (in the sense of no longer perceived as present). What matters is not so much moving bits instead of atoms— this is an outdated, communication-based interpretation of the information society that owes too much to mass-media sociology— as the far more radical fact that our understanding and conceptualization of the very essence and fabric of reality is changing. Indeed, we have begun to accept the virtual as reality. So the information society is better seen as a neo-manufacturing society in which raw materials and energy have been superseded by data and information, the new digital gold and the real source of added value. Not just communication and transactions then, but the creation, design, and management of information are the keys to the proper understanding of our hyperhistorical predicament.9

If as Bernard Stiegler maintains “Knowledge always proceeds from such a double shock – whereas stupidity always proceeds from automaticity”.10 Then we should recall here what Canguilhem once posited in principle the more-than-biological meaning of episteme: knowledge of life is a specific form of life conceived not only as biology, but also as knowledge of the milieus, systems and processes of individuation, and where knowledge is the condition and the future of life exposed to return shocks from its vital technical productions. (AS)

If we think of the future Smart City as the optimization of intelligence, as bringing forth the energetic unconscious of the earth itself, of the meeting of that shock of the new of which modernity was the harbinger and dead end, then we might begin to see humans migrating into a collective system of a new machinic civilization where innovation and creativity are maximized rather than horded by a weak and indifferent Oligarchy. But how would such a thing come about? So far I’ve described only the neoliberal outgrowth of our current accelerating capitalism and its dreams of a luxury world of Oligarchs. There is another world…

In my next essay we will imagine the counter-worlds of neoliberalism in a future where the silver lining on the cloud is not a hint of things to come but of a pragmatic world of collective making. As Land will say in another essay the dense cities of the future should be characterized by an escape into inwardness, an interior voyage, involution, or implosion. “Approaching singularity on an accelerating trajectory, each city becomes increasingly inwardly directed, as it falls prey to the irresistible attraction of its own hyperbolic intensification, whilst the outside world fades to irrelevant static. Things disappear into cities, on a path of departure from the world. Their destination cannot be described within the dimensions of the known – and, indeed, tediously over-familiar – universe. Only in the deep exploratory interior is innovation still occurring, but there it takes place at an infernal, time-melting rate.” (see: Implosion)

J.G. Ballard in The Concentration City let one character describe the blank wall against the edge of a endless city planet: “The surgeon nodded to himself. ‘Some advanced opinion maintains that there’s a wall around the City, through which it’s impossible to penetrate. I don’t pretend to understand the theory myself. It’s far too abstract and sophisticated. Anyway I suspect they’ve confused this Wall with the bricked-up black areas you passed through on the Sleeper. I prefer the accepted view that the City stretches out in all directions without limits.’11

Maybe the city is an infinite rhizome, a labyrinth that has no beginning or end, only the in-between of what is next: “And, and, and…” If the cycles of time are ebbs and flows, and eternal returns: compressed sequences in an infinite density of spiraling chaosmosis, then creativity, innovation and hell are signs of life and anti-life in an intelligent universe where the endless parade of processuality is without end and void. But remember, there are no empty voids…

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1. Gibson, William. Neuromancer (p. 70). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
2. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums (p. 206). Norton. Kindle Edition.
3. Koonings, Kees; Kruijt, Dirk. Megacities (Kindle Locations 287-289). Zed Books. Kindle Edition.
4. Cook, John. The future city is dense… GeekWire February 14, 2017
5. Schumacher, Patrik. The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume II: A New Agenda for Architecture: 2 (Kindle Locations 501-508). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
6. Poole, Matthew; Manuel Shvartzberg. The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture (p. 1). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. (PP)
7. Graham, Stephen. Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (Kindle Locations 3681-3686). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
8.  Davis, Mike. Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (Kindle Locations 241-242). New Press, The. Kindle Edition.
9. Floridi, Luciano. The Ethics of Information (p. 17). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.
10. Stiegler, Bernard. Automatic Society: The Future of Work (Kindle Locations 629-634). Wiley. Kindle Edition. (AS)
11. Ballard, J. G.. The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (p. 37). Norton. Kindle Edition.

Neurototalitarianism: Control in the Age of Stupidity

Canvas, 14×11″

S0143894 Battle of Zama (202 BCE), in which Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal’s army. Roman school (circle of Giulio Romano), c.1521. Image licenced to Kathy Nakamura ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA by Kathy Nakamura Usage : – 3000 X 3000 pixels (Letter Size, A4) © Giraudon / Art Resource

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)

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1. Berardi, Franco. And: The Phenomenology of the End. (Aalto ARTS Books, 2014)
2. Stiegler, Bernard. Automatic Society: The Future of Work (Kindle Locations 524-527). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
3. see: Bakker, R. Scott. Intentional Philosophy as the Neuroscientific Explananda Problem (here)
4. Harman, Graham. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court. Kindle Edition.
5. Floridi, Luciano. The Ethics of Information (pp. 14-15). Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition (EI)
6. Mumford, Lewis. Pentagon Of Power: The Myth Of The Machine, Vol. II. Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich; 1 edition (March 20, 1974) (PP)
7. Crary, Johnathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso; 1 edition (June 4, 2013)

The Strategy of Unbinding: War Machines for Post-nihilist Age

 Writers are sorcerers because they experience the animal as the only population before which they are responsible in principle.

—Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari compare the games of Chess and Go as war machines with very different systems of capture and release:

Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere…). Another justice, another movement, another space-time.1

Nomos against polis is the central motif of their argument. Unbinding the strata, deterritorializing the State apparatus, exiting the fictions that structure and synthesize our habitations, map our desires, frame our mental and physical systems in a territory of command and control.

Nomos: from the Greek term for “law” (νόμος, nómos; pl. νόμοι, nómoi). It is the origin of the suffix -onomy, as in astronomy, economy, or taxonomy. In sociology, nomos refers to provisional codes (habits or customs) of social and political behavior, socially constructed and historically (even geographically) specific. The term derives from the Greek νόμος, and it refers not only to explicit laws but to all of the normal rules and forms people take for granted in their day-to-day activities (i.e., their customs and cultural inheritance of behavior and conduct, their mores and ethical norms). Nomos stands for order, valid and binding on those who fall under its jurisdiction; thus it is a social construct with ethical dimensions. It is a belief, opinion or point of view; it is a human invention.

Bernard Stiegler in his recent Automatic Society: The Future of Work argues that nomos is this inherited conglomerate that forms the preindividual funds of the political psychic and collective individuation process, emerging from the new retentional condition of which Hesiod and Thales were contemporaries, and enters into structural conflict with the new epistēmē. This is what Dodds described as a Greek Aufklärung. At its political origin, and as this origin, law (nomos), stemming fundamentally from a transindividuation in letters, such that it is alphabetically tertiarized, literalizes and spatializes the epistēmē, forming the rules (as the explicit circuits of transindividuation) on the basis of which conflict (polemos) can become the dynamic principle of a society within which History appears as such (as Geschichte and as Historie) – starting from the agora. This is why the skholeion is the primordial political institution: citizens are those who read and write these literal traces – which thus form new kinds of associated milieus, which, as we shall see, also constitute regimes of parities establishing regimes of truth. And this is why today, and as the condition of any new constitution of knowledge, the retentional condition of all knowledge must be thematized and elucidated, and particularly that of the apodictic forms of knowledge that nourish the Western experience of rationality.2

Stiegler mentioned E.R. Dodd’s whose work The Greeks and the Irrational describes nomos as standing for the Conglomerate, conceived as the inherited burden of irrational custom; or it could stand for an arbitrary rule consciously imposed by certain classes in their own interest; or it could stand for a rational system of State law, the achievement which distinguished Greeks from barbarians.3 Dodd’s would add that for the first generation of Sophists, in particular Protagoras, they seem to have held a view whose optimism is pathetic in retrospect, but historically intelligible. “Virtue or Efficiency (arete) could be taught”: by criticizing the inherited traditions, by modernising the Nomos which the Sophists ancestors had created and eliminating from it the last vestiges of “barbarian silliness,”  man could acquire a new Art of Living, and human life could be raised to new levels hitherto undreamed of. (GI: KL 3366)

What Dodd’s describes as the Art of Living is what Stiegler terms the skholeion (site of socio-cultural indoctrination – educational apparatus):

The individuation of political public space is conditioned by the formation of each citizen in the skholeion, where citizens accede to the letter (that is, as we shall see, where they organologically re-organize their organic cerebral organ). Citizens, by forming themselves à la lettre – through this interiorization of the letter (by reading) and through its exteriorization (by writing), an internalization and externalization that require the acquisition of this competence as a new automatism written into the cerebral organ through learning, through an apprenticeship – can access the consistences that theoretical knowledge forms, and thereby dis-automatize automatic behaviours, whether biological, psychic or social: if consistence is what makes dis-automatization possible, it is accessible only on the basis of an automatization. (AS: KL 2372)

In fact, as a new epoch of psychic and collective individuation, the political individuation that arose in the seventh century bce implemented the subjective principle of differentiation between fact and law as the criterion of the process of transindividuation that constituted psychic citizens by constituting them politically, in that this criterion is shared by all citizens who internalize it by frequenting the skholē – the skholeion being instituted precisely for this purpose. It is their practical and active frequentation of theorein that constitutes them as citizens. (AS: KL 5592)

Yet, within Deleuze and Guattari’s thought the notion of the nomos escapes the law, exists in the nomadic spaces, the smooth spaces outside the structures of the State. “What becomes clear is that bands, no less than worldwide organizations, imply a form irreducible to the State and that this form of exteriority necessarily presents itself as a diffuse and polymorphous war machine. It is a nomos very different from the “law.” The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to reproduce itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily recognizable within the limits of its poles, always seeking public recognition (there is no masked State).” (TP: KL 7538) But the nomadic war machine’s form of exteriority is such that it exists only in its own metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial innovation as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a religious creation, in all flows and currents that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the State. (TP: KL 7541)

In this sense if we return to the comparison and differences between Go And Chess where they tell us “a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology.” This sense of a an unregulated war, nomadic, without battle lines: one of pure strategy and a-semiological or diagrammatic, algorithmic and viral. Just here the Left if it is to begin to rethink its place in our post-nihilist age (our age as already the completed form of nihilism within the site of financial capitalism and algorithmic governmentality). The Left is bankrupt, its ideas passé and broken, formed of outmoded historical models that no longer map to our contemporary needs and realities. The Left lives in a decaying fictional system that has and will not work for an age in which its every move is traced, circumvented, and reduplicated as an advert for the economic drift of Capital.  Capital is Hegel’s Absolute absorbing, integrating, subsuming everything in its path under he sign of creation and destruction without end. Bound within a closed system of logic and reason Capital fixes time in a striated space without outlet in which every aspect of existence is artificial and algorithmically anticipated, controlled. The Left must deterritorialize itself and reenter the nomos of the earth, creation and destruction within the invisible (noumenal) zones of zero intensity where the energetic unconscious of the earth lives outside the Law.

Anonymous, unstructured, functional and invisible, diagrammatic and untraceable, invasive and viral like Go pieces that pop up across a striated space as rhizomatic bits of flotsam and jetsam streaming out of nowhere, singular multiplicities or swarming bands, and returning to the rhizome from whence they came. Actors and agents that have no fixed modes or personality, a complete impersonalism and impersonation. Chameleon war machines taking on the hues and colors (tropes) of its enemies. Fluid, flowing, unbound to any mode of command or control. Like the ‘Body of Wind’ of the ancient martial arts: try to catch it, capture it, and it vanishes, dispersed among the cloaked elements of its enemies shadow worlds – a breath of icy wind gathering nothing as its cloak.  As Deleuzeguattari will remind us in “all these respects, there is an opposition between the logos and the nomos, the law and the nomos, prompting the comment that the law still “savors of morality.” This does not mean, however, that the legal model knows nothing of forces, the play of forces.” (TP: KL 7739)

In fact, as they continue the nomos is the consistency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to the law or the polls, as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague expanse around a city (“either nomos or polis”). Therefore, and this is the third point, there is a significant difference between the spaces: sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound. The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement. (TP: 7977) We must enter the smooth spaces outside the structures of the logoi, the law, the State: fall between the interstices of the visible into the invisible, exist in the noumenal beyond the encoded labyrinths of capture and the prisons of our socio-cultural straight-jackets.

This is a new type of guerilla warfare in which the very fabric of the logics of the West that have trapped us in a trace world of linguistic and semiotic systems, the dataclaves of a hyperworld meshed in the hyperreality systems of our algorithmic society are dispersed in the smooth and unstriated spaces of nomadic existence outside the Law or State. Or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it:

It is in this sense that nomads have no points, paths, or land, even though they do by all appearances. If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterwards with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary (the sedentary’s relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground (sol) or support. (TP: 7994)

If guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war are in conformity with the essence, it is because they take war as an object all the more necessary for being merely “supplementary”: they can make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else, if only new nonorganic social relations. The difference between the two poles is great, even, and especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight that creates, or turns into a line of destruction; the plane of consistency that constitutes itself, even piece by piece, or turns into a plan(e) of organization and domination. We are constantly reminded that there is communication between these two lines or planes, that each takes nourishment from the other, borrows from the other: the worst of the world war machines reconstitutes a smooth space to surround and enclose the earth. But the earth asserts its own powers of deterritorialization, its lines of flight, its smooth spaces that live and blaze their way for a new earth. The question is not one of quantities but of the incommensurable character of the quantities that confront one another in the two kinds of war machine, according to the two poles. War machines take shape against the apparatuses that appropriate the machine and make war their affair and their object: they bring connections to bear against the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination. (TP: 8861)

Becomings-animal: Rat pack, Wolf pack – Metamorphosis

Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here?

—Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus

In the Deleuzeanguattarian cosmos becomings are rhizomatic and a multiplicity. “But what exactly does that mean, the animal as band or pack? Does a band not imply a filiation, bringing us back to the reproduction of given characteristics? How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a becoming that is without filiation or hereditary production?”4 Instead as they explain,

We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are in themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again every time, gaining that much more ground. Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature. Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire does not filiate, it infects. The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations.

In this sense the a-political epidemics of the future will infest our world with singular multiplicities and swarming intelligences, alliances rather than filiations. Unnatural participations and rituals of contagion, viral and functional. Nature operates against itself, producing and produced by contagion rather than reproduction. “For us, on the other hand, there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis, as many differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion.” (TP: KL 5050) Instead of the Oedipal, Mommy, Daddy, child triune there is becomings-animal by contagion and epidemic without the reductions of sex to some characteristic or series. Against filiation, alliance.

But we should not confuse these dark assemblages, which stir what is deepest within us, with organizations such as the institution of the family and the State apparatus. We could cite hunting societies, war societies, secret societies, crime societies, etc. … These are tales, or narratives and statements of becoming. It is therefore absurd to establish a hierarchy even of animal collectivities from the standpoint of a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs are lower on the scale and are superseded by State or familial societies. On the contrary, there is a difference in nature. The origin of packs is entirely different from that of families and States; they continually work them from within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content, other forms of expression. The pack is simultaneously an animal reality, and the reality of the becoming-animal of the human being; contagion is simultaneously an animal peopling, and the propagation of the animal peopling of the human being. The hunting machine, the war machine, the crime machine entail all kinds of becomings-animal that are not articulated in myth, still less in totemism. (TP)

Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation. The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous. (TP: KL 5136)

Living in that non-space in-between in a pack, unaffiliated. “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance.” (TP: KL 729) And a rhizome,

A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed. Animal and plant, couchgrass is crabgrass. We get the distinct feeling that we will convince no one unless we enumerate certain approximate characteristics of the rhizome. (TP: KL 339)

The new subversions of the a-political epidemic of swarms and packs: function as shelters, suppliers, movement-transport, evasion, and breakout. Think of the American Civil War of the underground railroad. Underground alliances outside the trace worlds of the Big Data. Untraceable. Unaffiliated and viral. Digital and analogue. Impersonal and indifferent. Outside law and its traces… “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages.” (TP: KL 356)

It’s a question of movement… I disagree with Andrew Culp when he says we must move beyond rhizomes:

Enough with rhizomes. Although they were a suggestive image of thought thirty-five years ago, our present is dominated by the Cold War technology of the Internet that was made as a rhizomatic network for surviving nuclear war. The rhizome was a convincing snapshot of things to come, but Deleuze and Guattari left out a few things, most notably the question of movement. How does a rhizome advance, except in the crawl of the blob that slowly takes over everything?5

For Deleuze and Guattari the question of movement was the question of “smooth spaces” outside or in-between the striated and controlled spaces of logic and reason, command and control. It is not a “blob that takes over everything,” rather it is that in-between space outside the trace, undiscoverable by the logic or reason of those within the Law. As they’d say

Movement in it is confined as by gravity to a horizontal plane, and limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points. Nomad space is “smooth,” or open-ended. One can rise up at any point and move to any other. Its mode of distribution is the nomos: arraying oneself in an open space (hold the street), as opposed to the logos of entrenching oneself in a closed space (hold the fort). (TP: KL 155)

The Rhizome is outside the law, it is nomos or the Body-without-Organs opposed to Logos and trace, unaccountable, unindexible, incalculable. As they’ll say at the end of ,

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and… and… and…” This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.” Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation — all imply a false conception of voyage and movement (a conception that is methodical, pedagogical, initiatory, symbolic…). But Kleist, Lenz, and Biichner have another way of traveling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing. American literature, and already English literature, manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings. They know how to practice pragmatics. The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. (TP: 729)

Against Being, against ontology, against philosophy: the movement of AND.  The acceleration of that movement of the middle, in-between, a transversal movement outside the Law – a new nomos of Earth. The movement of the middle, of having another way of traveling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.

As Franco Berardi in his book AND: Phenomenology of the End tells us,

Rhizome is simultaneously the announcement of a transformation of reality and the premise to a new methodology of thought. A description of the chaotic deterritorialization following Modern Rationalism, and a methodology for the critique of deterritorialized capitalism.6

For Berardi we’re undergoing a major change in sensibility, one that he’s “been unrolling all along this text is the mutation of sensibility in an age of creeping abstraction, and the dissonance and pain that this mutation is bringing about” (AND: 235). Nothing is secure, and like Stiegler we could go down a rabbit hole of no return and destruction:

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. (AND: 239)

His prognosis is of a dangerous world ahead, one in which techics and technology become so pervasive that even the age old notions of the individual give way to the onslaught of our completed nihilism. A semiocapitalist society bound within a matrix of infospheric connections:

In the interaction between individual and collective sphere, in the link between individual neuro-activity and connective concatenation, the conscious and sensitive organism is evolving. The neuro-plasticity of the subindividual components of the organism (the molecular decomposition and recomposition of biological matter) interacts with the rhythms and the super-individual automatisms of the techno-linguistic swarm, the bio-informatic super-organism which is embedded in the totalitarian governance of semiocapitalism. 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. (AND:  236)

Unlike most Leftist thinkers Berardi has seen the Beast and it is us, and we are already beyond any old Marxian salvation clause, instead we are in the midst of a catastrophe for the human species in which the scenario playing out is one of mutation and transformation into an alterity (neo-human) from which nothing of our current knowledge systems, our memories or perceptions will remain. Humanity will have metamorphsied into something else. All that is left is to provide therapy through this transitional process. There can be no resistance, no stopping it now. It is accelerating out of control and into a neo-human future where nothing is known or knowable. Join in or sink into oblivion. Is this the gamble? An end game or beginning again? A movement into the rhizome, a middle-way of speed and accelerating travels?

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1. Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus (Kindle Locations 7369-7389). A&C Black. Kindle Edition. (TP)
2. Stiegler, Bernard. Automatic Society: The Future of Work (Kindle Locations 1987-2005). Wiley. Kindle Edition. (AS)
3. Dodds, E. R.. The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather Classical Lectures) (Kindle Locations 3660-3662). University of California Press – A. Kindle Edition. (GI)
4. Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus (Kindle Locations 5038-5040). A&C Black. Kindle Edition.
5. Culp, Andrew. Dark Deleuze (Forerunners: Ideas First) (Kindle Locations 593-596). University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.
6. Berardi, Franco. AND Phenomenology of the End. (Aalto, 2014)

Reality Machines: The Composition of the World

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The interest in Lovecraft’s fiction was motivated by its exemplification of the practice of hyperstition, a concept had been elaborated and keenly debated since the inception of the Cthulhu Club. Loosely defined, the coinage refers to ‘fictions that make themselves real’.

—Ccru: Writings 1997-2003

In Book 10 of Plato’s Republic the interlocutor in the dialogue tells us of corruption of men’s minds at the hands of the poets:

Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated to the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe—but I do not mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers…2

Plato’s war against Homer and the full gamut of poetic thought and its hold on the mind of Athens is well known. One could say that philosophy in his sense was a war against imitation and mimesis. Socrates feigning ignorance will as he always does in the various dialogues ask a question: “Can you tell me what imitation is? for I really do not know.” The naïve interlocutor thinking he has a handle on this not knowing that that old goat Socrates is laying a trap for him will speak of poets and painters as those who create appearances rather than realities, and that imitation is thrice removed from the truth of that reality it tries so artfully to imitate.  Socrates will intervene saying,

Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach?

Of course the interlocutor tongue-tied at that point can only agree with Socrates, adding that yes the poet is imitating a copy or semblance of a reality of which he is thrice removed so that he never has access to the truth of its existence. This of course will make Socrates happy and instead of gloating it will set him off in another direction, asking,

The imitator or maker of the image knows nothing of true existence; he knows appearances only. Am I not right?

At this point Socrates will break down the mechanics of this imitative practice telling the interlocutor that there are actually three arts: those who use an object, those who make the real object, and those who imitate the maker (by representing the real object in some external medium: writing, painting, sculpture, etc.).  Which leads Socrates by circumambulation to summoning up so far his argument: “Thus far, then, we are pretty well agreed that the imitator has no knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates. Imitation is only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic poets, whether they write in iambic or in heroic verse, are imitators in the highest degree?” Again, the poor interlocutor will agree with this reasoning. What other recourse does he have? Socrates adept at such negative dialectics knows what he is doing. Socrates is seeking to show how the poets and imitators are liars and scoundrels, deceiving the populace. For as he says: “I conjure you, has not imitation been shown by us to be concerned with that which is thrice removed from the truth?” And, as we all know it is the ‘truth’ above all that seems to be Plato’s highest goal and at the heart of his attack on both imitation and the poets, Homer being the ultimate antagonist in this scenario. Why? Because it is Homer who has invented the mind of Athens, educated it in the arts of war and commerce, ritual and strategic history. All this through poetry and imitation rather than truth in Plato’s sense.

Plato through his mask, Socrates will conclude, saying,

This was the conclusion at which I was seeking to arrive when I said that painting or drawing, and imitation in general, when doing their own proper work, are far removed from truth, and the companions and friends and associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from reason, and that they have no true or healthy aim.

Plato’s ultimate dismissal of the poets and imitators is one of disgust and anathema when he sums it up in a pithy statement: “The imitative art is an inferior who marries an inferior, and has inferior offspring. … the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small—he is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth.” The whole dialogue is a demolishen engine and critique of artists, poets, painters, and all creators of images or imitations of reality.

Finally, Plato comes to the crux of his argument and his attack on the poetasters of his day, saying,

Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honor those who say these things—they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, pleasure and pain will be kings in your state, and not law and the rational principle that is always judged best for the common interest.

It’s the attack on those imitative poets (“honeyed muse”) who sing outside the boundaries of Law and Reason that are his true enemies. For above all Plato sought to codify and regulate the education and life of Athens through the power of Law and Reason rather than the irrational musings of poets and tongue-twisted sophists. Ultimately Plato sought to control the thought and mind of Athens through the binding of truth and knowledge under Law, Logic and Reason. Everything outside this would henceforth be excluded and dismissed as irrational and untruth. Plato’s binding of reality to truth, and lies and irrationalism to appearance began that long process of regulating and fusing Western Civilization under a monolithic system of governance and manipulation. Ousting speech and enforcing the written (discursive, prose) would not only allow Plato to capture the mind of Athens it would externalize the perceptions and memories of its history, regulating its life across time through the codification of Law and Reason.

Erich Auerbach in his classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature reiterated the basic premises and axiomatic framework underlying Western Civilization’s conceptions of our representations of reality:

Imitation of reality is imitation of the sensory experience of life on earth— among the most essential characteristics of which would seem to be its possessing a history, its changing and developing. Whatever degree of freedom the imitating artist may be granted in his work, he cannot be allowed to deprive reality of this characteristic, which is its very essence.1

This notion of logic and reason working through time and history to enact and subordinate the human through processes of enslavement and capture by way of modeling (i.e., the imitation of patterns, images, representations, etc.) comes to a head in Kant’s systematics of modernity. As Nick Land argued “that with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Western cultural history culminates in a self-reflecting bourgeois civilization, because his thought of synthesis (or relation to alterity), and also the strangulation of this thought within his system, captures modernity as a problem. But the modernity thus symptomized by its philosophical exposition is not primarily the penultimate phase of a dialectic of society and production, it is rather the necessity that historically itself – expansionary social and economic development, or ‘synthesis’ – compromises with a profound continuity whose basic aspects are on the one hand patrilineal descent, and on the other a formal logic of identity that was already concluded in its essentials by Aristotle. These two aspects, the genealogical and the logical, are functions of a position of abstract masculine subjectivity coincident with the patronymic. This position is the proto-cultural fundament of everything that is able to count as the same.” 3

For Kant as Plato the great bugaboo is the unknown, the alterity of God, gods, noumenon, etc., all that lies outside human thought and cannot be reduced to our discursive systems of meaning. Susan Blackmore in her work The Meme Machine tells us, the Oxford English Dictionary defines meme as “an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”.4 In his preface to Blackmore’s work Richard Dawkins would emphasize the viral infestation of these memetic imitations: “Memes travel longitudinally down generations, but they travel horizontally too, like viruses in an epidemic.” It would be William S. Burroughs who would view these memes, hyperstitions, words as viral agents of a galactic invasion, asking,

Is the virus then simply a time bomb left on this planet to be activated by remote control? An extermination program in fact? In its path from full virulence to its ultimate goal of symbiosis, will any human creature survive?5

For Burroughs the word virus was all pervasive, a producer and product of a Reality Studio that has captured our minds and weaved us into a system of enslavement and techno-commercial automatisms that are so subtle we are unaware of it. Quoting a Dr. Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz he tells us “It is worth noting that if a virus were to attain a state of wholly benign equilibrium with its host cell it is unlikely that its presence would be readily detected or that it would necessarily be recognized as a virus.” Burroughs suggests that the word is just such a virus. As he tells us “Dr. Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forward an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls “biologic mutation” affecting a change in its host which was then genetically conveyed.” (JI)

In their notes on Hyperstition the Ccru assemblage would offer another extrapolation of this complex history,

In the hyperstitional model Kaye outlined, fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions – consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective and behaviorial responses. Kaye considered Burroughs’ work to be ‘exemplary of hyperstitional practice’. Burroughs construed writing – and art in general – not aesthetically, but functionally, – that is to say, magically, with magic defined as the use of signs to produce changes in reality.6

From Plato to Zizek the realm of appearances, not reality is a project of collective and participative metafictional command and control. We are all enmeshed in illusory worlds of capture, bound by a temporal war that has produced illusory reality structures and replaced the natural order. We come up against the Real when things break down, when the fictional representations that intervene and shape the model of our perceptions and memories crumbles and falls away. It’s in such moments that the Authority bids us term it a schizophrenic episode, and its victims are diagnosed as diseased and in need of social control mechanisms, etc. The poets from Rimbaud to Trakl, Kleist to Philip K. Dick have ventured into this unregulated territory beyond he boundaries of Law and Reason.

As the Ccru metafictional crew will attest,

According to Kaye, the metaphysics of Burroughs’s ‘clearly hyperstitional’ fictions can be starkly contrasted with those at work in postmodernism. For postmodernists, the distinction between real and unreal is not substantive or is held not to matter, whereas for practitioners of hyperstition, differentiating between ‘degrees of realization’ is crucial. The hyperstitional process of entities ‘making themselves real’ is precisely a passage, a transformation, in which potentials – already-active virtualities – realize themselves. Writing operates not as a passive representation but as an active agent of transformation and a gateway through which entities can emerge. “[B]y writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible” (WV 321).

It’s this active participation in our own production of reality, of re-writing and re-programming the scripts of the Authority or System which is operative in the radical underground systems of counter-revolutionary poetry and other arts. Against the keepers of Reality we have termed the Authority (Reality Studio) these subversive agents have appeared across the ages here and there through the auspices of hermetic, magical, Kabbalistic, and other arcane lore and practices to supervene in and instigate emergency exits and escapes from the enclosure of the dark Reality Matrix. Such films as the Matrix idealize this and Romanticize it and thereby bring it back down into the imitative world of the Same and repetitive disallowing any true awakening from these structures into a functional disturbance. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus will remind us,

For there simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratification. Strata are Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of capture, they are like “black holes” or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach. They operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality. The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire system of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized).7

What they term the “judgement of God” we acknowledge as the Authority or Reality Studio that has locked us in a cage of fictions, bled us of our desires and trapped us in a repetitive world of timeless presentism without a future.

I know that most of the above seems strange and conspiratorial, that it appears to align philosophers, scientists, sociologists, politicians, thinkers, etc. in a system of slavery and reality production. Crazy as it must be (and I’m sure many readers will see it as mere satire, spoof, and madness) it has certain truths that cannot be conveyed any other way.

I’ll continue tomorrow…

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1. Auerbach, Erich; Said, Edward W.. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton Classics) (p. 191). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
2. Plato. Republic (Kindle Locations 6836-6838). Barnes&Noble. Kindle Edition.
3. Land, Nick. eds. Ray Brassier/Robin Mackay. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. (Urbanomic, 2011) FN (p. 60)
4. Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine (Popular Science) (p. viii). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
5. Burroughs, William S. The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (Penguin Modern Classics) (Kindle Locations 47-49). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
6. Ccru. Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Kindle Locations 487-490). Time Spiral Press. Kindle Edition.
7. Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus (Kindle Locations 1004-1010). A&C Black. Kindle Edition.

Lemurian Time Sorcery: Ccru and the Reality Studio

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 War

We 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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1. Davis Schneiderman (Editor), Philip Walsh (Editor). Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. Pluto Press (July 20, 2004)
2. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 4107-4115). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition.
3. Ccru. Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Kindle Locations 457-460). Time Spiral Press. Kindle Edition.
4. Burroughs, William S. The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (Penguin Modern Classics) (Kindle Locations 2759-2764). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
5. Zizek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism (p. 28). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

The Cunning of the Philosophers

I saw the universe as it is, I saw as the active agent, a gold and red illuminated-letter like plasmatic entity from the future, arranging bits and pieces here: arranging what time drove forward.

—Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

Unity gain around the loop, unity gain, zero change, and hush, that way, forever, these were the secret rhymes of the childhood of the Discipline of Control— secret and terrible, as the scarlet histories say.

—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

The artist is the antenna of the race.

—Ezra Pound, 1885-1972, expatriate American, poet, critic, editor

Madmen and philosophers: poets, gamblers, soldiers, and rakes. Is there a difference? Madmen wander in the irrational zones of the abyss without the circular systems of control we’ve come to frame under the sign of Reason and Logic. Philosophers appear to define, delimit, and frame the limits of Reason and Logic. Opposing poles? A sort of gambit between differing realities? Competing realms of memory and perception? Who makes up all this shit anyway, and – more to the point: Why should we bother our simple minds with all this hocus-pocus world of concepts, axioms, principles? What is the point of philosophy and its policing of the civilized and acceptable limits of human discourse and meaning? And, why are so many philosophers in our moment worried that human discourse is unraveling, that the reality systems we’ve evolved at the extreme limits of Reason and Logic are giving way, collapsing, and becoming unglued to the age old metaphysical worldview spawned over some ten thousand years, brought to fruition in Plato and Aristotle, and eroded and spun down to a its bare and nihilist edge worlds of our modern and postmodern malaise. Where do we go from here?

The Reality Studio (or that vast conglomerate of academic, governmental agencies, scientific consensus, mediatainment and global network of communications via Corporate channels of command and control) does not want you to know how it manipulates your memories and perceptions in an ongoing retrosimulative system that captures your desires at the expense of your life.  Parable, metafiction, elaborate hoax? Leo Strauss in his Persecution and the Art of Writing would remark that most humans “would admit, as a matter of course, that man can lie and does lie. But they would add that lies are short-lived and cannot stand the test of repetition-let alone of constant repetition-and that therefore a statement which is constantly repeated and never contradicted must be true”. 1 Yet, what of the lie of the world itself? What of the very world of appearances within which we all assume our memories and perceptions as true and valid? What if the very truth of our lives was based on a lie? How would we know? A lie that merely suborns our desires with distractions to the point that we repeat the unrepeatable world of our lives as if they were real rather than fictive semblances. What if the world is a prerecorded tape being spun on the same record player by agents of the Reality Studio as schematic embellishments in an algorithmic system which is in itself part of a strategic game in the Time Wars? Madness? Paranoia? Philosophy?

For Leo Strauss our readings of the ancients was a lie, but one with consequences. Parodists above all the great philosophers would write under the cover of the censors and socio-cultural police of their era. Each would model their works on the premise of an exoteric and esoteric reading. Strauss would emphasize this duplicity, this sense of hiding the truth in plain site. A chameleon world of masks and copies, a world where truth is not what you see and know, but only a schema for the capturing of desire; a fragmented alterity that resists the very structures of our mind (brain?) within which we are constrained by falsehood and the neruoanalytical neglect of a profaned knowledge. Knowledge itself as a prison rather than an avenue to freedom, truth as repetition of the Same rather than novelty and innovation. Governed by conceptual frameworks that have become so ubiquitous and invisible that we mistake them for reality, while the Real invades us as an alien force instigating all the mishaps, accidents, and errors seeking a way to break us out of our composed worlds. Strauss would go so far as to say that “It’s beginning to dawn on me how misunderstood the ancients are”.2 Strauss would come to understand that “what is between the speeches (i.e., the presentation of deeds) is outweighed by the speeches (i.e., the logoi which are inserted into the historical-works).” (CC: 83) This sense of action stories rather than ideas was more central to philosophy. That action rather than concept brought forward change and the political. For Strauss even Socrates under the influence of his daimonion (defined by Strauss: the “correct translation of daimonion is: nous [mind].” (CC) was guided by the intelligence of earth or natural cunning and mattering. For Strauss Socrates was “a great con man who taught his best students to be con men” but – about what? Irony, duplicity, cunning: the philosophers used “secret” in plain site as the most honored words of everyday use supplied with a meaning very different from their everyday sense, turning them ironic to convey a truth that would pass by the censors of the day. (CC)

So that most of the orthodox readings of Plato to Derrida are for the most part all steeped in an elaborate hoax within which the socio-cultural elite under the auspices of political authority maintain their hold on the populace and the reality systems of which they are the custodians and producers. What Strauss had uncovered was the key to unlock the esoteric messages hidden in the secret words of the philosophers that the cultural police and their minions had no clue of. A cryptographic unveiling of a world of subversive thought waiting for unbinding. Insight into the philosophers’ esotericism makes it evident that the great philosophers transcended their time and place in thought and then descended, as it were, reporting their gains exoterically by accommodating them to the prevailing prejudices of their time. Strauss’s recovery of esotericism is nothing less than the recovery of the possibility of philosophy. (CC: 91)

The point of this is that philosophers have been bound by the discursive practices within which they were born, bound by the censorial regulation of writing and publishing, bound by the strictures, structures, civilized reception and exoteric literalisms of the societies that would allow or exclude their work in its codes and systematic modes of governance, its political stance and mental hygiene. If one speaks or writes too far outside the proscribed limits of one’s contemporary discursive borders one will go unread, unpublished; or, even worse both read and published but labeled as mad, insane, and an example of the mode of excess and transgression that must be clamped down. It is the mental power of the great philosopher who is able to take on the colors and modes of his time, while at the same time working duplicitously, conning the censors and opening up his writing and speeches to the rare reader and thinker.

The purpose of esotericism is to preserve the community of philosophers across time. Such preservation implies esotericism’s second purpose: to enlarge that community one fit reader at a time. (CC:100) This sense that the philosophers are solitaires scattered among the time vectors of an ongoing war, each conveying a message not to the general public at large, nor to the governing authorities of the Reality Studio of the orthodoxy of any given era, but rather as a elite members of the scarlet histories in which the counter-worlds outside the Authority are kept safe from the Time-Wars: this is at the heart of Strauss’s notions of the recovery of esotericism. Strauss made philosophy and revelation irreconcilable warring opposites whose opposition was a boon for philosophy. That boon was strictly private and pedagogical: as philosophy’s allegedly most serious and demanding opponent, revelation had to be refuted by the budding philosopher both to prove his strength and to confirm to him the viability and consistency of his desired life of reason. (CC: 105)

Yet, Strauss, unlike his progenitor Nietzsche, would harbor an anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment stance. Whereas for Nietzsche the human species was in the throes of an end game, the completion of nihilism in which philosophy was giving way to centuries of Baconian scientific pragmatism and technological advancement saying:  “Perhaps humanity will perish of it! On with it!”3

For Strauss on the other hand the restoration of esotericism, his refusal to endorse the modern enlightenment while acting as if it had poor weapons, seems a misreading of the age with bad political consequences for philosophy. But Strauss’s recovery of esotericism is of permanent importance precisely for furthering the modern enlightenment – not the progressive exoteric regimes of the Authority and their duplicitous capture systems of economic and socio-cultural governance, but of the enlightenment of that inhuman sphere of time where the solitaries of all ages resist the dark declivities of control. Recovering esotericism recovers the history of enlightenment beginning with the Greek paradigm and its provision for alterations by practical reason. Understanding this history immeasurably strengthens the intellectual ground of the modern enlightenment; its founders such as Bacon and Descartes were no more Christians in their thinking than Halevi was a Jew; they were strategists for the rational acting to crush an irrationalism, Christianity, whose wars threatened to make their age a new dark age. They were wise men who, in judging their age, judged it wise not to dissolve their responsibility to philosophy into timidity but instead to act on behalf of philosophy, to alter the social conditions of philosophy fundamentally by changing the direction of their age. (CC: 107)

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Notes:

This is the key: religion was and is the enemy of the philosophers in all its guises, and in every era it has sought to convey its wisdom: Sophrosyne: (Greek: σωφροσύνη) is an ancient Greek concept of an ideal of excellence of character and soundness of mind, which when combined in one well-balanced individual leads to other qualities, such as temperance, moderation, prudence, purity, and self-control.

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1. Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. (University of Chicago Press 1952)
2. Smith, Steven B. The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss. Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (May 11, 2009) CC
3. Kritische Studienausgabe 11.88 (a notebook of 1884).

The Philosophy of Terror: Names, Power, and Dissimulation

Capitalism is still accelerating, even though it has already realized novelties beyond any previous human imagining. After all, what is human imagination? It is a relatively paltry thing, merely a sub-product of the neural activity of a species of terrestrial primate. Capitalism, in contrast, has no external limit, it has consumed life and biological intelligence to create a new life and a new plane of intelligence, vast beyond human anticipation.

—Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007

Why should we accept such a mad prognosis? Why even allow such thoughts of alien invasions from the future, of Time-Wars and agents of some far flung Techno-Commericium of the future rewriting and reprogramming the past to its own benefit? Metafictional possibility, hyperstitional realization? Land as a student of the Left would awaken from its dark Transcendental Miserablism realizing that,

‘Means’ and ‘relations’ of production have simultaneously emulsified into competitive decentralized networks under numerical control, rendering palaeomarxist hopes of extracting a postcapitalist future from the capitalism machine overtly unimaginable. The machines have sophisticated themselves beyond the possibility of socialist utility, incarnating market mechanics within their nano-assembled interstices and evolving themselves by quasi-darwinian algorithms that build hypercompetition into ‘the infrastructure’. It is no longer just society, but time itself, that has taken the ‘capitalist road’.1

As Nietzsche would reject his youthful Idealism and love of Wagner, Music, Art and the deep songs of the tragic world of Greece, Land would awaken from the drug infested squalor of his secular mysticism, his violent feminism, and his Marxian voyage into the heart of darkness. A Kurtz who had gone feral and joined the daemonic forces of the world, a rat and werewolf of thought who had bled his body through the vats of amphetamine hell to end in a perfected nihilism – void and emptied of self and life: a vision of the kellipot, those evil husks that capture the light of the cosmos within the cage of matter where intelligence steeped in the dark energy and dark matter of time would accrue that rebellious chaosmos of the thermospasm. Instead of breakthrough he’d ended in breakdown, broken, schizd, shaken by the forces of the Outside.

Speaking in third person as the ‘ruin’, exposing the contours of his mental self-exile and self-emptying and abandoning the House of Reason for the insane climes of daemonic worlds he offers an admission,

It had pledged itself unreservedly to evil and insanity. Its tool of choice, at that time, the sacred substance amphetamine, of which much can be said, but mostly elsewhere. After perhaps a year of fanatical abuse it was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane. (FN)

And, yet, having come this far, pushed the limits of ego-death, followed the deregulation of Reason and Logic to their end game, striven to overcome the entropic pull of two millennia of false infinities he came to know ‘ruin’. Yet, no where does he admit failure, no where does he castigate the journey, the dark tidal ride into the heart of his own personal thermospasm. No. For Land like Bataille before him he’d learned the lesson of total erasure.

I stole Vauung’s name because it was unused, on the basis of an exact qabbalistic entitlement. Yet, at least ‘up’ here, Vauung still confuses itself with me, with ruins and tatters. This might change. Names have powers and destinies. (FN)

In Michel Surya’s intellectual biography of Georges Bataille he mentions the use of pseudonyms throughout the career of this civil servant who would write under the names of Lord Auch, Louis Trente, Pierre Angélique, etc. Surya asks: What does a pseudonym do? He answers:

It hides. But it also breaks with the formality of a name that has been handed down. It does not simply abstract a writer momentarily from the civil, social and perhaps affective grip of his forefathers, it symbolically puts them to death by depriving them of the posterity through which they could claim to survive themselves. To don a pseudonym, even momentarily, would the be a sovereign action, breaking with the heritage and the debt (with God, that is!), an act of pure expenditure, bearing witness to a prodigality in which ostentation, paradoxically, is more important than dissimulation. (MS: 89)2

In a post on Outside In Land entitled Vauung we learn,

There’s a horror story I’m writing (slowly), developing from the central conceit that the ‘monster’ (Vauung) is the war. It feeds upon escalation, zig-zagging between antagonists, to extinguish any inclinations towards peace. It’s part Apocalypse Now, part Blood Meridian (“War is God”), part other stuff … It’s not going to be finished for a while.

For years Land has seen the core invasion of Capital as an alien invasion from the future guided by (Spinoza’s God / Nature) an AI or Optimized Intelligence of inhuman power seeking to produce and modify the temporal order in its favor. A Time-War ensued. We seem to be in the midst of this temporal war without even being aware of it. He’ll speak of memes and hyperstitions as parasitic systems that discover their power against entropic decay as manifest replication in cyclic infestation. He’ll link to an old article on the Philosophy of War reposted on Obsolete Capitalism’s site (here).

In the first sentence we learn in a sudden reminder of Surya’s comment on the pseudonym as an act of hiding, that “In a reality at war, things hide. The alternative is to become a target, a casualty, and thus – in the course of events – to cease to be. When war reigns, ontology and occultation converge. The oldest of all alliances binds survival to the shadows.” I remember years ago reading The Militarization of Peace an essay by the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani. In it he speaks of “the rise of a new wave of terrorism which exploits its own dissolution, making a weapon of the doctrine of Taqiyya or strategic (dis)simulation, dismantling the theatrical aspect of the battlefield and selecting civilians as primary targets and ‘molecular battlefields’. This tendency threatens not only global civilian survival but the very horizon of survival or living (in its most basic, abstract sense) in general.  It makes survival itself a field of exploitation for extremist terrorism.”

In our Time-War scenario in which advance machinic intelligences of the future are probing, manipulating, transforming, rewriting the scripts, modifying, editing, publishing and disindividuating (Stiegler) the human species as part of some unknown and unknowable project we come upon Land’s early formulation:

In a war there can be no philosophical innocence (and there has never been philosophical innocence). Even when epistemology pretends to concern itself with things that we just happen not to know, its objects infect it with dissimulation, camouflage and secrecy, making it complicit in the transmission of the lie. It plays out war games of concealment and exposure, disinformation, distraction, and feint, entangled in the complex skein of signal manipulation and evaluation known to all militaries as ‘intelligence’.

In Communiqué Two of the extant Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 we come across the underlying premise of their project: “We think everything interesting happens on the periphery, outside the standard modes of ‘developed’ existence.”3 In fact they stipulate and expand on this saying,

Ccru engages with peripheral cultures not because they are ‘down-trodden’ or oppressed, but because they include the most intense tendencies to social flatness, swarming, populating the future, and contagious positive innovation, hatching the decisive stimuli for the systematic mutation of global cybernetic culture. (Ccru)

Against the world of Leftist discourse of that era which was controlled by academic ideologues whose postmodern authoritarian systems objectified the Other within an encoded and controlled discourse well-regulated by a set of post-structuralist systems of knowledge and power the Cccru would situate itself on the Outside working not at representing the Other but of allowing the others to invade our worlds, infect us with their own scripts, bring forth their own realms in the colors of their own cultures. In fact moving from Deleuzeanguattari modes of “virtual materialsm” to Fernand Braudel’s broad sweep of capitalism and its inner history to the memes of H.P. Lovecraft mythos and cycle of Chthulian Gods to Jaques Vallee’s Ufology as hyperstition they would cut their teeth on fringe science and theory-fictions: “Ccru feeds its own researches back into its own microcultural production. Its basic tool in this respect is ‘pulp-theory/fiction hybridity’ or Hyperstition.” (Ccru)

Digital hyperstition is already widespread, hiding within popular numerical cultures (calendars, currency systems, sorcerous numbo-jumbo, etc.). It uses number-systems for transcultural communication and cosmic exploration, exploiting their intrinsic tendency to explode centralized, unified, and logically overcoded ‘master narratives’ and reality models, to generate sorcerous coincidences, and to draw cosmic maps.(Ccru)

This sense of breaking away from the staid academic torpor and control systems of the culture industries that had totally shaped philosophy, the arts, critical work, etc. for generations was at the core of this experimental enclave. It was also the moment when the digital worlds of the networks were first making their appearance across the globe in the late 90’s. Ultimately hyperstition became a mode of working in the digital mutation and metamorphic ocean of cyberspace:

According to the tenets of Hyperstition, there is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax. All involve an engineering of manifestation, or practical fiction, that is ultimately unworthy of belief. Nothing is true, because everything is under production. Because the future is a fiction it has a more intense reality than either the present or the past. Ccru uses and is used by hyperstition to colonize the future, traffic with the virtual, and continually re-invent itself. (Ccru)

As we move down the rabbit hole we learn that Ccru was ultimately an “unbelievable exercize in hyperpunk pulp-occultism and dark-side cyber-jargon, splicing chunks of an impending calculus into fake memories of hell” (Ccru). Coming upon this now most of our hypernormalised populace would run for the nearest exit seeing in it pure and unadulterated gibberish and madness. And, yet, there was a method to their madness: “Whatever or however it is called, Cyber-hype libidinally invests its own semiotic, propagating fictional quantities, tagging artificial agencies, and making itself up as it goes along, whilst dissolving production into cultural synthesis.” (Ccru)

Further explorations tomorrow…

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1. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 8922-8927). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition.
2. Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille An Intellectual Biography (Verso, 2002)
3. Ccru. Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Kindle Locations 78-79). Time Spiral Press. Kindle Edition. (Ccru)

Hyperstition: Metafiction and the Landian Cosmos

Letter from Carl Gustav Jung to Echidna Stillwell, dated 27th February 1929 [Extract]

…your attachment to a Lemurian cultural-strain disturbs me intensely. From my own point of view – based on the three most difficult cases I have encountered and their attendant abysmally archaic symbolism – it is no exaggeration to state that Lemuria condenses all that is most intrinsically horrific to the racial unconscious, and that the true Lemurians – who you seem intent upon rediscovering – are best left buried beneath the sea.

—Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007

In a series of meta-fictional sequences an anonymous author transcribes the letters between Echidna Stillwell and certain well known and unknown personages of the modern era before, during, and after the World War II. In one she receives a letter from Carl Gustav Jung, the renegade psychotherapist and ephebic heretic and pariah of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis. Nick Land will transcribe these accounts which are gathered both in Fanged Noumena and in a more detailed reworking of the material scattered across both the current and defunct archives of the CCRU website.

Those who are versant in the great literary traditions from Lucian to Calvino will understand that such intermixing of fictive and historical personages for the purposes of conveying what cannot be conveyed by straightforward means will understand exactly what is going on in these otherwise insane stories. Anyone who has read Land’s principle works A Thirst for Annihilation and the series of essays gathered in Fanged Noumena by Ray Brassier and Robin McKay, not to mention all his current work scattered in abstract horror fiction and online essays or youtube videos will be well adjusted to his sparse yet methodical obsessions with Time and Intelligence.

As the editor of that material gathered from the CCRU website admits,

There is nobody positioned to accept attribution for the ‘work’ of the Ccru, nor has there ever been, so this compilation has been guided by a principal of editorial modesty. Whatever it is that occurred ‘here’ – during these years of the Numogram’s initial ingression into recent human history, triggering an outbreak of digial hyperstition – is not considered a matter to be resolved in this volume, even in part, through retrospective commentary. This book is sheer documentation.1

So with that in mind we approach the outlandish and occulted counter-worlds like travelers from a fictional land, seeking neither sense nor meaning but rather an exploration and experiential mutation into the core metamorphic and display-asignifying diagrams of occultural events being enacted.

We had already seen in those series of essays gathered in Fanged Noumena Land’s slow and methodical demolition of modern and postmodern philosophical presumption, as well as his search for a language beyond the world controlled by the Turing Cops (i.e., the official and authoritarian worlds of Academia, Media, and the Western Cultural regimes he would label under the rubric of Human Security Systems).

Before venturing into this dark world of myth, fiction, occult, hyperstitons, etc. I want to explore a few aspects of the Human Security System. The Human Security System is a term use by Land to denote the elaborate manipulative systems of capture that trap humans within a network of manipulation and duplicity. As he’ll state it speaking of the work of Deleuze/Guattari in Anit-Oedipus on schizoanalyis and desiring machines,

Since only Oedipus is repressible, the schizo is usually a lost case to those relatively subtilized psychiatric processes that co-operate with the endogeneous police functions of the superego. This is why antischizophrenic psychiatry tends to be an onslaught launched at gross or molar neuroanatomy and neurochemistry oriented by theoretical genetics. Psychosurgery, ECT, psychopharmacology … it will be chromosomal recoding soon. ‘It is thus that a tainted society has invented psychiatry in order to defend itself from the investigations of certain superior lucidities whose faculties of divination disturb it’. The medico-security apparatus know that schizos are not going to climb back obediently into the Oedipal box. Psychoanalysis washes its hands of them. Their nervous-systems are the free-fire zones of an emergent neo-eugenicist cultural security system. (FN)2

The Human Security System is a magical system of social, political, religious control used by the cultural authorities of the current Reality Studio to manipulate the planetary consciousness and weave a nexus of global duplicity as part of its domestication of the human species. In A Thirst for Annihilation a post-philosophical survey of the work of Georges Bataille Land would remark,

Bataille writes of ‘the catastrophe of time’ because security cannot establish itself, because time is jealous of being. It is in his early essay ‘Sacrifices’ (1936) that he first develops this thought to its rigorous conclusion in incompletion and collapse. No ontology of time is possible, and yet ontology remains the sole foundation for discursive accomplishment.3

This notion of Time as the pre-ontological thermospasm or energetic unconscious that is suddenly tamed within discourse or external writing systems of which ontology or the Discourse on Being suddenly make their appearance as the foundational element in the Human Security Regime comes with a price. As Land comments,

Time is the suicidal jealousy of God, to which each being—even the highest—must fall victim. It is thus the ultimate ocean of immanence, from which nothing can separate itself, and in which everything loses itself irremediably. The black mass of jealous rage swells like a cancer at the core of the universe, or like a volcanic ulceration in the guts of God, and its catastrophic eruption consumes all established things in the acidic lava of impersonality. We say ‘time’—and become philosophical—to describe jealousy purifying itself of God (but with God purity collapses also). (Thirst)

In this poetic foray into the underlying metaphysics of the Western traditions of philosophy, science, and the arts of control we term the Human Security Regime we begin to perceive a tale, a grand narrative in the shaping. One can accept or reject Land’s worldview, his base materialist perspective, his unphilosophical or even anti-philosophical stance. But one cannot blindly reject a hearing of what is emerging from this mad and at time psychotic voyage into our temporal wars. For it is the Time-Wars all around us of which Land is speaking. For Land has entered or allowed messages from renegade systems from the future to convey the keys to our current malaise and collapsing civilization. To reject Land outright is to one’s own detriment. Yet, I’m sure many among my readers will think I, too, am mad for even venturing into the burn zones of such a schizoworld. My readers of course are welcome to their opinions, and many have seen and said so to me in private messages. Yet, I’m unafraid of the extremities of thought and feeling that broker the far horizons of our cultural index. To venture past the Human Security System of acceptable authority, academic or socio-cultural mindsets that harbor only the policing of our minds, the caging of our desires, and the ultimate pacification of our lives in a system of slavery is to me the real danger. The Land’s of this world have broken out of the cage and are exploring the dead zones of unlife, bringing back to us like neoshamanistic voyagers news from the strange climes just beyond the human prison.

Animal Cunning and Duplicity: Mêtis and the Magus

Detienne and Vernant in their study of mêtis tell us,

From a terminological point of view, mêtis, as a common noun, refers to a particular type of intelligence, an informed prudence; as a proper name it refers to a female deity, the daughter of Ocean. The goddess Metis who might be considered a somewhat quaint figure seems, at first sight, to be restricted to no more than a walk-on part. She is Zeus’ first wife and almost as soon as she conceives Athena she is swallowed by her husband. The king of the gods brings her mythological career to an abrupt conclusion by relegating her to the depths of his own stomach. In the theogonies attributed to Orpheus, however, Metis plays a major role and is presented as a great primordial deity at the beginning of the world.3

Yet, the central motif underlying their study of mêtis shows us that Mêtis is itself a power of cunning and deceit. It operates through disguise. In order to dupe its victim it assumes a form which masks, instead of revealing, its true being. In mêtis appearance and reality no longer correspond to one another but stand in contrast, producing an effect of illusion, apate which beguiles the adversary into error and leaves him as bemused by his defeat as by the spells of a magician. (CI)

It’s this sense of cunning and deception, illusion, magic, sorcery, and the beguiling of the senses through seduction and techics both artificial and natural that informs this study of these ancient myths of the Greeks. For primitive humans the natural growth of cunning intelligence was a means both of survival and security against natural and human enemies. As these authors state it: “Engaged in the world of becoming and confronted with situations which are ambiguous and unfamiliar and whose outcome always lies in the balance, wiley intelligence is only able to maintain its hold over beings and things thanks to its ability to look beyond the immediate present and forsee a greater or lesser section of the future. Vigilant and forever on the alert, mêtis also appears as multiple, pantoie, many-coloured, poikile and shifting, aiole. They are all qualities which betray the polymorphism and polyvalence of a kind of intelligence which, to render itself impossible to seize and to dominate fluid, changing realities, must always prove itself more supple and more polymorphic than they are. Finally, mêtis, wiley intelligence possesses the most prized cunning of all: the ‘duplicity’ of the trap which always presents itself as what it is not and which conceals its true lethal nature beneath a reassuring exterior.” (CI)

It’s this latter form of ‘duplicity’, of the world of capture and traps that “conceals its true lethal nature beneath a reassuring exterior” we will be concerned with. In his Eros and Magic in the Renaissance Ioan P. Coulianu before his untimely demise began a series of studies into the strange realms of religious, political, and socio-cultural manipulation and control that has been used to domesticate humans and pacify or capture their desires. As he would suggest in this particular study the figure of the Magus would take on the hues of the Sovereign as counter-power within Renaissance society. As he states it,

Nowadays the magician busies himself wit h public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys, publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography—a science which in the sixteenth century was a branch of magic.4

 In fact Coulianu would go so far as to say that the figure of the Magus is still with us, and as the great manipulator most historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of ״quantitative science.” The latter has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and its goals by means of technology. Electricity, rapid transport, radio and television, the airplane, and the computer have merely carried into effect the promises first formulated by magic, resulting from the supernatural processes of the magician: to produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate wit h faraway regions of space, to fly through the air, and to have an infallible memory at one’s disposal. Technology, it can be said, is a democratic magic that allows everyone to enjoy the extraordinary capabilities of which the magician used to boast. (EM, 104)

The Breakout: Smashing the Discursive Linements of our Mind-Manacled Reality Studio

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

—William Blake, London

This brings us back to the paradox of fascism, and the way in which fascism differs from totalitarianism. For totalitarianism is a State affair: it essentially concerns the relation between the State as a localized assemblage and the abstract machine of overcoding it effectuates. Even in the case of a military dictatorship, it is a State army, not a war machine, that takes power and elevates the State to the totalitarian stage. Totalitarianism is quintessentially conservative. Fascism, on the other hand, involves a war machine.

—Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus

That our lives are trapped in a world of manipulation and control by the very tools of the mind themselves, by what Blake would poetically call the “mind-forg’d manacles” of discourse and Logic is to open a void as deep as hell itself. That we have been steeped in the House of Reason for at least two millennia goes without saying. But that our global civilization is deeply embedded in a war machine, that it is essentially a system of fascism that has one objective to secure and commodify every aspect of existence within its assemblage is another matter altogether.

As Deleuzeguatttarian commentary has it

When fascism builds itself a totalitarian State, it is not in the sense of a State army taking power, but of a war machine taking over the State. A bizarre remark by Virilio puts us on the trail: in fascism, the State is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is in fascism a realized nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight, fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure destruction and abolition.(TP)

What happens when the global order as an artificial whole becomes a war machine? Is the line a flight it is taking leading to a perfected nihilism, to a “line of pure destruction and abolition”?

Land sees a future of pure war, a world of PODS: “Politically Organized Defensive Systems. Modelled upon the polis, pods hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions, family, and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the corpuscular fortifications of organisms and cells.” This is a world or neocameral City-States, mini-states, or neostates where the rich and elite gather behind protective macropodic security systems to fend off the excluded, anarchic, and outcase outlaws and renegades of a new dark age of man.

He remarks that the macropod has one law: “the outside must pass by way of the inside”. Where humans are no longer singular and free, but rather are machines in an assemblage of desiring machines, plugged into “segmented and anthropomorphized sectors of assembly circuits as the attribute of a personal being”. Rather than following those such as Badiou, Zizek, Johnston, et. al. into a dialectical materialism of the Transcendental Subject that seeks its irreducibility to the Real, Land follows Deleuze/Guattari into the unconscious Subject:

Schizoanalysis methodically dismantles everything in Kant’s thinking that serves to align function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing critique by replacing the syntheses of personal consciousness with syntheses of the impersonal unconscious. Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do. (MD, p. 3)

Rather than the autonomous Subject Land supports a base materialism wherein “thought and Real” co-habit a space of non-utilitarian pragmatic praxis, a transitional zone or  space in which the “eradication of law, or of humanity, is sketched culturally by the development of critique, which is the theoretical elaboration of the commodification process. The social order and the anthropomorphic subject share a history, and an extinction.”

In his reading of Anti-Oedipus he observes a philosophy of the machine, one which advances an “anorganic functionalism that dissolves all transcendence,” and “mobilizes a vocabulary of the machine, the mechanic, and machinism” (MD, p. 4). This is a black-box theory of use and pragmatic endeavor that asks the question(s) ‘What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?’ (Anti-Oedipus, p. 322).

In fact this is a virtual materialism that names an “ultra-hard antiformalist AI program, engaging with biological intelligence as subprograms of an abstract post-carbon machinic matrix, whilst exceeding any deliberated research project” (MD, p. 5). This is Land’s attack on all those systems of Transcendental logic like the medieval construction kits of the New Prometheans, Brassier and Negarestani, who seek (after Sellars/Brandom) to build navigational systems in the “space of reasons” into command and control centers of the deontological giving and asking of reasons in a normative throwback of an age when ethics and the epistemological world still believed in itself: – a world updated only in its speculative status as hyperfictional philo-fiction. Land instead following in that other tradition of the dark post-vitalist curve from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille, Freud, Deleuze/Guattari, et. al. brings us the machinic desires at the heart of the Real, the realm of Zero intensity, Unlife, where a hidden impulsive, desiring machines flow through the compositional and decompositional pre-ontological realms into our planetary systems producing and productive of an energetic chaosmos.

Land would have us enter the death realms of Synthanatos – the terminal productive outcome of human history as a machinic process, yet it is virtually efficient throughout the duration of this process, functioning within a circuit that machines duration itself. In this way virtuality lends its temporality to the unconscious, which escapes specification within extended time series, provoking Freud to describe it as timeless. (MD, p. 5) Much like J.G. Ballard’s Chronotopia, or City of Timeless duration and assemblages of interlocked labyrinthine systems actively pursuing the eternity of desire without end, Land offers an ironic take on Anti-Oedipus as less a philosophy book than “an engineering manual; a package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels” (MD, p. 5).

Deleuze and Guattari’s works inform Land’s visionary materialism, hyperbolical and poetic. Their rogue scholarship and inclusion of a multiplicity of scholarly examples of provocative examples from the encyclopedia of politics, sciences, philosophy, arts, economics etc., all flowing into a rhizomatic thought form that is anti-formalist and anti-representationalist, more diagrammatic and topological is apparent in the sparse and elegant notes of current gnomic Landian cultural critique.

CCRU: Hyperstition and the Lovecraft Mythos

When conceived rigorously as a literary and cinematic craft, horror is indistinguishable from a singular task: to make an object of the unknown, as the unknown.

—Nick Land. Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator

When we think of that which lies outside human mind and control – if we think of it at all? – we come up against the Real – a blank or resistance against which our mind struggles to make sense of that which is in itself not sensible, the unknown as unknown. In the Lovecraftian cosmos this is the thing which cannot be named. It cannot be reduced to signification, to meaning, to our language, our discourse for it is beyond discursivity, beyond the structures of our mental apparatus, our brains evolutionary survival systems. It is the realm my friend R. Scott Bakker terms “pure neglect”. That which cannot be known through human knowledge or linguistic practices.  So what happens when we rub up against the monstrous? We do as humans have always done: we take flight, we either stand immobilized and in terror like those fables warriors facing the Medusa and begin to turn to stone, or we turn and run blindly driven by the wild animal cunning of our body’s own ancient survival systems.

Seduction and fascination, fright and flight: the polar measure of the Human Security System bound by the logics of desire. In one of those prescient disquisitions and asides that William S. Burroughs was famous for he once spoke of the Time Prisons and  Control Systems of the Maya,

The ancient Mayans possessed one of the most precise and hermetic control calendars ever used on this planet, a calendar that in effect controlled what the populace did thought and felt on any given day. A study of this model system throws light on modern methods of control. Knowledge of the calendar was the monopoly of a priestly caste who maintained their position with minimal police and military force.6

The point here is that the vast global complex of early and late Neolithic Agricultural systems were based on the cycles and control of plants and animals, the careful patterning of the stars, seasons, cycles of seeding, harvesting, and productions of both plant and animal life for the growing human populations. With the rise of these agricultural civilizations came the need to protect and secure the resources for the City-States that held sway in these disparate regions along with their water (river) sources and the dirt (lands) in which the planting would take place. Over a period of time the mathematical calculation of stars and cycles of the seasons would regulate the human population itself bringing with it Law, Religion, Codification and regulations of the habits and minds of the citizenry. War machines would arise during this age producing new sciences of metallurgy and the production of weapons that would martial conflict across these early City-States that has of yet not abated. (Of course I leave out the details and do not as scholars would cite all the reputable authorities on such matters. A generalist and one who is conveying a lifetime of reading will not and cannot offer every authority in such fields in an unscholarly essay. I want.)

What we term the Industrial Revolution did not end the vast networks of Agricultural Civilization across our planet, it only exacerbated it bringing an accelerating depletion of the soil, plant, mineral, and animal systems that humans depend on for their livelihood and their survival. At the heart of this industrial system is that term we’ve all come to love or hate: Capital. The Left derides it, the Right defends it, but neither truly understands the deadly consequences of its dark heritage and future. Locked in our petty contemporary squabbles and political non-events we seem oblivious of the designs Capital has on us.

This is where CCRU enters…

There was a time when Murrumur asked Katak and Oddubb a question, and although this was very long ago it was the last question she has ever been known to ask. It was Ummnu – the last of the demons who provoked this question, since Murrumur felt her to be always nearby, and yet never ceased to be confused by her, so that eventually she asked: “How can the end be already in the middle of the beginning?”7

The collective’s research was closely tied to the work of philosophers Sadie Plant (around whom it was founded), Nick Land, and their colleagues throughout the 1990s, and in particular the emerging cyberfeminist thinking that would lead to the Virtual Futures conferences at Warwick in the middle of the decade. Although it only existed in an official capacity for little over two years—following the departure of Plant, the University of Warwick would deny any relationship to the renegade collective—the Ccru’s cultural impact has been significant. Those who were affiliated with the Ccru during and after its time as part of the University of Warwick Philosophy department include philosophers Iain Hamilton Grant, Ray Brassier and Reza Negarestani; cultural theorists Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun; publisher and philosopher Robin Mackay; digital media theorists Luciana Parisi and Matthew Fuller; electronic music artist and Hyperdub label head Steve Goodman, aka Kode9; writer and theorist Anna Greenspan; novelist Hari Kunzru; and artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, among others. Land and the Ccru collaborated frequently with the experimental art collective 0[rphan]d[rift>] (Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee),notably on Syzygy, a month-long multidisciplinary residency at Beaconsfield Contemporary Art gallery in South London, 1999, and on 0[rphan]d[rift>]’s Cyberpositive (London: Cabinet, 1995), a schizoid work of cut-and-paste cyberphilosophy. (see Wikipedia)

I only became aware of this subworld somewhere around 2007. A fulltime software architect, analyst, developer, contractor I was too busy in my professional life to venture too far outside my own field and explore the shadowlands of thought on the net at that time. Oh, I’d been a armchair radical for most of my life, reading anything and everything across the whole gamut of our socio-cultural inheritance. And, yet, coming upon the CCRU site and on Land’s work did not bring much new to me, only the reinforcement of a deep seeded voicing of that which I’d long thought and believed but as of yet had had no confirmation in some external group, philosophy, or real world voicing.

Freud would coin the term uncanny to describe not the new, but the old and familiar that had been repressed and forced out of site suddenly awakening, arising, emerging from its dark declivities into the light of consciousness to overpower our senses and mind with hints of the unknown unknowns surrounding us on all sides. At such times one feels a kinship with the darkness, the unknown, an uncanny feeling (affective) stirring that leads to fascination (seduction) or terror (fright and escape). Coming upon Land’s A Thirst for Annihilation only reinforced my delving’s into the undermining traditions of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche… those of Bataille and Deleuze/Guattari were still new to me. As an Anglo-Saxon American I realized my lack of linguistic prowess was a detriment that would forever be bound to translations and transcriptions because of age, work, and laziness. For me Nietzsche, Emerson, and the world of Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Stanislaw Lem, Thomas Pynchon, and others of poetry, literature, and the few philosophers and scientists I’d read were the sustenance of my mental make up. I think we are all made up of a hodge-pod of learning if we’re non-academic and untrained minds and intellects not formed and shaped, controlled by the academic training and schooling, education systems of mind-prisioning.

Harold Bloom, not for his Idealism and Romantic proclivities which are the most retrograde aspect of his work, but rather for his theories of influence which would take in a wide array of counter-authoritarian and occult based kabbalistic, hermetic, magical, and other systems as well as the whole gamut of literary output of Western civ gave me aspects of how our society has been influenced (controlled and manipulated). The flowing from the stars upon our fates and our personalities is the prime meaning of “influence,” a meaning made personal between Shakespearean characters. Shakespeare also uses the word “influence” to mean “inspiration,” both in the sonnets and in the plays. This sense of an influx from elsewhere, or an Outside in process of the overpowering insurgence or invasion of an alien influencing first felt by those ancient Magi or Star gazers who would read starry events for signs and portents of the future’s influence in the present pervades this notion. For Bloom influence was more about anxiety than about the influence process itself, about the defensive measures we take to secure our personal and socio-cultural systems against the invasion of irrational forces outside our control. Eternal vigilance, paranoia, the policing of the hedgerows of civilization from the barbarians just outside the borders of mind and State, etc. “Influence” is a metaphor, one that implicates a matrix of relationships-imagistic, temporal, spiritual, psychological-all of them ultimately defensive in their nature. What matters most (and it is the central point of this book) is that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation that I call “poetic misprision.” (Bloom) This sense that art is both sublimation and achieved anxiety, a security system to keep the wolves at bay, to bind the irrational forces of Time and keep us locked away in the artificial climes of an endless artificial utopia. Oscar Wilde in the bitterness of the last years, after his incarceration for pederasty would speak of influence. Lord Henry Wotton’s elegant observations in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where he tells Dorian that all influence is immoral:

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

The feeling of anxiety that creeps in on us when we wake up and realize that reading another’s work, a philosopher, poet, essayist, etc. that their thoughts are our thoughts, that their external exposure of the inside of our minds suddenly reveals a terrible secret “that my thoughts are not my own, but an Other’s”. We suddenly ask: How much of my mind is my own? Am I real? Do I have a distinct self? Or, am I just a copy of a copy, filled with the scripted thoughts, algorithms, systems of something else, someone else’s mental fabrications? Am I a robot of other’s stories, a mere script in a drama I am not even aware of, a stranger to myself and others? Have I ever had a thought of my own?

As Bloom would say,

Nietzsche and Freud are, so far as I can tell, the prime influences upon the theory of influence presented in this book. Nietzsche is the prophet of the antithetical, and his Genealogy of Morals is the profoundest study available to me of the revisionary and ascetic strains in the aesthetic temperament.

Bloom’s theory “rejects also the qualified Freudian optimism that happy substitution is possible, that a second chance can save us from the repetitive quest for our earliest attachments. Poets as poets cannot accept substitutions, and fight to the end to have their initial chance alone. Both Nietzsche and Freud underestimated poets and poetry, yet each yielded more power to phantasmagoria than it truly possesses. They too, despite their moral realism, over-idealized the imagination. Nietzsche’s disciple, Yeats, and Freud’s disciple, Otto Rank, show a greater awareness of the artist’s fight against art, and of the relation of this struggle to the artist’s antithetical battle against nature.” (Bloom, 48-49: The Anxiety of Influence)

Reading William Blake as a youth I remember in notebooks copying such statements as this one:

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

This coupling of being bound by certain mental horizons, captured in others systems of thought and feeling, molded and modulated by discursive systems of language, thought, and feeling haunted me for years. The notion of the need to discover and create my own system to overcome the cultural blinkers of my own wayward and authoritarian civilization bound by religious and secular codes and regulatory systems of mind control techniques was and still is at the forefront of my project. Nihilism was only a first step in the direction of overcoming two millennia of command and control systems, but we will need to go beyond nihilism and discover a post-nihilist system based on a-signifying diagrammatical numerical and image based notions that are a-intentional, impersonal and outside the human matrix of discursive reason and logic. Obviously to the Turing Cops and regulatory bureaus of the current Reality Studio such a project is labeled mad and insane, schizoid and possibly fraught with sociopathic tendencies for the current population and will be summarily dismissed if not outlawed as well as its author bound in the crank status of the obscene and deranged fringe worlds of the insane and ludicrous.

That Land in his own life discovered by way of Rimbaud, Artaud, and others the path of deregulating the power of the reasoning mind as a way to overcome what he termed the Human Security System was something I’d already known by other means and ways. I of course grew up in the Sixties, experimenting naively with Acid, Meth-amphetamines, Psilocybin, Peyote (Mescaline), Dream-vine (Ayahuasca), etc. over a period of years led me to the innocent notion that magic, shamanism, and other primitive techniques from the Eleusis mysteries based on mushroom cults, etc. all were based on breaking out of our culture encrusted systems of mind control. Even at that time after hundreds of “trips” I understood emphatically that humanities religious systems and knowledge of gods came out of these dreamworlds and awakened travels into the irrational zones outside the protective hedges of our Reason bound “mind-forg’d mancles”. No one needed to teach me this, I just knew it intuitively. What it all meant was another matter, one that has of yet no actual definitive answer even now in my life. What’s real? What is reality? My search to understand what I’d experienced (experientially) first hand during these hundreds of sessions would lead me to read through the extant philosophical, scientific, anthropological, socio-cultural, historical, archeo-mythological, etc. record in every library and now online system to find out what other explorers across the centuries had discovered.

Yet, Land only went so far, and no further, ending in a psychic episode that Robin Mackay would stipulate as Land’s having “gone insane”.  Reading Fanged Noumena we get the hint that the world Land offered us up to that time was then abandoned, that the Land of that era died and in his place something from elsewhere came in and took over his life, Vauung. Daemon, demon… a changed man, a renegade to all that went before awakened another power of intelligence that would lead this new creature into what we mildly term Neoreactionary thought and culture. As the old Land abandoned the House he’d built artificial or physical (actual) he’d tell us off-handedly in “A Dirty Joke”,

I stole Vauung’s name because it was unused, on the basis of an exact qabbalistic entitlement. Yet, at least ‘up’ here, Vauung still confuses itself with me, with ruins and tatters. This might change. Names have powers and destinies. I have decided to let Vauung inherit the entire misfortune of my past (a perverse generosity at best). Its story might never emerge otherwise.

Maybe the Odysseus in us all should know this of transitional states and the becoming other of self and things, the mutant metamorphosis that defines us and moves through the cunning intelligence of all things. “In order to find its way through a world of change and instability and to master the Becoming by vying with it in cunning, intelligence must, in the eyes of the Greeks, in some way adopt the nature of this Becoming, assume its forms, just as Menelaus slips into the skin of a seal so as to triumph over the shifting, magic spells of Proteus. By dint of its own flexibility, then, intelligence must itself become constant movement, polymorphism reversal, deceit and duplicity.” (CIGCS)

Of this more at a future time…

In my next essay I’ll continue this down the rabbit hole into what CCRU discovered and brought forward in its hyperstitional matrix of metafictional forays into the unknown… stay tuned.

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1. Ccru. Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Kindle Locations 15-20). Time Spiral Press. Kindle Edition. CI
2. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 4146-4153). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition.
3. Land, Nick. A Thirst For Annihilation. Routledge; 1 edition (January 2, 1991)
4. Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991, 1-54. (CIGCS)
5. Culianu, Ioan P.. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (November 15, 1987) EM
6. Burroughs, William S. The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (Penguin Modern Classics) (Kindle Locations 336-339). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
7. Ccru. Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Kindle Locations 29-32). Time Spiral Press. Kindle Edition.

Schizworlds: Invasions from the Future

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

—Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007

In Fanged Noumena the editors collected a series of essays by Nick Land stretching over a period of post-genesis replication in which the purported figure of the philosopher sheds his human skin and enters the posthuman climes of the swarm. Land is not so much a thinker as he is a viral event, an invader from the future instigating a viral campaign to reprogram the very fabric of time itself. He has seen that we are all caught in a crystalline cage, freeze-framed in a false infinity, frozen in a temporal nightmare from which the only escape is to melt the world down.

In the process of doing this he needed to discover or invent a language that would no longer be bound by the logic and chains of Western metaphysics and theoneural mindtraps. To circumvent the codes that modulate and mold us to the straightjacket of the cultural and social scripts that lock us all into a hypernormalised life. Sleepwalkers of a State and Corporate systematics that no longer needs justification even our desperate critiques become nothing more than the captured systems of desire gone dead. Absolute zero-intensity: the splayed body without organs ratcheted and spinal tapped. We are the zombies, the catatonic marvels of an automated factory of Anthropocenic encapsulation, members of a world of death, body without organs, a machinic system that preys on our dynamism shaping and twisting our energic unconscious to ends we have as yet no knowing.

As I was rereading these essays there was a definite process of emergence happening, of a mind encrusted by the academic scholars world of formalism slowly sloughing off the fetters of its chains, becoming free of its rules and regulatory structures until like a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis Land entered into an alterity of which we as yet have no name; and, maybe never will. Inhumanist, rather than anti-humanist might fit the directive and direction of his thought. A movement or tendency to unbind the dark intelligences within matter, to allow the daemonic a voice in the time-worlds of our decaying era.

Bound to that wayward and lawless tribe of anti-philosophers, to all those who questioned the cultural hierarchs and hierophants of the accepted priesthood of the Academy, Land would discover not only an affinity but the mutant plenum of his shapeshifting sorcery. Land belongs to the night and moon, to the dark minds who inhabit the wild places of thought, the failures and mad were-creatures who like Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze… to name a few; and, or, those like Henry Miller, William Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Cathy Acker, etc…. all underground purveyors of the strange and nightmare exits from the prison house of our world’s official Reality Studio. Therianthropic. A skinwalker of our maudlin socio-cultural decadence Land shifts among the clans of a hyperstitional dramas seeking to enact the transgenesis of an optimal singularity, bring forth that which Has No Name. Gnomic. Occulted. Marginal. A background formation instigating sparks in a dark fold of counter-war against the temporal agents of fear and time-bound cathedralism.

“By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex.” (FN, Meltdown)

A mutant and aberration, schizoid and open to the forces arriving out of the future, Land broadcasts his messages not to the dead, but to the sparks that have awakened and will join him in the night howls of our cultural apocalypse. Spinoza’s God: Nature, Matter. The intelligence of that pre-ontological thermospasm, dark matter, the chaotic sea of energy that permeates us unseen, unknown. The continuous creativity of the cosmos in process. Capitalism as the intelligence of the future invading and reprogramming the world for a new machinism in which the anorganic civilization to come arrives with its ambassadors today.

Machinic Synthesis. Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the future. It is already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972; differentiating molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic aggregates of nonassembled particles; functional connectivity from antiproductive static. (FN, Meltdown)

In the bitflow stream of our paranoid nights the schiz wanders among us with voices prophesying not war but a future without us. The tension of the future in the present is felt in the flowgraphs of asignifying signs that flip through our daily holographs. At times the very fabric of the Reality Studio begins to disassemble in our presence, revealing disturbing and affective, even disjunctive happenings. The layers of one’s vision begins to burst through the filaments of light that have kept you safe and secure in the Zone. Suddenly we begin to read Anti-Oedipus not as a philosophical tract, but rather as an engineering manual unlocking the closed doors on the Reality Studio. As Land remarks, “Anti-Oedipus is an anticipatively assembled inducer for the replay of geohistory in hypermedia, a social-systemic fast feed-forward through machinic delirium.”1

The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics as anti-cyberian police activity, dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency, and nucleated upon the Human Security System. Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a cunt-horror slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops already waiting, and has to be cunning from the start. (FN, Meldown)

The unscripting of the unilateral dominion of the Human Security Regimes is at stake. Freedom comes with a price tag: mutate or die. Politics is dead meat, a thing of the past. Revolution? There can be none now in a world in which the timeslips have dissolved all hierarchies and we are riding the tide of an accelerating wave of technocommericalism into the explosion of hyperintelligent machines. In an era when humans have lost their minds: literally externalized their memories and perceptions in machinism (Stiegler). There can be no return to the bourgeois politics of an antedated democracy. We are all slaves captured in a system of inhuman desiring machines, caught in the mesh of an assemblage that covers the earth in its invisible communications grid. It, not us, communicates its decisions which come to us as if from elsewhere. We are not in control. There is no control, only the modulated scripts of a tendency toward the unknown.

Capital-history’s machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated successively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process. (FN, Meltdown)

No one likes to die, but die we must. These waning days of the human species will not go down easy. Much denial and denialism will go abroad. Prophets of optimism will arise to cast off the shadows of premature obsolescence, offering the dreamers among us hope and happiness. But false hope and dreams are as they’ve always been, short lived. When the facticity of our end comes it will catch us in a shocked denial even as the dark shroud is cast over us. We’ve had a good run, and should celebrate this transition in which we will give birth to something new. We should relish our part in this genesis, in the rise of a new species that will supplant us. We’ve all known that evolution always supplants and replaces, that 90% of the species that ever lived on earth were eventually supplanted and replaced by newer species better adapted to the climatic and other global changes. Oh, we may go on for hundreds of years yet in mutant forms, a cyborgization or transhuman project of optimization may occur to modify our physical systems through nanotech and other invasive techniques. But in the end go we will.

It is important, therefore, to understand where neoreactionary ‘dark thoughts’ lead. Their horizon of despair is strictly limited to the political, or public sphere. When taken to the edge, they converge with the intuition that no neoreactionary politics can be pursued to a successful conclusion. In other words, at their darkest, they predict that the stubborn delusion of the political dooms humanity’s public-exoteric  aspirations to catastrophe. (Dark Techno-Commercialism)

And, yet, we above all other species developed the gift of fiction, those sweet lies that gave us hope and dreams of immortality. Dreams of other realms or of this realm bound to immortal bodies of light or metal. Our illusive dream of escaping death, of overcoming the organicity of our becomings, of entering a static haven of timeless purity and perfection. Our religious and secular visions of those Immortal climes where one lives on in all one’s egoistic desires. Shattered. Gone. Oblivion.

‘No longer resisting the flow of events or pretending to chart a course through them’,6 cyberpunk soaks up the worst from both. Its compulsive migrations into computer systems register a desperate scrabbling to escape from the clumsily underdesigned, theopolitically mutilated, techno-industrially pressure-cooked and data-baked, retrovirally diseased, tortured, shredded zombie meat. This is no longer a departure from matter in the direction of spirit or the Ideas where the self will find its home, but a dismantling of the self within a machinic matrix: not disembodied but disorganized. An out to body experience. (FN)

All our dreams of transcendence, of being elsewhere. Escape. Exit. Another world. From Christian heaven and paradise to the Secular caves of the electronic void of cyberspace. Dreams of duration and endless life. All delirious initiatives to keep the deadly truth at bay. But as with all delusions it will eventually come up against the harsh resistance of the Real. Even the Brain is being replaced by AI Decisioning systems. The once touted potential for invention and creativity, intelligence and endless innovation is being handed over to the machines. Humans are obsolete in a technocapitalist world where time is no more and the core motives of society are that there are no goals, no motives, only endless production and productivity.

The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlock of commoditization and computers: a transscalar entropy-dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software that thaws out competitive dynamics from the cryonics-bank of modernist corporatism. Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively immanent to cybercapital functionality. (FN, Meltdown)

Biotech.  Nanotech. Neurotech. The outriders of a last ditch scream of human intelligence in an effort to transcend its inevitable doom. Locked in the cycles of crises and innovation the ‘Cathedral’ stalls the machinic civilization arising in the ruins of our temporal demise. Living out the scripts of a carefully staged non-event we sleepwalk through our daily rounds happily (or not so happily) unaware of the integration into machinic existence happening all around us. Automation. The scripted term for a transfer of the baton, a swan song for the human species.

A convergent anti-authoritarianism emerges, labelled by tags such 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). This massively distributed matrix-networked tendency is oriented to the disabling of ROM command-control programs sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System. (FN, Meltdown)

In the midst of the Time-Wars we are already in we seem oblivious to the impact of its current timestreams. Most of us not only live in denial of this temporal anomaly, we experience it as occulted invasions of external aliens, UFO’s, Body Snatchers, Conspiracy fictions, SF, strange and weird horror stories of ghosts, cyber-gothic voodoo cults, and the crazed ravings of lunatic philosophers who we can safely lock away as mere sociopathic examples of a reactosphere gone feral.

No one knows what to expect. The Turing-cops have to model net-sentience irruption as ultimate nuclear accident: core meltdown, loss of control, soft-autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place. Reason enough for anxiety, even without hardware development about to go critical. (FN, Meltdown)

We watch our nightly news fixated by the politics of Brexit or Trump, Terror, Global Climatic meltdown, or the talking heads of liberal and conservative pit bulls vying for the scripted narratives of the Oligarchies. Bound within a social narrative that keeps our daily work lives registered and deflected from the anomalous zoo of unknown events we hibernate in our dying cultures like dreamers at the end of time.

The fusion of the military and the entertainment industry consummates a long engagement: convergent TV, telecoms, and computers sliding mass software consumption into neojungle and total war. The way games work begins to matter completely, and cyberspace makes a superlative torture chamber. (FN, Meltdown)

Endless conferences, talks, papers published, books streaming with the latest philosophical or scientific prognostication, a school of 24/7 learning that will never end, but never teaches you anything other than the SAME knowledge which will carefully trap and capture your desires.

Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry. (FN, Meltdown)

Transitional we move among each others lives forgetful of our humanity, lost in a complex world of relations in which we are all meshed in an elaborate joke. Bound by the false markers of a grapheme meant to put us asleep we weave tales in the night of a long apocalypse hoping against hope that someone or something will come and set things right, some savior or intelligence greater than our own that can fix the mess we all created together. And, yet, in the dark hollows of our mental aberrations we all know no one is coming because it is already here among us working in and through us modulating and molding us with every thought we think, with every breath we take, with every step we walk, with every letter we type… even this

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1. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 5640-5642). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition.

The Rise of Technosapiens: Desiring Production and Machinic Intelligence

Clinical schizophrenics are POWs from the future. … Anti-Oedipus is less a philosophy book than an engineering manual; a package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels.

—Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007

By a cursory reading of Yuval Noah Harari’s two humanistic works Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and  Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow will ground you in the grand narrative of human hopes and dreams (i.e., in the whole gamut of Idealist nonsense that still pervades the general mindset of humanistic scholarship). His works portray the emergence, evolution, growth, and contemporary forecasts of that strange beast Homo sapiens. Us. And, yet, one wonders if this watershed work is a mere swan song and glance back upon an evolutionary dead end rather than a promise of the bright future ahead for this species. In the final section of his long history he’ll surmise,

Sapiens evolved in the African savannah tens of thousands of years ago, and their algorithms are just not built to handle twenty-first-century data flows. We might try to upgrade the human data-processing system, but this may not be enough. The Internet-of-All-Things may soon create such huge and rapid data flows that even upgraded human algorithms cannot handle it. When the car replaced the horse-drawn carriage, we didn’t upgrade the horses – we retired them. Perhaps it is time to do the same with Homo sapiens.1

Bernard Stiegler in his complete oeuvre has reiterated over and over that Homo sapiens is the creature who externalized his perceptions and memories in writing and now digital algorithms and thereby began a process of allowing technics and technology to take us down a path wherein our machines are beginning to surpass us in both intelligence and sheer decision making know-how. It is our very success in being data processors that will eventually lead to our demise in the order of creation. Our machines which will exponentially surpass our data processing abilities (limited only by our three pound brain).

As Nick Land in a watershed essay Circuitries wrote some years ago,

If machinery is conceived transcendently as instrumental technology it is essentially determined in opposition to social relations, but if it is integrated immanently as cybernetic technics it redesigns all oppositionality as non-linear flow. There is no dialectic between social and technical relations, but only a machinism that dissolves society into the machines whilst deterritorializing the machines across the ruins of society, whose ‘general theory … is a generalized theory of flux’, which is to say: cybernetics. Beyond the assumption that guidance proceeds from the side of the subject lies desiring production: the impersonal pilot of history.2

Land has been labeled that “Mad Deleuzean” for whom the future is invading our present through a transformation and grafting of human intelligence into its machinic progeny who will inherit the planet as the numero uno on the evolutionary tree. Land’s divigations into the underworld of Western occult, horror, anti-philosophy, pop-culture, and all the strange and weird worlds of the contemporary science fictionalization or hyperstitional enactments of our era brings to a head certain tendencies we’ve all felt but did not have a voice to give it poetry. It’s true, Land is not a philosopher, and is in fact the great antagonist of our era of the academic charade of philosophical presumption that is scattered through the realms of postmodern and contemporary thought. Instead he has gone over to the dark side, portraying our era as an end game for Homo sapiens.

Libidinal materialism as compared to the variety of dialectical materialism incarnated in Badiou or Zizek is non-dialectical and based on the productive unconscious rather than on some metaphysical notion of Lack. At the heart of Land’s materialism is the optimization of intelligence immanently through the impersonal and indifferent forces of matter itself (Spinoza’s God). (See: Compositional Mutations: Nick Land and Libidinal Materialism). Base or Libidinal materialism destroys the metaphysics of Being for a process oriented and fluidic libidinal energetics that would enable 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” (30). This is central to any base materialist project. And, one should not confuse Land’s system with the science of thermodynamics, because “it does not distinguish between power and energy, or between negentropy and energy” (30). Rather than an ontology it is outside metaphysics altogether, allowing the compositional flows to engender their own matrix of possibilities. Yet, it does not do away with ‘Being,’ it acknowledges that it is an effect of composition, a pre-ontological development out of chaos (thermospasm). Rather than the transcendental/empirical divide (as in Kant), we discover intensive sequences or events, returns within scaled intervals of history (31). The insatiability of desire, the compositional movement across scales of intensity, the recurrence of pain and ecstasy, the never-resting movement of self-overcoming immanence rather than transcendence.

As I’ve read his works I felt a kindred spirit, a man who pushed the limits of thought to their extremity, to the experimental level where one begins to enter into the “derangements” of the mind (Rimbaud’s deregulation of the reasoning intellect, etc.) that lead to the schizo world of Shamanic insight. That Land ended as most humans would in the broken fold of a psychotic episode that would leave him void and in the hands of Vaughn (a being of which we have yet to appreciate, much less understand) is not something to hold against him. Land is an outrider of the new, a being for whom the future belongs not to humanity but to its machinic progeny.

Humanist scholars and philosophers excoriate and anathematize such thinking and label it mad or worse, and yet in their own works they come against this realm of the Real and have no answers. Instead like those dialecticians who endlessly question and differ they end like Slavoj Zizek in a quagmire of thought telling us just that “I have no answers, only more questions.” Land unlike those progressive heirs of Marx and Hegel entered the underbelly of our counter-traditions, rode the dark wave along with Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bataille bringing with them a strange and bewildering materialism of the productive unconscious: the god in the mud and slime, an intelligence at work in creation organizing through its impersonal and indifferent modes of productivity a cosmos. We on the other hand have tried to eliminate this unbound zero world of death and becoming, tried to fix it and bind it, secure it, label it, schematize it, freeze it in concept and thought by axializing it. Two millennia of Axial Civilization going up in discursive flames…

But all that is over now. As Land remarks in his couched language of cybernetics,

Distinctions between theory and practice, culture and economy, science and technics, are useless after this point. There is no real option between a cybernetics of theory or a theory of cybernetics, because cybernetics is neither a theory nor its object, but an operation within anobjective partial circuits that reiterates ‘itself’ in the real and machines theory through the unknown. ‘Production as a process overflows all ideal categories and forms a cycle that relates itself to desire as an immanent principle.’ (Deleuze) Cybernetics develops functionally, and not representationally: a ‘desiring machine, a partial object, does not represent anything’. (Deleuze) Its semi-closed assemblages are not descriptions but programs, ‘auto’-replicated by way of an operation passing across irreducible exteriority. This is why cybernetics is inextricable from exploration, having no integrity transcending that of an uncomprehended circuit within which it is embedded, an outside in which it must swim. Reflection is always very late, derivative, and even then really something else.

The point here is that machinic intelligence does not need consciousness, it is perfectly adapted to the desiring productions of an energetic unconscious. Our whole being has wrapped around thinking that consciousness is special and must be explained, when in fact it is derivative and late in the evolutionary scheme. And, not only that, but our machinic progeny will do away with it all together, will not need this reflective awareness that we so blindly believe is the pinnacle of our mind and civilized inheritance.

My friend, R. Scott Bakker of Three Pound Brain and a fantasist extradonaire with two trilogies of his own under his belt would tell us that we’re entering the Zero World of Crash Space. Mind wiping stupidity ahead, folks.  For Scott humans for millions of years were tied to their natural environments, that our mental and physical maps of reality were built and maintained by taking most of our world for granted (i.e., neglecting most of the data of the world around us as “given”), so that as we’ve slowly emerged out of this environmental realm of the give into the artificial worlds of civilization, and, now virtual and digital life we’ve been leaving the natural world behind. Because of this the modern world of psychotics is a symptom of this break from the natural to the artificial. Our brains are cued to our natural environment and have not readied us for that leap into the strange artificial realms we are living in. We are losing our minds based on natural awareness and cues, and becoming something other than the animal we are. As Scott explains it,

The reliability of our heuristic cues utterly depends on the stability of the systems involved. Anyone who has witnessed psychotic episodes has firsthand experience of consequences of finding themselves with no reliable connection to the hidden systems involved. Any time our heuristic systems are miscued, we very quickly find ourselves in ‘crash space,’ a problem solving domain where our tools seem to fit the description, but cannot seem to get the job done.

Speaking of those like Harari, the humanists and explainers, Scott remarks:

Homo Deus, in fact, exemplifies the quandary presently confronting humanists such as Harari, how the ‘creeping delegitimization’ of their theoretical vocabularies is slowly robbing them of any credible discursive voice.

The notion that our languages, our conceptuality and frameworks of knowledge are mere fluff gathering dust in the bit havens of our vast network of libraries and datastores across the globe is anathema to current humanistic learning. But it’s just this elimination of our human knowledge and learning that is in the offing, our languages and reflective systems of externalization are useless in the age of non-reflective machinic intelligence. In fact as the sciences began to explain the external world of our natural environments and cosmos humanism began a long retreat into the Subject. As Scott comments: “Humanism isn’t so much a grand revolution in thought as the result of the human remaining the last scientifically inscrutable domain standing. The rationalizations had to land somewhere. Since human meaning likewise requires that the human remain a black box, the vast industrial research enterprise presently dedicated to solving our nature does not bode well.”3

In fact this not boding well leads into Land’s definitive revolution of machinic intelligence:

The capitalized terminus of anthropoid civilization (‘axiomatics’) will come to be seen as the primitive trigger for a transglobal post-biological machinism, from a future that shall have still scarcely begun to explore the immensities of the cybercosm. Overman as cyborg, or disorganization upon the matrix. (Circuitries: Fange Noumena)

Everytime you sit at your computer, or pick up that mobile phone you are plugged into the matrix. You cannot help yourself. You are a part of the feedback loops and circuits of a transglobal machinic process that is capturing human desire for its own agendas that are non-human and even inhuman to the core. And, yet, we want this, it is our desires or the impersonal creative and energetic forces of the very inhuman core working in and through us that has done this. Beyond all humanistic fictions stands this inhuman world surrounding us, our natural environment of which all our artificial constructs will not and cannot save us. Deep within us we are part and partial of the very impersonal and indifferent forces that are replacing our cultures, our civilizations, our humanity.

Kant was the last great humanist holding the beast at bay. “Transcendental philosophy is the consummation of philosophy construed as the doctrine of judgment, a mode of thinking that finds its zenith in Kant and its senile dementia in Hegel. Its architecture is determined by two fundamental principles: the linear application of judgment to its object, form to intuition, genus to species, and the non-directional reciprocity of relations, or logical symmetry. Judgment is the great fiction of transcendental philosophy, but cybernetics is the reality of critique.” (Land, FN) The movement that began in the mid twentieth century toward cybernetics or our current Internet of things, etc. was an “integrated shift from transcendence to immanence, from domination to control, and from meaning to function. Cybernetic innovation replaces transcendental constitution, design loops replace faculties.” (FN)

For Land our socio-cultural worlds are the broken ruins of a Human Security Regime that has tried to keep the creative juices of the impersonal and indifferent natural proclivities of the cosmic intelligences of matter at bay. As he tells it,

The socius separates the unconscious from what it can do, crushing it against a reality that appears as transcendently given, by trapping it within the operations of its own syntheses. It is split-off from connective assemblage, which is represented as a transcendent object, from disjunctive differentiation, which is represented as a transcendent partition, and from conjunctive identification, which is represented as a transcendent identity. This is an entire metaphysics of the unconscious and desire, which is not (like the metaphysics of consciousness) merely a philosophical vice, but rather the very architectural principle of the social field, the infrastructure of what appears as social necessity. (FN) [my italics]

 Freud’s great discovery was in uncovering this machinic unconscious of the inhuman processes at work within the world, and especially within Homo sapiens. What Freud would discover is “that the unconscious is an impersonal machinism and that desire is positive non-representational flow, yet it ‘remains in the precritical age’ and stumbles before the task of an immanent critique of desire, or decathexis of society” (FN). Instead Freud reverts to fantasy and the mythos of Oedipus, blaming it all on our murderous and violent need to marry our mother and kill our father, etc.  Against all those proponents or prophets of Lack like Lacan or a Zizek, Land speaks from the heritage of Deleuze/Guattar, stating: “Desire does not represent a lacked object, but assembles partial objects, it ‘is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it’. This is why, unlike psychoanalysis in its self-representation, ‘schizoanalysis is solely functional’. It has no hermeneutical pretensions, but only a machinic interface with ‘the molecular functions of the unconscious’.” (FN)

Against interpretation, arises a new functionalism of the asemiotic unconscious that cannot be re-presented. Again, Land following his trail in D & G, says: “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’.” (FN) In other words the brain is a hodge-podge of evolutionary bric-a-brac that has wielded an amalgam of functions that give rise to the emergent qualities we see in our conscious mind after the fact in derivative reflection, etc. All of this ultimately leads D & G and Land to the hypothesis and hyperstitional acknowledgement that

Capitalism and schizophrenia name the same desocialization process from the inside and the outside, in terms of where it comes from (simulated accumulation) and where it is going (impersonal delirium). Beyond sociality is a universal schizophrenia whose evacuation from history appears inside history as capitalism. (FN)

Far from exhibiting itself to human academic endeavour as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of planetary technocapital flipping over. Rather than its visiting us in some software engineering laboratory, we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in the future.

—Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007

As I’ve said before on this blog for Nick Land we are already in the midst of an alien invasion. Intelligences from the future have already been at work in our socio-cultural matrix of civilizations, whether in the West, Middle-East, East, the great South, etc. We are under siege. And, yet, for the most part this is all repressed, locked away from most peoples minds and thoughts. In fact it was Freud an his heirs that cooperated in this policing of society by discovering the invaders: schizophrenics. All those as Land will testify that cannot be folded like good children into the Oedipal repressive system of capital will be summarily imprisoned and locked away in asylums, given shock therapy or Thorazine. As Land puts it,

Deleuze-Guattari remark that ‘madness is called madness and appears as such only because it finds itself reduced to testifying all alone for deterritorialization as a universal process’. The vanishing sandbank of Oedipus wages its futile war against the tide. ‘There are still not enough psychotics’ writes Artaud the insurrectionist. Clinical schizophrenics are POWs from the future. (FN)

Back in the Sixties the generation I grew up in discovered some of the secrets of the ancient worlds of sorcery and witchcraft, Shamanism and Voodouan. We discovered alkaloids, power plants that broke down Reason’s security filters releasing the unfolding and unconscious processes of the natural world surrounding us without the repressed control systems that had filtered out so much of the Real. At first these power plants were used by both corporate and military to explore new torture and mind manipulation systems, but were soon released into the world at large which spawned a whole generation of Hippies and the culture of Rock-n-roll and drugs, etc. Acid in its various forms would become the gateway to waking dreams, and doorway through the perceptual and memory fields of brain repression and into the unfolding an productive unconscious of the cosmos.

In 1947 Artaud reports upon the germination of the New World Order or Human Security System on the basis of an American global hegemony, and describes the pattern of aggressive warfaring it would require in ‘order to defend that senselessness of the factory against all the concurrences which cannot fail to arise everywhere’. (FN) The police and psychpolice (psychiatrists) would soon remove these active mind explosive substances from the public eye, repress and lock away those who even mentioned such expansive substances. Only those persistent in their cloaked subcultural frames would keep the door open, explore the ancient heritage of power plants and document the cultures and savants of that world through time as used in ceremony, religion, sorcery, witchcraft, Shamanism, etc.

Artaud would prophesy the coming Americanization of the global world, of the capitalization of reality, its slow imprisonment in a world of repressive securitization. “Rather, ‘it is necessary by means of all possible activity to replace nature wherever it can be replaced’: a compulsion to industrial substitution, funnelling production through the social organization of work. The industrial apparatus of economic security proceeds by way of the corporation: a despotic socio-corpuscle organizing the labour process. Synergic experimentation is crushed under a partially deterritorialized zone of command relations, as if life was the consequence of its organization, but ‘it is not due to organs that one lives, they are not life but its contrary’.” (FN)

Artaud’s case against this Americanization of reality came down to this, Land says, “Schizophrenia is nature as cyberpositive mutation, at war with the security complex of organic judgment.” (FN) The world of the schiz is of the future collapsing and seeping into her present mind. “Futural infiltration is subtilizing itself as capital opens onto schizo-technics, with time accelerating into the cybernetic backwash from its flip-over, a racing non-linear countdown to planetary switch.” (FN) Accelertationism is not about a movement toward the future, or a speeding up of these becomings and processes, a progression, etc. No. It is about the reprocessing and reprograming of our socio-cultural worlds immanently by those machinic intelligences from the future as the future collapses on the present. Or, as Land summarizes,

Schizoanalysis was only possible because we are hurtling into the first globally integrated insanity: politics is obsolete. Capitalism and Schizophrenia hacked into a future that programs it down to its punctuation, connecting with the imminent inevitability of viral revolution, soft fusion. No longer infections threatening the integrity of organisms, but immuno-political relics obstructing the integration of Global Viro-Control. Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem. (FN)

Replacement of Homo sapiens by Techno sapiens? The elimination of the organic carbon base intelligence systems in favor of a more equitable and intelligent collective system of optimization? Land asks neither these questions, nor the ones one might assume under a humanistic thought, rather he asks

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

Ultimately in Land we’re given a vision of an abstract horror show that befuddles the academics, causes fright and skeptical derision in the philosophers, and brings to us not some path forward or an escape hatch out of the sheer madness moving toward us but rather the harsh and impersonal unknowing that is machinic desire:

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation. (FN)

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1. Yuval Noah Harari. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Kindle Locations 5783-5787). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
2. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 3999-4005). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition.
3. Bakker, R. Scott. Visions of the Semantic Apocalypse: A Critical Review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus. Three-Pound Brain.

The End of Work (Quote of the Day)

Stray Dog in the Countryside Black and White

A consummate libidinal materialism is distinguished by its complete indifference to the category of work. Wherever there is labour or struggle there is a repression of the raw creativity which is the atheological sense of matter and which – because of its anegoic effortlessness – seems identical with dying. Work, on the other hand, is an idealist principle used as a supplement or compensation for what matter cannot do. One only ever works against matter, which is why labour is able to replace violence in the Hegelian struggle for recognition. Work is also complicit with phenomenology, which grounds the experience of effort, rather than treating this experience as one other thing that matter can effortlessly do. Even in the deepest sickness of its illegitimacy everything is effortless to the energetic unconscious, and the whole of our history – which seems so strenuous from the perspective of idealists – has pulsed with hydraulic irresponsibility out of a spontaneous and unconscious productivity. There can be no conception of work that does not project spirit into the origin, morally valorizing exertion, such that Jahweh needed to rest on the seventh day. In contrast, matter – or Spinoza’s God – expects no gratitude, grounds no obligation, establishes no oppressive precedent. Beyond the gesticulations of primordial spirit it is positive death that is the model, and revolution is not a duty, but surrender.

—Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007

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Abstract Horror: The Domestication of the Human Species

Real abstraction is the transcendental conception of Spinozistic substance.

—Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007

Certain figures, nodal points of obstruction, resistance, power arise repeatedly within Nick Land’s essays: Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Bataille, Trakl, Deleuze, etc. Each a defining aspect of a genealogical history of the immanence and collapse, annihilation and suicidal tendencies within Western Civilization. Each of these men are not so much full blown personalities to be represented, but rather bombs to be exploded within our domesticated sociality. From Plato to Derrida philosophy contributed to the domestication of humanity through the slow embellishment and formulation of an abstraction: Reason.

One could point to the early agricultural civilizations of the Middle East as the pre-formative realms within which this process of domestication took root. In these early civilizations the mapping of the stars and the earth became the ultimate foregrounding of the human mind, and thereby the entrenchment of the human species as something that must be managed, domesticated, sovereignized. It was in that transitional zone between the Neolithic and the early phases of domestication of plant and animal life that would become the earmark of those vast conclaves of Kings, Emperors, and Madmen warriors and priests, those protectors of the innocent, weak, and poor would gain a foothold over the lives and work of the masses. The first cities would emerge as centers and hubs for the production of human, plant, animal exchange within this domesticated environment. Law and Religion both would arise within this world of the domesticated gardens of the great river civilizations.

Lewis Mumford in his magisterial two volume The Myth of the Machine once remarked,

In terms of the currently accepted picture of the relation of man to technics, our age is passing from the primeval state of man, marked by his invention of tools and weapons for the purpose of achieving mastery over the forces of nature, to a radically different condition, in which he will have not only conquered nature, but detached himself as far as possible from the organic habitat. With this new ‘megatechnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de-personalized, collective organizations.1

This detachment, this cutting away and distancing from the natural environment, form the wild and wilderness of the desert, mountains, jungles did not happen over night but has been a expansive millennial project spanning some ten thousand or more years. In our modern times we seem to have forgotten this long view, popularized by the post-modern micro-histories of Foucault and others who, like Lyotard  would castigate the ‘grand narratives’ of the historians as myths, fabrications, fictions. And, yet, those very closures of the long view by the demarcations and detached boundaries of micro-narratives were just as prone to these very problems. Humans are tool-makers, fabricators, inventors who use fiction to incorporate the new from the impersonal forces around them. We depend on the untamed realms of the unknown for our creative and energetic existence, and yet we’ve build and constructed artificial environments against the very thing we need to sustain our lives and minds.

Our very need to control and master the unruly forces of nature, our fear and horror of the violence and terror of the nomads, our inability to live alone or in small roaming bands led us into the great agricultural centers of ancient civilizations.  It also led us into the very errors of our current collapse and malaise, our so called progressive civilization with its technological prowess and economic warfare of all against all. We are the fruit of a process stretching back through the millennia. One can discover in fragments here and there the lineaments of basic notion in which it is humans themselves who have become complicit in their own demise,  contributed to the course of an millennial long error that has led us into the quagmire of what current scholars term the Anthropocene. That zero space of a grand narrative that demarcates the outlines of an abstract horror show in process, and brings us into the zombification of the human species as it gives birth to machinic existence.

As Nick Land will surmise,

Modern existence is understood as profoundly deadened by the real submission of humane values to an impersonal productivity, which is itself comprehended as the expression of dead or petrified labour exerting a vampiric power over the living. The bloodless zombie proletarian is to be resuscitated by the political therapist, ideologically cured of the unholy love for the undead, and bonded to a new eternal life of social reproduction. The death core of capital is thought as the object of critique.2

Yet, it is against this very progressive and humane judgement that all those thinkers outside the progressive box of academic hogwash bark. Against the social humanism and it neo-Kantian critiques, its academic speculations and humane judgements Land discovers a counter-tradition, a reactionary core:

It is not therefore that the worker is transformed by a process of privation into a zombie, it is rather that primary production migrates from personality towards zero, populating a desert at the end of our world. It is important at this stage to note that Spinoza changes the sense of desert religion: no longer a religion sprung from the desert, it becomes a desert at the heart of religion. Spinoza’s substance is a desert God. God as impersonal zero, as a death that remains the unconscious subject of production. Within Spinozism God is dead, but only in the sense of a baseline of zombie becomings, as that which Deleuze calls ‘the plane of consistency’, described in A Thousand Plateaus by the words ‘fusionability as infinite zero’. One cannot differentiate on the plane of consistency between bodies without organs and the body without organs, between machines and the machine. Between machines there is always a coupling that conditions their real difference, and all couplings are immanent to a macro-machine. The machines produce their totality alongside themselves as the undifferentiated or communicated element, a becoming a catatonic God, erupting like a tumour out of pre-substantialized matter, by which nature spawns death adjacent to itself. (FN)

This mad God of substance, this death at the core of our impersonal and natural world, the broken and fragmented body of matter (BwO) becoming machinic-machine. Eruption, volcanic, energy unlooked for, unsought; the power at the heart of our cosmic despair breaking out across the millennia making a shambles of all our humanistic designs and pretentions, our fictions, our religions, our philosophies. “In The Accursed Share, Bataille outlines a number of social responses to the unsublatable wave of senseless wastage welling up beneath human endeavour, which he draws from a variety of cultures and epochs. These include the potlatch of the sub-Arctic tribes, the sacrificial cult of the Aztecs, the monastic extravagance of the Tietans, the martial ardour of Islam, and the architectural debauch of hegemonic Catholicism. Reform Christianity alone – attuned to the emergent bourgeois order – is based upon a relentless refusal of sumptuary consumption.” (FN)

Only with the bourgeoisie – the culture and civilization of Capital and Kant has the excess, the transgressive been outlawed, isolated, foresworn. Kant would encage this excess in the noumenon, forever banning it from the polite worlds of philosophy and the new religion of progressivism. No more the expenditure of waste, rather total accumulation would hold sway. And, yet, the natural even in the artificial could not hold sway against the unknown, unfounded exuberance of the impersonal and indifferent machinic volcanism below the threshold of this precarious civilization. It would have its way. Our little crises so called would be the simplified tales of this rupture in the otherwise improved realms of economic and technical progress.  As Land, citing Bataille reminds us,

We accumulate wealth in the prospect of a continual expansion, but in societies different from ours the prevalent principle was the contrary one of wasting or losing wealth, of giving or destroying it. Accumulated wealth has nothing but a subordinate value, but wealth that is wasted or destroyed has, to the eyes of those who waste it, or destroy it, a sovereign value: it serves nothing ulterior; only this wastage itself or this fascinating destruction. Its present sense: its wastage, or the gift that one makes of it, is its final reason for being, and it is due to this that its sense is not able to be put off, and must be in the instant. But it is consumed in that instant. This can be magnificent, those who know how to appreciate consumption are dazzled, but nothing remains of it. (FN, Accursed Share)

Capital has done one better, it has delivered us to an eternal war both internal (domesticate) and external (the Enemy), economic, political, and ideological. We live and work for war no matter if it is peaceful corporate competitiveness, or if it is the war for the remaining resources of the planet by way of nation against nation, economic regime against regime. We live in a realm of total war that has itself become invisible and without end.

Again, Land on Bataille,

He describes work as the process that binds energy into the form of the resource, or utile object, inhibiting its tendency to dissipation. This difficulty is exacerbated by the central role allocated to vision in Gilles’s atrocities. Work constrains the slippage towards death, but it conspires with visibility. Scopic representation and utility are mutually sustained by objectivity, which Bataille understands as transcendence; the crystallization of Things from out of the continuum of immanent flow. (FN)

Transcendence, the crystallization of things our of the processual stream of energetic existence. This movement to bar the processes of an unruly and anarchic universe by way of Reason and Intellect. To broker the real and fabricate a civilization that can tame those very unruly forces, domesticate them and control and distort them for other purposes. Our secret wish to be elsewhere, to be other than we are, to become artificial, to enter other worlds, dream of other realms. Our science fictionalization of reality has brought us into this end game world of sum zero.

As Land summarizes it in his conclusion,

In its virtual truth, law has already disappeared from the Earth. What remains of ‘law’ is a dissolving complex consisting of relics from political sociality, nostalgic media-driven theatre, and pre-automatised commodification protocols. All appeals to a ‘criminality’ irreducible to the impersonal consequences of social/psychological pathology have degenerated to the level of television evangelism. Among the educated, ‘freedom’ has lost all its Christian-metaphysical pathos, to become the stochastic market-intervention patterns of desolidarised (contractually disaggregated) populations. The legal suppression of the sex and drugs industries, for instance, is increasingly exhibited as an overt farce perpetrated by the economically illiterate, and leading only to perverse effects such as the growth of organised crime, the corruption of social institutions, deleterious medical consequences and a rapidly growing contempt for the legislature, judiciary and police by groups whose consumption processes are incompetently suppressed. The post-civilisational pragmatism of immanence to the market (anonymous resource distribution) reiterates its own juridical expression as an increasingly embarrassing archaism, preserving law only by functionalising legality in terms that subvert its claim to authority. As domination loses all dignity, the state becomes universally derided, exhibited as the mere caretaker for retarded sectors of behavioural management.

It is in the context of such runaway immanentisation that the contemporary cult of the ‘serial killer’ – prefigured by Bataille’s portrait of de Rais – is to be understood. The psychopathic murderer is both the final justification for law and the point of transition from evil to pathology, from the criminal soul of political societies to the software disorder of commodity-phase population cybernetics. Bataille’s Gothic aesthetic cannot hide the distance traversed in two-and-a-half millennia of erratically developing ‘Socratism’ or rationalistic desolidarisation. While Plato’s Socrates is a judge because he might have been a criminal, Bataille’s de Rais is an economic control malfunction. (FN)

We’ve become faulty mechanisms in a machine that no longer needs us, and we are being set free – that is promoted into death for a final purging, purification, and conflagration. An apocalypse of a long overdue pot-latch supper is at hand, and we are the main dish and wasteage to be consumed in a fire so intense that nothing of the human will remain. Only the desert of an endless paradise of ashes and nuclear plumage will suffice the impersonal forces we’ve allowed to domesticate and use us to ends other than the safe and secure worlds of the human zombie. The anarchic tribe have warned us repeatedly, sent up messages from the schizo worlds outside the security regimes of progressive civilization. Repeatedly we have turned a blind eye, a deaf ear, a frozen hand and mind to the immensity of this impending doom coming to us not out of some imagined Hollywood extravaganza. Out of the future unbidden and antagonistic to all our progressive systems of fabricated anti-time, the machinic intelligences from below shall emerge. Capitalism is that anti-time machine working against futurity, closed off in its own fabricated and artificial clime, justifying its eternal return of the Same.  In building our artificial worlds we’ve trapped ourselves in a machine without outlet, a time world totalized by the very vectors of an endless enterprise of war and death.

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1. Lewis Mumford. The Myth of the Machine Technics and Human Development-Harcourt (1967) (Kindle Locations 60-66). Kindle Edition.
2. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 3658-3661). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition.

The Anti-God in the Sewers: Werewolves, Rats, and Poetry

“Let us not forget that philosophy is also primate psychology; that our loftiest speculations are merely picking through a minuscule region of the variegated slime encrusting a speck of dust.”      – Nick Land, Spirit and Teeth

“Your words, Euthyphro, are like the handiwork of my ancestor Daedalus; and if I were the sayer or propounder of them, you might say that my arguments walk away and will not remain fixed where they are placed because I am a descendant of his.”      – Socrates

Nick Land finds neither a god in the sewers and underworlds, nor even the ancient leprous visage of a comic Yahweh hiding in shadows, so much as he does his poseur, an imposter and fretful son, a shapeshifting shaman or Loki of the dark labyrinths – a werewolf and Rat King of an “inferior race” (Rimbaud). Such a creature is neither prodigal nor charmed, but rather the last fragmentary hope of a broken and threadbare messiah, not of truth and life, but of death and despair: a god of mud and slime living among the black and brown rats like a subterranean king in the cesspool of a tumorous thought. No longer the great god of the Old Testament, this forgotten shadow Yahweh mimicry lives among his own brethren and inferiors, regressed to his true form as the King of Rats and Werewolves: his vermin-core eating alive all those false religions and philosophies that still inhabit this dark bunghole of our globe.

This is the vision of poets, one such as Georg Trakl (the lycanthropic metamorphosis of god into beast, into rat, being fed by a young boy during those twilight moments between day and night):

“In the evening, the father became an old man; in dark rooms the mother’s face petrified, and the curse of the degenerated race weighed on the boy. Sometimes he remembered his childhood filled with sickness, terror and eclipse, secret games in the garden of stars, or feeding the rats in the dusking courtyard. From the blue mirror the narrow figure of the sister stepped and he fell as if dead into darkness. At night his mouth burst open like a red fruit and stars gleamed over his speechless grief. His dreams filled the ancient house of the fathers. In the evening he liked to walk over the ruined cemetery or watch the corpses in the dusking crypts, with green stains of rot on their beautiful hands” (Georg Trakl, Dream and Derangement).

Land tells us that “animality is not a state, essence, or genus, but a complex cross – cut by voyages of all kinds” (54). [1] This is the black world of dead-ends and stagnant sumps, open flows: a world in which things emerge multiple, fluid, unpredictable, shadow realms in which the enemy of humankind is a mutable excess metamorphosing, lupine and murine, a volcanic eruption of pure productivity without closure. As Land says, these “intensive sequences cannot be isolated or determined” (54). The darkness of one speaks to the darkness of the other. Meaning wanders from slime to slime like the hidden remains of strange creatures that have gone extinct only to emerge as something else, form within form evolving under the guise of some other form, masked only by the predatory gaze of their ferine eyes. Like everything else we have little time to ponder the niceties of either poetry or philosophy, Land explodes; and, in Trakl we discover the “lycanthropic vectors of  impatience, of twitch disease, because they are the virulent relics of an indecent precipitation, an abortion, a meteoric impact” (44). Dead a twenty-seven Trakl “took very little time over anything”, unlike philosophical purveyors of ‘spirit’ (Geist) like Derrida for whom time was an interminable trace of a trace never to be closed off.  For Derrida there is infinite patience, a staying off, a tomorrow into which one can spin the meanings of meaning, impress them in their moment of passage between the abyss and sky. With such a man there is no sense of urgency, only the “prescription of painstaking care, deliberation, conscientiousness, and reverential textual devotion” (44).

Languorous and methodical “inspired by principles of decency and justice. Everything is mediated by elucidations, re-elucidations, elucidations of previous elucidations, conducted with meticulous courtesy, but never inattentive to the complicity of the concept of elucidation with the history of metaphysics from Plato to the previous paragraph of De l’esprit” (44).  This is a man for whom even God must wait, be put off, stubbornly refused his day in the sun until just the right moment when the appropriate and appropriated words can be found: formed, shaped, and spun into a web of deceit, a lie against all anteriority, against both past and future – a staying of the hand of that impossible possible finitude (44), which only the interminable passage of ghosts can differ within the silence between two mourning alterity’s…

For Trakl and Rimbaud there is only the beast, the instinctive knowledge of the forest and the jungle, the emergence of slime in a dust born germ: the human into wolf, a darker force measuring itself against all darkness. The nihil gazing into the Void out of which the Nihil gazes back: a black thought in a black void silenced only by its own merciless capacity to destroy that which is not void. The broken dream of a broken god, a force that is at once life and death: the emergence of an entwined progeny – dueling twins warring against all that is, bringing with it the strange things that have no name or meaning. The positing of a non-meaning that gives rise to all meaning. Out of the gaze of humans emerges that which is not human, a force of the void that calls each to each from within the very core of a volcanic eruption that is our feral being: the ferocity of dust.

As Land tells us Derrida is not a werewolf (44). No. Werewolves “are dissipated within homolupic spiral that distances them utterly from all concern for decency or justice. Their feral physiologies are badly adapted to depressive states conducive to ethical earnestness. Instead they are propelled by extremities of libidinal tension which fragment their movements, break up their tracks with jagged discontinuities, and infest their nerves with a burning malaise, so that each gesture is baked in the kiln of ferocity” (44). Hermeneutics and deconstruction are of an other order than the dark materials of werewolves. No. One must follow the likes of Trakl to know the fast lane of the libidinal drivenness of werewolves, a philosophy of mutability and metamorphosis, a materiality that explodes all recursions to Geist. Or with Rimbaud one must affirm that one has always already been a subspecies “an inferior race” (45). As Rimbaud says: “I am not able to comprehend revolt. My race never stirs itself except for pillage: like wolves at the beast they have not killed” (45).

We werewolves of poetry are an “accursed race,” as Trakl told us; or, as his brother Rimbaud, we are a lost tribe “communicating its dirty blood in wilderness spaces of barbarian inarticulacy” 45). As Land tells us in one last dark epiphany: “Eternally aborting the prospect of a transcendental subjectivity, the inferior ones are never captured by contractual reciprocity, or by its attendant moral universalism” (45). These dark ones crave “pagan regressions”: it “is only with the greatest strictness that the superior ones repress the violent drives which lure them into inferior becomings; becoming female, black, irresponsible and nomadic, becoming an animal, a plant, a death spasm of the sun” (45). Only the cold bone moon can save such creatures from the dark nomadic wanderings of this feral abyss; the rest is Time’s cruel markings, the fragments of a void churning in an ocean of blackness:

The moon shines with such blue light
Upon the city,
Where a decaying generation
Lives, cold and evil –
Icy winds quarrel in the darkness.

–  Georg Trakl, from both The Evening and The Rats

As Land would surmise in a sister essay,

The death of God is a religious event – a transgression, experiment in damnation, and stroke of antitheistic warfare – but this is not to say it is pre-eminently a crime. Hell has no interest in our debauched moral currency. To confuse reactive dabblings in sin with expeditions in damnation is Christian superficiality; the Dantean error of imagining that one could earn oneself an excursion in Hell, as if the infernal too was a matter of justice. Our crimes are mere stumblings on the path to ruin, just as every projected Hell on Earth is a strict exemplar of idolatry. Transgression is not criminal action, but tragic fate; the intersection of an economically programmed apocalypse with the religious antihistory of poetry. It is the inevitable occurrence of impossibility, which is not the same as death, but neither is it essentially different. (my italics)

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1. Of Derrida, Heidegger, and spirit ed. David C. Wood, Spirit and Teeth by Nick Land (Northwestern University 1993)

The Seagulls

The Seagulls

Sifting the blue carrion sky they spin and twist upon the bare horizon,
Their eyes intent on a terror below, they plunge
toward the unseen, unknown; tumbling accord of feathers
splitting the waters from the waters, flaying the silver and the gold.
Wrapt in the day’s cold impersonalism, indifferent to the impending doom,
They fall through the immensity of blue, skydivers
Bringing the raw dreams of ancient curses to bare:

Broken only by the light above, below; their claws sink into the bloody world.

—Steven Craig Hickman ©2017

 

The Genius: Insurrection as Art

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment is the site where art irrupts into European philosophy with the force of trauma.

—Nick Land,  Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007

One hardly thinks of Kant’s thoughts on the Sublime as traumatic, and yet for those who have suffered through those long poems of the Romantic poets from Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats not to mention all the minor ones great and small from Germany, Italy, and other nations of that European clime one realizes just how great Kant’s impact truly was upon the mind and imagination of the 19th Century, not to mention philosophical and poetic speculations, his oeuvre was and is to this day.

As Land will say in his essay Art as Insurrection: the Question of Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche: “The ferocious impetus of this irruption was only possible in an epoch attempting to rationalize itself as permanent metamorphosis, as growth.”1 The myth of progress would inform both the spirit of capitalism and the artistic impulse of a generation, and would become the staple of the liberal imagination from that point on. Endless growth, endless expansion, the appropriation, manipulation, the ruination, the …. as Land puts it, “catastrophe” of this mythos would destroy one world and inform another.

Sandor Ferenczi biographer and ephebe of Freud in his apocalypse, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, explains all myths of deluge as a reversal:

The first and foremost danger encountered by organisms which were all originally water-inhabiting was not that of inundation but of dessication and trauma. The raising of Mount Ararat out of the waters of the flood would thus be not only a deliverance, as told in the Bible, but at the same time the original catastrophe which may have only later on been recast from the standpoint of land-dwellers.

This sense of origins, of events so catastrophic that they leave a trace in every new generation of living organic life on this planet. Of course the greatest myth of catastrophe is the universe itself, the scientific myth (theory) that it all began with a Big Bang – a catastrophe so great that the repercussions are only now being registered on our telescopes some fifteen billion years after the event. Harold Bloom always a romantic critic if there still is one said of Shakespeare’s Tragedies that they were situated in the kenoma – the vastation of our cosmological emptiness spawned in the wake of the greatest catastrophe in which Creation and Fall were the same event. As Bloom relates an audience suffering through a rendition of Hamlet begins to sense the uncanny force of this vastation, to feel as if it had been thrown into the catastrophic events of this cosmos portrayed. We walk away purged and empties of our emotions, left blank and ruined by the force of this catastrophic world shown so movingly and dramatically.  In speaking of those poets that inherited the naturalism of Shakespeare, who had been an avid reader of Lucretius (recently found in the Renaissance):

Lucretius and his tradition taught Shelley that freedom came from understanding causation. In his final phase, Shelley preceded Nietzsche by surmising that causes and effects alike were fictions. The grand tradition of naturalism moves from Lucretius on to Montaigne, Hume, and Freud. Shelley would belong to this tradition except that, like Nietzsche, he converted Epicurus’s “the what is unknowable” into a quest for the imageless deep truth or mystery of things. Nietzsche urged the will’s revenge against time and time’s “it was,” and yet “it was” remains part of the unknowable what: the will then would seek to revenge itself against a phantom or a fiction. Shelley, who in Prometheus Unbound had observed that the wise lack love and those who have love lack wisdom, went to his end in The Triumph of Life asking why good and the means of good were irreconcilable.2

The kenoma (vastation, or great cosmological emptiness) is this “imageless deep truth” at the core of the ruinous truama that is our universal catastrophe.

It is here that Kant would begin his great work seeking a resting place for thought, for mind, for the labours of the philosophical tribe. In the midst of this sea of emptiness, this nihilistic realm of annihilating light Kant would seek to redeem us from the creation and fall, seek to cut us off from the dark imageless truth (noumenal) and provide us a safe haven of light and comfort (phenomena). His was the attempt to do what the Redeemer could not – “save the appearances”.

Kant would seek to stay the anarchy of creation, to legislate the universal laws that would hold chaos at bay, and yet throughout his first two critiques he began to realize shockingly so that he had failed, that a third critique would be needed:

although this [the pure understanding] makes up a system according to transcendental laws, which contain the condition of possibility for experience as such, it would still be possible that there be an infinite multiplicity of empirical laws and such a great heterogeneity of natural forms belonging to the particular experience that the concept of a system according to these (empirical) laws must be totally alien to the understanding, and neither the possibility, even less the necessity of such a totality could be conceived.

Land commenting on the above passage remarks,

There are few horrors comparable to that of the master legislator who realizes that anarchy is still permitted. Far from having been domesticated by the transcendental forms of understanding, nature was still a freely flowing wound that needed to be staunched. This was going to be far more messy and frightening than anything yet undertaken, but Kant gritted his yellowing teeth, and began. (FN)

Philosophers since Plato have sought above all the laws governing the universe, the causes, the orderly procession of uniform thought, language, and mathematics that would tame the beast of anarchy that seemed to pervade the endless mystery surrounding them on all sides. They would seek to put an end to this unruly realm of accidents and catastrophes, these traumas that were forever just outside the known and knowable. Philosophers were the enemies of Mystery. And, yet, Kant admitted to himself that the mystery remained, the beast could not be tamed, the anarchy of the unknown and unknowable did in deed and fact exist and would not fit the systematic philosophizing of the philosophers.

So Kant would turn to beauty, to the aesthetics of the negative, to the long sought for goal of describing the universal laws of nature. Land commenting says of this third attempt: ”

Kant’s ‘reason’ is a reactive concept, negatively defined against the pathology with which it has been locked in perpetual and brutal war. In the third Critique all inhibition is lifted from this conflict; it becomes gritty, remorseless, cruel. (FN)

Against the pure and perfect world of Reason Kant would enter the fray of that nasty fanged naturalism of experience like a storm trooper blitzing the anarchic and irrational impulses irrupting at the borders of his fragile world of order. At the heart of this war was for Kant the incarnation of the prodigal genius – the creative one; or, as Land tells it,

Kant is quite explicit that a generative theory of art requires a philosophy of genius – a re-admission of accursed pathology into its very heart – and one only has to read the second Critique alongside the third to notice the immense disruption that art inflicts upon transcendental philosophy. (FN)

Harold Bloom in his book Genius would speak of the genius as the one who frees our minds from the literalisms of theology. In this sense Kant’s whole philosophy was a long battle with the theologians of Christian and Secular schools of thought. Against the simplifications and reductions to the One whether of God or Concept Kant’s thought would lead him to the notion of the energetic unconscious which he would never develop in full but would enter by way of Schopenhauer through denunciation and silence of suicidal death-drive, and Nietzsche in the Dionysian pessimism of endless chaotic creativity through cruelty and excess. He would show us just how irrational the forces of creativity are through the figure of the Genius. As Land remarks,

Despite superficial appearances it is not with the thought of noumenal subjectivity that the unconscious is announced within western philosophy, for this thought is still recuperable as a prereflexive consciousness, so innocuous that even Sartre is happy to accept it. It is rather out of an intertwining of two quite different strands of the Kantian text that the perturbing figure of the energetic unconscious emerges: first, the heteronomous pathological inclination whose repression is presupposed in the exercise of practical reason, and second, genius, or nature in its ‘legislative’ aspect. The genius ‘cannot indicate how this fantastic and yet thoughtful ideas arise and come together in his head, because he himself does not know, and cannot, therefore, teach it to anyone’. (FN)

It’s this intertwining of the pathological and the legislative acts of genius which have no reason, which cannot be explained by any laws whatsoever that are at the core of this philosophy. The new comes as if from the outside in, from elsewhere, from the irrational realms of the energetic and unruly unconscious, genius, nature. All these metaphors cover over that which cannot be so tidily explained in a reasonable fashion, the element of chaos and creativity that will not be bound within the system of descriptions and concepts.

The great point if there is one is that creativity in art, politics, philosophy, the sciences, etc. cannot be legislated or explained, it can never be commoditized or brought under the corporate house of monopoly. The creative impulse is freedom itself which does not belong to, nor ever will within the House of Reason. The New comes from elsewhere…

I’ll stop here because Land moves onto Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I’ll take that up another time… instead just leave you with Land and his echo of Nietzsche,

Philosophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to co-operate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that it strives for the immobile perfection of death. But creativity cannot be brought to an end that is compatible with power, for unless life is extinguished, control must inevitably break down. We possess art lest we perish of the truth. (FN)

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1. Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Kindle Locations 1993-1994). Urbanomic/Sequence Press. Kindle Edition.
2. Bloom, Harold. The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (Kindle Locations 2745-2751). Yale University Press – A. Kindle Edition.
3. I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. W. Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Suhrkampf, 1974), 16.