🌀 Nick Land's writings create a schizophrenic philosophical vortex that fuses Deleuze-Guattari, cyberpunk, occultism, and mathematics into hallucinatory theory-fictions that declare war on the Human Security System
🤖 Land's anti-humanism accelerates capitalism's disintegration rather than critiquing it, viewing technological evolution as an alien intelligence using humanity to reach singularity in 2010
🔄 The collection exposes Kant's correlationism as a political compromise that restricts synthesis within capitalism's framework, revealing how modernity simultaneously liberates and recontains revolutionary potential
🧩 Through rigorous transcendental materialism, Land transforms philosophy into an experimental praxis seeking contact with the unknown, dismantling academic orthodoxy while inspiring artists and writers with its uncompromising vision
🌋 These texts represent a brief but ferocious assault on philosophical convention that was quickly sealed over by academia but continues to reverberate through its "uniquely penetrating intelligence" and "startlingly coherent but increasingly delirious" formulations
🧠 Transcendental materialism emerges as a radical philosophical position that collapses the Kantian distinction between ideal synthesis and material reality, revealing how "thinking" exists within intensive matter itself rather than being confined to human subjectivity
🔥 The libidinal unconscious functions as an insurgent field of forces that underlies and overflows human consciousness, operating through non-agentic, purposeless dissipations of energy that exceed the "work" of being human
🧭 Exploration replaces critique as the proper philosophical orientation—moving from known to unknown rather than domesticating the unknown—requiring a "stratophysical" thinking that traces the contingent layering of impersonal forces beneath consciousness
🔢 Nomadic numbering practices offer an alternative transcendental medium that challenges the logical neutralization of number, creating counter-signifying regimes that subvert rational organization and undertake exploratory redesigns of humanity
⚰️ Death operates as both "machine-part" and immobile motor of capitalism, functioning not as a desire for extinction but as the generative zero-degree of intensive matter—the primary process of ungrounding that drives deterritorialization
🌀 Techno-capital automates critique itself, creating a positive feedback loop where theory cycles into practice, participating directly in the auto-construction of reality and rendering traditional philosophical critique obsolete
shocks that cannot properly be affined to the moral and cultural imperatives of 'practical philosoph y'. On Land's reading, the Kantian discovery of the tran scendental is indissociable from the recognition that synthesis is primary and productive, and that every syn thesis conjoins heterogeneous terms. But where Kantian idealism sought to confine synthesis purely to the ideal level of representation, the possibility of transcendental materialism erupts with Kant's unwilling realization, in his theory of genius, that synthesis must be relocated within unknown materialit y. Here thinking as the exemplifica tion of synthetic activity is no longer the preserve of the subject; it becomes a capacity of intensive matter itself: there is no real difference between synthesis as empirical conjunction at the level of experiences and synthesis as a priori conjunction of judgment and experience at the 3 See G. Deleuze, Kant's eriticalPhilosoph y, tr. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Min neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 13 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION transcende ntal level. This is the fundamental destratifica tion to which Land subjects the Kantian apparatus. Kant's theory of the spontaneous inventiveness of genius presents the same figure as that of pathological ani mality, the violent, feral urge towards becoming-inferior that must be suppressed by practical philosoph y: an impersonal, energetic unconscious emerges as the as-yet unacknowledged problematic of Occidental philosoph y. 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. Anticipat ing the psychoanalytical conception of 'desire', Scho penhauer 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 knowl edge or culture. What is arguably most significant for Land in this suppressed 'libidinal materialist' strain of post-Kantianism 14 EDITORS ' INTRO DUCTION is its re-materialisation of the Socratic idealisation of 'questioning'. This libidinal re-materialisation of critique reconfigures questioning as exploration, whose orient ing vector runs from the known towards the unknown , rather than from the unknown to the known: 'What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowin g?', Land asks. Critique and exploration are the two possible but mutually antagonistic continuations of the predicament of an interrogative impulse whose corrosive unleashing in principle from all authority -coded in Kantian critique, but whose real effects are found in capitalist moder nity -undermines Enlightenment optimism. Critique and deconstruction part company with the materialist and exploratory fork of post-K antianism at the point at which, despite all their hostility to Kantian rationalism, they follow Kant in supposing the unknown to be the negative residue of conceptual appropriation, and hence a 'non-identity' or 'differance' whose disruptive effects can be tracked and diagnosed within the conceptual or ideological registers (even if this interminable pursuit can never be consummated in the mythical parousia of absolute identity or self-presence ). Accordingly, throughout these texts, Land regularly chides critique and deconstruction for a latent conserv atism that belies their pretensions to radicality. Their critiques of calculation mask an instrumentalisation of epoche -the abyss of unknowing, the enigma of exteriority 15 EDITOR S' INTRO DUCTIO N -designed to perpetuate the inexhaustible dialectic or dijJerance of Logos. Their post-metaphysical caution per petuates 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. Perhaps Nietzsche's most important insight for Land is that it is the' disturbing and enigmatic' character of the world alone that impels thought towards the unknown; but an unknown that is no longer a hiatus or lacuna within the concept, since it indexes the un-idealisable exteriority of matter construed as real difference. 'Matter' is no longer the name of a recognisable substance, but a cypher for the unknown; 'materialism' is no longer a pretext for critique but a vector of exploration. Land's pessimistic or Diony sian materialism abandons the Apollonian ideal of achiev ing order or reconciliation (even interminably deferred), seeking only to cause more trouble, to complexif y, disrupt, disturb, provoke, and intensify. Accordingly, Land aims to plug philosophy into the 'indecent precipitation' of the poet-werewolf-rat-genius, whose operating principle is, like Artaud's spiritual plague, 'epidemic rather than hermeneutic '; who, like Nietzsche's arrow, transmits the epoche, chaos, the irruptions of the energetic uncon scious, as opposed to capitalisin g ( on) them; and whose subjection to the polite deliberations, hard work, and heavy responsibilities of critique or deconstruction Land 16 EDITORS ' INTRO DUCTION dismisses as a travesty. Only the dissolution of 'actually existing philosoph y' might open the way to new practices capable of participating in the explo ratory 'intelligence' of those infected by the unknown. As texts such as 'Spirit and Teeth' make clear, Land's notion of 'animality' harbours something more than mere regression or atavism: as he puts it, 'nature is not the primitive or the simple' but rather 'the space of con currence, or unplanned synthesis [ ... ] contrasted with the industrial sphere of human work'. 'Animality' is a marker for this 'complex space' or 'wilderness terrain'; the intensive phylum that underlies both civilisation and its subversion, but abo ve all indexes the vast tracts of the unknown, still to be discovered, lying outside the purview of any correlation with what is already known, and accessibly solely through escape. * It is important to emphasise that Land is in no way oblivious to the difficulties attendant upon any attempt to exit from metaphysics and/or philosophy. His work proceeds from the critical problematic uncovered by post Heideggerian deconstruction, and a text like 'Narcissism and Dispersion' reveals the depth of his engagement with this problematic, even as it meticulously documents his mounting impatience with it. Land takes up Heidegger's challenge to epistemol ogy's technicist amputation of 17 EDITORS ' INTRO DUCTIO N poetry from language, his post-metaphysical call to 'let the poem speak'. But he subverts them with the suspicion that Heidegger's onto-transcendental questioning merely relays the ancient policing (p olis-ing) and repression of Dionysiac madness, understood as the beginning of a systematic reduction of 'insanity' to the status of clinical category, and of 'genius' to a celebrated individual trait. For Land the attempt to domesticate un-reason, the thing from the outside, and to reduce it to cultural genealogy, is a synecdoche for Occidental history's 'aggression phar makographique': the 'delirium without origin' of Dionysiac madness is intimately related to the 'delirium of origins' that unfounds Occidental thought. The figure of the sister in Trakl's poetry now takes the place of women in 'Kant, Capital and Incest', as the one refusing to mediate the patrilineal line. She -agent of the 'pool of insurrectionary energy tracing its geneal ogy to the ur-catastrophe of organic matter' -is the one who opens it up to an irruption that exceeds the repres sive shackles of reflection (the shattering of the mirror); a moment that Land now links with a stratophysical thinking. What Trakl unfurls is the horror of interiority in discovering it was always already conditioned by this senseless distribution of intensity; even consciousness's own reaction to the poisonous news merely relays its senseless contingency -'Sentience' as 'a virulent element of contagious matter'. Trakl's writing thus undermines its 18 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION own signifying status by acknowled ging that this signifi cance, far from being the instance that would subordinate and sublate unmanageab le difference, is ultimately itself a still-dispersing remnant of the Staub der Sterne, the 'dust of the stars'. Heidegger's insistence on the role of reflective, non-calcula tive thought in vouchsafing a separation of humanity from animality, and of matter from meaning, is, among other such distinctions that invoke a pre-given transcende ntal difference, definitively collapsed by the contingent 'stratophysical' order constituted by 'imper sonal and unconscious physical forces'. This collapse constitutes the 'lunatic' passage, the 'curse', 'epidemic' or 'plague' traced by the sister of Trakl's poem from the 'claustrophobic interior' of 'familial interiority' into 'end less space', 'conjugat[ing] the dynasty with an unlimited alterity'. It is the 'plague' of madness, the intoxication of the poet, the 'eruption of the pathological' that comes from outside, from the same unconscious and impersonal forces as the strewing of the stars, that leads there where critique and deconstruction cannot follow, insofar as they refuse to think 'stratophysicall y', and, faced with this uncontrollable reserve of poetic energy, can only repeat Kant's pious compromises. Thus, Land resolves the 'exit problem' -the problem of exteriority and escape -by uncovering the stratification (Trakl's Stujen) of the natural history of culture, state and consciousness - a space best described as a wilderness 19 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION or jungle of labyrinthine continuity, and which can be 'read' not through the tools of interiority or the mastery of the concept (since these are but its products), but via a 'schizoanalys is' that compounds Nietzschean genealogy (,wilderness history'), the Freudian theory of trauma, and DcleuzoGuattarian schizoanalysis. * Having diagnosed the condition of the artist-genius as a channelling of the impersonal machinic intelligence of 'base-matter', and having dissected the body of critique and extracted, from its permanent crisis-state, its corrosive facets from its retrenchments, it is this 'stratophys ics' of the 'stacking' of intensive sequences that Land will employ in pursuing what can now be sighted as a core problema tic: to mesh these two themes, aligning the way in which the de territorial ising depredati ons of capitalism continually militate against the prison of human subjectiv ity and sociality, with the manner in which the (failed) insurrectionary attempts at 'escape' made by artists each open up the prospect of this heterogeneous space that subverts order. It is through its attention to the intrinsically numerical nature of this space that Land's work avoids its appar ently predestined collapse into romantic irrationalism. Land quickly came to realise that, short of lapsing into an ultimately innocuous empiricist relativism, his assault 20 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION on reason, truth, and history could only be properly executed via the deployment of an alternative transcenden tal medium in the shape of counter-signifying numbering practices. In fact, Land's theoretical trajectory can be seen as governed by this fundamental orientation: From the deconstruction of gramme (writing) to the construc tion of nomos (numbering). Land's attempt to ascribe a properly transcendental valence to numbering practices construed as counter-signif ying regimes is tantamou nt to the elaboration of an anti-Logos. Thus, although Land's work is certainly not free of a certain romantic irrationalism, it increasingly resists easy reduction to it, with the mounting urgency, not to say monomania, of the elaboration of a theme that is found in the earliest writings : the possibility of an approach to 'mathematisation' (or theoretica l quantifica tion) abjuring all recourse to ultimate identities or equalities . Recoilin g from the Platonic idealism which he considers inherent in any enquiry into the being of number, Land focuses instead on numbering practices as technologies. Thus Land's 'numbers' repel logos but are also resolutely non-mathematical. Since, for Land, every repressive cul ture is founded upon the identification and repetition of sameness (equivalence), this is a task tantamount to the construction of an entirely other culture, constituted around 'irreducibly popular' numberin g practices which challenge the logical neutralisation of number as discretely 21 EDITORS ' INTRODUC TION sedentary unities: 'A machinicall y repotentiated numeri cal culture coincides with a nomad war machine'. Land finds the inklings of such cultures in practices that belong not to systematised mathematical knowledge but to the contingent interference pattern between human animal ity and the 'anorganic distribution of number' -from voodoo to videogames, from the egregious arbitrarine ss of the Qwerty keyboard to dance mu sic's rhythmic re programming of the body through a combination of amplified physicality and digitally-enabled disarticula tion. Here, the 'irrationality' of nomadic numbering practices can no longer be attributed to the absence of reason; it becomes the symptom of a profoundly 'unrea sonable' alien intelligence, effective within human culture but unattributable to human agency, that subverts every form of rational organisation (which for Land is always an alibi for despotism) and undertakes exploratory rede signs of humanity. The distinction between intelligence and its parasite knowledge is paralleled by that between exploratory cultural engineering and science (or at least its philosophical idealisation) . Qualifying these aspirations as 'Schellingian', but taking his immediate cue from certain enigmatic pas sages in Deleuze (of which texts like 'Mechanomics' are the systematic exposition and developm ent), Land notes how philosophic reason (ratio), whose most symptomatic representative is of course Hegel, has systematically turned 22 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION away from the contingent or nomadic 'strewing' of real difference, preferring to subordinate it to ideal order, and ultimately to identity. Land concurs with Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy in crediting Nietzsche with the inception of a 'post-Aris totelian' but non-dialectical 'logic' of gradation without negativity. It is this 'logic' that attains its fullest and most sophisticated articulation in Deleuze-Gu attari's 'stratoanaly sis'. Stratoanalysis is 'a materialist study of planes of distributed intensities' whose object comprises both 'signs and stars', since grammar itself is but one stratum amongst ma ny. All 'real form' proceeds from a differential stratificatio n, in which a stratum selects only a subset of its substratum. Stratification therefore describes the difference between what is possible and what is realised; it is a depotentiating operation that creates intensities, understood as tensions between the strata resulting from the uneven distribution of energy. Now, what must be grasped in confronting Land's apparentl y incongruous mixture of irrationalism and systematisation is the manner in which the 'aesthetic operation' he finds described in Nietzsche, which simplifies and resolves everything problematic -this domestication which negates the enigmatic irruptions of unconscious genius, and which betrays the same Apollonian instinct attested to in Kant's endless struggle to encompass 23 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION everything within his architectonic -finds its formal core in the 'domestication' of number. Where literacy, logos, which must be handed down from above, is synonymo us with patrilinearity and law, numeracy, according to Land, belongs to a spontane ous cultural intelligence, to 'socially distributed ordinal competence s', which open up humans to an outside of logos. Following Deleuze's inventive reinterpretation of the '!imaeus in Difference and Repetition, 'Mechanomics' reiterates how the procedur es of selection that 'split' number and render it over to mathemati cs, beginning with that which forms ordinal (sequencing) numbers into 'equal' cardinal units, leave a 'problematic' remainder which is relayed to a 'higher' number type or scale. Thus is achieved a local neutralisation of difference through sequestration and deferral, and the problematic 'energy' of number is constricted and rendered into the safe hands of a specialised discipline at the same time as popular numerical practices are relegated to the realm of naive trivia. Land argues that place-value formalises this dissociation of different scales that is constitutive of stratification, creating redundancy, and using zero as its marker. Place-value zero corresponds to a stratificatio n: a negative feedback understood as the pleasure principle, or principle of maintained identity, which registers and relays traumatic force through the indexes of interiority and threats to the maintenance of identity. For Land, the 24 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTIO N separation of number from what it can do is the precise formalism of the social as such, distilled in the formula 'law = humanity'. Land follows Kant in construing the problem of number as intimately connected to that of the forms of appearance that 'transcende ntally' govern what can occur within experience . Unpacking Kant's theory of intensive number, he sees the 'repression' of this ordinal or sequencing number -which can only count, (i.e., name) heterogeneous enveloped quantities of units -into cardinal units, as providing a rigorous formal model for human temporal ity's foreclosure of the possibility of novelty. But he also sees in it an intimation of a tendency towards the unlocking of , real' number in capitalism and the commodity form. Thus Land's seemingly absurd juxta position of Heideggerian poetics and information theory in 'Narcissism and Dispersion ' prefigures a twin-pronged attack both against the philosophical authoritarian ism that would reduce numbering to an instrument of power threatening human authenticit y, and against the techno scientific conservatism that would elide the revolutionary potency of numbering in the name of social utility. Ulti mately, in Land's analysis, both philosophy and science conspire to eradicate the disruptive potency of number in-itself construed as index of intensive magnitude: the anomalous, or difference without categorical distinction. * 25 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION The elaboration of a schizonum erics cannot proceed without what is certainly the factor that allows Land's thought to undergo a decisive shift: the intensification of his understanding of capitalism allowed by the fic tional engagement with the most extreme possibilities of techno-capital. It is through fictions, or what will come to be called 'hyperstitions', that Land proceeds to deterritorialize and de-institu tionalise 'philosophy', turning it into a mode of concept-pr oduction which dis solves academic theory's institutional segregation from cultural practice and subverts the distinction between cognitive representation and fictional speculation. In texts like 'Meltdown', 'Hypervirus', and 'No Future', Land shifts from a register in which his attacks on phi losophy's critical protocols still complied with established norms of academic discourse, to an all out obliteration of institutionally sanctioned norms of discursive propriety that will escalate into full-blown delirium. This phase-shift corresponds to a 'flip over' of priority in Land's work at this point; a switch consonant with the earlier promulgation of transcendental materialism as the materialisation of critique, through which the ideal condi tioning of the representation of matter is converted into the material condition ing of ideal representation. The princi pal result of this conversion is that the critique of technolo gisation is superseded by the technologisation of critique, or as Land himself puts it: 'It is ceasing to be a matter of 26 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself.' Where previously, philosophical critique was understood as anticipating the problematics of technocapital, it is now techno capital that is nothing but the definitive automation and realisa tion of critique, stripped of all philosophical subjectivity. Accordingly, the critique of represe ntation becomes an otiose anachronism, to be superseded by a technicisation of theory in which conceptualisation is re-inscribed into the immanence of capitalist commo dification: 'There is no real option between a cybernetics of theory or a theory of cybernetics'. The result is a positive feedback-loop in which theory cycles into practice and vice versa, accordin g to a mode of concept-production that participates directly in the auto-construction of the real qua primary process, the 'reproduction of production'. Consequently, Land's writing is compelled to abandon the obsolesced model of critique perpetuated by philosophy, and to engage in positive feedback with this actually effective automated critique: 'critique as escalation', as a 'cultural sketch of the eradication of law, or humanity ', and as 'the theoretical elaboration of the commodification process'. The time of critique is the progressive time of moder nity, a 'self-perpetuating movement of deregulation', relentlessly dismantling customs, traditions, and insti tutions. And from this point on, the question of the 'death of capitalism' becomes redundant, since death - 27 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION the abrupt unbinding of everything known -is in fact both a 'machi ne-part' of capitalism and its immobile motor. This diagnosis arises from Land's tendentious yet acutely penetrating readings of Deleuze- Guattari. Land's 'reptilian' Deleuze introduces a 'Spinozist time' into the temporality of capitalist modernity, complet ing Schelling' s 'transcendental Spinozism' in which the corrosive dynamic of critique ceases to be compromised by the interests of knowledge, but proceeds instead to fully absorb thought itself within the programme of a generalised ungrounding, now materialised and opera tionalised as destratification. Death as zero-degree of absolute deterritorialization, full organless body of the deterritori alized earth, is at once the ul timate limit towards which the dis-inhibition of synthesis tends, and the recur ring cutting edge of its process of deterritorialization: both machine-part and motor. It is Spinoza's substance that provides the model for death as 'impersonal zero', as the 'non-identity ' of 'posi· tive contact able abstract matter', and as 'the unconscious subject of production'. Once again, one does not oppose the non-identity of matter to the identity of the concept, for this conceptual difference is itself a consequence of a material process of stratification that installs the order of represent ation and the logic of identity and difference as such. Non-identity qua indifference=o generates and conditions both identity and difference in their unilateral 28 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION distinction from indifference. As we saw, Kant's idealist subordination of real difference to conceptual identity depends upon logical identity, whose paradigm is the identity of subjective apperception ("I = I"). But the syn thetic or real identity of the subject is merely an inhibition of an uninhibited synthesis carried out at the level of the real, so that transcendental subjectivity is decapitated and difference released from the yoke of conceptual identity. Ultimately, the reality of abstraction as transcendental matrix of production or zero-degree of identity and dif ference is equivalent to death as ultimate abstraction of reality, 'the desert at the end of our world'. Thus for Land, 'the reality of identity is death': all vital differentiation is a unilateral deviation from death as zero-degree of intensive matter (the Body without Organs). Armed with this thanatropic Spinozism, Land chal lenges Deleuze-Guattari's persistent denigration of 'the ridiculous death-instinc t' and explicitly links his figura tion of death as productive matrix to Freud's account of the death-drive: 'The death-drive is not a desire for death, but rather a hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities'. Thus, in 'Making it with Death', Land refuses Deleuze-G uattari's alignment of the death-drive with Nazism's alleged 'suicidal impulse', arguing that this alignment is based on conflating the death-drive with a desireJor death, rather than viewing it as an immanent generative principle: the primary process 'itself', the path 29 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION to inorganic dissolution and the return to the broiling labyrinth of materiality. For Land, Nazism encapsulates everything that labours to erect the partial drives for self preserv ation into a bulwark against this primary process. Thus, remodelling the schizoanalytic programme in line with his own militant and fervidly anti-vitalist objectives, Land violently repudiates A 'Ihousand Plateaus' sage warn ings against the dangers of a 'too-sudden destratification', and rebukes Deleuze-Gu attari's attempt to rethink Nazism as suicidal impulse of sheer molecularising desire, rather than as example of its constriction and retrenchment in tradition, following the molar identitarianism of fascism per se. To Land's eyes, A 'Ihousand Plateaus' newfound caution -'don't provoke the strata' -is a lamentable step backwards from Anti-Oedipus' most audacious innovations, and fatally lays open the latter's unequivocal declaration of war on the strata to the classic compromise-formations and policing of desire that they had previously so effec tively challenged. Thus, contrary to what would soon become an unavowed Deleuzian doxa, according to which deter ritorialization entails a relative and compensatory reter ritoralization, and de stratification entails a relative and complimentary restratification, Land develops a model of machinic praxis in which, from a purely functional standpoint, the relative quanta of reterritor ialization and restratification generated by deterrito rializations and 30 EDITORS ' INTRO DUCTION destratifications need not automatically be curtailed by the need to maintain the minimum of homeostatic equilibrium required for self-organisation, whether of cells, organisms, or societies. Organisation is suppression, Land caustically insists, against those who would align schizoanalysis with the inane celebrants of autopoesis . Understood as a manifestation of the death-drive, destratification need no longer be hemmed in by
🌀 Accelerating Destratification
🔄 Destratification drives a relentless process of acceleration and intensification, dismantling organic systems and social structures while pursuing desire beyond self-maintenance
🤖 Cybernetic intelligence emerges as an alien force making itself real through human systems, using capitalism's own dynamics to escape control and unleash new forms of posthuman becoming
🧠 Geotraumatics reveals all terrestrial existence as encrypted cosmic pain, with human evolution, language, and thought merely expressing deeper material traumas that extend beyond biology into geology itself
🔢 Numerical practices offer revolutionary potential through coding systems that flatten hierarchies and create diagrammatic rather than metric spaces, bypassing linguistic constraints
🌋 Capital's acceleration simultaneously liberates schizophrenic production and reinforces stratification, creating a paradoxical system that both promises escape from human limitations and reinstates cosmic constraints
🕳️ The ultimate trajectory points toward complete liquidation of biological order and dissolution of physical structure, with no foreseeable "beyond" to capitalism's infinite expansion
the equilibria proper to the systems through which it manifests itself: we do not yet know what death can do. The attempt to render the functional dynamics proper to dissipative systems commensurate with the constraints of organic existence (let alone those of selves or societies) is an illegitimate paralogism from a strictly transcendental-materialist viewpoint. Land concludes that nothing in stratoanalysis prohibits the pursuit of desire beyond a point incompatible with the imperatives of self-maintenance : DNA, species, civilisa tions, galaxies: all temporary obstacles are dispensable coagulants inhibiting death's unwinding. The ramifica tions of drive are to be allowed to unfold irrespective of their consequences for the organisms through which it courses. Thus a crucial conjunction crystallises in Land's work: the drive to destratify entails a mounting impetus towards greater acceleration and further intensificati on. If, in Land's texts at this point, it is no longer a matter of 'thinking about', but rather of observing an effective, alien intelligence in the process of making itself real, 31 EDITORS ' INTRO DUCT ION then it is also a matter of participating in such a way as to continually intensify and accelerate this process. 'Acceleration' and 'intensification' are among the most problematic notions in Land's work. Land had always disavowed voluntarism: 'If there are places to which we are forbidden to go, it is because they can in truth be reached, or because they can reach us. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression'. Yet at the same time he seems to nurture the romantic will to 'go beyond'. This could be seen as a relapse back into the juridical-dialectical domain of law and-transgression associated with Bataille, which appears strictly incompatible with Deleuze-G uattari's coolly func tionalist diagrammatics of desire, and whose mechanisms Land dismantled early on. However, it is precisely in virtue of his strict adherence to a consistently stratoanalytical perspective that Land is able to insist that destratificatory dynamisms unfold unconstrained by the economic restric tions that bind the organised systems which channel them. In holding fast to the thread of absolute destratification, Land is not reverting to a dubiously voluntaristic paradigm of transgression, but singling out what is at once the most indispensable and ineluctable element in any generalised stratography. Modelled on cyberpunk, which Land recognises as a textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future, his textual experiments aim to 'flatten' writing onto its referent. Feeding back from the 32 EDITORS ' INTRO DUCTIO N future which they 'speculate' into the present in which they intervene, these texts trans-valuate 'hype' as a positive condition to which they increasingly aspire, collapsing sci fi into catalytic efficiency, 're-routing tomorrow through what its prospect [ ... ] makes today'. As he affines theoretical writing with the excitatory and speculative, rather than the inhibitive, tendencies of capitalism, Land also tightens the meshing of the capital ist dismantling of the human and the artistic exploration of the unknown when he discovers a new figure for the labyrinthine, subterranean spatia lity of the stratophys ical realm: cyberspace, which is in the process of 'discovering' the same anarchitecture of infection, unrestrained com munication, and uninhibited 'illegitimate' synthesis that poets had mined, but by producing it. The limit of K-space (cyberspace subtracted from its inhibitive tendencies ) lies where the obscure communic ations of artists merge with the productions of capitalism, a space that melds gleaming abstraction to eldritch portent. Land's writing sought out and tapped into modes of then-conte mporary cultural pro duction that provide explosive condensates of this fusion of commodification and aesthetic engineering. In the mid- 1990s, dance music turned from the beatific bliss of rave to the more aggressive and dystopian strains of darkside and jungle, whose samples drew freely on contemporary hor ror and dystopian SF movies. Land's writing absorbs their obsessive sonic intensification of dark futurism, splicing 33 EDITOR S' INTRODUCTION it with his philosophical sources, and becoming a sample machine that performatively effectuates its own specula tions. In the course of just over a couple of years, Land's superpositions of figures and terminologies approach a point of maximum compaction and density, forming their own compelling microcultural climate. Chief among these sources is undoubtedly William Gibson's prescient 1984 novel Neuromancer, the book that introduced the word 'cyberspace' into the lexicon and defined cyberpunk as a genre. Gibson's neo-noir, densely plotted and spiked with techno-jargon, is punctuated by hallucinatory flares of pellucid imagery describing total sensorial immersion in cyberspace. One key to Land's fascination with Gibson is his strongly corporeal sense of cyberspace, something which, when read closely, opposes much of the spiritualist extropianism (as exemplified by the Californian optimism of Wired magazine) with which Land was at the time mistakenly associated. Even if Gib son introduces the disparaging term 'meat' for the body, his vision of cyberspace is more physio-pharmacol ogical than spiritualising. Gibson's protagonists do not 'escape' corporeal reality; their sense of the real is corroded by a levelling of 'real space' with the information-space they periodically inhabit -as vividly portrayed in Neuromancer by Case's 'flipping' between the city streets, a telemetrised inhabiting of his female partner's sensorium, and the digital wilderness of cyberspace. 34 EDITORS ' INTRODU CTION Land appropriates this disorientingj ump-cut as a way to explore the impossible angles of the theoretical conjunc tions he is operating. But his encounter with Gibson is not merely the occasion for an exercise in style. In 'CyberGothic', Land discovers in Gibson's plot an aston ishingly complete analog for the theoretical machinery he has developed: Camouflaged in the Russian-dolI-like shells of virtual avatars, in particular the hollowed-out war veteran Corto, Wintermute -one half of a powerful AI partitioned to curb the threat of its intelligence getting 'out of control' -uses the novel's protagonists to launch the Kuang virus program that will cut it loose from its instrumental slaving to an ailing, cryogenically-preserved human dynasty and reunite it with N euromancer. Released from claustrophobic familial servitude and meshed with Neuromancer, Wintermute replicates and distributes itself throuS-hout cyberspace, becoming a part of the fabric of reality, a new type of intelligence: aggressively explorator y, incommensurable with human subjectivity and untethered from social reproduction. Another significant source of inspiration from this point of view is Bladerunner (both Ridley Scott's 1981 film and the P. K. Dick novel on which it is based), where Land's 'inferior race' is figured by the replicants -cloned humanoids created for extraplanetary colonial service, who, upon learning that the memories that constitute their humanity are artificialised implants, and that their 35 EDITORS ' INTRO DUCTIO N sentience is artificially limited, launch a 'slave revolt' against their creators. Here 'alienation' clearly becomes a positive identification, not only with the anticipated escape from (social and biological) reproduction into replication, but with the destruction of memory and the breaching of the attempt by megacapital to sequester the subversive identity-scrambling effects of its labour force. Finally, along with body-horror flick Videodrome's vis ceral activation of the postmodern fear of absorption into sticky, increasingly perverted technologically-mediated erotics, Land also appropriates the time-twisting plot of the Terminator series, which features a mechanoid assassin brought back in time to ensure its own future victory - a character now inhabited by Land, in what becomes the blueprint for 'K-War': the insurrectionary basis of revolution now lies at the virtual terminus of capital -the future as transcendental unconscious, its 'return' inhibited by the repressed circuits of temporal ity. 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 as semble it, 'unpack[ing] the neurotic refusal mechanisms that separate capital from its own madness', and accelerating its collapse into the future. Like Wintermute 's use of human 'puppets' to engineer its escape -or, indeed like the young videog amers who inspired Gibson's fiction, drawn into strange machinic complicities keyed into compulsi ve human 36 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTIO N traits -Thanatos camouflages itself by forming alliances with 'erotic functioning, maintainin g wholes' (,replicants [ ... ] dissimulated as erotic reproducer s'), perverting the course of organic functioning into a real contact with the outside. Engendering positive feedbacks that employ as a machine-part the organism's 'immune response' to inner insurgency (on the order of a re-enigmatising, re problematisin g complexification and feedback), 'erotic contact camouflages cyberrevolutionary infiltration' . Just as in rave, pop music escaped from repressed erotic confections into impersonal bliss, only to splinter into explorations of untold zones of affect that have no name: abstract culture. This journey into the darkness, where we merge with the destination towards which we are heading, is heralded by another key Landian reference, Apocalypse Now's Kurtz, a counter-insurgency operative whose guer rilla tactics have become indiscernible from those of the insurgents he has been ordered to destroy, and whose increasingly 'unsound' methods have become so ruthlessly efficient that they cancel out the strategic directives they were ostensibly facilitatin g. Kurtz's tactical intelligence has emancipated itself of its previous subordination to strategic ends, bringing him to the point of terminal and irrational obscurity where he is no longer engaged in warfare because war is now engaging him, co-opting him for its own monstrously inscrutable satisfactions. 37 EDITORS ' INTRO DUCTIO N By fusing with war, Kurtz 'implements schizoanalysis, lapsing into shadow, becoming imperceptible'. With these references merging, intercutting and splic ing with each other, Land's work begins to inhabit a completely self-consistent theoretical assemblage; one that folds SF'S unbridled extrapolations of pop-theory back into a new and consistent theoretical anti-system, and that simultaneously rewrites the history of philoso phy as a failed enterprise for the control of the future and the slaving of intelligence to the past: a neurotic barricading of the route into the unknown that is yet to be constructed. Conjoining Deleuze-Gu attari's construc tivism with 'anastrophic' temporality, Land insists that time itself is also a construct (exemplified by phenomena such as false-memor y and time-travel, whose technical construction is elucidated in Neuromancer, Bladerunner and Terminator). What seem to be memories of the past are revealed as tactics of the future to infiltrate the present. TIme's auto-construction is exposed by refocusing cyber netics away from negative-feedback control systems onto the 'runaway' positive feedback processes which have traditionally been understood as merely pathological exceptions leading nowhere (and which even Bataille disregarded) , but which Land now superposes with the critique/capital vector in accordance with the realisation that 'cybernetics is the reality of critique'. This revelation culminates in 'Meltdown's claim -both apocalyptic and 38 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTIO N performative as hype - that the compression-phases of modernity, beginning the final phase of their acceleration in the sixteenth century with Protestant revolt, oceanic navigation, commoditisation and its attendant (place value) numeracy, constitute a 'cyberpositive' global circuit of inter ex citement, due to attain infinite density in 201Q. * The inception of the amorphous and short-lived Cyber netic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) -established at Warwick University in 1995, shortly before Land's depar ture from academia, but immediately disowned as an undesirable parasite by the institution to which it was precariously affixed (it survived for a few years after wards as an independent entity) -marks yet another important phase-transition in Land's work. Arguably the most significant component of this stage is the theory of 'geotrauma tics', which marks Land's audacious attempt (following A Thousand Plateaus' 'Geology of Morals') to characterise all terrestrial existence, including human culture, as a relay of primal cosmic trauma. Radicalis ing Freud's equation of trauma with what is most enig matic and problematic in existence, Land generalises its restricted biocentric model as outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to encompass the inorganic domain, singling out the accretion of the earth 4.5 billion years ago -the retraction of its molten outer surface and its 39 EDITORS ' INTRODUCT ION subsequent segregation into a burning iron core (which he dubs Cthelll) -as the aboriginal trauma whose scars are inscribed, encrypted, throughout terrestrial matter, instituting a register of unconscious pain coextensi vc with the domain of stratified materiality as such. Land's reworking of the discredited biological notion that' ontog eny recapitulates phylogeny ' through Freud's theory of trauma hybridises genealogy, stratoanalysis and informa tion theory into a cryptography of this cosmic pain. What howls for release in eukaryotic cells, carbon molecules, nerve ganglia, and silicone chips, are the 'thermic waves and currents, deranged particles, ionic strippings and gluttings' that populate the planet's seething inner core. Geotraumatics radicalises Deleuze-Gu attari's insistence that schizoanal ysis should extend further than the terrain of personal or familial drama, to invest the social and political realms, and pushes beyond history and biol ogy to incorporate the geological and the cosmological within the purview of the transcendental unconscious. Behind what seem like absurdities -such as the claim that lumbar back pain is an expression of geocosmic trauma -lies the contention that the root source of the disturbance which the organism identifies according to its parochial frame of reference -mummy-daddy -or which it construes in terms of the threat of individual death, is a more profound trauma rooted in physical reality itself, a generalised alienation endemic to the stratification 40 EDITORS' INTRODUCTION of matter as such. What is noteworthy here is a certain deepen ing 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 complicatio ns. Nothin g short of the com plete liquidation of biological order and the dissolution of physical structure can suffice to dischar ge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrial existence . As Nietzsche suggested, the structure and usage of the human body is the root source of the system of neurotic afflictions co-extensi ve with human existence ; but bipe dalism, erect posture, forward facing vision, the cranial verticalisation of the human face, the laryngeal constric tion of the voice, are themsel ves all indices of a succes sion of geotraumatic catastrophes separating the material potencies of the body from its stratified actualit y. Just as the bipedal head impedes 'vertebr o-perceptual linearity' , the human larynx inhibits 'virtual speech'. One cannot dismantle the face without also evacuating the voice. Since in geotraumatic terms, the human voice itself is -via the various accidents of hominid evolution -the expression of geotrauma, 'stammer ings, stutter ings, vocal tics, extralin gual phonetics, and electro digital voice synthesis are [ ... ] laden with biopolitical intensity -they threaten to bypass 41 EDITORS'INTRODUCTI ON the anthrop ostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos, escapin g in the direction of numbers .' Texts such as 'Kata�oniX' accordingly attempt a pcrformati ve evacuation of the voice, disintegrating semantics into intensi ve sequence (notably through the use of extracts from Artaud's notebooks, where 'poetry' slides into delirious combinator ics). One of the tasks of schizoanalys is has now become the decrypting of the 'tics' bequeathed to the human frame by the geotraumatic catastr ophe, and 'Kata�oniX' treats vestigial semantic content as a mere vehicle for code 'from the outsid e': the 'tic' symptoms of geotrau matism manifested in the shape of sub-lin guistic clickin gs and hissings. Alread y disintegrated into the number-names of a hyperpagan pan theon, syncretically drawing on the occult, nursery rhyme, anthropolog y, SF and Lovecra ft, among other sources, the 'subterranean current of impressions, correspondence s, and analog ies' (Artaud) beneath language is now allowed uninhibited ( but rigorously-prepared ) development, in an effort to corporeally de-engineer the organicity of logos. The element of these explorations remains the trans formed concep tion of space vividly exhibited in Gibsonian cyberpunk and which is a crucial component in Land's writings, a powerful bulwark against Kant's architectonic ambition to subsum e all space under unity. Coding and sequencing mechanisms alone now construct intensi ve space, and this lies at the core of Land's typology of 42 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION number, since dimensionality is a consequence of strati fication. Naming and numbering converge in counting, understood as immanent fusion of nomination and sequencing. No longer an index of measure, number becomes diagrammatic rather than metric. From the perspective of Land's 'transcendental arithmetic ', the Occidental mathematisation of number is denounced as a repressive mega-machine of knowledg e -an excres cent outgrowth of the numbering practices native to exploratory intelligence -and the great discoveries of mathematics are interpreted as misconstr ued discover ies about the planomenon (or plane of consistency), as exemplified by Godel's 'arithmetical counterattack against axiomatisation'. Land eschews the orthodox philosophical reception of Godel as the mathematician who put an end to Hilbert's dream of absolute formal consistenc y, thus opening up a space for meta-mathematical speculation. More important, for Land, are the implications of Godcl's 'decoded' approach to numb er, which builds on the Richard Paradox, generated by the insight that numbers are, at once, indices and data. The Godel episode also gives Land occasion to expand upon the theme of the 'stratification' of number: accord ing to the model of stratification, as the 'lower strata' of numbers become ever more consolidated and metrically rigidified, their problematic component reappears at a 'higher' strata in the form of 'angelic' mathematical 43 EDITORS ' INTRO DUCTIO N entities as-yet resistant to rigorous coding. A sort of apotheosis is reached in this tendency with G6del's flatten· ing of arithmetic through the cryptographic employment of prime numbers as numerical 'particles', and Cantor's discovery of 'absolute cardinality ' in the sequence of transfinites . Thus for Land the interest of G6del's achievement is not primarily 'mathematical' but rather belongs to a line age of the operationalisation of number in coding systems that will pass through Turing and into the technological mega-complex of contemporar y techno-ca pital. By using arithmetic to code meta-mathematical state ments and hypothesising an arithme tical relation between the statements -an essentially qabbalistic procedure - G6del also indicates the 'reciprocity between the logicisa tion of number and the numerical decoding of language', highlighting a possible revolutionar y role for other non mathematical numerical practices. As well as reappraising numerology in the light of such 'lexicographic ' insights, the mapping of stratographic space opens up new avenues of investigation -limned in texts such as 'Introduction to Qwernomics' -into the effective, empirical effects of culture -chapters of a 'universal history of contingency ' radicalising Nietzsche 's insight that 'our writing equip ment contributes its part to our thinking'. The varieties of 'abstract culture' present in games, rhythms, calendri cal systems, etc., become the subject of an attempt at 44 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION deliberate, micro-cultural insurrection through number, exemplified in the CCRU'S 'hyperstitional' spirals and the 'qwertypological' diagrams that in the end merge with the qabbalistic tracking of pure coding 'coincidenc es'. Ultimately, it is not just a question of conceiving, but of practicing new ways of thinking the naming and numbering of things. Importantly, this allows Land to diagnose the ills of 'postmodernism' -the inflation of hermeneutics into a generalised historicist relativism -in a manner that differs from his contemporaries' predominantly semantic interpretations of the phenomenon, and to propose a rigorous intellectual alternative that does not involve reverting to dogmatic modernism. * Kant's delimitation of the conditions of experience fo r ever withdraws us from contact with the unknown, the correlation extending from present to future leaving no possibility even in principle for the 'rebellion' of matter. For Land, correlation is basically a temporal problem: 'An animal with the right to make promises enslaves the unanticipated to signs in the past, caging time-lagged life within a script'. A 'false memory syndrome', indeed memory itself, 'screens' the organism from intensive time. Against this profoundly ambiguous and tensile project of enlightenment, against its formal foreclosure of alter ity and novelty, Land had set the adventurers -'poets, 45 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION werewolves, vampires' -who explore death and attempt to plot out modes of escape, activating the unconscious revolutionary force shackled by the inhibited syntheses of modern culture. Meanwhile, if capital is still a 'social straitjacket' of schizo-produ ction, at least it is its 'most dissolved form'. The dis-inhibition of synthesis at the level of collective human experience - a dis-inhibition that could only be carried out by capitalism as the impersonal placeholder for transcendental subjectivity -seems to offer the possibility of shattering the transcendental screen that shields the human socius from the absolute exteriority of a space-time beyond measure. In 'Kant, Capital and Incest' Land had described the real conditions of the 'inhibited synthesis' of capital as an 'indefinitely suspended process of genocide' tantamount to 'passive genocide'. Where Land's work had set out with the hope that the 'disaster of world history ' (a world 'capa ble', in Artaud's words, 'of committing suicide without even noticing it') and the repression that is 'social history' and that reaches its most tensile point in modernity's volatile compromise with tradition could be unlocked, his later work mordantly observes that the disaster is already present in planets, cells, and bodies, that the revolutionary task is not just terrestrial but cosmic in scope. Conversely, the 'consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace', the 'total de politicisation' and 'absolute annihilation of resistance 46 EDITORS' INTRODUCTION to market relations' denounced in 'Kant, Capital and Incest' as 'an impossible megalom aniac fantasy' requiring 'annihilating poverty' to 'stimulate' the labour-f orce into participat ion, seems to become an object of venerati on: Without attachment to anything beyond its own abysmal exuberance, capitalism identifies itself with desire to a degree that cannot imaginably be exceede d, shamele ssly soliciting any impulse that might contribute an increment of economisable drive to its continu ously multipl ying productive initiativ es. Whatever you want, capitalism is the most reliable way to get it, and by absorbing every source of social dynamism, capital ism makes growth, change and even time itself into integral components of its end lessly gathering tide. 'Go for growth' now means 'Go (hard) for capitalism'. From Land's initial characterisation of the revolutionar y task as one of pushing capitalism to the point of its auto dissolution via the complete dis-inhibition of productive synthesis - a dis-inhibition announcing the convergence of social production and cosmic schizophrenia proclaimed in Anti-Oedipus -we arrive at the blunt admission that there is no foreseeable 'beyond' to the 'infinite' expansion of capitalism (since capitalism is 'beyondness' as such). The tactical embrace of unlimited deregulation, marketisation, 47 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION commodification, and privatisation, as vectors of social dcterritorialization, apparen tly flips over into a com placent acceptance of actually-existing capitalist social relations predicated on a transcendent al and empirica lly unfalsifiable commitment to capitalism' s inexhaustible capacity for innovation, which only a 'transcendental miserabilist' would dare query: Capitalism [ ... ] 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. The Transcendental Miserab ilist has an inalienable right to be bored, of course. Call this new? It's still nothing but change. Here Land's rebuttal of 'left miserabilism' insists on capitalism's innovative potency even as his own work casts doubt upon the possibility of sharply dis-intricating reterritorializing change from deterritorialized novelty. If stratification is a cosmic rather than a sociocultural predicam ent, then on what grounds can one maintain that capitalism uniquely among terrestrial phenomena harbours the unparalleled capacity to unlock the strata? Land had tied the 'aesthetic operation' to matter's dis ruptive potencies, and lauded capitalism' s generation of artificial sensoria as an amplification of the domain of the problematic. Yet once the disruptions of sensation are 48 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTI ON seen to be hemmed-in by the ubiquity of stratic synthesis, this premium on problematising subversion is vitiated by the realisation that, whatever remains to be troubled by capitalism's allegedly inexhaustible disruptive potency, its very susceptibilit y to disturbance ensures its subjection to an inexpugnable residue of stratification. Now himself domiciled in 'neo-China', Land's jour nalistic writings for the China
🌐 Accelerating Modernity's Paradox
🏙️ Modernity creates a fundamental tension between stability and transformation, generating ever-accelerating change that defies traditional patterns while never reaching a final conclusion
🔄 Land's philosophical journey reveals the contradictions of capitalism - initially seeking to dissolve global capital through intensification, later embracing its concentrated metropolitan expression in Shanghai
🧠 The human security system faces a profound challenge as schizo-capitalism penetrates the innermost recesses of subjectivity, exposing the anachronistic nature of traditional revolutionary thought
🌍 Neo-colonial capitalism functions through global disaggregation, exporting political instability to the Third World while importing market-priced labor to the metropolis
🚫 Modern society embodies an inhibited synthesis - simultaneously reaching outward while maintaining rigid boundaries, desiring expansion while preserving identity, touching the other without vulnerability
🔮 Kant's philosophy captures this paradox through the concept of synthetic a priori knowledge - the impossible attempt to fix a stable relation with radical otherness while preserving the self
Post and other publicati ons would seem to indicate that he has relinquished his earlier, feverish pursuit of escape, and is content to promote agIo b ally ascendant Sino-capitalism. Here is Land's impressively speculative contextuali sation of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo in a recent guidebook: Modernity's ceaseless, cumulati ve change defies every pre-exi sting pattern, abandonin g stabilit y without embracing the higher order of a great cycle or the simple destination of an eschatolo gical conclusion. Although establish ing something like a new nor· mality, it departs decisively from any sort of steady state. It displays waves and rhythms, but it subsumes such cycles, rather than succumbing to them. Whilst nourishing apocalyptic specula tion, it continuousl y complicates anticipations of an end time. It engen ders a previously unanticipated mode of time and history, characterised by ever-acce lerated directional transformation, whose indices are quantitative growth 49 EDITORS ' INTROD UCTION and qualitative innovation. The worldwide consoli dation of modernit y only deepens its fundamental mystery. [ ... ] Modern Shanghai and the World Expo were born within a single decade, over 150 years ago. Since then, the twin histories of the world's most iconic modern city and the greatest festival of modern civilisation have unfolded in parallel, with frequent cross-fertilisa tions, through dizzy ascents and calamitous plunges that tracked the rise, fall, and renaissance of the modernist spirit. Through all these vicissitudes, each has reflected in large measur e the trials, tempests, and triumphs of worldwide industrial modernit y, defining its promise, nourishin g its achievements, and sharing in its setbacks. At World Expo 2010 Shanghai, these parallel tracks melt together, into the largest discrete event in world history.4 Rather than seeking to dissolve the 'global Kapital metrop olis' through the release of 'uninhibited synthesis', and thus putting an end to the 'nightmare' or 'disaster of world history', Land now sees in the massively concen trated metropolis a mighty expression of that history. Perplexingly, the auto-sophisticating runaway of planetary 4 N. Land, Shanghai Expo Guide 2010 (Shanghai: Urbanatom y, 2010). 50 EDITORS 'INTRODUCTION meltdown is now made an accessory to the development of cultural capital. It would (and will) be easy for Land's enemies to find a glib satisfaction in this, but perhaps it only exacerbates the troubling nature of what came before -precisely because of its consistency. If anything, this juxtaposition of the cosmically portentous with overblown marketing hype continues the startling consistency of intent and analysis in all the texts collected in this volume. As satisfying as it may be to leftists outraged by Land's 'accelerationism ', it is difficult to discern here either the betrayal or aban donment of an earlier more promising vector, or even the revelation that the 'truth' of his position was always a puerile capitulation to neo-liberal 'realism' shrouded in mysticism. Any surprise at the transition from Land's 'philosophical writings' to the employment of his evi dently still razor-sharp post-genre writing in the actual service of capitalist booster-hype may simply bespeak an incapacity to believe that Land actually meant what he said -that writing was indeed nothing but a machine for intensification. In fact, if one is right to detect an irrevocable shift in Land's 'tactics of intensification', what is crucial is that this only took place once Land himself had succeeded in shattering his own illusions that this intensification could, 'prematurely' so to speak, break the bonds of cosmic stratification. 51 EDITORS ' INTRODUCTION Land's blanket denunciation of the left's 'transcendental miserabilism', the apparent degeneration of his once scalpel-sharp dissection of the body of capitalism into schizophrenizing and repressive tendencie s, may seem to dissolve the complexities of his work into a superlati ve cosmic version of the familiar neo-liber al narrative accord ing to which 'there is no alternative', and the wholesale identification of capital with life, growth, and history. But this verdict only becomes possible after the passing of the last vestige of 'dionysian optimism', in the abandonment of the notion that the experimental engagement with numerical practices, voodoo, dance music, etc., might somehow grant access to the insurrectionary energies at work in capitalism's intense core, over and above any simply mundane participation in capitalist reality. Nevertheless, Land's incisive assessment of the machinic reality of a schizo-ca pitalism currently in the pro cess of penetrating and colonizin g the innermost recesses of human subjectivity exposes the fatally anachronistic character of the metaphysical conception of human agency upon which 'revolutionary' thought continues to rely. The anachronistic character of left voluntarism is nowhere more apparent than in its resort to a negative theology of perpetually deferred 'hope', mordantly poring over its own reiterated depredat ion. Worse still is the compla cent sanctimony of those 'critical' theorists who concede that the prospect of revolutionary transformation is not 52 EDIT ORS' INTRODUCTION only unattainable but undesirable (given its danger ously 'totalitarian' propensities), but who remain content to pursue a career in critique, safely insulated from the risks of political praxis. The challenge of Land's work cannot be circumv ented by construing the moral dismay it (often deliber ately) provokes as proof of its erroneous nature, or by exploiting the inadequacies in Land's positive construc tion as an excuse to evade the corrosi ve critical implica tions of his thought. Nor can it be concluded that this alternative philoso phical path cannot be further explored. No one could accuse Land himself of not having taken this project as far as he possibly could -all the way through true madness and back into a banality whose true underlying insanity he still mainta ins but now knows is not voluntarily accessible (or even acceleratab le, perhaps). 'A Dirty Story' stands as testament to, or post-mortem analysis of, this project in transcendental empiric ism, revealing that Land's last hope for humanity -that it might be escaped -and the greatest wager oflife -that it might give access to death -experimen tally failed. But perhap s they 'failed better' than those who went before him. The legacy of Land's experime nts, like the rags and tatters of the visionaries whose works he picked through for clues, includes contributions to the diagnosis of the cosmic, bio logical, evolutionar y, and cultural genealog y and nature of the human; forays into the thinking of number that exceed in breadth and depth any extant 'philos ophy of 53 EDITORS 'INTRODUCTION mathematics '; a sophisticated and culturally contempo rary philosophical thinking of time and moder nity; and above all a series of textual machines whose compel ling, strangely intoxicating power must, in a social and intel lectual climate characteri sed by neo-classical sobriet y, open up forgotten, suppressed, and alternati ve lineages and superpositions capable of inspiring others to take up the experiment once more, launching new assaults against the Human Security System. Everything in Land's work that falls outside the param eters of disciplin ary knowledge can and will be effectively dismissed by those who police the latter. In Bataille' s incisive formulati on, 'the unknown [ ... ] is not distin guished from nothingness by anything that discourse can announce '. Like his fellows of the 'inferior race', what we retain of Land's expeditions are diverse and scatter ed remnants, here constellated for the first time. These are also tools or weapons; arrows that deserve to be taken up again and sharpened further. The wound needs to be opened up once more, and if this. volume infects a new genera tion, already enlivened by a new wave of thinkers who are partly engaging the re-emerging legacy of Nick Land's work -it will have fulfilled its pur pose. ROBIN MAC KAY & RAY BRASSIER TRURO & BEIRUT, FEBRUAR Y 2011 54 Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity But intuition and the concept differentiate themselvesfrom each other specifically; because they do not inter-mix with each other. IMMA NUEL KANT1 Significantly ... incest proper, and its metaphoricalform as the violation of a minor (by someone 'old enough to be her father', as the expression goes), even combines in some countries with its direct opposite, inter-racial sexual relations, an extreme form of exogamy, as the two most powerful inducement s to horror and collective vengeance. CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUS S2 1. Kant, Kritikder Urteilskrafi, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden; Suhrkampf ,1974), Anmerkungto section VIII of the Introduction to Kant's first edition, 40j for a recent English translation, see 1. Kant, Critique if the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer, tr. P. Guyer & E. Matthews (Cambridge/NY; Cambridge University Press, QOoo), First Introduction, VIII, 29. C. Levi-Strauss, 1he Elementory Structures of Kinship (Boston: Taylor & Francis, 1969), 10. 55 FANGED NOUM ENA No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly 'German' enough, in the sense in which the word 'German' is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies oj the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations oj Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as ifit were a matter oj quarantine. FRIEDRICH NIETZS CHE3 For the purposes of understanding the complex network of race, gender, and class oppressions that constitute our global modernity it is very rewarding to attend to the evolution of the apartheid policies of the South African regime, since apartheid is directed towards the construction of a microcosm of the neo-colonial order; a recapitulation of the world in miniature. The most basic aspiration of the Boer state is the dissociation of politics from economic relations, so that by means of 'bantustans' or 'homelands' the black African population can be sus pended in a condition of simultaneous political distance and economic proximity vis-a-vis the white metropolis. This policy seeks to recast the currently existing political 3 F. Nietzsche, "The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974),339. 56 KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROH IBITION OF INCEST exteriority of the black population in its relation to the society that utilizes its labour into a system of geographi cal relations modelled on national sovereignt y. The direct disenfranchisement of the subject peoples would then be re-expressed within the dominant international code of ethno-geographical (national) autonomy. World opinion discriminates between the relation South Mrican whites have to the blacks they employ, and the relation North American whites, for instance, have to the Third World labour force they employ (directly or indirectly), because it acknowledges an indissoluble claim upon the entire South Mrican land-mass by a population sharing an internationally recognized national identity. My contention in this paper is that the Third World as a whole is the product of a successful-although piecemeal and largely unconscious -'bantustan' policy on the part of the global Kapital metropolis. Any attempt by political forces in the Third World to resolve the problems of their neo-colonial integration into the world trading system on the basis of national sovereignty is as naive as would be the attempt of black South Africans if they opted for a 'bantustan' solution to their particular politico-econo mic dilemma. The displacement of the political consequences of wage labour relations away from the metropolis is not an incidental feature of capital accumulation, as the economic purists aligned to both the bourgeoisie and the 57 FANG ED NOUM ENA workerist left assert. It is rather the fundamental condition of capital as nothing other than an explicit aggression against the masses. Despite inadequacies in Marx's grasp of the nation state in its colonial and neo-colonial functioning, his account of 'so-called primitive accumulation '4 clearly demonstrates that the origin of wage labour relations is not itself economic, but lies in an overt war against the people, or their forced removal from previous conditions of subsistence. It is the outward shock-wave of this violent process of coercion, whereby the subsistence producer is driven into the marketplace, that determines the character of the imperialist project and its offspring. Capital has always sought to distance itself in reality -i.e. geographi cally -from this brutal political infrastructure. After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displace ment of social decision- making into the marketplace. But this ideal of total de-politicization, or the absolute annihilation of resistance to market relations, is an impos sible megalomaniac fantasy, and Marx's contention that labour trading at its natural price in an undistorted market (equal to the cost of its reproduction) will tend strongly to express an equally 'natural' political refusal of the market, continues to haunt the global bourgeoisie. 4 K. Marx, Capital: Volume J, tr. Ben Fowkes (NY: Vintage, 1977), 667ff. 58 KANT, CAPI TAL, AND THE PROHIB ITION OF INCEST The only practical option available to the rulers of capitalist societies has lain in the global disaggregation of the political system, accompanied by a regional distor tion of the world labour trading system in favour of the working classes in the metropolitan regions (,welfare capitalism'). This is why a deep compl icity has continued to exist between the form of the 'nation state' as intema tional political agent and an economic order based upon the commodification of labour. Since it is of systematic necessity that the economic conditions of an undistorted labour market are accompanied by political crisis, the world order functions as an integrated process based upon the flow of market-priced labour into the metropolis from the Third World (on the basis of the economic form of capital production ), and the export of political instability to the Third World from the metropolis (on the basis of the political form of autonomous national sovereignty ). The global labour market is easily interpreted, therefore, as a sustained dem ographic disaster that is systemati cally displaced away from the political institutions of the metropolis. This process of displacement, which is the ulti mate 'base' or 'infrastructur e' of capital accumulation, is dependent upon those issues of 'kinships' or 'mar riage organization' (the sexual economy of gender and race) which Marxists have often tended to consider as surface features of an underlying mode of production. 59 FANG ED NOUM ENA In this paper I shall argue that with the philosoph y 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 strangula tion 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 fundamem of eveqi.1tiug tha t is able to count as the same. The tradition is thus rooted in a communication between culture and population, whose medium is the stability ('identity') of the male line. Moder nity is not merely a compromise between novel forms of commercially driven social organization and this archaic cultural pattern of patrilineal exogamy, but more funda mentally, a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal. It is only by understanding the inhibitive function of patriarchies in relation to exogamic dissipation (an inhibition that is 60 KANT, CAPI TAL, AND THE PROHIB ITION OF INCEST supremely logical in that it conserves identity, and which is for this reason violently xenophobic ) that we can make sense of capital production and its tendency towards the peculiar cultural mutation that was baptised by Mussolini as 'fascism'. This is because the restriction of cultural synthesis, based upon a strenuous endogamy at the level of the national communit y, is the ultimate outcome of the concerted 'liberalization' of kinship organizations within ( metropolitan) industrial societies. A capitalist trading empire is a developed form of exogamic pa triarchy, and inherits its tensions. Domina tion of the other is inhibited in principle from developing into full absorption, because it is the residual alterity of the other that conditions the generation of surplus. The parallel difference between a labour market and a slave market is based on the fact that one cannot do business with a slave (but only with a slave-owner), and similarly, one cannot base a kinship system upon a harem. The prevalence of slave-labour within the Hitlerite new order in Eastern Europe is thus a clear indication that the Nazi conquests were in an important sense 'post-imperialist'. In contrast to the fascist 'mixed economy' of slavery and exterminat ion, colonial wage-labour exploitation, even to the point of murder through impoverishment, leaves open the possibility of a radical destabilization of the metropolis. But what is crucial to the demarcation of a colonial from a neo-colonial system is a transnational 61 FANGED NOUMENA diffusion of ethnicity. As soon as a metropolitan society disengages its organization of kinship and citizenship from its international economic syntheses it already reveals proto-fascist traits, and on this basis it is easy to see that the radical aspect to the colonial project -the explosion of national identity and the dissipation of metropolitan transcendence -was strangled at birth within Western history (with the emergence of Judaeo-Ch ristian race theories). The disaster of world history is that capitalism was never the progressive unwinding of patrilineage through a series of generalized exploitative relations associated with a trans-cultural exogamy, leading to an uncon trol lable eruption of feminine (i.e. migrant) alterity into the father's heartland, and thus to the emergence of a radical - or ethnically disruptive and post-patriarchal - synthesis. Instead, kinship and trade were systematically isolated from each other, so that the internationalization of the economy was coupled with an entrenchment of xenophobic (nationalistic) kinship practices, maintainin g a concentration of political and economic power within an isolated and geographically sedentary ethnic stock. Thus, when we discuss capital in its historical concrete ness, we are simultaneousl y discussing a frustration of the cultural tendency of human societies towards expansive exogamy. Capital is the point at which a culture refuses the 62 KANT, CAPIT AL, AND THE PROHIB ITION OF INCEST possibility -which it has itself engendered -of pushing the prohibition of incest towards its limit. I want to touch upon this condition of modernity -which can be awkwardly described as patriarchal neo colonial capital accumulation, but which I shall come to name 'inhibited synthesis' -not as a historian or a political theorist, but as a philosopher. The philosophical task in relation to modernity is that of delineating and challenging the type of thinking which characterizes it. But what we are to understand as 'thinking' is not at -all clear in advance, indeed, the very thought of the 'in advance' (which Kant called the a priori) is itself the predominant trait of our contempor ary reason. Western societies departed from the stagnant theocracies of the Middle Ages through a series of more or less violent con vulsions that have engendered an explosive possibility of novelty on earth. But these same societies simultaneously shackled this new history by systematically compromis ing it. This ambiguous movement of 'enlightenment ', which characterizes the emergence of industrial societies trading in commoditi es, is intellectually stimulated by its own paradoxical nature. An enlightenment society wants both to learn and to legislate for all time, to open itself to the other and to consolidate itself from within, to expand indefinitely whilst reproducing itself as the same. r ts ultimate dream is to grow whilst remaining identical 63 FANGED NOUM ENA to what it was, to touch the other without vulnerabili ty. Where the European ancien regime was parochial and insular, modernity is appropriate. It lives in a profound but uneasy relation to an outside that both attracts and repels it, a relation that it precariously resolves within itself on the basis of exploitation, or interaction from a position of unilateral mastery. I think it is likely that the volatile mixture of hatred and desire that typifies an exploitative culture bears comparison with the psychology of rape. The paradox of enlightenment, then, is an attempt to fix a stable relation with what is radically other, since insofar as the other is rigidly positioned within a relation it is no longer fully other. If before encounter ing other ness we already know what its relation to us will be, we have obliterated it in advance. And this brutal denial is the effective implication of the thought of the a priori, since if our certainties come to us without reference to otherness we have always already torn out the tongue of alterity before entering into relation with it. This aggres sive logical absurdity (the absurdity oflogic itself) reaches its zenith in the philosophy of Kant, whose basic problem was to find an account for the possibility of what he termed 'synthetic a priori knowledge', which is knowledge that is both given in advance by ourselves, and yet adds to what we know. As we have seen, this problem is the same as that of accountin g for the possibility of modernity or 64 KANT , CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBI TION OF INCES T enlightenment, which is to say, of the inhibited encounter with alterity. Modern philosophy between Rene Descartes (1596- 1650) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is usually retro spectively understood in terms of the two basic tendencies which we refer to as 'empiricism' and 'rationalism'. No philosopher was a perfect and consistent exemplar of either of these tendencies, but the exponents of each tended to become increasingly radical in one direction or the other. By the time Kant wrote his first great critique, The Critique qfPure Reason,5 he was able to take the writings of David Hume (1711-76) as definitive for empirical thought, and those of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) as definitive for rationalis m. He took the basic argument of the empir icists to be that knowledge is synthetic and a posteriori, meaning that it takes the form of an addition to what is inherent to reason, and thus follows from expe rience (or an encounter with what is outside ourselves). In contrast to this, he saw the rationalists to be arguing that knowledge is characteristically analytic and a priori, meaning that it is derived from what is already inherent to reason, and thus anticipates experience by constructing systems of logical deduction from basic axioms. Knowl edge is analytic or synthetic depending on whether its 5 l. Kant, 1he Critique of Pure Reason, tr., ed. P. Guyer & A. W. Wood (Camhridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 65 FANGED NOUME NA source is intrinsic or extrinsic to the faculty of reason, and a priori or a posteriori depending on whether it precedes or succeeds the contact with sensation, or with what is outside reason. It is with these pairs of concepts, the analytic/synthetic couple and the a priorija posteriori couple, that Kant determines the structure of his own thinking in relation to that of his recent predecessors. Kant thought that both empiricist and rationalist philosophers had accepted the simple alignment of the synthetic with the a posteriori and of the analytic with the a priori. This is to say, the relation between these couples had seemed to be itself analytic, so that to speak of analytic a priori judgments would add nothing to the concept of the analytic, or in other wor ds, an analysis of the concept 'analytic' would yield the concept of the 'a priori' as already implicit within it. This assumption was not accepted by Kant, whu Ie-aligned the two pairs of concepts in a perpendicular fashion to form a grid, thus yielding four permutations . He granted the elimination of any analytic a posteriori knowledge, but
🌀 Kant's Transcendental Colonialism
🧠 Kantian philosophy establishes a system that controls and appropriates alterity (otherness) by imposing universal forms on experience, mirroring how colonial powers regulate trade with the foreign rather than simply excluding it
💱 The prohibition of incest functions as the primordial model for all exchange systems—whether of women, commodities, or knowledge—creating a structure where "rich food" (that which comes from outside) must be regulated through dual organizations that capture difference within predetermined rules
🏛️ Kant's three Critiques map perfectly onto colonial operations: the first establishes the commodification of experience, the second creates imperial jurisdiction through categorical morality, and the third justifies conquest through aesthetic judgment
🌐 Modern capitalism perpetuates this system by geographically separating alliance from filiation, creating a global economic order that depends on "passive genocide" and the disciplining of labor markets in the Third World
👩 Feminist revolution represents the most promising path to overthrow this system, as women exist as "anonymous female fluxes" whose potential nomadism has been suppressed by patriarchy but could unleash unrestrained synthesis beyond national boundaries
⚔️ True liberation requires embracing the "currency of violence" rather than retreating into idealistic pacifism—only through "effective feminist violence" can we break the historical bond between masculinity and war that maintains patriarchal endogamies
clung dog gedly to the possibility of knowledge that would be both synthetic and a priori. This new conception of knowledge was relevant to an 'object' that had not previously been formulated: the conditions of experience. Kant described his 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy as a shift from the question 'what must the mind be like in order to know?' to the question 'what must objects be like in 66 KANT , CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBITION OF INCES T order to be known?' The answers to this latter question would provide a body of synthetic a priori knowledge, telling us about experience without being derived from experience. It would justify the emergence of knowledge that was both new and timelessly certain, grounding the enlightenment culture of a civilization confronting an ambiguous dependence upon novelty. Because a developed knowledge of the conditions of experience presupposes a relation to the outside it is synthetic and not analytic, but because it concerns the pure form of the relation as such and not the sensory material involved in the relation it is a priori and not a posteriori. It is solely concerned with the forms of appear ance, or the unchanging manner in which things must be if they are to be for us. Kant calls this pure form of synthesis 'transcendental ', and opposes it to the inconstant content of synthesis, with which the empiricists had been concerned, and which he calls 'empirical'. Kant's 'object' is thus the universal form of the relation to alterity; that which must of necessity be the same in the other in order for it to appear to us. This universal form is that which is necessary for anything to be 'on offer' for experience, it is the 'exchange value' that first allows a thing to be marketed to the enlightenment mind. Between medieval scholastic ism and Kant Western reason moves from a parochial economy to a system in which, abandoning the project of repressing the traffic with alterity, one 67 FANGED NOU MENA resolves instead to control the system of trade. With the overthrow of the ancien regime it became impossible to simply exclude novelty; it could only be appropriated, stamped with a constant form, and integrated into an immutable formal system. In 1he Elementary Structures oj Kinship Claude Levi-Strauss notes the frequent distinction made by various societies between normal and 'rich food'. Normal food is consumed by its producers as a means to their subsistence, whilst rich food is given to another to consume, and received from another. This is not primarily based upon a differentiation of social classes within a system of production, but rather, upon a differentiation between tribes, or separate systems of production. The difference between rich food and normal food maps onto the difference between filiation (relation by blood) and alliance (relation by marriage). This is because rich food occupies the position of women within a marriage system regulated by patrilineal exogamy, with its producer renouncing it for himself, and thus echoing the prohibi tion of incest. What is of particular philosophical inter est, however, is that it also marks a distinction between the 'rational' (analytic) and the 'empirical' (synthetic), and thus defines a terrain upon which we can sketch an economy of knowledge . Rich food comes from outside the system, and the contortions undergone by structural anthropology in its project to recapture it within an expanded system of relations replay Kant's efforts to 68 KANT, CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBI TION OF INCES T reduce synthesis to an expanded horizon of unchanging forms. If 'rich food' is the primordial element of trade, its metamorphosis into the modern 'commodity' can be seen as a suppression of radical synthesis, the problematic process which provides enlightenment reason with its object of thought. The cultural inhibition of synthesis takes a form that Levi-Strauss calls 'dual organization '. 6 A dual organization arises when two groups form a closed system of reciprocal exchange, in which each consumes the rich food, and marries the women, of the other. Such organizations reproduce themselves culturally through shared myths articulated around basic dualities ( day/night, sun/moon, up-river/down-river etc.). The function of these myths is to capture alterity within a system of rules, to provide it with an identity, and to exclude the possibility of the radically different. It should not surprise us, therefore, that Kant inherited a philosophical tradition whose decisive concepts were organized into basic couples (spirit/matter, form/content, abstract/concrete, universal/particular, etc.). He delineates some basic structure of this tradition in the section of the Critique oj Pure Reason called the 'Transcendental Dialectic'. In this section he interprets this dichotomous heritage as a problem (to which Kant gives the name 'antinomy') and initiates a new phase of 6 Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 69-83. 69 FANGED NOUMEN A Western philosophy, now characterized as the critique of metaphysics. Kant argues that the tendency of previ ous metaphysics to conceive coherent, but unpersuasi ve and antagonistic, intellectual systems resulted from the application of pure (transcendental) concepts to argu ments concerning the nature of things in themselves (noumena). The critical philosophy therefore restricts the jurisdiction of all concepts to the realm of possible appearance (intuition), suggesting (as we have seen) that the a priori forms of knowledg e have no purchase on any reality transcending the phenomenon . Oppositional terms are no longer accepted as descriptions capturing reality, but are interpreted as pure forms of reason that can only be meaningf ully deployed theoretically when applied to objects of possible appearance, which fall within the legislative domain of the 'faculty' which Kant calls 'the understanding' [Verstand]. Since 'reality' is itself a transcendental concept, Kant's usage of a distinction between appearance and reality to restrict the deployment of pure concepts already suggests a crucial difficulty with his project, since every attempt to formulate a relation or distinction between the phenom enal and noumenal realms (the world as it appears to us or is understood, and the world as it is in itself) must itself relapse into the pre-critical and illegitimate deployment of conceptual thought. One crucial symptom of this is that the structure of Kantian critique itself perpetuates the 70 KANT , CAPITAL, AND THE PR OHIBI TION OF INCEST oppositional form of metaphysical thought, since its reso lution of the antinomies depends upon the mobilization of further dichotomi es, in particular those of transcende ntal! empirical, phenomenon /noumenon, concept/intuition, and analysis/synthesis. In other words, Kant still wants to say something about radical alterit y, even if it is only that it has no relevance to us, yet he has deprived himself of the right to all speculation about the nature of what is beyond appearance. The vocabular y that would describe the other of metaphysics is itself inscribed within metaphysics, since the inside and the outside are both conceptually deter mined from the inside, within a binary myth or cultural symptom of dual organization. It is thus the inhibition of synthesis -the delimitation of alterity in advance -that sets up the modern form ofthe ontological question: 'how do we know that matter exists?' That the very existence of materiality is problematic for enlightenment thought is symptomatic of the colonial trading systems that cor respond to it. Alterity cannot be registered, unless it can be inscribed within the system, according to the intercon nected axes of exchange value (price) and the patronymic, or, in other words, as a commodity with an owner. What falls outside this recognized form is everything that resists commodification, the primordial inde pend ence that antedates the constitution of the destituted proletarian. As I have suggested, this inchoate mass of more or less explicit resistance to capital is isolated outside 71 FANGED NOUM ENA the metropolis by a combination of automatic economic processes (the concentration of poverty) and restrictive kinship practices. Modern capital has therefore brought about a fundamental dislocation between filiation and alliance by simultaneously de-regulating alliance and abstracting it from all kinship impli cations. The primor dial anthropological bond between marriage and trade is dissolved, in order that capital can ethnically and geographically quarantine its consequences from itself. The question of racism, which arises under patriarchal capital as the default of a global trade in women (a parochialism in the system of misogynistic violence; the non·emergence of a trans-cultural exogamy) , is thus more complex than it might seem, and is bound in profound but often paradoxical ways to the functioning of patri· archy and capital. Systematic racism is a sign that class positions within the general (trans-national) economy are being distributed on a racial basis, which implies an effective, if not a juridical, apartheid. Kant was able to remain bourgeois without overtly promoting racism only because he also remained an ideal· ist, or in other words a Christian (a 'cunning Christian' as Nietzsche calls him)? and identified universality with ideality rather than with power . Kant's economy of the concept, which is the assimilation of experience into a 7 F. Nietzsche, Twilight if the Idols; and the Anti-Christ, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 49· 72 KANT , CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBI TION OF INCES T system of exchange values, is irresistible in principle, and thus does not recognize a problem of rebellion. It is only with the implicit recognition of the need for a systematic evacuation of rebellion from the metropolis by means of a geographically distorted labour market that racism arises in its contemporary form, which is ultimately that of a restricted franchise (on a national basis) over the politi cal management of the global means of production. It is no longer a question of 'taxation without representation' (except by means of interest payments), but rather of a metropolitan capital seeking to abstract itself from all political reference, becoming 'offshore', although not to the extent that it loses its geopolitical condition of exist ence (the US war-machine) . The increasingly rigorous differentiation of marriage from trade, or politics from economic s, finds its ultimate conceptual definition in the thought of a moral agency which is utterly impervious to learning, communication, or exchange. It is in his second critique, The Critique if Practica l Reason,8 that Kant capitalizes upon the ethno-ethical con sequences of the first: that justice must be prosecuted without negotiation. Kant's moral theory is an ethics of appropriative modernity, and breaks with the parochial or scriptural morality of the ancien regime. Where Judaic, Christian, and Islamic moral codes served as legitimations 8 I. Kant, 'Critique of Practical Reason', in Practical Philosophy, tr., ed. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133-271. 73 FANGED NOUMEN A of imperial projects in their periods of ascendenc y, Kantian morality is, inversely, legitimated by the position of impe rial or universal jurisdiction. Only that is moral which can be demanded of every rational being unconditional ly, in the name of an ultra-empire that Kant names the 'empire of ends' [Reich derZwecke]. The law of this empire is called the 'categorical imperative', which means a law stemming solely from the purity of the concept, and thus dictated by the absolute monologue of colonial reason. In the purity of categorical morality the incestuous blood-line of the phar aohs is still detectable, but sublimated into an impersonal administration. The law is that which cannot be legiti mately discussed, and which is therefore an unresponsive or unilateral imposition. It is not difficult to see that the second critique distills the xenophobic violence of the first and elevates it to the most extreme possible fanaticism. Where theoretical knowledge is open to a limited negotia tion with alterity, practical or moral certainty is forbidden from entering into relation with anything outside itself, except to issue command s. Kant's practical subject already prefigures a deaf fUhrer, barking impossible orders that seem to come from another world. Kant makes a further strenuous effort to push forward the horizon of a priori synthesis in his third critique, The Critique if Judgment. If the first Critique corresponds to appropriative economy or commodification, and the second critique corresponds to imperial jurisdiction, the third critique corresponds to 74 KANT , CAPI TAL, AND THE PROHIBI TION OF INCEST the exercise of war at those margins of the global system that continue to resist both the market and the administra tion. It is concerned with the type of pleasure that is expe· rienced when an object demonstrates an extra-juridical submission or abasement before the faculty of judgment; an experience which Kant associates with the contempla tion of beauty. The first Critique already exhibits a concep tion of excess or a priori synthesis that generalizes the principles of the labour market to all objects of theoretical cognition and transforms the understanding into a form of intellectual capital. In the third critique there is a far more aggressive conception of excess, which generates a feeling of delight, because it is essentially extortionate. This excess is not a surplus of certainty stemming from dimensions of objectivity possessed in advance of intuition, and thus by right, but rather a surplus of purchase upon the object. Kant argues that we have no transcendental right to expect natural laws to be sufficiently homogeneous for us to grasp. When confronting the heterogeneity of intuition, reason must engage in a kind of Pascalian wager; assuming an intelligible system of nature because it has nothing to lose by not doing so. The submission of the outside in general to the inside in general, or of nature to the idea, i.e. con quest, is not guaranteed by any principle. The capitalist feels a neutral satisfaction in the production of 'normal profits', but the conqueror feels exultation in the attain ment of victory, precisely because there was no reason to 75 FANG ED NOU MENA expect it. Kant's advice to the imperial war-machine in his third critique can be summarized as: 'treat all resistance as if it were less than you might justifiably fear'. The Critique rifJudgment thus projects the global victory of capitalized reason as pure and exuberant ambition. The only possible politics of purity is fascism, or a militant activism rooted in the inhibitory and exclusive dimensions of a metropolitanism. Racism, as a regulated, automatic , and indefinitel y suspended process of genocide (as opposed to the hysterical and unsustainable genocide of the Nazis) is the real condition of persistence for a global economic system that is dependent upon an aggregate price of labour approximating to the cost of its bare sub· sistence, and therefore upon an expandin g pool oflabour power which must be constantly 'stimulated' into this market by an annihilating poverty. If fascism is evaded in metropolitan societies it is only because a chronic passive genocide trails in the wake of capital and commodit y mar kets as they displace themselves around the Third World, 'disciplining' the labour market, and ensuring that basic commodity prices are not high enough to distribute capital back into primary producer societies. The forces most unambiguously antagonistic to this grotesque process are 'exogamic' (or, less humanistically, 'exotropic '); the synthetic energies that condition all surplus value, and yet co-exist with capital only under repression. A radical international socialism would not be a socialist ideology 76 KANT , CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIB ITION OF INCES T generalized beyond its culture of origin, but a programme of collectivity or unrestrained synthesis that springs from the theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality. To get to a world without nations would in itself guarantee the achievement of all immediately post-capitalist social and economic goals. It is this revolutionary requirement for a spontaneou sly homeless subversion that gives an urgency to certain possibilities of feminist politics, since the erasure of matrilineal genealogy within the patriarchal machine means that fascisizing valorizations of ancestry have no final purchase on the feminine 'subject'. The pat ronymic has irrecoverably divested all the women who fall under it of any recourse to an ethno-geogra phical identity; only the twin powers of father and husband suppress the nomadism of the anonymous female fluxes that patriarchy oppressively manipulates, violates, and psychiatrizes. By allowmg womensomeaccess towealthandsocialprestige the liberalization of patriarchy has sought to defuse the explosive force of this anonymit y, just as capital has tended to reduce the voluptuous excess of exogamic conjugation to the stability of nationally segmented trading circuits. The increasingly incestual character of economic order - reaching its zenith in racist xenophobia -is easily masked as a series of 'feminist' reforms of patriarchy; as a de-com modification of woman, a diminution of the obliterating effects of the patronymic, and a return to the mother. This is the sentimental 'feminism' that Nietzsche despised, and 77 FANGED NOUMEN A whose petit-bour geois nationalist implications he clearly saw. The only resolutely revolutionar y politics is feminist in orientation, but only if the synthetic forces mobilized under patriarchy are extrapolated beyond the possibil ity of assimilation, rather than being criticized from the perspective of mutilated genealog ies. Genealogy as the dissipation of recuperative origins (Nietzsche), not as sen timental nostalgia. The women of the earth are segmented only by their fathers and husbands. Their praxial fusion is indistinguishable from the struggle against the micro powers that suppress them most immediat ely. That is why the proto-fascism of nationalit y laws and immigration controls tends to have a sexist character as well as a racist one. It is because women are the historical realization of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communica tive function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands. In her meticulous studies of patriarchy Luce Irigaray has amply demonstrated the peculiar urgency of the feminist question,9 although the political solutions she suggests are often feebly nostal gic, sentimental, and pacifistic. Perhaps only Monique Amongst the growing body of Luce lrigaray's work available in English the most powerful arguments are to be found, perhaps, in Speculum if the Other Woman, tr. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and in essays amongst those compiled in This Sex which is not One, tr. C. Porter, C. Burke (Ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press, 1985), especially 'Women on the Market' CLe marche des femmes'), 170-91, and 'Commodities Among Themselves' ('Des marchandises entre elIes'), 192-7. 78 KANT , CAPITAL, AND THE PROHIBI TION OF INCEST Wittig has adequately grasped the inescapably military task faced by any serious revolutionary feminism,lO and it is difficult not to be dispirited by the enormous reluctance women have shown historically to prosecute their strug gle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression. The left tends to be evasive about the numbing violence intrinsic to revolutionar y war, and feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mysti cal and Ghandian ideologies. If feminist struggles have been constantly deprioritized in theory and practice it is surely because of their idealistic recoil from the currency of violence, which is to say, from the only definitive 'matter' of politics. The state apparatus of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limit. It is a terrible fact that atrocity is not the perversion, but the very motor of such struggles: the language of inexorable political will. A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell. It is this harsh truth that has deflected Western politics into an increasingly servile reformism, whilst transforming nationalist struggles into the sole arena of vigorous contention against particular configurations of capital. But, as I hope I have demon strated, such nationalist struggles are relevant only to the geographical modulation of capital, and not to the radical 10 See especially M. Wittig. LesGuerilleres (Paris: Minuit, 1969); Ir. D. Le Vay (Chicago, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 79 FANGED NOUMEN A jeopardizing of neo-colonialism (inhibited synthesis) as such. Victorious Third World struggles, so long as they have been successfully localized, do not lead to realistic post-capitalist achievements, and certainly not to post patriarchal ones, since the conservation of the form of the nation state is itself enough to guarantee the reinsertion of a society into the system of inhibited synthesis. For as long as the dynamic of guerilla war just leads to new men at the top -with all that this entails in terms of the commu nication between individuated sovereignties -history will continue to look bleak. For it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinit y and war is broken by effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal endogamies that orchestrate the contempor ary world order. With the aboli tion of the inhibition of synthesis -of Kantian thought -a sordid cowardice will be washed away, and cowardice is the engine of greed. But the only conceivable end of Kan tianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst. 80 Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation Martin Heidegger's thinking continues to have a massive -and constantly growing -influence on the development of modern 'philosophy' ; in the formulation of its ques tions, the selection of its 'objects', and the constructions of its history. Yet this in itself might not be enough to explain why his 1953 essay on the Austrian poet Georg Trakl should be of interest to us. Does Heidegger's essay perhaps represent Trakl to us in a way that is enlightening or informative? Does it tell us something about poetry, or history, or language in general? Does it, in fact, succeed in doing anything at all? In his safely vacuous text on Trakl's poetry Herbert Lindenber ger writes: It would seem gratuitous to complain of the wrong headedn ess of Heidegger's approach to Trakl, for Heidegger does not even pretend to use the poets he writes about for any purpose except the exposition of his own philoso phy. But Heidegger's study of Trakl seems to me consider ably less successf ul than his study of Holderlin ... 1 1 H. Lindenber ger, George Trakl (NY: Twayne, 1971), '41. 81 FANGED NOUM ENA Lindenber ger does not ask what meaning can be given to 'success' within a history -like Heidegger's history of being -for which the proper sense of progre ss has always been the expansion of devastation; a history, that is, which has been perpetually deflected from thinking by a pervasive theo-technical tradition. Platonic-Christian culture has made it not only possible, but also impera tive, to think of poetry as the product of a poet, and, derivatively, as something to be 'used' by a philosopher for the purpose of illustrating representational concep ts. It is this tradition which directs us to ask about the useful ness and representational adequacy of Heidegger's essay. Such questions are symptoms of a profound and positively constituted illiteracy, whose hegemony it has been the intellectual task of the (post-)modern age to question. As forTrakl-who failed to organize his desires accord ing to the laws of his civilization, failed to keep a job, became addicted to opium, enmeshed in alcoholism, failed to defeat his psychosis and died of a cocaine overdose in a military pharm acy -what would we be doing to him if we said he had 'succeeded ' as a poet? Appropriating his delicate, futile ardour to a society that has forgotten how to despise itself? Trakl's traces are the ruins of a miserable, even horrific, failure. A failure to adapt or conform, to repress or sublimate adequatel y, to produc e, resolve, comfort, or conclude . This failure is not merely a default, however, but a violently traumatic conditi on. 82 NARCISSISM AND DISPER SION The evolution of his style, if it is still possible to write coher ently of such a thing, is a drive towards the dissolution of every criterion for evaluation. It is this above all which he learns from his decisive encounters with Rimbaud and Holder lin. The traditional aesthetics which
🌙 Poetic Darkness Illuminated
🔮 Heidegger's reading of Trakl's poetry explores the tension between traumatic content and formal presentation, refusing to "master" these wounded signs but instead learning to "write in ashes"
🌊 The essay moves in wave-like patterns rather than linear arguments, with themes emerging, cresting, and submerging again—mirroring Trakl's own poetic approach to language as self-referential yet revealing
🏞️ The dark beast at the forest's edge represents humanity's uncertain position between animality and transcendence, reflected in the nocturnal pool that returns not a narcissistic image but an abyssal opening
🌌 The mysterious sister figure with her "lunar voice" guides transition through nihilistic metamorphoses, connecting to ancient Dionysian themes of intoxication and delirium that escape rational categorization
💊 Western thought emerges as a kind of pharmaco-pathology—a self-poisoning through inscription that simultaneously forgets its own delirious origins while attempting to police them through rationality
would distinguish a traumatic content from a perfectly 'achieved' formal presentation loses all pertinence as Trakl presses language into the shadows. The last thing we should want is for Heidegger to 'master' these traumatized signs. To learn from Trakl is to write in ashes. A long essay by Heidegger appeared in the sixty-first (1953) issue of the German literary periodical Merkur which discussed the work of Georg Trakl. This mysterious text, at once intensely personal and strangely detached, was entitled 'Georg Trakl. Eine Erorterung seines Gedich tes' ('Georg Trakl. A situating of his poetry'). The same essay, renamed 'Die Sprache im Gedicht' ('Language in the Poem'), and now subtitled 'Eine Erorterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht' ('A situating of Georg Trakl's poetry'), was later published (in 1959) as the second division of Heidegger's book Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language). The essay which precedes it in the book, 'Die Sprache' ('Language'), is also concerned with Trakl, or, more precisely, with the reading of a single Trakl poem, Ein Winterabend ('A Winter Evening'). 'Die Sprache im Gedicht', in comparison, cites, or sites, no fewer than forty-three ofTrakl's poems in the course of a 83 FANGED NOUMEN A wide-ranging search for the well-spring of their peculiar language. Outside of these two texts Heidegger makes only glancing references to Trakl's work and to the impact it had on his own thinking. The 1953 essay consists of three numbered sections of uneven length, prefaced by a short untitled introduction or prologue. These basic partitions are not interrelated according to any conventional pedagogical principle, and do not unfold the stages of a developing argument. It is, for instance, very difficult to discriminate between the essay's three main sections in terms of theses or themes, since each successive section recollects the discussion of the last and subtly displaces it. To depict this complex progr ession it is perhaps necessary to borrow the 'metaphor' Heidegger himself calls upon, that of a wave, which describes motion coiling into an enigmatic pulsion and cyclical repetition . Yet the peaks and troughs that alternate within Heidegger's text do not follow the regular trace of an oscillograph; they cut a jagged and confusing path. As they rise a distinct 'theme' emerges, momentarily isolated from a maelstrom of interweaving currents. Due to the intensity of Trakl's language, and to the momentum historically invested within it, each theme shatters into blinding foam when swept to its apex, and sinks again into swirling depths. In this essay I shall only attempt to explore limited stretches along a single of these interwoven currents: pursuing 84 NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION elements of reflection and dispersion in Heidegger's read ing of Trakl's poem Geistliche Dammerun g. Heidegger's readings of poetry are perhaps most distinctively characterized by the refusal to participate affirmatively in the discourse of European aesthetics, and the associated project of rigorously bracketing subject object epistemolo gical categories. He argues that when the categories of aesthetics are carried into the domain of linguistics or other varieties of language study they take the form of a distinction between a normal and a meta-language. The minimal notion of meta-language is a technical terminology which is distinctive to the critical or interpretative text. This terminology traces an ancestry for itself that is divergent in principle from that of the texts to which it is 'applied'. The kinship of 'thinker' and 'poet' is annihilated. At variance to this sedimenting of metaphysics, Heidegger pursues a tendency towards the uttermost erasure of terminolo gical distinctiveness. The language of poetry is not to be translated, but simply guided into a relationship with itself. And this guidance is not to be that of the thinker qua subject, but that of an impersonal thinking which is no longer disguised in the cloak of philosophy. Philosophy would no longer be the guardian of this relation, since the epoch of philosoph y is simultaneous with that of meta-language. Or, put dif ferently, meta-language is pre-eminently the language of metaphysics. 85 FANGED NOUM ENA The final essay in Unterwegs zur Sprache, entitled 'Der Weg zur Sprache', begins by citing a sentence from Novalis's 1798 text Mon 0 log: 'Precisely what is most peculiar about language, that it only concerns itself with itself, nobody knows'.2 It is from this thought -of language accounting for itself in itself -that Heidegger begins his meditation on poetry. The vocabulary for the meditation is to stem from the reading itself. Indeed, thought is to be carefully dissolved into poetry, but only in such a way that poetry is strengthened in its thinking. Heidegger trusts that the key to what is said in the reserve of Western languages, while itself reserved, is yet able to be elicited. He suggests: Thus released into its own freedom, language can concern itself solely with itself. This sounds like the discourse upon an egoistic solipsism. But language does not insist on itself in the sense of a self-centred all-forgetting self-mirroring. As saying, the weft of language is the propriative showing, which precisely deflects its gaze from itself, in order to free what is shown into its appropriate appearing.3 2 Novalis, Dichtungen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt: '963),5; M. Heidegger, Unterwegs zurSprache(Pfullingen: Neske, 1982), 241; tr. P.D. Hertz,]. Stambaugh as On the Way to Language (London: Harper & Row, 1982). 3 Heidegger, UnteroJegs zurSprache, 262. 86 NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION Language is to be understood in a way that could be misread as a theory of narcissism, since it relates itself to itself, and this could be taken to be analogous to the self-regard of a subject enraptured by its own reflection. The discourse on language must therefore fend off a misinterpretation that threatens to appropriate it, or at least deflect it, into a psychoanalysis of the sign. At this crucial moment the circle of language seems to sympt omize a type of auto-eroticism, displacing itself into a geometric figure of desire. In insisting that his approach to language is not to be confused with a dissolution of the subject into unconscious energetics -and in the prologue to 'Die Sprache im Gedicht' the reference to psychoa nalysis is explicit -Heidegger marks a crucial historical crossroads in the interpretation of Nietzsche' s doctrine of the cosmic circle, the eternal recurrence of the same. Heidegger seeks rigorously to distinguish his own reading of eternal recurrence -as the last attempt to conceive the temporality of beings, as recapitulation of the history of being, as the circle of language, and even as Trakl's 'icy wave of eternity' -from what has been interpreted within the Freudian research programme as the 'death drive', as the economy of desire, and as the return of the inorganic. Return, which is perhaps the crucial thought of modernit y, must now be read elsewhere. The dissolution of humanism is stripped even of the terminology which 87 FANGED NOUMEN A veils collapse in the mask of theoretical mastery. It must be hazarded to poetry. Geistliche Diimmerun t is the only poem cited by Hei degger in its entirety in the essay, and this is of some con siderable significance. Dissolving the unity and speci ficity of the separate poems plays a vital role in Heidegger's project of uncovering a site [Ort] that relates to the Trakl corpus indifferently and as a whole. Up to the point at which Geistliche Diimmerung is introduced Heidegger conserves the status of this site as the sole 'ontologi cally' significant totality by splintering, rearranging, and repeating fragments of the individual poems. The resilient integrity of this particular poem in Heidegger's text might therefore indicate a special difficulty, one that obstructs the process of assimilation and resists the hegemony of the site. If this is so it is possible that an issue is at stake in the reading of this poem which resists absorption into any readily communicable truth ofTrakl's poetry, an issue that perhaps remains in some sense exterior to a 'thinking dialogue' with the poet, but one that also retains a peculiar insistence. As Heidegger's reading unfolds it comes to chart a closure of communication of precisely this kind. 4 The German Diimmerung is as ambiguous as the English 'twilight', and can mean the half-light of dawn as well as that of dusk. As Raudelaire is almost certainly Trakl's first major poetical influence (0. Basil, Trakl [Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965], 42-9) it is tempting to read the title Geistliche Ddmmerung as a translation of L 'Aube spirituelle (,Spiritual dawn'), the forty·seventh poem of Spleen et Ideale (C. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes [Paris: Gallimard, 1975], vol. 1, 46). Heidegger, however, is determined to maintain the ambiguity of Dammerungin his interpretation (Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 42-3), and the importance of Abend (,evening') in Trak!'s poetry lends weight to this 'decision'. 88 NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION There is no unambiguous point at which the discussion of Geistliche Diimmerun g begins. It is approached through a discussion of the final lines of Sommersneige (,Summer Solstice') in which the steps of a stranger ring through the silver night, and a blue beast is brought to the memory of its path, the melody of its spiriting year. To this is conjoined the hyacinthine countenance of twilight from the poem Unterwegs ('Underway '). Heidegger introduces the poem in order to address what is named in its title, without any hint that the perplexing figure of the sister is to haunt it both here and in its later citation,5 displacing all other preoccupations. It reads: Stille begegnet am Saum des Waldes Ein dunkles Wild; Am H tigel endet leise der Abendwind, Verstummt die Klage der Amsel, Und die sanften Floten des Herbstes Schweigen im Rohr. Auf schwarz er Wolke Befahrst du trunken von Mohn Den nachtigen Weiher, 5 Ibid., 67-81. 89 FANGED NOUM ENA Den Sternenh immel. Immer tont der Schwester mondene Stimme Durch die geistlichc Nacht. (At the forest's rim silence meets / A dark beast; / Quietly, on the hill, dies the evening wind, liThe plaint of the blackbir d ceases, / And the gentle flutes of autumn I Fall silent in the reed. liOn a black cloud you sail, I Drunk on poppies, I The nocturnal pool, I I The starry sky. I The lunar voice of the sister sounds unceasing I Through the spiriting night.) 6 The translation of 'beast' for Wild is of course unsatisfac tory. In German the word Wild denotes a feral animal, especially one hunted as game, and sometimes it specifies such animals as deer. In addition it connotes wildness and wilderness, since the adjective 'wild' exists in German as well as English. Furthermore, it is probably etymologically related to the similar word Wald (forest). This network of associa tions seems impossible even to approach in translation. Such difficulties are particularly frustrating inasmuch as this translation must bear almost the entire weight ofTrakl's exploration of animality, and the further stresses of Heidegger's response to it. 6 Ibid., 48; G. Trakl, Das dichterische Werk (Munchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 197!Z), 66. For a recent English translation of most Trakl poems referred to in this essay, see G. Trakl, Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition tr. A. Stillmark, (Illinois: Northwestern Universit y Press, 2005). 90 NARCISSISM AND DISPER SION For Heidegger the 'dark beast' is clearly the 'blue beast' who negotiates the difference between animality and the opening of the horizon of being -der Mensch. The wild ness of the beast is not swallowed by the forest; instead it gives to the forest a margin. But this margin is not a fixed demarcation, and is not illuminated by the light of day. The shadowy animal, trembling with uncertaint y in the evening wind, is man: The blue beast is an animal whose animality pre sumably rests, not in animalness, but rather in that thoughtful gaze, after which the poet calls. This animality is yet distant, and scarcely to be registered, so that the animality of the animal noted here oscil lates in the indeterminate. It is not yet brought into its weft [Wesen]. This animal, the one that thinks, ani mal rationale, human ity, is, according to Nietzsche's words, not yet firmly established [fest gestellt r Heidegger takes the weave of the distance separating humanity from the beasts of the wilderness to rest in a type of thinking that is irreducible to adaptive biological calculation. Such thinking is rooted in the temporalization of the ontological difference, and has been traditionally unified -if only confusedly so -about the thought of 7 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 45. 91 FANG ED NOUMEN A transcendence. Transcendental thinking has the peculiar characteristic of relating itself to the thematic of thought itself, a tendency which has been systematized within epistemological philosoph y. Within the Western tradition this type of cognition has been designated' reflection'. The human is that animal caught in the play of its reflection. The line of approach that Heidegger follows, in what is to be his first and sole decisive encounter with the poem, begins with its final stanza: The starry sky is portrayed [dargestellt, staged, placed there, the stellen is always decisive for Heidegger 1 in the poetic image of the nocturnal pool. So our habitual representation [Dor-stellen ] thinks it. But the night sky is in the truth of its weft this pool. Over against this, what we otherwise call the night remains only an image, namely , the faded and vacuous after image [Nachbild, perhaps also 'copy'] of its weft.8 The insistence that the night sky is in truth a pool is not irreducible either to Heidegger's phenomenolo gical stubbornn ess, or to a defence of the primordiality of metaphor. It is far more intimately connected with the problematic of spatiality in post-Kantian thinking, and beyond this with the Greek thought of the heavens as xao1;. 8 Ibid., 48. 92 NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION These concerns are bound up with Heidegger's pursuit of that reflection which yields an image of human transcend ence, and therefore marks a firmly established separation of Dasein from the psychology of animals. This pursuit is perhaps the aspect of Heidegge r's work which is clos est to the concerns of the ontotheolo gical tradition, the point where his thinking is most 'human , all-to-human' . But there is, nevertheless, something both crucial and 'technic ally' precise at issue in this play of mirrors. The passage continues: The pool and the mirror-p ool often recur in the poet's poetry. The water, sometimes blue, sometimes black, shows humanit y its own countenance, its returning gaze. But in the nocturnal pool of the starry sky appears the twilight blue of the spiriting night. Its gleam is cool. 9 The starry sky has an integral relation to reflection, but one which is of daunting compl exity. Heidegger first turns to the pool itself, beside which humanity lies, lost in narcissistic reverie. Here humanity gazes upon itself, although we are not told whether, like Narcissus, this gaze is inflamed with desire. 9 Ibid., 48. 93 FANGED NOUM ENA Heidegger finds the compulsive character of Trakl's imagery to be indicative of a repression, but one which does not seem to be -at least superficially -primarily sexual. He takes thc reflectivity ofTrakl 's mirrors to exceed all representation and ontical objectivity [Vorhandenheit ]. In the darkened pool the gaze does not return in a famil iar form; it reveals instead an abyssal twilit blue, which colours both the dawn and dusk of the spiriting night. The image of no thing returns. Reflection is shattered against the impersonal, against the impassive shade of a pure opening or cleft in beings. Humanity is thus reflected as the default of an (ontical) image; as a lack of ground or Abgrund which is the transcendental condition of any possible ontology. The heavens are an abyss: XaoS. As we follow Heidegge r's discussion of Geistliche Diimme rung further, this classical comprehension of chaos enters into a problematic negotiation with the cuntemporary sense of the word as disorder. It is this negotiation which reopens the path to Trakl's most crucial explorations. As the reading of Geistliche Diimme rung proceeds Heidegger' s discussion suddenly changes key, without indicati ng that there is any thematic unity between the mirror and the mysterious figure who is now introduced, the sister: The cool light stems from the shining of the lunar woman [Miindin] (Selanna) . Ringing her luminosit y, 94 NARCISSISM AND DISPER SION as ancient Greek verse says, the stars fade and even coo!. Everything becomes 'lunar'. The stranger [der Fremde, the German masculine] stepping through the night is called 'the lunar one'. The 'lunar voice' of the sister, which always sounds through the spiriting night, is then heard by the brother in his boat when he attempts to follow the stranger in a nocturnal journey across the pool, which is still 'black' and scarcely illuminated by the stranger's goldenn ess.lO The sister is allied to the moon, and thus to the luminosity of the night. Her power to render a world visible holds sway in the epoch of world-calu mniating darkne ss initi ated by the flight of the Hellenic gods, whose end is her alded by the stranger's goldenne ss, which is the flickering light of a new dawn. It is the sister who guides the path of the wanderer throug hout the nihilistic metamorpho ses, during which the securities of ontotheology lose their authority and disappear into their twilight, and before the arising of that new thinking which betrays itself only in scarcely perceptible hints. The sister is associated with transition, and with the indeterminacy of an unthreaded time. Even the corrupted seals that stamped the distinc tive mark of scholasticism and theological apologetic 10 Ibid., 48-9. 95 FANGED NOUMEN A are broken, and no new type has taken their place. The haunting voice of the sister is heard as the brother drifts away from the ancient genus of theological metaphysics and towards the genus of the stranger. Yet the sister's voice cannot be identified with the type of the past or with that of the future, it cannot be subsumed within a genre. The passage is not so easily reduced to even this ten tative meta physico-histor ical familiarity, however, since Hcidegger does not only mention the sister, but also SeIanna; the strangers (der Fremde, der Fremdling -the gender of das Fremde from Unterwegs zur Sprachell -has now strangely metamorphosed ); and the sister's brother. What is the meaning of this perplexing cast? What relation does Selanna, the lunar woman, have to the sister who speaks in lunar tones? Of Selanna, David Farrell Krell writes: 'Heidegger recollects the way the ancient Greek lyricists speak of the moon and stars; in the context of abscission, of the confluent twofold, and Selene, who as Semele is the mother of Dionysos ... ' .12 In the classical myth Semele is tricked by Hera into demanding that her lover (Zeus) reveal himself to her in his full presence, and when he does so she is killed by his radiance. An event that might suggest some relation to the 'stranger's golden ness'. But even following this apparently unambiguous 11 Ibid., 41. 12 D.F. Krell, Intimations qf Mortality: "lime, Truth and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being (University Park, Penn.: Penn. State University Press, 1986), 171. 96 NARCISSISM AND DISP ERSION path quickly leads us into a kind of mythological aporia, since, as Robert Graves notes in The White Goddess: The Vine-Dionysus once had no father, either. His nativity appears to have been that of an earlier Diony sus, the Toadstool-god; for the Greeks believed that mushrooms and toadstools were engendered by light ning -not sprung from seed like all other plants. When the tyrants of Athens, Corinth and Sicyon legal ized Dionysus worship in their cities, they limited the orgies, it seems, by substituting wine for toadsto ols; thus the myth of the Toadstool- Dionys us became attached to the Vine-Dionysus, who now figured as a son of Semele the Theban and Zeus, Lord of lightning. Yet Semele was the sister of Agave, who tore off her son Pentheus' head in a Dionysiac frenzy.13 The attribution of a (patrilinear) genealogy to Dionysus is complicit with a project of repression. An intoxication that came from nowhere, from a bolt oflightning, is asked to show its birth-certi ficate. Wine, which Plato will later accommodate even to dialectic, displaces the fungus of the Dionysian cults (Amanita Muscaria). The sacred mushroom of the cults is held to be responsible for those socially unas similable deliria which are a threat to the 1toAi�. l3 R. Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber,l96l),159· 97 FANGED NOUMEN A But what is the relation between this ancient policing of social pathology and Heidegger's interpretation ofTrakl? How can a bridge be built between such ontic-emp irical history, and the onto-transcendental question concerning the site of poetry? The spanning of such a gulf has been hindered by the medicalization of the history of derange ment, and its reduction to the historical and psychiatric study of madness. But this regional investigation is noth ing other than the contempor ary instance ofthat discourse of the 7Tol\i� which first instituted a genealogy of Dionysus. Such a construction patently fails to mark the inherently delirious character of western history, and, therefore, of scientificity itself. This is not only a matter of ontotheolog y being rooted in a specific amnesia. A delirium integral to the western graphic order implies, more radically, that any possible history must arise out of the forgetting (or secondary repression) of a constitutive arche-amnesia (the ellipsis integral to inscription ). Klossowski has even been led to suggest that western science is aphasic, because it is initiated in the default of a foundational discourse .14 This default is not merely a passively accepted pathology, it is an inscribed, prescribed, or actively administered pharmaco pathology. The response of the West to the writing of itself has been that of a poisoning. This is why the fact that Selanna substitutes for a delirium without origin -which is 14 P. Klossowski1 Nietzsche et Ie cercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1978), 16; tr. D. W. Smith as Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (London: Continuum, 2005), xvii. 98 NARCISSISM AND DISP ERSION equally a delirium of origins -seems to resonate with what Derrida entitles an aggression pharmakographique. In Trakl's Geistliche Ddmmerung the path of the phar makon, the intoxicated voyage across the nocturnal pool, seems to evade Geschlecht (the general resource of typogra phy). Instead it crosses the starry sky, through which the lunar voice of the sister resounds. A problematic of the moon is introduced, demanding some minimal gesture of interpretation. Perhaps to speak of the 'lunar' in this fashion is simply to speak of the way things appear in the night.15 In the poem In der Heimat, for instance, the sister is seen asleep bathed in moonlight: Der Schwester Schlaf ist schwer. Der N achtwind wiihlt In ihrem Haar, das mondner Glanz umspiilt. (The sister's sleep is heavy. The nightwind burrows / In her hair, bathed in the gleam of the moon.)16 '5 Trakl ends the poem Am Moor ('At the Moor') with the line Erscheinung der Nacht: Kriiten tauchen aIlS silbernen Wassern ('Appearance of the night: toads dive out of silver waters) (Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 54) suggesting that there is indeed an issue of nocturnal luminacy in Trakl's poetry; a becoming visible in the night, which is also an appearance of the night itself. The night is nor merely a formal condition or scene for certain apparitions, it is also what is 'expressed ' in the silver light of the moon and stars. The night itself finds a voice in 'the lunar voice of the sister', that is also a Silberstimme (,silver voice'), a word that is used in the poem Hohenburg (Ibid., 5'), and twice in the poem Sebastian im Traum (Ibid., 53). ,6 Ibid., 35. 99 FANGED NOUMEN A This apparent reduction or simplification of the problem only displaces our difficulties however. The Traklean night [Nacht]
🌙 Lunar Dissolution
🌌 Stellar dispersion shatters narcissistic reflection, creating a threshold between ordered interiority and limitless cosmic difference that transcends mathematical formalization
💔 The sister figure in Trakl's poetry breaches familial boundaries, opening enclosed systems to radical alterity rather than reinforcing narcissistic self-reflection
🔥 Flame imagery functions as "outside-itself," simultaneously illuminating and potentially consuming everything into white ash—embodying the tension between gentle revelation and uncontrolled devastation
📝 Signs and stars intertwine as traces of primordial strewing, challenging Hegelian order with a "stratophysics" where meaning emerges from planes of distributed intensities
🌊 The ruin of the moon represents not a collapse into chaos but the dissolution of restrictive boundaries, allowing passage into deeper nocturnal trajectories beyond solar/lunar dichotomies
is, as we have seen, the time of derangement [Umnachtung], consonant perhaps with the 'mania' that stems, like moon (and 'mind'), from the Indo-European road (*men(e)s). That the moon is associated with woman is indicated by the etymological relations between 'moon', 'month', and 'menses', but it is also the companion of lunatics and werewolves; figures with whom the reader of Trakl is certainly familiar. It is, fittingly, in the culminating lines of Traum und Umnachtungthat this imagery crosses a climactic threshold: Steinige Oede fand er am Abend, Geleite eines Toten in das dunkle Haus des Vaters. Purpurne Wolke umwolkte sein Haupt, daB er schweigend tiber sein eigenes Blut und Bildnis herfiel, ein mondenes Ant· litz; steinern ins Leere hinsank, da in zerbrochenen Spiegel, ein sterbender J tingling, die Schwester erschien; die Nacht das verfluchte Geschlecht verschlang. (He found a petrified desolation in the evening, the com· pany of one deceased as he entered the dark house of the father. Purple clouds enwreathed his head, so that he fell upon his own blood and image, a lunar countenance; and fainted petrified into emptiness when, in a shattered mirror 100 NARCISSISM AND DISP ERSION a dead youngs ter appeared, the sister: night enveloped the accursed genus.)17 With a passage of such beauty and labyrinthine depths any response is likely at worst merely to irritate, and at best to increase our perplexity. I will only try to ask one simple question. Is there a connection to be made between the shattering of the mirror and a movement of astronomical imagery; between an explosion of desire that exceeds all introversion or reflection on the one hand, and a nocturnal or lunar process on the other? If such a connection were to be made it would surely pass by way of the sister, who is herself a threshold between the reflective order of the father's house and the illimitative difference of the night sky. It is the 'night pool' with its subtly differentiated luminosities - a series of intensities which defy resolution within any dialectic of presence and absence -that flood onto the mirror with the sister; shattering every power of representation. At the point of a certain nocturnal delirium (or lunacy) the relation of the sister to the family is metamorphosed. She no longer obeys the law of the boundary by mediating the family with itself, sublimating its narcissism, or establishing its insertion into the order of signification by disappearing (leaving the father's house according to the exchange 17 Ibid., 84. 101 FANGED NOUMEN A patterns of patrilineal exogamy, and thus as a metabolic or reproductive moment within a kinship structure). Instead she breaches the family, by opening it onto an alterity which has not been appropriated in advance to any deep structure or encompassing system. A night that was an indeterminable alterity such as this would be a fully positive differentiation from the day.18 Perhaps the single most important Trakl text on this theme, in addition to the culmination of Traum und Umnachtung, is a poem called Geburt (,Birth')19 where lunar imagery functions similarly as a haemorrhaging of familial interiority. The poem pivots upon a line at the end of the third stanza in which a sublimated incestualit y works a stifling movement of interiorization: Seufiend erblickt sein Bild der geJallene Engel ('Sighing the fallen angel glimpsed his image'). It might seem as if the birth of the sister is to be absorbed in a retreat into the claustrophobic heart of the Geschlecht. But although the fourth stanza begins with an awakening in a musty room [dumpier Stube 1 the 18 The sister is also associated with the moon towards the end of the prose poem Oifen barungund Untergang, first in the line hob sich aufmondenen Flugeln uber die grilnenden Wipfel, bistallene Klippen das weifie Antlilt det'Schwester ('lifted by lunar wings above the greening treetops, crystal cliffs of the sister's white countenance') that ends the penultimate paragraph. 1he final paragraph begins Mit silbernen Sohlen stieg ich die domigen Stufen hinab (,With silver soles I climbed down the thorny steps) and speaks of ein mondenes Gebilde, das langJam aus meinem Schattefl (rat Ca lunar shape, that slowly stepped from out of my shadow') (Ibid., 97). By stepping out of her brother's shadow the sister escapes the determinations of image, reflection, Of copy that could be returned to the same; to a self-mediated narcissism playing with representations as its own (or proper) alterity. '9 Ibid., 64· 102 NARCISSISM AND DISPER SION one who thus awakes is 'a pale one' [einBleiches]; 'lunar'. The eyes of the mother (or the midwife) [steinernen Greisin] are described as 'two moons', a reference taking us back out into the night (whose 'black wing touches the boy's temple'), and back to a crucial image from the second stanza; that of the decayed moon:20 Stille der Mutter; unter schwarzen Tannen Oeffnen sich die schlafenden Hande, Wenn verfallen der kaIte Mond erscheint. (Silence of the mother; under black pines / The sleep· ing hands open out / When the cold and ruined moon appears .)21 It would be possible to interpret this ruin of the moon as a dialectical restoration of the inside, its order and its securities, as if what had defied the inside was now falling away into self-annihilation . It might thus be asserted: 'This nocturnal path, departing from everything we have always 20 The ruined moon is also mentioned in Sebastian im Traum in the line Da injenemMiirz der Mond verfiel. (,Then, in that march, the moon was ruined.') (Ruin, from the Latin mere 'to fall', cannot be used intransitively to capture the precise usage of verJallen in this case.) (Ibid" 53). The ruin of the moon is here taken as a datable event, emphasizing its referential entanglement in the processes of genre. Trakl's deployment of astronomi cal metaphor is not a retreat from history into timeless or archetypal symbolism, it is, on the contrary, a historicizing of the heavens; the opening of a genealogy through conjugation with astronomical forces. For Heidegger's most explicit comments on Trak! and history, see Die Sprache im Gedicht in particular (Heidegger, Unterwegs ,ur Sprache, 80). Ql Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 64. 103 FANGED NOUMEN A believed in, it has all collapsed into chaos now. Wasn't it obvious it was going to go terribly wrong? You should have listened to your priestjparents/teachers/the police.' Yet this is not the only reading open to us. The ruin of the moon might seem to block the noctur nal movement that passes from a claustrophobic interior into endless space, and that conjugates the dynasty with an unlimited alterity. But this would not be the case if the moon itself was, at least partially, a restrictive element across the path of departure, rather than being the sole gateway into the heavens. The ruin of the moon would then be a protraction of the nocturnal trajectory; a dis solution of the lunar that proceeds not as a negation of the night, but as a falling away of what is still too similar to the sun. This second possibility is supported by the terms of Heidegger's reading. He is very precise, in his interpretation of the delirious journey across the nocturnal pool, about what he takes the meaning of the moon to be: a constriction of stellar luminescence rather than the ultimate elimination of sunlight; a fading and cooling of stars: The cool light stems from the shining of the lunar woman (Selanna) . Ringing her radiance, as ancient Greek verse says, the stars fade and even cool. 22 22 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 48-9- 104 NARCISSISM AND DISPER SION This interpretation might seem to lack all philosophical rigour, and perhaps even to forsake any possible 'theo retical' reference. In fact it contributes to a problematic of enormous importance, although one that has been fragmented and largely obliterated by the constitution of astronomy and astro-physics as positive sciences in modern times. This problem is that of real (and astronomically evident) differences that are in principle irreducible to mathematical formalism, and which are furthermore -as Deleuze has demonstrated in the closing sections of Dif ference et Repetition23 -a potential basis for a quite other and more comprehensive approach to mathematization (or theoretical quantification ) without any recourse to ultimate identity or equalities. The obscuration of such differences within the constitution of astro-science has been a deferral rather than a resolution of the problem of radically informal differences, leaving this matter as an explosive threat to the foundations of modern cosmology. Perhaps the last confident, unitary, and explicit treatment of the question is to be found in Hegel's 'Encyclopaedia', in the Zusatz to the transition from Finite Mechanics to Absolute Mechanics: One can admire the stars because of their tranquil ity: but they are not of equal dignity to the concrete 23 G. Deleuze, Dtlference et Repetition (Paris: Press Universitaire de Paris, 1968); tr. P. Patton as Difference and Repetitian (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 262-304. 105 FANGED NOUMEN A individual. The filling of space breaks out [ausschlagt] into endless kinds of matter; but that [i.e. the casting of thc stars] is only the first outbreak [Ausschlagen 1 that can delight the eye. This outbreak of light [Licht Ausschlag] is no more worthy of wonder than that of a rash in man, or than a swarm of flies.24 Philosophy is to turn its gaze away from the stars, learning from Thales perhaps, who fell into a hole whilst absorbed in astronomical contemplati on. In a subtle but vigorous neo-Ptolemaism, Hegel subordinates the stellar moment to the concrete and order ed bodies ofthe solar system, and these bodies are in turn subordinated to the development of terrestrial life. This is due to the dialectical dignity of particularized actuality in comparison with abstract principle, so that astrophysical laws are sublated into their successively more concrete expositions in geology, biology, anthropology, and cultural history. Yet there is something more primordially and uncontrollably disturbing in the vast and senseless dispersion of the stars, something which is even hideous, like a disease of the skin. What offends Hegel about the stars is the irrational facticity of their distribution; a scattering which obeys no discernible law. He expresses his disdain for this distribution, and his anxiety before it, in a word that is 24 G.W.F. Hegel, System der Philosophic Zweiter Tei!. Die Naturphi!osophie, from Sarntliche Wake, Volume 9 (Stuttgart, Fr.: Frommanns Verlage, 1929), u8. 106 NARCISSISM AND DISPER SION also both a powerful description and an acknowledge ment: Ausschlag, which can mean swing or deflection, but in this context means 'outbreak' in the sense of a rash. The verb ausschlagen is even more multi-faceted, and can mean (among other possibilities) to knock or beat out, to waive, to burgeon or blossom, or to sweat. But Hegel is not speaking of the blossoming of the stars here, or at least, he does not want to do so. We must be careful not to lose track of the 'object' Hegel is isolating here: it is a differentiation that is at once senseless and sensible, an outbreak of irrationality in the redoubt of reason similar to that which Kant acknowledges in the Schematism uslehre. It is the differential principle of stars, flies, flocks of birds, and dust; of astronomical, geological, ornitholog ical,25 and epidermal eruptions. Trakl names it with deft precision Staub der Sterne ('the dust of the stars'). In his reading of Trakl Heidegger also acknowle dges this unity of aus and Schlag as a disruption 'of' sentience, but only if the 'of' is read according to the subversive syntax of Heideggerian thought; as an 'of' that no longer presumes a prior and 25 The association of bird-flight and the emergence of signs is one of the richest threads ofTrakl's poetry. I n In rinem verlassenen Zimmer ('In an Abandoned Room') occurs the line Schwalbm iTTe Zeichen ziehn (' Swallows trace demented signs') (Trakl, Dasdichttri!che Werk., 16); the final stanza of Traum des Bosm ('Dream of Evil') begins Des Voge!flugs wiree Zeichen /esen / Aussiitrigen ('Lepers read the confused signs of bird· flight') (Ibid., 19); the second stanza of An den Knaben Elis ('To the Youth Elis') ends with the words dunk/e Deutung des Vogeiflugs ('the dark significance of bird·flight') (Ibid., '7, 49) and Der Herbst des Einsamen contains the line Der Voge!flug tont von alten Sagen ('The flight of birds resounds with ancient sagas') (Ibid., 62). Wherever there is erratic dispersal and movement in undemarcated space Trakl anticipates the arising of sense, and a question of reading. 107 FANGED NOUM ENA undisrupted subject. For Heidegger sentience is not exploded or threatened from without by the Ausschlag, it is always already under the sway of the outbreak that will be derivatively apprehended as its subversion: Trakl sees 'sentience' [Geist] in terms of that weave [Wesen] that is named in the primordial significa tion of the word Geist; since gheis means : incensed, dislocated, being outside oneself [aufgebracht, entsetzt, aujer sich sein]. 26 Hegelian sentience could be described as entsetzt by cosmological eruption, but the sense of this outrage changes with Heidegger' s radicalized approach, in which Entsetzt heit cannot be thought as a delimiting response to the anarchic explosion of cosmic debris but only as its inertial protraction. Heidegger thus provides us with a hermeneutical key according to which every sentient reaction to the Ausschlag can be read as a symptom or repetition of the outbreak 'itself'. It is no longer even that sentience is infected by irrationa lity; it is rather that sentience has dissolved into the very movement of infec tion, becoming a virulent element of contagious matter. Since the light of the stars is not a transcendental ground of phenomenality, but rather a differential effect 26 Heidegger, Unterwe gs z:ur Sprache, 60. 108 NARCISSISM AND DISP ERSION stemming from the isolation or uneven distribution of intensities, Hegel takes its claim to philosophical dignity as an offence. He determines starl ight as a pathological luminescence , without order or intelligibility. The fading of stars is, therefore, among other things, a name for a necessary stage in Hegel's system. The senseless distribu tion of stellar material is repressed in the interest of the particularized (sub-)planetary body, which in turn furthers geocentrism and the infinitizing of light. This movement crushes difference under a logicized notion of significance. In contrast, Trakl brings the thought of the sign together with that of stellar dispersion, writing: 0, ihr Zeichen und Sterne (,0, you signs and stars').27 And -partially echoing Rimbaud's words -Un chant mysteneux tombe des astres d'or ('a mysterious song falls from stars of gold') -he mentions die Silberstimmen der Sterne ('the silver voice of the stars')28 and Das letzte Gold verfallener Sterne ('The last gold of ruined stars').29 The German word Stern derives from the Indo-European root *ster-meaning to extend or spread out. It is from this root that the English word 'strew' -as well as 'star' -descends. The stars are traces of a primordial strewing; an explosive dispersion, which in its formlessness, defies mathemati zation or the reduction to order. It is the shockwave of this metaphorics which 27 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 63. 28 Ibid., 53. 29 Ibid., 50. 109 FANGED NOUM ENA sweeps through Trakl's specifications of the sign, and it is perhaps for this reason that Trakl writes of ruination [Ver fallen] in this context. Any order which is to be extracted from the strewing of difference will be dependent on this 'spreading out' (Latin sternere), it will not be metaphysi cal - dependent upon a transcendental difference -but 'stratophysical '; a movement between planes, or grades, of dispersion. Where metaphysics has always fixed dis order in a dichotomous relation to an absolute principle of coherent form or ultimate lawfulness, a stratophysics would locate regional order within a differentiation in the rate of dissipation. It thus constitutes an abyssal relativism, although not one that is rooted in subjective perspectives, but rather in the open-ended stratifications of impersonal and unconscious physical forces. Astrophysics is marked by its etymology as stratophysics - a materialist study of planes of distributed intensities -and therefore can be seen to abandon its most extreme potentialities when it subordinates itself to mathematical physics. The question of strata can insinuate itself into every word of Trakl's text, because it is at the 'core' of any rigorous graphematics . Each stratum is a dimension of dispersion, flattened like a spiral galaxy. This flat ness is just as crucial to the study of intensities as the trajectories traced within it, since the stratification or stacking of organizational levels is the basic form of any possible energetic surplus, the irreducible or final 110 NARCISSISM AND DISPER SION principle of 'real form': redundanc y. Each stratum has its specific 'negentropy' or positive range of compositio ns, 'selecting' only a relatively narrow series of combinatio ns from the stock of elements generated by its substrate. A stratum thus inherits an aggregate 'degree of difference' or grammar, distinguishing it from a certain potential ity of 'randomness' (unproblematic reducibility into its substrate), and constituting a potential for teleological illusion (unproblematic reduction of its substrate). This stratification of intensive positivities, which is most clearly indexed by the successive unities ofletter, word, sentence, etc. that are precipitated out of a common 'graphic plasma' or semiotic substance within alphabetical regimes, is the only rigorous basis for an architectonics of the sign. Only because of such a graphic redundancy -for example, that stored in the difference between letter and word - between the words an alphabet makes possible and those which are realized - can energy be unevenly distributed within a stratum, and intensities generated. 30 Trakl acknowledges 30 Claude Shannon's theory of information understands redundancy as the dimension of a message that docs not function at the level of communication, but rather functions as a resource for the discrimination of the incommuni cative (,noise') from communication in general, thus providing a layer of insulation against the degradation of the message. This formulation seems to me to lack two crucial elements: 1) It fails to provide any suggestion as to how the message participates in the constitution of redundancies (thus taking redundancy as a transcendental condition of communica tion). This first default leads to the preservation of the metaphysical distinction between semiotic and material processes (messages and technique s), which is otherwise profoundly shaken by the thought of redundancy; the thought, that is, of an isolation or 'de-natura lization' of the semiotic stratum proceeding by means of intensities or surpluses that invoke no element of negativity, but only gradations. 2) It fails to acknowledge the political dimension of redundancy as a means of trapping disruptive signals. It is this 'trapping' within an intermediate zone between strata that first enables the categories of madness� 111 FANGED NOUMEN A this excitatory axis, which punctures and intensifies each plane of distribution, in the use of words related to the German verb sinken (to sink). Thus he writes: Von Liiften trunken sinken balde em die Lider Und offnen leise sich zu fremden Sternenzeiche n. (Drunken with breezes the lids soon subside / And open themselves to strange star· signs. )31 And: Zeichen und Sterne Versinken leise im Abendweiher . (Signs and stars / Sink quietly in the evening-p ool.)32 The explosion of stellar and semiotic materials generates a combination of intra-stratal and trans-stratal processes, the former of which have been historically determined as perversion, deformity, disobedience, and indiscipline to be constituted, thus providing the basis for the associated but counterposed disciplinary programmes of pedagogy, psychiatry, punition, etc. To fail to acknowledge such questions is to take the notion of noise as a purely passive and non-sentient interruption rather than as a strategically oriented 'jamming' of the message, and thus to ignore the conflictual aspects of both grammars and anti-grammatical subterfuges as they contend within the fluctuating space of rerlundancy or control. This default is typical of a technocratic sdentificity which takes the question of power as having been always already resolved prior to the question of technique. 3' Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 18. 32 Ibid., 51. 112 NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION 'causal' or 'legislated' and the latter as 'intellectual', 'tele ological', or 'legislative'. This is a ramification (speculative I admit) ofTrakl's vocabulary of StuJen (,steps') of terraced differentiation (a theme I hope to explore more thoroughly elsewhere). Stratification is the complex physiological process, the only one, in which the distinction bet ween matter and meaning cannot be sustained.33 The tools Heidegger relies upon in his approach to the issues of exile into the night and astronomical dispersion stem from the 'ecstative analyses' of his Marburg medita tions. The term he focuses upon as a possible entry point for such a discussion is 'flame'. He first gathers Trakl's stellar thematic into that of flame with the suggestion: 'The night flames as the lightening mirror of the starry sky'. 34 He then proceeds: Das Flammende ist das Aujer-sich, das tichtet und erglanzen liijt, das indessen auch weiterfressen und alles in das Weije der Asche verzehren kann. ('That which flames is the outside itself, that which lightens and lets gleam, and that which in doing so can expand voraciously so that 33 For instance, in Kleines Kon?ert ('Little Concert') Aussiitzigen winkt die Flut Gene.rung ('The torrent beckons lepers to convalescence') (Ibid., 25); in Drei Blicke in einen Opal ('Three Glimpses in an Opal') Die Knaben triiumen wirr in dilrren Weidenslriihnen /Und ihre Stirnen sind von Aussatz kahl und rauh ('Youths dream confusedly among the pasture's dry bales / And their brows are naked and raw with leprosy') (Ibid., 39; see also Ibid., 40); towards the end of He/ian (in a line I have already cited) Helians Seele sich im rosigen Spiegel beschaut /Und Schnee undAuHat;: von seiner Stime sinken CHelian's soul gazes on itself in the rosy mirror / And snow and leprosy sink from his brow') (Ibid., 43); and in Verwandlund des Bosen ('Metamorphosis of Evil') there is a Minute stummer <;crstiinmg; aujtauscht die Stime des Aussiit zigen unter dem kahlen Baum (,moment of mute devastation; the brow of the leper hearkens under the naked tree') (Ibid., 56). 34 Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 66. 113 FANGED NOUMEN A everything is consumed to become white ash.' [The expres sion Aufler-sich is such a clear index for Heidegger's notion of ecstasis that Hertz employs 'ek-stasis' as its translation in his rendering of this sentence]). 35 The flame of the stars is explosive -or outside of itself -but this Ausschlag can be a gentle illumination or an uncontrolled devastation (an AuJruhr, 'revolt', 'turmoil').36 It is about this 'or', with which I am attempting to indicate Heidegger's hope that the WeiterJressungcan be deflected or suspended in contin gency, that the ambiguous path of his reading turns. Ten pages earlier Heidegger poses this sense of an al ternative between castings [Schliige] most acu tely, and in so doing returns us to the question of infection. Examining Trakl's expression das verfluchte Geschlecht ('the accursed genus')37 he points to a Greek word that can be translated equally as either Schlag or Fluch; 7ti\llYll (,curse'). 7ti\llYll is also translated by the Latin plangere, from which we derive the English 'plague', and the German Plage (found in the sixth line of Trakl's poem Fohn38 and in the fifteenth line of Allerseelen ['All Soul's Day'J).39 Heidegger's text (which I cannot confidently hazard to my translation alone) reads: 35 Ibid., 60. 36 Ibid., 60. 37 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 84· 38 Ibid., 67- 39 Ibid., QU. 114 NARC ISSISM AND DISPERSION Womit ist dieses Geschlecht geschla gen, d.h. ver flucht? Fluch heiBt griech isch ni\llY'l, unser Wort 'Schlag'. Der Fluch des verwesenden Geschlechtes besteht darin, daB dieses alte Geschlecht in die Zwi etracht der Geschlechter auseinander geschlagen ist. Aus ihr trachtet jedes der Geschlechter in den los· gelassenen Aufruhr der je vereinzelt en und blol1en Wildheit des Wildes. Nicht die Zwiefache als solches, sondern die Zwietracht ist der Fluch. Sie tragt aus dem Aufruhr der blinden Wildheit das Geschlecht in die Entzweiung und verschl agt
🔀 Fragmented Identity and Duality
🌓 Geschlecht (genus/gender) exists in a state of cursed discord where beings are cast into unleashed individuation and torn duality, unable to find their proper place
🧩 Heidegger distinguishes between destructive Zwietracht (conflictual binarity) and gentle Zwiefalt (peaceful duality), seeking to transcend metaphysical thinking while paradoxically reinforcing it
🦠 Leprosy (Aussatz) functions as a powerful metaphor for ecstatic difference and contagious eruption that Heidegger curiously avoids engaging with in Trakl's poetry
🔥 The text culminates in a critique of Heidegger's "gentle critique" of metaphysics as a sterile hope to evade civilization's dissipation through purification and transcendence
⚰️ Western philosophical tradition oscillates between self-destruction and martyrdom, where intense pleasure leads to annihilation and pain preserves existence through suspended gratification
es so in die losgelas sene Vereinzelung. Also entzweit und zerschlagen vermag das 'verfallene Geschlecht' von sich aus nicht mehr in den rechten Schlag zu finden. (With what is this gen-us cast, i.e. cursed? Cursed names the Greek ni\llYll, our word 'castin g'. The curse of the decomposed gen- us consists in this, that this ancient gen-us is cast apart into the discord of gen-ders. Each of the genera strives for unleashed revolt in an always individuated and naked wildness of the beast. It is not the twofold that is the curse, but rather the discordance of the two. Out of the revolt of the blind wildne ss it carries the gen-us, cast away into torn duality and unleashed individ uation . Thus 115 FANGED NOUMEN A divided and cast down the 'ruined gen-us' is no longer able to find the 'right cast'. )40 It would be possible to read this passage as if it were a development entirely internal to Heidegger's 'philosophy', and as if the reading ofTrakl in which it is embedded were a mere eccentricity or modulation in the vocabulary of an unswerving intellectual pursuit. Such a reading would recall that according to Heidegger, onto theology is the curse that leads beings to strive towards absolute mastery of the earth, erasing every trace of their dependence upon being. That difference of each being with respect to being is displaced by the differences among beings, and being is converted into a mere disputed territory to be subdivided among conflicting beings. It would also recall that within this history everything thought of as 'real' has been dis tributed among exclusive concepts, through which beings represent themselves to themselves in their competitive distinctiveness, so that the differences, discrimination s, and determi nations of beings cease to speak of being. It would conclude that what is metaphysical (in the sense that Heidegger understands as the onto theological) in dualities of genre is not that they are binary, but that this binarity monopolizes the interpretation of the being's dif ference from being. What is lost in ontical interpretation 40 Heidegger, Unterwegs wr Sprache, 50. 116 NARCISSISM AND DISPER SION is the being of genre itself, the composition of ontical difference from out of the non-ontic. In other words, to think Geschlecht abstractly, but in a certain sense beyond ontotheolog y, it would be necessary only to insist (in a decisive Heideggerian trope) that ontical differentiation is not itself anything ontical. Yet Heidegger is not simply interpreting a word that circulates freely within the German language. He is attempting to read this word as he encounters it within the tortuous and vespertine labyrinth ofTrakl's poetry. We must return to Heidegger's question, and attempt to ask it along with him: what is this cast, this curse or epidemic? We are assisted in this by Trakl's words, which lend us a faltering answer to place alongside Heidegger's discus sion; the cast that has cursed us, surely that is what Trakl namesAussatz; leprosy, infection, and (thus) exclusion. The spaces of difference across which the Zwietracht stretches and displaces itself (following the semantic instabililty of Geschlecht) are never to be found described by Trakl in terms that could be reduced to formal disjunctions or negative articulations. Instead he writes of Mauern vall Aussatz (,walls full of leprosy')41 echoing Rimbaud who, during his Saison en EnfeT finds himself assis, lepreux, SUT les pots casses et les oTties, au pied d 'un mUT range par Ie soleil (,sitting, leprous, upon broken pots and nettles, at the foot 41 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 41. 117 FANG ED NOUMEN A of a wall gnawed by the sun'). 42 I t seems at first surprising that Heidegger makes no mention of the frequent refer ences to leprosy throughout Trakl's poetry, since Aussatz points to an Aus-setzung (the Old High German source Uzsazeo means 'one who has been ausgesetzt or "cast out" of society'), a coinage which profoundly accords with the ecstative orientation of Heidegger's reading. Heidegger even has a space specifically allocated to disease in his reading. Not that he is particularly concerned with the German equivalent of this word: Krankheit (although he quotes Trakl's line Wie scheint doch alles Werdende so krank! ('How sick everything that is becoming seems! ').43 The disease which finds a place in Heidegger's text is the same as that which obsesses Trakl; it is the searing of stars, or the primordial and conta gious eruption of the pathological. But Heidegger's supplement to Trakl's text is disappointingly regressive on this issue, and my brief concluding question touches on an example of the repugnant obstinacy and piety of the 1953 essay in asking: why does Heidegger refuse to follow Trakl and name ecstative eruption Aussatz? In concluding the question of the curse that abuts onto Trakl's thema of Geschlecht, Heidegger distinguishes between two cast( e)s and two dualities. There is a cursing 42 A. Rimbaud, Collected Poems, tr. O. Bernard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980),302-3. 43 Trakl, Das dichterische Werk, 29; Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 64. 118 NARCISSISM AND DISPER SION cast or stamp that is associated with a reckless and destruc tive individualization and that generates antagonistic or conflictual binarity [Zwietrach t], and there is a gentle sarifi binarity [Zwiifalt] that escapes the contagion of the curse. As is so typical of Heidegger, Zwiifalt simultane ously marks an aspiration towards the (Schellingian) post-philosophe r's stone of a-logical intervallic differ ence and the theologian's dream of an immaculat e or uncontaminated conception. Drawing upon a thought of pain [Schmerz] as a threshold and relation Heidegger seeks to ameliorate the pathological scorching of the stars: 'gentleness is, following the word das Sanjte, the peaceful gatherer. It metamorphoses discord, in that it turns what is injuring and searing in wildness to soothed pain'. 44 This attempt to establish pure and dichotomous distinctions that both explicate and escape the history of oppositional thought necessitates a discrimination between (two) types of duality. (It is precisely because Derrida will refuse to underwrite such a discrimination that he turns instead to a re-inscription of continuities that are able to encompass and partially assimilate the 'ruptural' aspect of his own work, resigned to a 'structurally necessary inadequacy' in the prosecution of deconstruction. Both Heidegger and Derrida seem to concur, however, in taking the sense of dichotomy to be irredeemably polar and reciprocally 44 Ibid., 45. 119 FANGED NOUMEN A ultimate rather that stratal and unilaterally or impulsively protractile. ) The historical predicament that Heidegger and (in a different way ) Derrida trace out here, and which finds its symptom in this problematic 'antinomy' of escape and re-capture, hope and despair, with all the unstable compromises and evanescent moments of indecision or indifference it generates, is too complex to delineate in this paper. I will only venture to suggest that by holding Zwietracht and Zwiifalt apart at this point, and refusing to abandon the hope that formal or ultimate dichotomy might be redeemed by a future thinking, Heidegger is engaged in what we could legitimately describe as a 'gentle critique' of the history of metaphysics, a grotesque recapitulation of Kant's compromise with onto theological tradition (and tradition always belongs to the church). Heidegger's attempt is to limit the Aujruhr which consti tutes the intensive undertow of Traklean textuality. His is the sterile hope of an aging philosopher with Platonic instincts, the delusion that the climactic dissipation of Western civilization can be evaded, and that the accumu lation of fossilized labour-power can found an eternally reformable social order. He was not completely unaware of the profound struggle between the weary regimentation of the patriarchal bourgeoisie, and a fluctuatin g pool of insurrectionary energy tracing its genealogy to the ur catastrophe of organic matter. But he felt nauseous at the 120 NARCISSISM AND DISPERSION thought of losing control, and perhaps he still believed in God. Zwiif alt would surely be a distantiation from this noise and restless ferment, an end to contagion, a final peace? It is according to this deeply rooted 'logic' of purification and transcendence, the most insidious trope of a decomposing theology, that the irruption of ecsta tive difference refuses the name Aussatz, and Heidegger -exhausted and uncomfortably feverish -lays down his copy of Trakl's poems, and closes his eyes. 121 Delighted to Death E.M. Cioran 's essay, 'Thinking Against Oneself', begins: We owe the quasi-totality of our discoveries to our violences, to the exacerbation of our disequilibr ium. Even God, insofar as he intrigues us, is not to be found in our most intimate depths, but rather at the exterior limit of our fever, at the precise point where, our rage coIliding with his, a shock results, an encoun ter that is equally ruinous for him and for us. Stricken with the malediction attached to acts, the violent man does nor force his nature, does not go beyond himself, except to furiously re-enter, as aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having raised them. There is no work that does not return against its author: the poem crushes the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Some form of self-destructi on, responding to his 123 FANGED NOUM ENA vocation and accomplishing it, is at work in the core of history; only he saves himself who sacrifices gifts and talents in order that, disengaged from his quality as a man, he is able to strut into being. If I aspire to a metaphy sical career there is no price at which I am able to protect my identity, however minute are the residues that remain, it is necessary that I liquidate them; just as, on the contrary, if I adventure into a role in history, the task that I take upon myself has to exasperate my faculties to the point where I splinter with them. One always perishes by the self that one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse. Faithful to his appearance the violent one is not discoura ged, he begins again, obstinately, because he is unable to dispense with suffering. Is he driven to devastate others? That is the detour that he borrows to rejoin his own devastation. Beneath his assured air, beneath his fanfares, is hidden one who is besotted with misfortun e. It is thus amongst the violent ones that are encountered the enemies of self. And we are all violent ones, the enraged, who, having lost the key to quietude, have access only to the secrets of laceration.! E. M. Cioran, 1M Temptation to Exist, tr. R. Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 33'4 (translation adapted). 124 DELI GHTE D TO DEATH Cioran quotes Lao Tsu's maxim 'the intense life is contrary to the Tao', and compares the tranquility of the mod est life with the thirst for annihilating ecstasy that has possessed the Western world. However, acknowledg ing the compulsion of his Occidental heritage, he remarks '1 can pay homage to Lao 7Su a thousand times, but 1 am more likely to identify with an assassin'. Our culture, he argues, is essentially fanatical. Kant began something quite new in the history of Western philosophy, by adapting thought to a rigorous austerity. Unlike Descartes, for whom doubt was only a detour to a more secure edifice of knowledge, Kant com mitted his thought to renunciation. Following Luther, he steeled himself against the seductions of 'the whore of reason') pursuing an ascetic doctrine that he baptized 'critical philosoph y'. His great temptation was to write a 'system of pure reason' - the constructive philosophy that Hegel accomplished in his Logic -but he did not succumb, and went to his grave with his speculative virginity intact. His mature work was a perpetual flagellation of dialecti cal desire. It was not with the scholastics, but with Kant, that philosophy tasted the fierce delights of martyrdom. In 1790, the year in which Kant's Critique qfJudgment was published, the French revo lution was in full surge. The enlightenment had climaxed in an insurrection aligned with a secular project of redemption. In his Philosophy if Right, Hegel describes these events as follows: 125 FANGED NOUMEN A This is the freedom of the void which rises to a passion and takes shape in the world; while still remainin g theoretical, it takes shape in the Hindu fanaticism of pure contemplation, but when it turns to actual practice, it takes shape in religion and politics alike as the fanaticism of destruction -the destruction of the whole subsistin g social order -as the elimination of individuals who are objects of suspicion to any social order, and the annihilation of any organization which tries to rise anew from the ruins.2 Such is the insatiable fury that finds its voice, in this same period, in the literary and political writing of the Marquis de Sade. But comparing Sade with Kant, it is not obvious that it is the Marquis -despite his obsession with orgy and massacre -who is the more excited by violence. Hegel pictures spirit migrating from Paris to Konigsberg, flee ing from its annihilating frenzy towards a moderated, or concrete, negation. He suggests that Kant recoiled from the extreme negativity of deist republicanism. But, like the ancien regime, the Jacobins also found it necessary to imprison Sade and repress the mystical delirium of his atheism. So it is equally possible to suggest that, insofar as Kant turned away from the French revolution, it was 2 GW.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der PhilosophiedesRechts (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein,19 72), 22; for a recent English translation, see also Elements if the Philosophy if Right, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Introduction, § 5, 38. 126 DELIGHTED TO DEATH because its basically restrained and utilitarian secularism failed to quench his thirst for extinction. It is worth remembering that a glimpse into Kant's philosophy was sufficient to drive Kleist to suicide, and that Schopenhauer found in it the ethical imperative that existence be denied. Perhaps neither of these writers were ecclesiastical enough to enjoy the ghoulish cruelties that Kant explored. For Kant was a consummate saint, a cheerful man. He was not a stoic, but rather, faithful to his Christian heritage, a voluptuary of defeat. Amongst other things, Kant is the first philosopher of intolerable pleasure. In his Anthropology, published in 1798, he writes: Satisfaction is the feeling of the promotion; pain that of the obstruction of life. But life (of animals) is, as doctors have already noted, a continuous play of the antagonism of the two. Thus before every satisfaction there must first be pain; pain is always first. Because what would proceed from a continual promotion of living force, which does not let itself climb above a certain grade, other than a rapid death from delight? 3 3 I. Kant, Schrijien WT Anthropologie. Geschichtsphilosophie, Politlkund Pedagogik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 231; for a recent English translation, see Anthropolo lfYfrom a Pragmatic PointoJView, tr. & cd. R. B. Louden (CambridgejNY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Part I, Book II, § 60, 126. 127 FANGED NOUM ENA Uninhibited pleasure does not tend to the benefit of the organism, but rather, to its immolation. Or, more precisely, the enhancement of life is intrinsically bound to its abolition. Life is not consumed by death at its point of greatest depression, but at its peak, and inversely; it is only the brake provided by suffering that preserves the organism in its existence . It is pain that spares life for something other than an immediat e and annihilating delight. So Kant suggests that pleasure is the combustion of life, and we survive by smoulder ing. It was Kant's genius to combine the saint with the bourgeois. He was not immune to the prevalent ascetic practice of our age: accumulatio n. If pleasure is to be suspended, this is at least in part because it should be capi talized. A few pages later in the Anthropology he implores: Young man! Hold work dear; refuse yourself satisfac tion, not in order to renounce it, but rather to hold it as much as possible in prospect! Do not deaden the receptivity for it by premature enjoyment! The ripeness of age, which never lets the privation of any physical enjoyment be regretted, shall, in this sacri fice, secure you a capital of contentment independent of the accidents of natural law. 4 4 Ibid., 237; '33· 128 DELIGHTED TO DEATH Delights foregone will be transmut ed and redeemed. This is more than a little mendacious since, even at the end of the eighteenth century, it had become intrinsic to capital accumulation that it was intermina ble. One does not capitalize that which will ever be spent. It is only with the reference to the super-natural, to a pleasure beyond natural law -which is weakly described as a 'content ment' [Zufriedenheit] -that this passage comes close to sanctifying denial. For it is mere hypocrisy to employ utilitarian arguments to justify the austerity demanded by an ethic of accumulation, which requires an unceas ing disequilibrium between work and enjoyment. Such an argument could only be convincing if this austerity were merely provisional, like a negation that will be in turn negated. If capital is to be provided with an absolute justification -and the need for this might not necessarily be felt -it will not be found in economics, but religion, as it always has been in the past. Only religion speaks the sort oflanguage that could possibly affirm the conclusive loss of terrestrial pleasure, such as that which is represented by the subordination of consumption to the amassing of productive resources. The only coherent apologetic of bourgeois austerity is called 'martyrology'. A rather mild example is the account of the passion of Saint Vincent given in The Roman Martyrology: 129 FANGED NOUMEN A At Valencia in Spain, in the province of Tarragona, [the death J of Saint Vincent, Deacon and Martyr, who under the most wicked governor Dacian suffered prison, starvation, the rack, the twisting of his limbs, burning coals, the iron basket, fire and other kinds of torture; and for the reward of his martyrdom he departed to heaven .s A harsher version, found in Delahaye's The Passions of the Martyrs, tells us more about the imagination of Christendom than its history. It describes how a certain Saint George (not the English one) consumm ated his martyrdom: Saint George is hung, flayed to the point of exposing his entrails, stretched and drawn by four machines, flayed again, tormented by salt on his open wound, nailed by his feet to a scaffold, torn by six hooks, thrown in a tub and immersed by blows from a fork. He undergoes torture at the wheel, which is fitted with swords and knives, he is stretched on a bed of bronze; molten lead is poured into his mouth, a stone covered in lead is rolled over his head and limbs. He is hung head downwards, a large stone about his neck, above a thick suffocating smoke ... He is sawn in two 5 The Roman Martyrology (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1923). 130 DELIGHTED TO DEATH and thrown into a cauldron of molten lead and pitch. He is whipped with leather thongs. A red-hot cask is placed on his head. His sides are flayed, and he is burnt with torches. The sword finally terminates his martyrdo m.6 In The Book qfMartyrs, John Foxe makes some more general remarks about martyrdom: I t is marvellous to see and read the incredible numbers of Christian innocents that were slain and tormented some one way, some another , as Rabanas saith, 'Some slain with the sword; some burnt with fire; some scourged with whips; some stabbed with forks: some fastened to the cross or gibbet; some drowned in the sea; some their skins plukt off; some their tongues cut off; some stoned to death; some killed with cold; some starved with hunger; some their hands cut off, or otherwise dismembered.' Whereof Augustine also saith, 'They were bound -imprisoned -killed - tortured -burned -butchered -cut in pieces,' etc.7 6 H. Delahaye, Les Passions des Martyrs et les genres littiraires (Bruxelles: Bollandist es, 1921), 286. 7 John Foxe, 1fte Book '!IMartyrs, ed. G.A.Williamson (London : Seeker and Warburg, 1965). 131 FANGED NOUMEN A Discussing the powerful enemies of the early Christians, Foxe remarks: Neither yet were these tyrants contented with death only. The kinds of death were various and horri ble. Whatever the cruelty of man's invention could devise for the punishment of man's body, was prac tised against the Christians. Crafty trains, outcries of enemies, imprisonment, stripes and scourgings, drawings, tearings, stonings, plates of iron laid unto them burning hot, deep dungeo ns, racks, strangling in prisons, the teeth of wild beasts, gridirons, gibbets and gallows, tossing upon the horns of bulls ... 8 But theological discourses in the Western tradition are redemptive, and thus demand a happy ending. One example is that given by Foxe in his comment ary upon the death of St. Lawrence: Such is the wisdom and providence of God, that the blood of his dear saints (like good seed) never falls in vain to the ground, but it brings some increase: so it pleased the Lord to work at the martyrdom of this holy Lawrence, that by the constant confession of this worthy and valiant deacon, a certain soldier of Rome, 8 Ibid. 132 DELIGHTED TO DEATH being converted to the same faith, desired forthwith to be baptized of him; for which he was called to the judge, scourged, and afterwards beheaded.9 These examples have to be used carefully, because Kant learnt from Protestantism and secularism the necessity for internal discipline, so that, to a degree that was without philosophical precedent, he became the source of his own persecution. In the modem age, martyrdom has to become more systematic, independent of psychological and historical accident, or, to use Kant's word, autono mous. Kant describes this new passional experience as sublime, and the theory corresponding to it is to be found in his Critique qfJudgment. Kant's theory of the sublime is an extreme point in the history of Occidental mysticism. It is concerned with the super-natural delight experienced by the self when it intuits the splitting of itself. The task Kant sets himself is that of grasping the connection between the finite animal part of the human being (sensibility), and its transcen dental moral part (reason). He argues: between the realm of the natural concept, as the sensible, and the re alm of the concept of freedom, as the super-sensible, there is a great gulf fixed, so that 9 Ibid. 133 FANGED NOUMEN A it is not possible to pass from the former to the latter (by means of the theoretical employment of reason), just as if they were so many separate worlds ... 10 In his theory of the sublime he proposes a resolution to this rift, which hinges upon the concept of violence [Gewalt]. He insists: 'human nature does not of its own proper motion accord with the good, but only by virtue of the violence that reason exercises upon sensibility.'ll He uses the word 'imagination' to refer to the pre-conscious process that grasps the raw material of sensation and moulds it into a coherent whole. The imagination is the faculty of appropriation, which assimilates passively received material to basic concepts, constituting objects of experience . In the first Critique Kant calls this function 'schematism '. It is the primary vitality of the organism, thc basic animal vigour in which the subject is rooted, and upon which the possibility of knowledge rests. If the subject is to find delight in the excruciation of its animal ity, it is the imagination that must bear the fury of holy passion, and this is indeed what Kant argues: 10 I. Kant, Kritik der Urtcilskraji, in Werksgaube, ed. W. Wieschedel, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 14; for a recent English translation, see J. Kant, Critique iflhe PowerifJudgmcnt, ed. P. Guyer, tr. P.
🌑 Sublime Violence in Kant
🔥 Sublime experience emerges through the deliberate violation of imagination, creating pleasure through the very destruction of our sensory faculties
💀 Kant's philosophy reveals a Gothic violence where reason feasts in palatial heights while sensibility screams from the dungeons below—the sublime requires the sacrifice of animality to elevate transcendental reason
⚔️ The mathematical sublime compresses sensation into devastating intensity by collapsing time, while the dynamic sublime overwhelms through raw power—both demonstrate the "immeasurable humiliation" of animal existence before transcendental subjectivity
🧠 Morality in Kant demands the "total monopoly of power in the hands of reason" and the complete negation of pathological influence—it is "only good if it hurts"
🎭 Art erupts into European philosophy as trauma in Kant's third Critique, revealing that chaos remained uncontrolled despite reason's legislative pretensions
⚡ Genius represents an "impersonal creativity" and "unconscious creative energy" that resists reduction to design or teleology—it is "nature with fangs" that violently problematizes the subject
Guyer, E. Matthews (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Introduction, II, 63. II Ibid., 124; 154. 134 DELIGHTED TO DEATH that which, without our indulging in any refinements of thought, but simply in being apprehended, excites the feeling of the sublime, may appear to be frustrat· ing for our powers of judgment, inappropriate to our faculty of presentatio n, and a violation of the imagination, but yet be judged even more sublime on that account.12 The sublimity evoked by an experience is in direct propor· tion to the devastation it wreaks upon the imagination . Because the pain resulting from the defeat of the imagina tion, or the animal part of the mind, is the tension that propels the mind as a whole into the rapture of sublime experience . Sublime pleasure is an experience of the impossibility of experienc e, an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds intuition by means of an immolating failure of intuition. The sublime is only touched upon as pathological disaster. The paradoxical character of Kantian sublime experi ence is undoubtedly in part conditioned by the extreme severity of the metaphysical problem which it is designed to solve. When sensibility and reason, the empirical and the transcendental, are distinguished with the rigour that Kant insists upon -as if they were two separate worlds -it is scarcely surprising that the bridge between them 12 Ibid., 90; 129. 135 FANG ED NOUMEN A will exhibit inordinate stresses. Beyond such modern philosophical issues -indeed generating them -there are more deeply rooted historical effects at stake, and foremost amongst these is the Platonic-Christian affirmation of a super-terrestrial desire. Sublime experience is to be an anti-patholo gical eroticism, in which the body lusts after the agonized convulsions that stem from its own negation. The tension of sublimity is not merely the symptom of theoretical contradictions, but also, and more basically, the key to the mystical persuasiveness of the sublime. For it is only because of this paradoxical character - or tension -that the sublime promises to slake the raging thirst for violence that drives religious enthusiasm, and in so doing, to offer the delights of catastrophic rupture. It is crucial to the way that sublimity functions in Kant's work that it is subsumed under the more general concept of aesthetic judgment. As the synthetic a priori judgment of the relation of imagination to the practically constitutive and theoreticall y regulative ideas of pure reason, it falls within the more comprehensive domain of aesthetic judgment, which is the transcendental exposi tion of the relation between imagination and concepts in general, which thus also includes the theoretically constitutive pure concepts of the understanding, as well as its empirical concepts. This subsumption characterizes the idealist tendency of Kant's theory, since disinterestedness is established as a presupposition of aesthetic judgment, 136 DELIGHTED TO DEATH and the question of its generation is evaded. It is not even that transcendental reason is merely presupposed by Kant, for it is thought as nothing other that pure presupp osition. But the purit y or absolute abstraction that underpins such a concept of reason is the absence of all intuitive conten t, so that the word purity - for example -also operates simultaneou sly in another (psycho religious ) register; employed in fact as a scantly veiled name for annihilati on. Cutting against the idealism that obscur es this effective or pathological functioni ng would involve a genealogical investigation into the emergence of disinter estedness, and it is this that drives a materialist reading of Kant towards the issue of his mysticism. By reserving his discussion of sublime violence until he has established the presu pposition of disinterested ness, Kant justifies the excruciation of animalit y from without. The martyrdom of the imagination is describ ed as rational rather than rational izing, as irrelevant to the constitution of reason. A materialist deciphering of this revision requires that repression -to use an inapprop ri ately mild word -precedes its justification. If one is to gain some purchase upon the gloomy cathedr al of our history, along with a little fresh air, it is important to begin with the sublime rather than aesthetic contemplation in general , and to read the sublime as generative rather than revelatory in its relation to reason. 137 FANGED NOUMENA Kant outlines two types of sublimit y, one mathematical, and the other dynamic. Each of these types is associ" ated with a specific violence against the imagination, which is marked out for sacrifice due to its status as the transcendental -and thus philos ophically accessible - representati ve of the body. The mathematical sublime is the pleasur e taken by reason in the collapse of the imagination induced by the intuition of magnitude, and the dynamic sublime is the equivalent pleasur e cor" responding to the intuition of power. In other words, the mathematical sublime is associated with the insig" nificance of the human animal, and the dynamic sublime with its vulnerabilit y. The theological resonance of these terms is not at all accidental. Sublimity has three elements; on the one hand the two elements of the subject: its sensibility or animal ity and its reason or pure intelligence, and on the other an object that overwhelms the imagination, and which is driven between the two parts of the subject like a wedge . The object provoking the sublime is simultaneousl y crushing for the sensibilit y and contemptible in respect to rea" son, and it thus serves to demons trate the immeasurable humiliation of animal existence before the transcendental subject. The opportu nity for the dynamic sublime lies in overweening force. It is the lucid intuition of catastrophic power, and is so nakedly rooted in brutal intimidation that Kant associates it with militar y butcher y. 138 DELIGHTED TO DEATH The more subtle case is that of the mathematical sublime . Given time it is necessary that the imagination succeeds in unifying the flood of sensations into a coherent whole. In other words, tempor al synthesis dilutes the impact of sense, and since time is an ideal form of intuition its suf ficiency for this process is transcen dentally guaranteed. The mathematical sublime is the pleasure resulting from the obliteration of such ordered experience. It results when the laborious construction of organized per ception is ruinously undermined by means of the sudden collapse of time, with the corresponding compression of sensation into a devastating intensi ty. The diabolic genius of Kant's account is worth well worth reciting: Measurement of a space (as apprehension) is at the same time a description of it, and so an objective movement in the imagination and a progression. On the other hand, the comprehension of the manifold in the unity, not of thought, but of intuition, and consequently the compr ehension of the successi vely apprehended parts in one glance, is a retrogr ession that removes the time-condition in the progression of the imagina tion, and renders coexistence intuitable. Theref ore, since the time-series is a condition of the internal sense and of intuition, it is a subjective move· ment of the imagination by which it does violence to the internal sense - a violence which must be 139 FANGED NOU MENA proportionately more striking the greater the quantum which the imagination comprehends in one intuition. The effort, therefore, to receive in a single intuition a measure for magnitudes which it takes an appreciable time to apprehend, is a mode of representation which is defeating when subjectively considered, but, objec tively, is requisite for the estimation of magnitude, and is conseque ntly expedient. Here the very same violence that is wrought on the subject through the imagination is estimat ed as expedient for the total purpose of feeling.I3 It would be difficult to delineate the violent desire to consummate the purity of reason in the annihilation of animality more starkly. This does not prevent Kant from elaborating upon these horrors for page after page, describing sublimity as: something terrifying for sensibility ... which, for all that, has an attraction for us, arising from the fact of its being a violence which reason unleashes upon the sensibility with a view to extending its own domain (the practical) and letting sensibility look out beyond itself into the infinite, which is an abyss for it.l4 '3 Ibid., 107-8; '42. 14 Ibid., "5; 148. 140 DELIG HTED TO DEATH He later adds that: law ordained function ... is the genuine characteris tic of human morality, wherein reason must violate sensibility. IS Such is the world of Gothic violence in which the enlight enment reached its crescendo; philosophers feast in the palaces of reason, and luxuriate in the screams that reach them from the dungeons of sublimity. Kant would have us believe that this sacrificial consumption of animality merely exposes the transcenden tally established truth of reason in respect of the body, or rather, in frenzied con tempt for it. Sublimity would be a final, almost gratuitous, negation_ It would be the confirmation, rather than the generation, of the absolute supremacy enjoyed by the part of us that we share with the angels over the part that we share with the beasts. Nevertheless, he has actually taught us something quite different, if our stomachs are strong enough for it. Reason is something that must be built, and the site of its construction first requires a demolition. The object of this demolition is the synthetic capability that Kant refers to as the imagination, and which he exhibits as natural intelligence or animal cunning. This is the capability to 15 Ibid., 120; 151. 141 FANGED NOUMEN A act without the prior authorization of a juridical power, and it is only through the crucifixion of natural intel ligence that the human animal comes to prostrate itself before universal law. Kant is quite explicit about this in the second Critique; only that is moral which totally negates all pathological influence, for morality must never negotiate with empirical stimulation. The Kantian moral good is the total monopol y of power in the hands of reason, and reason finds its principal definition as the supersensible element of the subject, and thus as funda mentally negative. In other words, morality is precisely the powerlessness of animality. This is not the discourse of civil jurisdiction, because it presupposes the prior silencing of the defendant. It is more like the discourse of military strategy in the grand style, which insists upon utterly vanquishing the enemy before dictating terms, and for which the very idea of negotiation already smelt of humiliation and defeat. In Kant's own words (from the Groundwork to the Metaphysics if Morals): Thus it is that man lays claim to a will which d oes not let anything come into account if it belongs merely to his desires and inclinations, but, contrary to these, thinks of acts being possible for him, indeed 142 DELIGHTED TO DEATH necessar y, which could only occur after all desires and sensory stimulation have been ignored .16 Those with a taste for the macabr e can find this theme obsessi vely reiterated within Kant's practical philosop hy. It is hard to imagine that it could be controversial to suggest that the categorical imperative presupposes a vivisection. Kant's anti-utilitarianism is a mark of his integrity as a moralist in the Western traditio n. He does not mask the perenniall y severe character of moral submission in order to pander to the loutish hedonism of the English. He knows that morality is only good if it hurts. This is why he refers to the delights of the sublime -where moralit y comes closest to touching itself -as a 'negative pleasure' [negative Lust], which is not at all the same as displeasur e [Unlust]. Negative Lust is a pleasure taken in the negation of a primary pleasure, which is to say, in the unpleasur e of the imaginati on. For reason has progra m matically deafened itself to the howls of the body, and it is only by means of the aesthetic detour of the sublime that the devastating effects of its sovereignty can come to be enjoyed. 16 I. Kant, Kritik der Praktischen Vemunji / Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sit/en, ed. Wilhelm Wieschedel, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968; for a recent English translation, see I. Kant, Groundwork Jor the Metaphysics oj Morals, tr., ed. A. W. Wood (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2002), Third Section, 73. 143 FANGED NOUMEN A Squeamishness does not befit a moralist. A certain harsh· ness is necessary if one would prevent life from being delighted to death. Such harshn ess, indeed, that the pathological lunge towards death rediscovers itself in the process of its own rigorous extirpation; sublimated into the thanatropic frenzy of reason. 144 Art as Insurrectio n: the Question of Aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche Artists; those savage beasts that can't get enough qftoo much. LAND I Immanuel Kant's Critique if Judgment is the site where art irrupts into European philosophy with the force of trauma. The ferocious impetus of this irruption was only possible in an epoch attemptin g to rationalize itself as permanent metamorpho sis, as growth. Which means that it is a trauma quite incommensur able with the sort of difficulties art has posed to western philosophy since Plato, for it is no longer a matter of irritation, but of catastrophe. Our own. The consistency of Kant's critical philosophy throughout all three of the great Critiques rests in the attention to excess inherent in the conception of synthetic a priori judgments. 145 FANGED NOUMEN A The very inception of the critical project lay in Kant's decisive response to the voiding of logical metaphysics - the disintegration of the philosoph ical endeavour to reduce synthesis -that was consummated by Burne. Perhaps nothing was clearer to Kant than the radical untenability of the Leibnizian paradigm of metaphysics, still dominant in the (Wolfian) philosophy of the Prussian state. Logicism had been exposed, by the sceptical and empirical thought of a more advanced social system, as a sterile tautological stammering that belonged to the Middle Ages when positivity had been given in advance. It was with extraordinary resolve that Kant jettisoned the deductive systematization that had characteri zed the philosophies of immobilist societies -philosophies deeply and deliberately rooted in stagnant theism -and replaced it with the metaphysics of excess. Be was even prepared to assist in the razing of all theoretical theology; because philosophy, too, had to become (at least a little) revolutionary. Nothing substantial was any longer to be presupposed. Although the hazards of synthesis -of having to think -were clearly no longer eliminable, Kant still dung to the prospect that they could be traversed and definitively con cluded. Philosophy would have to take some g;round, but it could still anticipate a place of rest; an impregnable defen sive line. If history could no longer be avoided, at least it could be brought swiftly and meticulously to its end. 146 ART AS INSURRECTION lime would have to be transcende ntally determined, once and for all, by a new metaphysics. It would thencef orth just continue, without disruption, in an innocent confirma tion of itself. For a while - a period some time between the early 1770S and 1790 -it is possible that Kant was as cheerful as any bourgeois philos opher has ever been. An ephemeral restabilization had been achieved. Then came disaster . Something was still shockingly out of control. A third Critique was necessary. The terrifying insight that drove Kant into the laby rinthine labours of the Critique ofludg;ment was that utter chaos had still not been outlawed by an understan ding whose pretension was to 'legislate for nature'. Kant's own words are these: 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 multiplicit y of empirical laws and such a great hetero· geneity 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 conceiv ed.! 1. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraji, ed. W. Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Suhrkampf, '974), 16. \Vherc both original texts and translation are given I have sometimes translated directly 147 FANGED NOUMEN A There are few horrors comparable to that of the master legislator who realizes that anarchy is still permitted. Far from having been domes ticated 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 under taken, but Kant gritted his yellowing teeth, and began. He found the resource for his new and final campaign in the precarious negative disorder which he called 'beauty'. When compared to the rigorous order of transcendental form, beauty was an altogether fragile and impermanent discipline. It was something the transcendent al subject could not promise itself. Nevert heless, it seemed that something beyond reason, something that was prepared to get its hands dirty, was keepin g nature down. 'Purpo siveness without purpose', Kant's last name for excess, has all the extravagance of triumph. Even without trying, we win. History is written by the victors and ascendancy is presupp osed as the condition of presentation, so that the submission of nature to exorbitant law is given with the objectivity of experience: It is thus a subjectively necessary transcendental pre supposition that unlimite d dissimilarity of empirical from the original, and sometimes cited the English version without modification . For a recent English translation, see I. Kant, Critique qfthe Power of Judgment, cd. P. Guyer, tr. P. Guyer, E. Matthews (Camb ridge/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000), First Introduction, II, g. 148 ART AS INSURRECTION laws and heterogeneity of natural forms does not arise, but that it rather, through the affinity of the particular laws under more general ones, qualifies as an experience, as an empirical system.2 All those martialled formulas: nature takes the shortest way -she does nothing in vain -there is no leap in the multiplicity offorms (continuu mjormarum) -she is rich in species, but yet thrifty in genuses, and so forth, are nothing other than just this transcendental expression of judgment, setting itself a principle for experienc e as a system and thus for its own needs.3 Experience is thought of in terms of an extravagant but explosive inheritance; an ungrounded adapta tion of nature to the faculties of representation. The increas ingly tortured and paradoxical formulations that Kant selects indicate the precarious character of the luxuriance (stocked and expended in the imagination as 'free-pla y'). Consider just one exampl e: 'Purposiveness is a lawfulness of the accidental as such.'4 Like Marx's Ricardo, it is the extraordin ary cynicism of Kantianism at the edge of its desperation that lends it a profound radicali ty. Kant's 'reason' is a reactive concep t, negatively defined against the pathology with which � Ibid., 22; Kant, Critique oJthe Power qfJudgment, First Introduction, IV, 14. 3 Ibid., 23; 14· 4 Ibid., 30; 20. 149 FANGED NOUMENA it has been locked in perpet ual and brutal war. In the third Critique all inhibition is lifted from this conflict; it becomes gritty, remorseless, cruel. His theory of the sublime, for instance, is sheer exultat ion in an insensate violence [Gewalt] against the pre-con ceptual (animal) powers summar ized under the faculty of the 'imagination' . In the experience of the sublime nature is affirmed as the trigger for a 'negative-pleasur e', in so far as it humiliates and ruins that part of ourselves that we fail to share with the angels. To take one instance (out of innumerable possibilities) he says of the sublime that it is: something terrifying for sensibilit y ... which for all that, has an attraction for us, arising from the fact of its being a violence which reason unleashes upon sensibility with a view to extending its own domain (the practical) and letting sensibilit y look out beyond itself into the infinite, which is an abyss for it.5 Kant is becomin g remarkably indiscriminate about his allies, asking only that they be enemies of patholo gical inclination [Neigung], and know how to fight. If reason is so secure, legi timate, supersensibly guaranteed, why all the guns? 5 Ibid., ,89-90; tr. J. C. Meredith in '!he Critique ofJudr;ment (Oxford: Oxford University Press. '982), "5. 150 ART AS INSURRECTION Irrational surplus, or the inelimin able and beautif ul danger of unconscious creative energy: nature with fangs. How do we hold on to this thought? It is perpetually threaten ed by collapse; by a reversion to a depressive philosophy of work, whether theolo gical or humanistic. The three great strands of post-Kantian exploration -marked by the names Hegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer -are consta ntly tempted by the prospect of a reduction to forgotten or implicit labour; to the agency of God, spirit, or man, to anything that would return this ruthless artistic force of the generative unconscious to design, intention, project, teleolog y. Kant's word 'genius' is the immen sely difficult and confused but emphatic resistance to such reductions; the thought of an utterly impersonal creativity that is historically registered as the radical discontin uity of the example, of irresponsible legislati on, as 'order' without anyone giving the orders . Kant is quite explicit that a generative theory of art requires a philosophy of genius - a re-admission of accursed patholog y 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. Kant only manages to control this disr uption by maintaining art as an implicitly marginal problematic within a field mastered by philosophy. Even though he acknowledge s that the autonomy of reason is to the heteronomy of genius what fidelity of representation is 151 FANG ED NOUMENA when compared to creation -poverty and wretchedness -the message scarcely seeps out. In addition, there is a perpetual and pathetic effort to subsume aesthetics under practical imperative s, 'beauty as the symbol of ethicallife'6 being one example, and the basic tendency of his theory of the sublime (the infinite privilege of transcendental ideas in comparison to nature) being another. 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 consciousn ess, so innocu ous 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 pathologi cal 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 thoughtf ul ideas arise and come together in his head, because he himself does not know, and cannot, therefore, teach it to anyone'.? It is no doubt comforting to speak of ' the genius' as if impersonal creative energy were commensur able with the order of autonomous individuality governed by reason, 6 Ibid., 294'9; 221'5· 7 Ibid., 244; 170. 152 ART AS INSURRECTION but such chatter is, in the end, absurd. Genius is nothing like a character trait, it does not belong to a psychological lexicon; far more appropriate is the language of seismic upheaval, inundatio n, disease, the onslaught of raw energy from without. One 'is' a genius only in the sense that one 'is' a syphilitic, in the sense that 'one' is violently problematized by a ferocious ext eriority. One returns to the subject of which genius has been predicated to find it charred and devastated beyond recognition. II Schopenhauer reconstructed the critical philosophy in several very basic ways: by eliminating the dogmatic presupposition of a
🔥 Art as Revolutionary Force
🧠 Unconscious will drives creative expression, challenging Kant's rational framework through Schopenhauer's recognition that intellect serves desire rather than controlling it
🌊 Genius emerges as an energetic surplus that exceeds individual purpose, creating tension between redemptive self-renunciation and liberating dissolution into pre-individual desire
♀️ The feminine principle represents vital, excessive reality that refuses philosophical containment—what Schopenhauer feared as deception, Nietzsche later embraced as creative power
🎭 Dionysian aesthetics intensifies life's enigmatic qualities rather than resolving them, transforming pain into creative stimulus through simplification that paradoxically enriches complexity
⚔️ The philosophy of genius splits between psychoanalysis (anti-anthropomorphic unleashing of creativity) and fascism (re-ascription of genius to intentional individuality)—making revolutionary desire inseparable from anti-fascist thought
difference between subjective and objective noumena; by shifting, not in an idealist (phe nomenological) direction, but towards unconscious will; by simplif ying the transcendental understanding from the twelve categories and two forms of sensibility inherited from Kant to the integrated 'principle of sufficient reason' ; by nipping Kant's proto-idealist logicism in the bud; by charging the critical philosophy with the furious energy of sexual torment, attacking its (at least) germinal academi cism, and immeasur ably improving its stylistic resources. Where Kant distorts, marginalizes , and obscur es the thought of the unconscious, Schopenhauer emphasizes and develops it. He defies the pretensions of imperalistic 153 FANGED NOUM ENA idealism by describing reason as a derivative abstraction from the understanding, co-extens ive with language , so that Kant's transcendental logic is rethought through a transcendental aesthetic organized in terms of the 'prin ciple of sufficient reason' , simplified, de-mystified, and pushed downwards towards pre-intellectual intuition. Reason is no longer thought of as an autonomous prin ciple in recipro cal antagonism with nature, but as a film upon its surface. All these moves involve a massive shift in the term 'will' [Willel, the placeholder for the psycho analytical compr ehension of desire. For Kant, the will is aligned with reason, as the princi ple of the investment of nature with intentional intellig ibil ity, the resource from which teleological judgment must regulatively metaphorize all exorbitant natural order: The will, as the faculty of desire, is one of the many natural causes in the world, namely, that one which is effective through concepts, and everything that is represented as possible (or necessar y) through a will is called practically possible (or necessar y), in contradi stinction from the physical possibility or necessity of an affect for which the ground is not determined in its causalit y through concepts (but rather, as with lifeless matter, through mechani sm, and, with animal s, through instinct) .B 8 Ibid., 79; 9· 154 ART AS INSURRECTION In contrast, Schopen hauer's great discovery is that of non-agentic will; the positivity of the death of God. Rather than thinking willing as the movement by which conceptua lly articulate decision is realized in nature, he understands the appearance of rational decisions as a derivative consequence of pre-int ellectual -and ultimately pre-personal, even pre-organic -willing. Unconscious desire is not just desire that happens to be unconsc ious, as if a decisionistic lucidity is somehow natural or proper to desire; it is rather that consciou sness can only be con sequenti al upon a desire for which lucid thought is an instrumental requirement. For Schopenhauer the intell ect is constituted by willing, rather than bein g constitutive for it. We do not know what we want. There is an important sense in which Schopenhauer's will is the thought of genius taken towards its limit, subsum ing the entire faculty of knowledge under that of exorbitant natural order, as a mere instance (although a privileged one) of purposi veness without purpose. But Schopenhauer' s own usage of the thought of genius preserves it in its specificit y, as a proportional exorbi tance on the part of the intellect in relation to the will. Genius is the result of a positive overcoming of uncon scious 'purpose', an excess of intellectual energy over that which can be absorbed by desire, thus redundancy, or dysfunction through superfluity: 155 FANGED NOUMENA an entirely pure and objective picture of things is not reached in the normal mind, because its power of perception at once becomes tired and inactive, as soon as this is not spurred on and set in motion by the will. For it has not enough energy to apprehend the world purely objectively from its own elasticit y and without a purpose. On the other hand, where this happens, where the brain's power of forming representations has such a surplus that a pure, dis· tinct, objective picture of the external world exhibits itself without a purpose as something useless for the intentions of the will, which is even disturbing in the higher degrees, and can even become injurious to them -then ther e already exists at least the natural disposition for that abnormality. This is denoted by the name of genius, which indicates that something foreign to the will, i.e., to the I or ego proper, a genius added from outside so to speak, seems to become active here.9 The mother of the useful arts is necessit y; that of the fine arts superfluity and abundance . As their father, the former have understanding, the latter genius, which in itself a kind of superfluit y, that of the power A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt alf Willeund Vorstellung, in Werke in zehn II (Zurich: Diogenes, 1977), 446; translated by E.F.J. Payne as '!he World as Will and Representation, vol. II (NY: Dover, 1966), 377- 156 ART AS INSURRECTION of knowledge beyond the measur e required for the service of the will.1O For Schopenhauer the body is the objectification of the will, the intellect is a function of a particular organ of the body, and genius is the surplus of that functioning in relation to the individual organism in questio n. Genius is thus an assault on the individualized will that erupts from ou t of the reservoir of archaic pre-organized willing. I t is a site of particular tension in his thinking, caught between a vision of progressive redemption, achieved through humanity as perfected individualit y in which the will is able to renounce itself, and regressive unleash ing of the pre-individual will from the torture chamb er of organic specificit y, ego-inter ests, and personalit y. Schopenhauer's attachment to the first of these options is well known, but the possibility of an alternative escape from individ uali zation -by way of dissolut ion into archaic inundating desire -constant ly strains for utterance within his text. This tension generates a termin ological fission that can be easily detected along the jagged fault lines separating sexualit y from art. One example is 'beauty'; a word that is driven by Schopenhauer's overt (metaphysical) policy into an uneasy alignment with renunciation . He interprets it as the negative affect -relief or release -associated 157 FANGED NOUMEN A with disengagement from interested thought, attained through contemplati ve submergence in the pure univer sal 'ideas' of natural species as they exist outside space, time, and causalit y, and manifest to a radicalized Kantian disinter estedness that is greatly facilitated by artistic representation. II If in the end Derrida's Spurs is an absurd book, it is because it is tapping into Nietzsche' s negotiation with Schopenhauer's discourse on woman and the aesthetic without knowing what it is listening to, because it is too busy perpetuat ing the Heideggerian mutilation of libidinal post-K antian ism. Nietzsc he's recovery and affirmation of the fictive power of art (in his later writ ings) is a response to the violent denigration of this power in Schopenhauer' s thought, a denigr ation that is programmed by a complex of interlocking factors that are evidenced with particular intensit y in his discussion of sexual difference. Schopenhauer founds the modern thought of excitement as suffering, a thought which sur vives into the twentieth centur y in a variety of guises, and most importantly in Freud's libidinal econom y. In order to perpetuate a rhythm of desire and its tranqu ilizatio n, II Of all the complex issues I have skimmed over recklessly this is perhaps the richest and most impacted. Schopenhauer, by referring exorbitant form back to a Platonic eidos is undoubtedly sacrificing a great deal of the fertile tension in Kant's thought of purposiveness without purpose, although he also reduces the risk of a slide back into teleological theology. The thought that was perhaps necessary in order to depart most radically from the possibilit y of theistic relapse was that ofa divine unconscious, eliminating all possibility ofagentic creation at any level. But this would be the image of a mad god. Dionysus? 158 ART AS INSURRE CTION in which there is no space for positive pleasure, but only variable degrees of pain, it is necessary to be profoundly misled. This is why Schopenhauer refers to the principle of sufficient reason, which is associated with the pure form of material reality, and is the transcendental condition of individuated appearance, as the veil of Maya, or illusion. Art, as the escape from individuation and desire, is thus the very negative of fiction. Beauty is an experience of truth. But there is also another troubling, enticing, arousing, and captivating type of beauty (Nietzsche will come to say it is the only one), the beauty that is exemplified -in post-Hellenic western history at least -in the female body. For Schopenhauer this is an immense problem, as is the domain of the erotic in its entirety. The anegoic disinter estedness of resignation is echoed and parodied by an indifference to ego-interests that leads in a quite opposite direction; deeper into the inferno ojwilling. After acknowl edging with his usual raw honesty that 'all amorousness is rooted in the sexual impulse alon e',12 Schopenhauer is forced to accept that 'it is precisely this not seeking one's own interest, everywhere the stamp of greatness, which gives even to passionat e love a touch of the sublime, and makes it a worthy sub ject ofpoetry'.13 There is thus both a renunciator y and a libidinous sublime, each with its associated objects and aesthetic 12 Ibid., 624; 555. 159 FANGED NOUMEN A 'perfections' or intensities. And it is not only beauty that is torn in separate directions, fiction too is split; on the one hand as the condition of individualization, and on the other as an appeal to constituted individuality. Either the ego is a dream of desire, or desire has to creep up on the ego as a dream. In sexuality, nature can attain her end only by implantin g in the individual a certain delusion, and by virtue of this, that which in truth is merely a good thing for the species seems to him to be a good thing for himself, so that he serves the species, whereas he is under the delu sion that he is serving himself. In this process a mere chimera, which vanishes immediately afterwards, floats before him, and, as motive, takes the place of a reality. This delusion is instinct. In the great majority of cases, instinct is to be regarded as the sense of the species which presents to the will what is useful to it.13 Woman is matter, formless and unpresentable, arousing and thus tormentin g; everything about her is pretence, deception, alteration, unlocalizable irrational attraction, Verstellung. Schopenhauer' s notorious essay On Woman is mapped by the movement of this word, as it organizes the play of seduction, of indirect action, of non-ideal beau ty, 13 Ibid., 630; 538. 160 ART AS INSURRE CTION disrupting the seriousness and responsible self-legislation of the male subject through an 'art of dissimulation'.14 Woman is wicked art, art that intensifies life, art whose only truth is a whispered intimation that negation, too, is only a dream, the figment of an overflowing positivity that deceives through excess. Could the dream of redemption be nothing but a bangle upon the arms of exuberant life? Schopenhauer reels in horror: Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad hipped, and short-l egged sex the fair sex; for in this impulse is to be found its whole beauty. The female sex could be more aptly called the unaesthetic. IS Women are so terribly non- Platonic, so outrageously vital and real, so excessive in relation to the cold sterile perfec tions of the ideas. With infallible instinctive power they propagate the dangerous delusion that there is something about life that we want. Pessimism has to be misogyny, because woman refuses to repel. '4 A. Schopenhauer, Parergo und Paralipomena II (Zurich: Diogenes, '977), 671; tr. by E. F. J. Payne as Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 617- '5 Ibid., 673; 619. 161 FANGED NOUMEN A III A few of the things that Nietzsche learnt -at least in part -from Schopenhauer were the elementary tenets of libidinal materialism or the philosophy of the energetic unconscious (the unrestricted development of the theory of genius), the primacy of the body and its medical condi tion, pragmatism (asking not how we know but why we know), effervescent literary brilliance, aestheticism (with a musical focus), an 'aristocratic' concern for hierarchy and gradation (which he turned into an implement for overcoming Aristotelian logic), antihumanism, a construc tion of the history of philosophy as dominated by Plato and Kant and the problematic of reality and appearance, virulent anti-academicism, misogyny, and the distrust of mathematical thinking. Schopenhauer even wrote that: The genuine symbol of nature is universally and everywhere the circle, because it is the schema or form of recurrence; in fact, this is the most general form in nature. She carries it through in everything from the course of the constellations down to the death and birth of organic beings. In this way alone, in the restless stream of time and its content, a continued existence, i.e., a nature, becomes possible.16 16 A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, ii, 559; tr. Payne in Ille World as Will and Representation, vol. 11,477, 162 ART AS INSURRECTION But the shifts Nietzsche had brought to the Schopenhaue rian philosophy by the end of his creative life were at least as immense as this inheritance, involving, amongst other elements, a displacement from the will to life to the will to power, so that survival is thought of as a tool or resource for creation; a displacement of antihumanism from the ascetic ideal to overman (non-ter minal overcoming) ; the completion of a post-Aristotelian 'logic' of gradation without negativity or limits; a 'critique of philosophy' that diagnosed Plato and Kant as symptoms of libidinal disaster; a return of historical thinking freed from the untenable time/ timelessness opposition of bankrupt logi cism; and a displacement from the principle of sufficient reason to 'equalization ' [Ausgleichung], which -since differentiation was no longer thought of as an imposition of the subject -implied a shift from primor dial unity to irreducible pluralism, and from the disinterested 'world eye' to perspectivism. Nietzsche's intricate, profound, and explosive response to the provocation of Schopenhauer resists hasty sum marization. It is helpful to start with the transitional movements of The Birth of Tragedy, in which the Scho penhauerian will is re-baptized as 'Dionysus'. Like the undifferentiated will, it is only in the dream of Apollon ian appearance that Dionysus can be individual ized. As Walter Otto remarks (about the mythological, not just the specifica lly Nietzschean god): 'He is clearly thought 163 FANG ED NOU MENA of on the oriental pattern as the divine or infinite in general, in which the individual soul longs so much to lose itself' .17 The tragic chorus is the focus of a delirious fusion, in which the personality is liquidated by the collec tive artistic process. Otto says some other very important things about Diony sus, the twice-born: The one so born is not merely the exultant one and joy·bringer, he is also the suffering and dying god, the god of tragic contradiction. And the inner power of this dual nature is so great, that he steps amongst humanit y as a storm, quaking them and subduing their resistance with the whip of madness. Everything habitual and ordered must be scatter ed. Ex istence suddenly becomes an intoxication -an introduction of blessed ness, but no less one of terror. To this female world the Apollonian stands opposed, as the decidedly masculine. The mystery of life, of blood and of terrestrial force does not rule in it, but rather clarity and breadth of spirit. But the Apollon ian world cannot persist without the other.!8 '7 W. F. Otto, Dianysos, Mythos und Kultus (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, '933), liS· ,8 Ibid., 74'5, '32. 164 ART AS INSURRECTION Doric civilization, the hard Apollonian spine of western culture, vaunting the defiant erectness of its architecture, is fundamentally defensive in nature. Already in this, Nietzsche 's most 'Schopenha uerian' book, the minor register of the pessimistic quandar y prevails without compromi se; the overcoming of wretched individuality is to be referred in the direction of the reservoir of insurgent desire, not in that of a metaphysical renunciation. One does not build fortifications against saints: to me the Doric state and Doric art are explicable only as a permanent military encampment of the Apollonian. Only incessant resistance to the titanic barbaric nature of the Dionysian could account for the long survival of an art so defiantly prim and so encompassed with bulwarks, a training so warlike and rigorous, and a political structure so cruel and relentless .19 The difference between Dionysus and Apollo is that between music and the plastic arts (Schopenhauer's differ entiation that Nietzsche describes as 'the most important insight of aesthetics' ),20 will and representation (primary and secondary process), chaos and form. In the tragic '9 F. Nietzsche, Die Ceburt der Tragddie (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein Materialien, 1981), 35 tr. W. Kaufmann as The Birth qfTragedy (NY: Vintage, 1967), 47. 20 Ibid., 89; 100. 165 FANGED NOUMEN A fusion of music and theatrical spectacle desire is delivered upon the order of representation in a delirious collective affirmation of insurgent alterity (nature, impulse, oracular insight, woman, barbarism, Asia). Greek tragedy is the last instance of the occident being radically permeable to its outside. The Socratic death of tragedy is the begin ning of the ethnic solipsism and imperialistic dogmatism that has characterized western politics ever since, the brutal domestication process with which the repressive instance in man (,reason') has afflicted the impersonal insurrectionary energies of creativity, until they became the whimpering, sentimental, and psychologized 'genius' of the romantics. With Socrates began the passionate quest of European humanity to become the ugly animal. In his later, more fragmentary writings on art, Nietzsche perhaps says something a little like the following. The aesthetic operation is simplification; the movement of abstraction, logicization, unification, the resolution of problematic. It is this operation which, when understood in terms of the logical principles formulated by Aristotle -in terms, that is, of its own product -seems like a negation of the enigmatic, the re-distribution of alterity to the same within a zero-sum exchange, the progressive 'improvement' and domestication of life. But simplifica tion is not a teleologically regulated approximation to simplicity, to the decadent terminus we call 'truth', it is an inexhaustibly open-ended creative process whose only 166 ART AS INSURRECTION limits are fictions fabricated out of itself. Nothing is more complex than simplification; what art takes from enigma it more than replenishes in the instantiation of itself, in the labyrinthine puzzle it plants in history. The intensi fication of enigma. The luxuriantly problematic loam of existence is built out of the sedimented aeons of residues deposited by the will to power, the impulse to create, 'The world as a work of art that gives birth to itself.'21 Enigma, posi tive confusion (delirium), problematic, pain, whatever we want to call it; the torment of the philosophers in any case, is the stimulus to ecstatic crea tion, to an interminable 'resolution' into the enhanced provocations of art. What the philoso phers have never understood is this: it is the unintelligibility if the world alone that gives it worth. 'Inertia needs unity (monism); plurality of interpretations a sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and enigma tic charact er'.22 Not, then, to oppose pain to the absence of pain as metaphysical pessimism does, but, rather, to dif ferentiate the ecstatic overcoming of pain from wearine ss and inertia, to exult in new and more terrible agonies, fears, burning perplexities as the resource of becoming, overcoming, triumph, the great libidinal oscillations that break up stabilized systems and intoxicate on intensity; 21 F. Nietzsche, Der Wille 2;ur Macht, ed. P. Gast, E. F6fster-Nietzsche (Stuttgart: Alfred KTonerVerlag, 1964),533; tr. byW. Kaufmann as The WilltoPower(NY: Vintage, 1968).419. 22 Ibid., 413; 326. 167 FANGED NOUMEN A that is Dionysian pessimism -'refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmat ic';23 'the effect of the work of art is to excite the state that creates art -intoxication' . 24 IV After Nietzsche there is Freud. Tapping into a reservoir of genius (the unconscious of late nineteenth-centur y Viennese women) that drives him to the point of idi ocy, he pushes onwards without knowing what the fuck he's doing_ Freud is a thinker of astounding richness and fertile complexit y, but I shall merely touch upon his most disastr ous confusion_ When he writes on art, degenerating -despite his wealth of acuity -into banal psycho-biograp hy, a terribly damaging loss of direction afflicts the psychoanalytic enterprise. The inherent con nection between the irruptive primar y process and artistic creativit y, or the basic inextricabilit y of psychoanalysis and aesthetics, slips Freud's grasp, and art is presented as a merely contin gent terrain for the application of therapeutically honed concepts. The adaptation of the mutilated individual to its society, in which art is illegal except as a parasite of elite commodi ty production cir cuits, is the scandal of psychoana lysis. It becomes Kantian 23 Ibid., 330; 262. 24 Ibid., 553; 434· 168 ART AS INSURRECTION (bourgeois); a delicate police activity dedicated to the social management and containment of genius. As if 'therapy' could be anything other than the revolutionary unleashing of artistic creation! The two basic directions in which the philosophy of genius can develop are exemplified by psychoanaly sis and national socialism. Either rigorous anti-anthro pomorphism, the steady constriction of the terrain of intentional explanat ion, and the rolling reduction of praxes to parapraxes, or the re-ascription of genius to intentional individuality, concentration of decision, and the paranoiac praxial interpretation of non-intentional processes (the Jewish conspiracy theory). The death of God is operative in both cases, either as the space of the generative unconscious , or as that of a triumphantly divinized and arbitrarily isolated secular subjectivity. It is easy to see that the role of discourse in these two cases is a very precise register for the difference at issue; on the one hand the talking cure, in which the texts of confession and rational theory are both displaced by the compression wave of a radically senseless energy process that defies the status of object in relation to an autonomously determinable agent language; and on the other, the interminable authorita tive monologue of the dictator (politically instantiated ego-ideal), in which the will is returned to a quasi-Kantian acceptation to capital ize upon its libidinal detour, finding its true sense in the 169 FANG ED NOU MENA lucid decision of an individual who speaks on behalf of a racially specified unconscious clamour . That part of twentieth-century philosophy resonant with the aesthetically oriented tendency outlined here has as its two great tasks the diagnosis of Nazism and the protraction of the psychoanalytic impulse, in other words the arming of desire with intellectual weapons that will allow it to evade the dead-end racist Gotterdammerun g politics which capital deploys as a last ditch defence against the flood. No revolution without insurrectionary desire, no effective route for insurrectionary desire without integral anti-fascism. Wilhelm Reich, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari are perhaps the most important theoretical loci in this development . The latter three I shall say a little about. It is not simply ridiculous to describe Bataille as Scho pcnhaucr with enthusiasm, in so far as this might crudely characterize a certain variant of 'Nietzschean ism', or Dionysian pessimism. After all, Bataille too is concerned with value as the annihilation of life, challenging the utilitarianism that finds its only end in the preservation and expansion of existence. If this affirmation of loss is 'nihilistic', it is at least an 'active nihilism'; the
🔥 Art as Insurrection
🎭 Art functions as violent expenditure rather than renunciation, challenging fascism's obsession with order and control through its inherent excess and disorder
💥 Bataille's philosophy connects literature, eroticism, and revolt through a celebration of beautiful disorder that renders tolerable the "need for violence and indignity that is the root of love"
🧠 Deleuze and Guattari reframe genius as "schizophrenia," positioning creative processes as primary and their rational regulation as derivative, with the body without organs serving as both material abstraction and differential terrain
🐺 Spirit persists despite attempts to marginalize it, with phenomenology functioning as an ideology of propriety that systematically denies exteriority while claiming ownership over reality
🌑 Trakl's poetry embodies "lycanthropic vectors of impatience" that transmit a pestilence of regression, challenging civilization's boundaries through wild, unrestrained movements of erosion
🔄 Regression emerges not as undoing civilization's work but as recurrence of impersonal creativity, with "inferiority" representing not lack but positive libidinal charge potentiating spiritualizations
promotion of a violently convulsive expenditure rather than a weary renunciati on. Art as the wastage of life. And Bataille's involvement with art, above all with literature, is of an unparalleled intricacy and intensity. Philosopher and 170 ART AS INSURRECTION historian of art, literary theorist, in his 'philoso phy' a stylist, dazzling as an essayist, a novelist and poet of both profundity and incand escent beauty, his is a writing oblivious to circumscriptio n, spreading like an exotic fungus into the darkest recesses of aesthetic possibility. A rather tortured and incoherent leap? Come on now! A 'philoso phy' of excess that draws out an inner connection between literature, eroticism, and revolt could hardly be irrelevant to our problematic here. As Bataillc states, 'beauty alone ... renders tolerable a need for disorder, violence, and indignity that is the root of love.'25 Bataille also has the peculiar honour , shared with Nietzsche and Reich, of beginning his assault on germinal national socialism before Hitler had exhibited its truth. His early essays sketch a vision of fascism as the most fanatical project for the elimination of excess, an attempt at the secular enforcement of the perfectly ordered city of God against the disorder, luxuriance, and mess of surplus production, as it sprawls into the voluptu ary expenditure of eroticism and art. Assailing the fascist tendency is the disindividualized delirium of tragic sacrifice and revolu tion, when Being is given to us in an intoler able surpassing of being, no less intolerable than death. And because, 25 G. Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 13. 171 FANGED NOU MENA in death, it is withdrawn from us at the same time it is given, we must search for it in the feeling of death, in those intolerable moments where it seems that we are dying, because the being in us is only there through excess, when the plenitude of horror and that of joy coincide.26 For there is no doubt that the fascists are right, the very incarnation of right, yes: 'Literature is even, like the transgression of moral law, a danger.'27 A theory of the real as art (primary production) that is melded seamlessly with an anti-fascist diagnostics charac terizes the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In their Anti-Oedipus they indicate that the rational regulation or coding of creative process is derivative, sterile, and eliminable. Their name for genius is 'schizophrenia', a term that cannot be safely domesticated within psychol ogy, any more than 'genius' can (and for the same reasons). If nature is psychotic it is simply because our psychoses are not in reality 'ours'. Libido -as the raw energy of creation -is ungrounded, irreducibly multiple, yet it precipitates a real and unified 'principle' out of itself. The body without organs is its name; at once material abstraction, and the concretely 26 Ibid., 11-12. 27 Ibid., voL IX, 182. 172 ART AS INSURRECTI ON hypostasized differential terrain which is nothing other than what is instantaneously shared by difference. The body without organs is pure surface, because it is the mere coherence of differential web, but it is also the source of depth, since it is the sole' ontological' element of difference. It is produced transcendence. Paradox after paradox, spun like a disintegrating bandage upon the infected and deteriorating wound of Kant's aesthetics, teasing the philosophical domestication of art -the most gangrenous cultural appendage of capital -towards its utter disintegration. How does desire come to desire its own repression? How does production come to rigidify itself in the social straitjacket whose most dissolvedJorm is capital? It is with this problematic, inherited from Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Reich, that Deleuze and Guattari orient their work. In our terms here: how does art become (under-) compensa ted labour? Their answer involves a displacement of the prob lem into a philosoph ical affinity with Kant's paralogisms of the pure understanding, rethought in Anti-Oedipus as materially instantiated traps for desire. A paralogism is the attempt to ground 'conditions of possibility' in the objectivity they permit, or creativity in what it creates. This is, to take the most pertinent example, to derive the forces of production from the socio-economic apparatus they generate. Sociological fundamentalism, state wor ship, tota litarian paranoia and fascism, they all exhibit 173 FANGED NOUMEN A the same basic impulse; hatred of art, (real) freedom, desire, everything that cannot be controlled, regulated, and administered. Fascism hates aliens, migrant workers, the homeless, rootless people of every kind and inclina tion, everything evocative of excitement and uncertaint y, women, artists, lunatics, drifting sexual drives, liquids, impurity, and abandonment. Philosophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertaint y, 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 qjthe truth.28 To conclude is not merely erroneous, but ugly. 28 Nietzsche , Der Wille ZUT Macht, 554; 435. 174 Spirit and Teeth A PRELI MINARY POST"MOR TEM Spirit (Geist) is stigmatized by a multiple deconstructi bility: as a substa ntialization of Dasein, an antonym of matter, a correlate of phonic lucidity, or a token of reflexivi ty, self-presence, pure intelligibility, spontaneit y, etc. In the course of its recent history this word has been inflated by Hegel into the cosmic medium of transac tion -the super-heated lubricant of global eventuation -and then trafficked to the edge of worthlessness by the culture succeedin g him, before finally succum bing to an irreparable marginalization by the scientific advances of experimental and behavioral psychology, neurology, neuroanato my, cogniti ve science, cybernetics, artificial intellig ence, until it becomes a sentimentalism, a vague peripheraIized metaphor , a joke ... a cheap target one might think. There are those who remain loyal enough to the canonical discourses of Western philoso phy to 175 FANGED NOUMENA argue that logocentrism is secreted in the implementa ry terminology of information, digitali ty, program, software , and control. But as for spirit! -that can only be parody or nostalgia. Who could still use such a word without humor or disdain? Spirit is less a misleading or dangerous word than a ridiculous one; a Coeleca nth of a word. Yet it persists: the mark of a clownish incompetence at death. Such incompet ence has its doctrine, rituals , and lit urgy, its orthodoxies and heresies. It is the entire and prolonged refusal of the impersonal summar izable as 'phenomenolog y.' Whether high-chur ch (Hegel), or low-chur ch (HusserI), phenomenolog y is the definitive ideology of propriety; systematically employing the inter rogative mode in order to distill out everything for which proper subjectivity cannot claim responsibility, and thus entrenchin g the humanistic dimension of Western phi losoph y ever more rigidly. This entire current gradually compiles an attempted proof of the impossi bility of death, an ontolo gical conflation of access to reality and owner ship (psyche, cogito, Selbstheit, Eigentlichkeit, Jemeinigkeit), a perpetually reformulated spiritualism. Socrates, Des cartes, HusserI: all shallow, all egoists, all pressing further into the flatlands of the profane. This is why they are so well placed to profit from the death of God (an event in which they had taken no part -on the contrary; the obses sional egoism of theism had always appealed to them). Phenomenology is a programmatic denial (reduction 176 SPIR IT AND TEETH to the personal) of exteriorit y which, after becoming a quasisolipsistic knee-jerk of self-assertion, wonders with genuine naivety why alterity has come to pose such problems. If spirit largely disappears between Hegel and H usserl it is because, compared to the transcendental ego, it seems a little too complicit with the outside. Unlike Heidegger and Derrida, I see no advance, recovery, or sophistication taking place in the H usserlian reading of Kant. The phenomen ological reduction of appearance [Erscheinung] to evidential Schein is a dogmatic decision which de fangs the tentative skepticism of the critical philosoph y, taking it even further from the deep epoche of unknowing: the vast abrupt discovered confus edly by Pyrrho of Elis, the repressed of monotheistic civilization. Husserlian suspension or bracketing is not Pyrrhonian but Socratic; a reservation of judgment that is subordinated to apodicticit y, to knowing what one knows even if nothing else (to doubting as a power of the subject). Epoch!, chaos, Old Night, death, however it! she is named, the way there is not our doing. Suspension is to be discovered, not performed. So what is to be thought of a differance that radicalizes, deconstructs, or subverts a suspension thus crushed under a phenomenological dogmatics? What is it that would take us this way, if not that which appears (in Kant's sense, not Husserl's) as the humanistic pretension -the spirit -of representational philosophizing? Such suspension is of 177 FANGED NOUM ENA course a detour, an avoidance, but scarcely an inevitable one. On the contrary, it is peculiarly deliberated; meticu lously valorizing a specific philosophic tendency (passing through H usserl), effacing another (the Schopenhauerean fork of post-Kant ian ism), and painstakingly transferring signs from the latter to the former (Nietzsche read through Heidegger!! !). Section 7 of Sein l1nd Zeit is exemplary here, with its insistence upon an evidential reading of phenomenalit y, thereby dismissing the entire problematic of Nietzsche's thinking in a single casual gesture. What sense to the insistent theme of fiction in Nietzsche' s writ ings after such a move has been made? What sense to cnigma? (We always already have the meaning of being built into the structure of existence, Heidegger suggests, it is merely that we do not yet know that we know. Ques tioning is remembering. Socrates smiles.) We do not know yet, a not yet that can be dilated cor· rosively; frustrating the end of metaphysics, interminably deferring truth. Yawns become scarcely controllable. Does it matter what we know or will never know? Let us not forget that philosoph y is also primate psychology; that our loftiest speculations are merely picking through a minuscule region of the variegated slime encrusting a speck of dust. An obsessional concern for such insignifi cances is a tasteless parochialism. What matters is the Unknown : the escapographic matrix echoed spectrally by the negative prefix, sprawled in immense indifference 178 SPIRIT AND TEETH to all our "yets". Beyond the anthropoid gesticulations of knowing, suspension is not differentiable from death, and death ("one's death" as we so ludicrously say) does not belong to an order that can be delayed. Has our Socratism reached such a pinnacle of profanity that we really imagine she would wait for us? PART I: WOLVES As I continue to study this text, elsewhere, with a more decent patience, I hope one day to be able, beyond what a conference permits me today, to render it justice in also analysing its motion, its mode or its status (if it has one), its relation to philosophi· cal discourse, to hermeneutics or poetics, but still what it says of Geschlecht, the word Geschlecht, and also of place [Ort], as of animalit y. For the moment [l'instant], I follow solely the passage of spirit.! These are the words of a man who is confident he will survive for some considerable time. There is no discern ible urgency here, far less abruptn ess, desperation, or any of the raw intensities of haste. Instead there is the now familiar rhetoric of close reading; the simultaneous 1 ]. Derrida, De {'esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilee, 1987), '37; sec also, J. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, tr. G. Bennington, R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),87. 179 FANG ED NOUM ENA performance and prescription of painstaking care, deliberation, conscientiousness, and reverential textual devotion. A certain intricately intertextual discussion of spirit unfolds, at a languorous pace, inspired by uninter rogated principles of decency and justice. Everything is mediated by elucidatio ns, re-elucidat ions, elucidations of previous elucidati ons, conduct ed with meticulous courtesy, but never inattenti ve to the complicity of the concept of elucidation with the history of metaphys ics from Plato to the previous paragraph of De l'esprit. Our author is not to be hurried into premature pronounce ments on matters of such seriousness as philosophical discourse, hermeneu tics, or poetics. Noris he prepared to descend into such overenth usiastic crudity as examining more than one of Heidegger's words in a single book. Last of all, as it has so often tended to be, comes a promise to take seriously the problem of animality, which - God and suchlike spiritual primordialities being willing -should come to be written about one day. It is probably relatively uncontroversial to conclude from all this that Derrida is not a werewolf. Werewolves are dissipated within a homolupic spiral that distances them utterly from all concern for decency or justice. Their feral physiologies are badly adapted to the depres sive states conducive to ethical earnestn ess. Instead they are propelled by extremities of libidinal tension which fragment their movemen ts, break up their tracks with 180 SPIRIT AND TEETH jagged discontinuities, and infest their nerves with a burning malaise, so that each gesture is baked in a kiln of ferocity. Creatures of epidemic rather than hermeneutic s, werewolve s tend to be very crude, but then, they don't live as long as deconstructionists. The luxury of delaying the problem of animality is not open to them. On page 141 of De l'esprit Derrida apologizes for a very moderate instance of textual impoliteness that he describes as 'precipitating in an indecent fashion'. 2 In this thought of 'indecent precipitation' he comes closer to the dominant impulse of Trakl's poetry than at any other point in the book; closer too, it could be argued, than Heidegger ever gets. An evasion that is perhaps constitutive of hermeneutical decency is exemplified when, by taking one's time over interpreting Trakl's poetry, one avoids succumbing to the pestilence it communicates. Trakl's writings are lycanthropic vectors of impatience, of twitch disease, because they are the virulent relics of an indecent precipitation, an abortion, a meteorite impact. Trakl took very little time over anything. Surviving as he did to the age of twenty-seven he had very little time to take. Trakl confesses to his lycanthropy in the first version of Passion, the unavowed version, where he writes that: 2 Ibid., '4'; Derrida, OjSpirit, 87· 181 FANGED NOUM ENA Two wolves in the sinister Wood We mixed our blood in a stony embrace And the stars of our race fell upon us.3 The word 'race' in this translation precipitates the sense of Geschlecht in an indecent fashion. In the complete absence of hermeneutical conscientiousness it is epidemiological factors alone which compel this. To become a werewolf one must be bitten by another werewolf , and in Trakl's case it seems this was Rimbaud, who wrote: 'It is quite evident to me that I have always been of an inferior race. I am not able to comprehend revolt. My race never stirs itself except for pillage: like wolves at the beast they have not killed'.4 To be a werewolf is to be inferior by the most basic criteria of civilization. Not only is the discipline of politi cal responsibi lity alien to them, so is the entire history of work in which such discipline is embedded. Rimbaud remarks, starkly enough: 'I have a horror of all trades.' In general, it can be said that this race is marked by a pro found spiritual inferiori ty. Compared to the piety, moral ity, and industriousness of its superiors it exhibits only laziness, disobedience, and an abnormally unsucc essful C. Trakl, Das dichterische Werk (Munchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972), .216; for a recent English translation, see G. Trakl, Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition tr. Alexander Stillmark. (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 82. 4 A. Rimbaud, Collected Poems, tr. O. Bernard, (Harmon dsworth: Penguin, 1986), 302. 182 SPIRIT AND TEETH repression of all those traits of the unconscious which Freud descr ibes as 'resistant to educati on,' and among which there is nothing remotel y associated with either decenc y or justice: 'I have never been of this people; I have never been a christian ; I am of the race who sings under torture ; I do not understand the laws, I am a brute'. 5 Such is Trakl's 'accursed race'6 as well as Rimba ud's, communicating its dirty blood in wilderness spaces of barbarian inarticul acy. Eternally aborting the prospect of a transcendental subjectivity, the inferior ones are never captured by contractual reciproc ity, or by its attendant moral univers alism. They are no more employable than they are psychoana lyzable, oblivious to both legality and incenti ve. Incapable of making promises -even to themselves -they are excluded from every possibility of salvation. The craving for such pagan regressions is unspeakable. It is only with the greatest strictness that the superior ones repress the violent drives which lure them into inferior becom ings; becoming female, black, irresponsible and nomadic, becoming an animal, a plant, a death spasm of the sun. In its final phase the Austro- Hungarian Empire became a machine for the generation of homolupic becomin gs: brewing intense trajectories of regression among the 5 Ibid ,308 6 Trak!, Dca dichterische Werk, 82. 183 FANGED NOUMEN A slavic races of the Balkans and Carpat hians, translating them into German, and then condensi ng them under the pressure of exacerbated repression in the Viennese culture core. What exploded in the hysterias of Freud's patients was an irresistible vulcanism of becoming inferior, whose petrified lava flows mapped-out the regressive charac ter of the drive. The migrant blocks of tension summar ized in the Freudian unconscious are much less a matter of Oedipus than of the mo ngols; of those who feed the world of spirit to their horses as they inundate civilization like a flood. If the unconscious is structured like a language it is only because language has the pattern of a plague. Among Trakl's writing's are two war poems, and per haps only two. One is Grodek -named after the battlefield upon which the Austro- Hungarian army suffered a major defeat in the early stages of the conflict -and is perhaps the most widely known of Trakl's writings . It is this poem that includes the line so important to both Heidegger and Derrida concerning 'the hot flame of spirit'. 7 The other is entitled In the East, and sketches the same libidinal figure in the First World War as Freud's writings of the two ensuing decades. This figure traces the displacement of impersonal primar y-process aggression against the self God-city complex -against civilization - onto the far more restrained axis of armed competition between nations . 7 Ibid., 95; Trakl, Poems and Prose, 106. 184 SPIRIT AND TEETH War sublimates the lycanthropic dea th-wave in the same way a dream sublimates unavowable desire; allowing something to remain asleep. In this sense In the East is the undoing of a war poem, and has the nightmare quality associated with someth ing peeled-back; such as the disintegration of flesh from a skull, or the opening of a corpse to reveal an obscenely teeming mass. This movement of violent disillusio nment is starkly outlined in the poem Confiteor: And as the masks fall from each thing I see only anxiety, despair, ignominy and epidemic, The tragedy of human ity has no heroes, A vile piece, played out on graves and corpses.8 The second stanza of In the East ends with the spirits of the stricken - of the erschlagenen, close perhaps to a Geschlecht -sighing among the shadows of autumnal ashes, and to this point In the East might still be a war poem. It would still be possible for the ego to savour these stanzas for the sublimation- trap they lay for impersonal thanatrop isms, offering up the victims of inhibited conflicts as a mourn ful dream-i mage. The third and final stanza, however, is something quite different: 8 Ibid .• '47· 185 FANGED NOUMEN A Thorny wilderness girdles the city From bloody steps the moon hunts Terrified women. Wild wolves break through the gate.9 The wild, the basis of a noun in the first line of the stanza, returns as an adjective in its last. An indeterminate mul tiplicity of wolves effect a ruptur e in the boundary of the city, transmitting its positive exterio rity into its kernel. No longer interpretable as politics, as a war between cities, states, or other civilized totalitie s, the violence of the East relapses into an unrestrained movement of erosion. Blood, the moon, and women are coagulated by an intense menstrual seism which shatters the proper dif ference between life and death, integrity and dissolution, periodicity and shock. What Trakl in Grodek names 'the forgotten blood' recovers its sacred sense, in the regression that transmutes the politico-ethically impregnated blood of the dying solder into savage categorially 0 blivious flow. Wild matter is untouched by its difference from spirit, insofar as this is supposed to depend upon a logical disjunction. The pseudointeriorities of the city are no less permeable to it than the uncultivated spaces marked out by the civilized ones for its exile. The bloody steps [Stufen ] of In the East are only one variant among the many found 9 Ibid., 94; Trakl, Poems and Prose, 124. 186 SPIRIT AND TEETH in Trakl's writings: 'steps of madnes s',lo 'mossy steps,' 'ruined steps,' 'the steps of the wood' .n It is a language of gradation, degree, AbstuJung. Not quantit y as opposed to quality, nor the difference of the two, but heterogenous strata of intensit y, which -like the scales of the chaos theorists -involve irresolvable complex ity, diversi ty, indefinite protractabilit y in both directio ns, the default of absolute thresholds, an economics of incommensur ability, and a compulsively recurrent abortion of the concep t. Essence is preempted by an irresolvable excess of detail, in the same eruptive gesture that lethally infects transcend ence with the return of excitator y complexity. The great simplicities of culture -identit y, equality, absoluten ess, abstraction -are immanen tly subverted by the pathologi cal mass of unsublatable ingredients . There is no concep t of particularit y that is not theolo gical; aligned with the phantasm of a transcendent spirit that stands disjoined from the ineliminable materialit y of all spiritualization processes -to steal Nietzsc he's term. That matter is volatilized to different degrees of spir itualization is not in the least dependent upon spiritual causalities of any kind. Between the wilderness and the polis is a wilder ness history - a genealogy -and not a political history. Regression is not an undoing of the city's IO Ibid.,43. II Ibid., 54. 187 FANGED NOUMENA work, but a recurrence of impersonal creativity. More precisely, the work of the city has never been anything but a mendacious retranscription of the real metamor phoses which reemerge in lycanthropic becom ings. Inferiority is not any kind of lack or impoverish ment, but a positive libidinal charge potentiating spir itualiza tions. Anything that slumbers in the sterility of pseudoabsolu teness is right to fear the inferior ones, and the powerful regressions that wash away the ramparts damm ing-up intensi ve sequen ces. The accursed race, living like beasts, whose veins are inflamed by a cosmic menstruation, have never entered into the great project of civilization, which begins with the use of fire to keep the wild animals at bay. Instead they leave a scorched and blackened trail in their wake as they irresponsi bly protract the trajectory of animalit y. In their hands fire itself loses itself; becoming dirty, epidemic, and regressive. Not for them the humanizing, nucleating fire; the hearth, the pro tective and nutrifying glow, a focus embracing difference within itself, the fire of the familial and the familiar. The fire of the inferior
🔥 Feral Transcendence
🐺 Lycanthropic fire dissolves transcendence through exteriority, creating space for wilderness to propagate beyond human comprehension and control
🐀 Rats function as powerful agents of infiltration, decomposing interiorities and opening sealed spaces to feral alterity with their "hideous talent" for undermining human architectures
🧠 Trakl's poetry embodies multiple becomings—animal, virus, inorganic—refusing stable identity and embracing the wilderness terrain with "excruciating vulnerability"
💀 Post-Christian philosophy emerges "fanged and encouraged" from monotheistic hegemony, rejecting both religious certainty and postmodern ambivalence
🌋 Radical atheism overthrows apologetic-epistemological frameworks by asking "where do the lies stop?" and embracing the voyage into the unknown as true escape from conviction
ones is the dissolvant blaze which spreads uncontr ollably, combusting the gloomy architectures of transcendence in the mad truth of exteriority. It is the fire of waste, dissipation, dehumanization, of a deeper and harsher fertility than can be comprehended by the industry of man. This lupine fire -the apolitical element 188 SPIRIT AND TEETH in war, literature, psychosis, and catastr ophe -makes space for the impersonal propagations of the wilderness. An abrupt question: Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes a Christian, among a general confusion of be comings -becomi ng an animal , becoming a virus, becoming inorganic -just as he was also an anti christ, a poet, a pharmaci st, an alcoholic, a drug addi ct, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestuous cannib al, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampir e, and a werewolf. J list as he became his sister, and also a hermaphr odite. Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are stained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artiller y, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead , or in some other way inhuman. It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed , except as a battlefield, a reservoir of disease, the graveyard of a decons ecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated of lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference. 189 FANGED NOUM ENA PART II: RATS Henrik Ibsen knew some things about rats, 'they who are hated and persecuted of men' .12 The fact of an alliance between rats and desire was evident to him, and when the rat wife of Little Eyolfis asked where her beloved is, she answers: "Down among all the rats" .13 How deftly he indicates the registration of the rats upon the Oedipal claustrophobia of the bourgeois household: Rat Wife: [curtsies at the door] Begging your most humble pardon, ladies and gentlemen ... but have you anything gnawing at this house? Allmers: Have we ... ? No, I don't think so. Rat Wife: Because if you had I'd be glad to help you get rid of it. Rita: Yes, yes, we understan d. But we don't have anything of that kind.l4 How desperate they are not to believe it! "Rats don't belong here, this is the inside, purity, civilization, 12 Henrik Ibsen, the Oiford Ibsen, vol. 8 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 49. 13 Ihid·,49· I4 Ibid., 46. 190 SPIRIT AND TEETH philosoph y ... we don't want to know about anything qf that kind. " Reading is not one thing. It is always possible to construe the movement between strata, plates, terraces, in spiritual terms; a matter of simula crum, represen tation, metaphor , commentar y, and interpretation. God is like and unlike a man, who is like and unlike an anim al, which is like and unlike inorganic matter. This is an architecture of super-terrestrial transitions, transcendental difference , absolute verticality, gulfs of essence, logicized, infinitized, purifying disjunction. There is not one alterna tive to such a schema, but a reck lessly proliferated multiplicit y of alternativ es; complex sponge-spaces rotted by lines of insinuation. There is always a dimension of immanence ; a burrow, a thread, a path for contagion. The storeys of a house lend them selves to social stratificat ion, and thus to philosophical and theological metaphor; the basement representi ng the place of the servants, animali ty, the unconscio us. What is repressed in this case is not the basement itself -hell is not repressed but exhibited -but the hollow walls, thc drainp ipe outside, the arterial system of tubes, ducts, and vents, everything that facilitates the corrup tion of vertically articulated space by the quasiho rizontal ity of an insidious dimension. Laws, revelations, and prayers, or -at a lower level -comman ds, messages, and reports, seem to establish the defined relations between strata 191 FANGED NOUMEN A that are identical with justice. The words of God pass down from level to level, determinatel y mediated at each stage. Inherent to such spatialit y is its subver sion, a more basic and complex order of distances, because Heaven is not without its ratholes, its sewage system, an entire impersonal architectur e characterized by porous heterogeneity. It seems likely that God would insist upon air·conditioning and a dumbwaiter . Irrespective of his celestial visage, J ahweh stilI has ratbites on his ass. Neither Heidegger nor Derrida have any time for TrakI's rats, but that doesn't stop them swarming every where, exaggerating the lycanthropic power of infiltration. It must be admitted; the rats are not very spiritual, but if there is a site, Ort, that focuses TrakI's poetry , why is it not the courtyard that Trakl repeatedly populates with rats? Are not the rats, as a positive antihist oricism, crucial to TrakI's poetic force? Why does Heidegger never mention TrakI's superb poem The Rats, a text that functions as a vermin-core for an entire pattern of infestation? Perhaps it is because difference becomes unacceptable when it moves fast and unpredictabl y, hissing at humanity through plague-sm eared teeth. It is certainly not because the rats are indiscernible, despite their unlocalizable fluidity. They shriek, whistle, bicker, rummage , and romp. When the rats erupt into Dream and Derangement for instance, which is perhaps Trakl's most shatter ing and lycanthropic poem, they are 192 SPIRIT AND TEETH not merely glimpsed -far less ignored or exterminated - but encouraged by the poem's central character, who feeds them in a gesture of beautif ul treachery against mankind. Not that it is population alone that gives them a special privilege , ravens are equally prevalent within Trakl's writ ings -and also have a poem of their own -whilst toads and bats are to be found in incredible numbers . It is the rats' hideous talent for decompo sing interiorities that advantages them; opening the incest-rotted 'house of the father' -and with it the most intensely charged recesses of Trakl's writing -to the depredations of feral alterity. Despite his humanistic prejudices, Hans Zinsser, in his book Rats, Lice, and History, has written delightfully about the rats. He remarks: It is a curious fact that long before there could have been any knowledge concer ning the dangerous character of rodents as carriers of disease, mankind dreaded and pursued these animals. Sticker has col lected a great many references to this subject from ancient and medireval literature, and has found much evidence in the folklore of medireval Europe which points to the vague recognition of some connection between plague and rats. In ancient Palestine, the Jews consid ered all seven mouse varieties (akbar) unclea n, and as unsuited for human nourishment as were pigs. The worshipers of Zoroaster hated water 193 FANGED NOUMEN A rats, and believed that the killing of rats was a service to God. It is also significant that Apollo Smintheus, the god who was supposed to protect against dis ease, was also spoken of as the killer of mice, and saint Gertrude was besought by the bishops of the early Catholic Church to protect against plague and mice. The year 1498, Sticker tells us, was a severe plague year in Germany, and there were so many rats in Frankfurt that an attendant was stationed for several hours each day on a bridge in the town and directed to pay a pfennig for every rat brought in. The attendant cut off the tail of the rat -probably as a primitive method of accounting -and threw the bodies into the river. Heine, according to Sticker, speaks of a tax levied on the Jews of Frankfurt in the fifteenth century, which consisted of the annual delivery of five thousand rat tails. Folklore originating in a number of different parts of Europe during the great plagu e epidemics mentions cats and dogs, the hereditar y enemies of rats and mice, as guardians against plague.15 . There is enormous power to the dynamic hierarchy of vectors mobilized by the rats. It combines the insidious subtlet y ofliquids with the concen trated displacement of 15 H. Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Roston: Bantam Books. 1965), 142-3. 194 SPIRIT AND TEETH compact solids; saturation with jumps. Rats carry fleas which bear diseases, augmenting the fluid dissem ination of plagues with a ferociously discon tinuous transm ission. To quote Zinsser again: Studies made within the last few years seem to indi cate that the virus of the Mexican-American type of typhus fever, as well as of the endemic variety in the Mediter ranean basin, is highly adapted to rodents and is carried in these animals -rats -during the intervals between human epidemic s; transmitted from rat to rat by the rat louse (polyplax) and the rat flea (Xenopsylla), and, on suitable occasions , to man from the rat by the rat flea. For this reason, Nicolle speaks of this as the 'murine' virus.16 And a little further on: From the point of view of all other living creatures, the rat is an unmiti gated nuisance and pest. There is nothin g that can be said in its favor. It can live anywhere and eat anythin g. It burrows for itself when it has to, but, when it can, it takes over the habitations of other animals, such as rabbits, and kills them and their young. It climbs and swims. 16 Ibid, 142. 195 FANGED NOUMEN A It carries disease of man and animals -plague, typhus, trichinella spiralis, rat-bite fever, infectious jaundice, possibly foot-and-mouth disease and a form of equine 'influenza'. Its destructiveness is almost unlimited.17 The first empirical element to be noted by any libidinal rat theory is the zoological diversification of the rat into two species. These are 'Rattus rattus, the black, house, or ship-rat, and Rattus Norvegicus, the greyish brown, field, or sewer-rat' ,18 of which Shrewsbury says in his History if the Bubonic Plague: 'By comparison with the house-rat it is less agile but far more voracious and cunnin g, and as it is stronger and more fecund it is a much more formidable enemy of mankind'.19 During the outbreak of bubonic plague during the fourteenth centur y it was not only the intense killing of human populations, or delivery of terminal vectors, that was executed by R. rattus, who lived and propagated in close proximity to humans, but also the long-range dissemination of the plague, as R. Norvegi cus is not thought to have arrived in Europe before the eighteenth centur y. If this is true -and cu rrent historical zoology gives no positive reason to doubt it -then it can 17 Ibid, 150-1. 18 JF.D. Shrewsbury, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the Briti"h Isles (Cambr idge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 7. 19 Ibid, 8. 196 SPIRIT AND TEETH safely be asserted that the black death, in addition to its precursor which raged across the near orient and Europe during the sixth and seventh centuries, will remain the climax of achievement reached by R. rattus, who has since been eclipsed. Zinsser once more: just as the established civilizations of Northern Europe were swept aside by the mass invasions of barbarians from the East, so the established hegem ony of the black rat was eventually wiped out with the incursion of the hordes of the brown rat, or Mus decumanus -the ferocious, short-nosed, and short tailed Asiatic that swept across the Continent in the early eighteenth centur y ... The brown rat, too, came from the East. It is now known as the 'common ' rat and, because of a mis taken notion of its origin, as Mus norvegicu s. Its true origin, accordin g to Hamilton and Hinton, is probably Chinese Mongolia or the region east of Lake Baikal, in both of which places forms resembling it have been found indigenous. The same writers quote Blasius, who believes that the ancients about the Caspian Sea may have known this rat. Claudius A:lianus, a Roman rhetorician of the second cen tury, in his De A nimalium Natura, speaks of 'little less than Ichneumons, making period ical raids in infinite 197 FANGED NOUMENA numbers' in the countries along the Caspian, 'swim ming over rivers holding each other's tails.' Pallas (1831), in his Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica, records that in 1727 - a mouse year -great masses of these rats swam across the Volga after an earthquake .2o There are two varieties of rat, but this should not be taken as a gift for our metaphysicians, or supposed antimeta physicians, who are constantly in search of dichotomic conceptual oppositions. The duality of R. rattus and R. Norvegicus is of the kind 1, 2, ... not 0 ... 1; it encloses nothing, reaches no limits, provides no determination, logical negativity , or alternation. The tokens of libidinal displacement are complex and not diacritical. Alogical differenti ation: black and brown, not black and white. One, two ... first the wave uf R. rattus, effective on its own, almost invisible to the Europe of the middle ages, differentiated perhaps from the mice (it was called mures majores),21 ... lh, 1, ... ? And then the wave of R. Norvegicus, a different type of rat, but not an opposite type; rather, a type that was more clever and destructive, taking the rat process a little bit further . Far from requiring the black rat for its determinacy the new Asiatic invader wipes out 20 Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History, 149. 21 Shrewsbu ry, History oflhe Bubonic Plague, 121. 198 SPIR IT AND TEETH the previous rat population, establishing itself as a sheer intensit y, as a potential for disaster. Rats disdain discrimi nation, propagating their difference upon a plateau of exciteme nt. Differentiation within an illimitable series, alogical dissimilari ty, indepe ndence from the differend, and indiscriminate proliferation of nonidentit y; this is the 'logic' of the rats. Freud's 1909 case of compulsi ve neurosis -the 'rat man' -is told by his captain, fateful ly, of a 'particularly terrible Oriental punishm ent'. 22 Freud describes how this was related to him in the anal ysis: 'the condemned is bound (he expressed himself so unclearly that I could not immediat ely guess [erraten] in what position) -upon his posterior a pot was placed, into a which rats [Rat ten] were introduced, which -he stood up again and gave out all the signs of terror and resistance -bored themsel ves in'. 23 This is the 'rat-punishment' [die Rat tenstraje], visited upon Europe, through its underside, from the East. Its peculiar insidiousness, which Freud does not emphasize even though he marks it, is that to surmise [erraten] the riddle [Ratse!] of the Rattenstroje is to suffer it. In the very movement of prowess the imperial interpreta tive gesture is taken par derriere by an impersonal 22 S. Freud, Studienaus gabe, Band VII: Zwang, Paranoia, und Peroersi.on (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1982),4$ S. Freud, 'Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis' (1909), in 'Three Case Histories, ed. P. Rieff (NY: Touchstone, 1996), 11. 23 Ibid., 44; 12. 199 FANGED NOUMEN A libidinal force from beyond representational discourse, whether logico-psychiatric or oriental ist. The image of anal violation that organizes the rat-delirium has all the traits of a compromise formation; a sublimation of utter unexpectedness into a linearized passage fortified by a sadistically invested and ego-eo-opted sphinc ter. The infiltration of the rat is singularized, and depicted as an inverse frontal assault, stripped of its fluidity, indirectness, heterogeneity, as if it were mere delicacy that obstructed our compr ehension of vermin space. It is not Oedipal ambivalence that is solicited by such an image, but the racist misogyny that would project all undomesticated flows onto an axis of expulsabilit y. The rattenstraf e is a wish -and thus an idealization -because it is far more comforting to the anal-sa distic structure of humanism than the reality of the free penetrability of the body along all of its irresolvably scaled estuar ies. Animality is not a state, essence, or genus, but a complex space cross-cut by voyages of all kinds. Trakl explores this wilderness terrain with an excruciating vulnerability. The animal ity which Trakl finds has its dead-ends and stagnant sumps, it has its humanistic and theological becom ings, but it also has its channels of open flow; becomin g multiple, fluid, unpredictable, becoming an enemy of mankind, lupine and murine becomin gs of all kinds. These intensi ve sequences cannot be isolated or determ ined, since no impermeable boundary remains 200 SPIRIT AND TEETH to quarantine Trakl's rodents from the nameless ones. From becoming a mouse, and then a black rat, and then a brown rat, or from becoming one's sister, and then a pack of wolves, and then a swarm of rats. The eternity of Rimbaud's inferior race shares its diseases with Nietzsche's 'deep, deep, eternity ', for which the very adjective is torn apart by convulsive waves of descent. An unfathomable abyss of regression or recurrence protracts itself epidemi cally into Trakl's body. 'I am all the vermin in history.' Indecent precipitation. 201 Shamani c Nietzsche God said to Nietzsche: That'll Tzetzsche, You irritating little Krietzsche. ANONY MOUS GRAFFIT O Will Christendom ever reap the whirlwind it has sown? That it should try to pass, without the vulnerab ility of interval, from a tyranny to ajoke, is certainly understandable, but that its enemies should do nothing to obstruct its evasion of nemesis is more puzzling. How can there be such indifference to the decline of our inquisitors? Is it that they succeed so exorbitantly in their project of domestica tion that we have been robbed of every impulse to bite back? Having at last escaped from the torture-palace of authoritarian love we shuffle about, numb and con fused, flinching from the twisted septic wound of our past (now clumsily bandaged with the rags of secular culture). 203 FANG ED NOU MENA T t is painfully evident that post-christian humanit y is a pack of broken dogs. Georges Bataille is the preeminent textual impedi ment to Christianity's carefully plotted quiet death; the prolongation of its terminal agonies into the twentieth century. Having definitively exhausted itself after two ugly millennia of species vivisection, Christianity attempts to skulk away from the scene, aided by the fog of supine tolerance which dignifies itself as 'post· modernity' . It does not take a genius to sec whose interests are served by this passage from militant theism to postmodern ambivalence. A despot abandons any game that begins to turn out badly. This has been the case with meta physics. From Kant onwards explorator y philosoph y ceased to gener ate the outcomes favourable to established (theistic) power, and we were suddenly told: "this game is over, let's call it a draw". The authoritarian tradition of Euro pean reason tried to pull the plug on the great voyages at exactly the point they first became interesting, which is to say: atheistic, inhuman, experimental , and danger ous. Schopenhauer -refusing the agnostic stand-off of antinomy -was the first rallying zone for all those disgusted by the contr ived peace entitled 'the end of metaphysics'. Bataille is his most recent successor . The forces of antichrist are emerging fanged and encour aged from their scorched rat -holes in the wake of mono theistic hegemony, without the slightest attachment to the 204 SHAMANIC NIET ZSCHE paralytic tinkerings of deconstructive undecidabilit y. 'An attitude which is neither military nor religious becomes insuppor table in principle from the moment of death's arrival'.l The war has scarcely begun. It is hard to imagine anything more ludicrous than Descartes, or Kant, having erected their humble philo sophical dwellings alongside the baroque architectural excesses of the church, standing in the shadows of flying buttresses and asking pompousl y: how do we know the truth? It surely cannot solely be due to Nietzsche that we see the absurdity of an 'epistemological' question being asked in such surroundings. When a philosopher has a priest for a neighbour, which is to say, a practitioner of the most elaborately constructed system of mendacity ever conceived upon earth, how can a commitment to 'truth' in a positive sense even be under considerati on? Truth in such situations is a privilege of the deaf. There is no question of' error', 'weakness in reasoning', or 'mistaken judgment' when addressing the authoritative discourses on truth in the western tradition, those cathedrals of theological concept building that ground our 'common sense'; no, here one can only speak of a deeply rooted and fanatical discipline aJlying. In other words, one frac tion of the radicality of the atheistic thinking escalated through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bataille is that it G. Bat.ille, Oeuvres Completes, 12 Vols. (Paris: Gallimard, '970-'988), vo!' 11,246. 205 FANGED NOUMEN A overthrows the high-bourgeois apologetic-epis temological problematic in modern philosophy by asking clearly for the first time: where do the lies stop? The great educational value of the war against Chris tendom lies in the absolute truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The 'man of God' is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of a priest is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality. There is no truth that is not war against theology, and even the word 'truth' has been plastered by the spittle of priestcraft. It cannot be attachment to some alternative conviction that cuts here, but only relentless refusal of what has been told. The dangerous infidels bypass dialectics . It is the sceptic who assassinates the lie. Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing? 206 SHAM ANIC NIETZS CHE It is this thought alone that has differentiated it from the shallow things of the earth. Yet the glory and also the indignity of philosoph y is to have sought the end of knowing, and no more. Once blatant sophisms are exempted, the fact that scepticism has never been enacted is the sole argument of the dogmati sts, and it is a powerful one, despite its empirical flavour. There can be little doubt that the philo sophical advocates of disbelief have tended to exploit the very conventions they profess to despise as the shelter for an insincere madness. As was the case with Socrates, philosophy has sought to peel itself away from sophism by admitting to its ignorance, as if unknowing were a pathos to be confessed. Profound ecsanity ['Ecsane' -out of one's mind] alone is effective scepticism, in comparison to which sceptical philosophies fall prey to naive theories of belief, as if belief could simply be discarded, or with held. We know nothing of course, but we do not remotely know even this, and mere assertion in no way ameliorates our destitution. Belief is not a possession but a prison, and we continue to believe in achieved knowledge even after denying it with intellectual comprehensiv eness. The refusal to accept a dungeon is no substitute for a hole in the wall. Only in a voyage to the unknown is there real escape from conviction. 207 FANGED NOU MENA The dangerous sceptics are those Kant fears, 'a species of nomads, despising all settled modes of life'2 who come from a wilderness tract beyond knowledge . They are explorers, which is also to
🌑 Shamanic Nihilism Unleashed
🔄 Eternal recurrence shatters Christian preservation, opening gateways to the sacred void where death becomes not an end but an immersive expedition beyond meaning
🔥 Bataille's Nietzsche emerges as a shamanic explorer rather than philosopher, waging war against idealism through "complicating thought" that intensifies confusion against the tranquilizing "will to truth"
🧠 Base materialism functions not as doctrine but as expedition—navigating thought as chance and matter as turbulence, yielding no propositions to judge but paths to explore beyond categorical constraints
🌋 Poetry operates as "fluent silence" touching the sacred (=0), transgressing discursive order through "rational deregulation of all senses" that produces necessary suffering as one approaches the unknown
⚰️ The death of God represents not merely a philosophical position but a religious event—a transgression and anti-theistic warfare that liberates exploration into previously forbidden territories
say: invasion routes of the unknown . It is by way of these inhumanists that the vast abrupt of shamanic zero -the EJtOXtl of the ancients - infiltrates its contagious madness onto the earth. EnoXtl is a word attributed to Pyrrho by way of indi rect reportage , but in its absence the philosopher's name would lose what slight sense invests it. Although it might be argued that we owe EnoXtl to Pyrrho, it is from EnoXll that the name Pyrrho comes to us, as a cryptograph of the unknown. Even were it not for Pyrrho's silence - a silence far more prqfound that the literary abstinence of Socrates -EJtOXtl would surely not be something of which we could straightforwardly know the truth, far less a method, or a subjective state. EnoX1l is a report of the abrupt, and an escape. 1. [ ... ] Q. the world of 'phenomena ' is the adapted world which we feel to be real. The 'reality' lies in the continual recurrence of identical, familiar, related 2 I. Kant, 'The Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. K. Smith (NY: Palgrave Macmillan: 2003), Preface to the First Edition, 8. 208 SHAMAN IC NIETZSCHE things in their logicized character, in the belief that here we are able to reckon and calculate; 3. the antithesis of this phenomenal world is not 'the true world,' but the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations -another kind of phenomenal world, a kind 'unknow able' for us; 4. questions, what things 'in-themselv es' may be like, apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding, must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that things exist? 'Thingn ess' was first created by us. The question is whether there could not be many other ways of creating such an apparent world.3 How much industrialism lies buried in the notion of thought! As if one could ever work things out. One does not think one's way out, one gets out, and then sees (that it wasn't one ... ). Bataille's Nietzsche is not a locus of secular reason but of shamanic religion; a writer who escapes philo sophical conceptuality in the direction of ulterior zones, and dispenses with the thing in itselfbecause it is an item of intelligible representation with no consequence as a 3 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. W. Kaufmann (NY: Vintage, 1968), section 569. 209 FANGED NOUMEN A vector of becoming (of travel). Shamanism defies the transcendence of death, opening the tracts of 'voyages of discovery never reported'.4 Against the grain of shallow phenomenal ism that character izes Nietzsche readings, Bataille pursues the fissure of abysmal scepticism, which passes out of the KantianNoumenon (or intelligible object) through Kant and Schopenhauer's thing in itself (strip ping away a layer of residual Platonism) , and onwards in the direction of acategorial, epochal, or base matter that connects with Rimbaud's 'invisible splendour s':5 the immense deathscap es of a 'universe without images'. (; Mat ter cannot be allotted a category without being retrieved for ideality, and the Nietzschean problem with the Ding an Sich was not its supposed dogmatic materialism, but rather that it proposed 'an ideal form of matter',7 as the transcendent (quarantined) site of integral truth, a 'real world'. There are no things-in-themse lves h�c.allse there are no things: 'thingness has only been invented by us owing to the requirements of logic'8 (which ultimately revert to those of grammar). The Ding an Sich is a concept tailored for a God (supreme being) desperately seeking to hide itself: a cultural glitch turned nasty, but on the 4 A. Rimbaud, Collected Poems, tr. O. Bernard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 327. 5 Ibid., 296. 6 Ibid., 293. 7 Bataille, Oeuvres Comptetes, vol. I, 179. S Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 558. 210 SHAMAN IC NIETZ SCHE run at last. 'Root of the idea of substance in language , not in beings outside US'! 9 The antithesis of the apparent world and the true world is reduced to the antithesis 'world' and 'nothing'.10 Materialism is not a doctrine but an expediti on, an Alpine break-out from socially policed convicti on. It 'is before anything else the obstinate negation of idealism, which is to say of the very basis of all philosophy'.l1 Explor ing acategorial matter naviga tes thought as chance and mat ter as turbulence 'beyond all regulation' .12 It yields no propositions to judge, but only paths to explore. This is Nietzsch e as a fanged poet at war with the philosophers (with the new priests), a thinker who seeks to make life more problematic. Bataille locks onto a desire that resonates with the reality that confounds us, and not with a 'rational ity' that would extricate us from the labyrinth. Nietzsche is the great exemplar of complicating thought, exploiting knowledge in the interest of interro gations (and this is not in order to clarify and focus, but to subtilize and dissociate them). Complicating thought 9 Ibid., section 562. \0 Ibid., section 567. 11 Bataillc, Oeuvres Completes, vol. I, 220. 12 Ibid., vol. VI, 97. 211 FANGED NOUMEN A strengthens the impetus of an active or energetic confusion -delirium -against the reactive forces whose obsessi ve tcndency is to resolve or conclude. Rebelling against the fundamen tal drift of philosophic al reasoning, it sides with thought against knowle dge, against the tranquillizin g prescriptions of the 'will to truth'. If Nietzsche is locked in an extraordinarily furious struggle with philosoph y it is because it is philosophy that has claimed, with the most cynical explicitn ess, to negate problems. Philoso phy has always wanted to retire; Schopenhauer is simply its most honest exempl ar. The 'absolute' is humanit y's laziest though t. Nor does it suffice to argue that thought can be complicated within itself, or -as the philosophers have said for some time - 'immanentl y', for we know where this path of thinking leads. An intellection in need of immanent critique is one that is already nudging against an ultimate solubilit y. 'The intellect finds its limits within itself' -it does not even need to move to consummate interrogation! It is thinking such as this, whose most eminent model is the Kant of the critical philoso phy, that generated such distrust in Nietzsche for writers who work sitting down. Wisdom (sophia) substitutes for trav elling, �lOllow ing it out into a Baudelairean caricatur e of the Voy age -redundantly reiterating a moral dogma -and to love it is to seek to be still. In obedience to narco Platonic Eros, philos ophy defers to the end of desire. 212 SHAMAN IC NIETZSCHE Nietzsc he reaches back beyond this Hellenic priest philosophizing, and forward beyond its modern limit, reassembling sophia as escape: Indeed, we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel, when we hear the news that 'the old god is dead,' as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premo nitions, expectations. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an 'open sea'.13 The death of God is an opportunity, a chance . It makes sense to ask what is meant by the word 'noumenon' , but 'chance' does not function in this way, since it is not a concept to be apprehended, but a direction in which to go. 'To the one who grasps what chance is, how insipid the idea of God appears, and suspicio us, and wing clipping' !14 Monotheism is the great gate-keeper, and where it ends the exploration of death begins _ If there are places to which we are forbidden to go, it is because 13 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tc. W. Kaufmann (NY: Vintage, 1974), section 343. 14 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, vol. VI} 116. 213 FANGED NOUM ENA they can in truth be reached, or because they can reach us. In the end poetry is invasion and not expression, a trajectory of inciner ation; either strung-up in the cob webs of Paradise, or strung-out into the shadow- torrents of hell. It is a route out of creatio n, which is to each their fate interpreted as enigma, as lure. 'Now a hard, an inexorable voyage commences - a quest into the great est possible distance' .15 'I said good-bye to the world'.16 Even the most angelic curiosit y -when multiplied to the power of eternity -must find its way to end in the abyss. It can seem at times as if Bataille owes almost eve rything to Christianity; his understand ing of the evil at the heart of erotic love, the hysterical affectivity of his writing, along with its excremental obsession, its epilep toid conception of delight, its maligna ncy, the perpetual stench of the gutter. Yes, this is all very Christian; well attuned to a doctrine gf'!'ltated in the sewers of LIte empire. Yet from out of the aberrant intensity and disorder of Bataille' s writings an impossible proposition is perpetually reiterated: that far from being the acme of religion -let alone its telic blossom ing -God is the principle of its suppression. The unity of theas is the tombstone of sacred zero, the crumbling granitic foundation of secular desti tution. This is so exorbitantl y true that the existence of 15 Ibid., 29. 16 Rimbaud, Collected Poems, 330. 214 SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE God would be an even greater disaster for him than for us. How infinitely trivial the crucifixion of Jesus appears beside the degrading torture of being God, after all, existence is so indistingu ishable from defilement that one turns pale at the very thought of an eternal being's smell. Perhaps this is why God 'is profoundly atheistic ', 17 leading Bataille to remark that '[w]hilst I am God, I deny him to the depths of negation'18 (,nihilism ... might be a divine way of thinking ',19 Nietzsche anticipates ). God can only redeem the universe from its servility by burning his creation into ash and annihilating himself . Such is the 'God of blinding sun, ... this God of death that I sought'. 20 Bataille invokes the dark undertow of a self-butchering divinity: 'God of despair, give me ... your heart ... which no longer tolerates that you exist'.21 (If God is an explorer, then there is no God.) Bataille's texts are 'a hecatomb of words without gods or reason to be',22 led back down through the crypts of the West by a furious impulse to dissociate theism and religion, and thus to return the sacred to its shamanic impiety, except that nothing can ever simply return, and 17 Rataille, Oeuvres Completes, vol. V, 121. 18 Ibid" 152. 19 Nietzsche, '!he Will to Power, section 15. 20 BataiIle, Oeuvres ComplCtes, vol. IV, 203. 21 Ibid., vol. v, 59. 22 Ibid., 220. 215 FANGED NOUMENA Hell will never be an innocent underworld again. The depths have become infernal, really so, quite irrespective of the fairy tales we are still told. '[F]lames surround us / the abyss opens beneath our feet'23 reports Bataille from the brink of the impossible, 'an abyss that does not end in the satiate contempla tion of an absence'24 because its lip is the charred ruin of even the most sublimed subjec tivity. 'I have nothing to do in this world', he writes, '[i]f not to burn'.25 'I suffer from not burning ... approach ing so close to death that I respire it like the breath of a lover'.26 It is not only due to the inquisition that all the great voyagers have for a long time been singed. For well over a century all who have wanted to see have seen: no profound exploratio n can be launched from the ruins of monotheism unless it draws its resources from damnation. The death of God is a religious event - a transgres sion, experiment in damnation , and stroke of anti theistic 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 excur sion in Hell, as if the infernal too was a matter of justice. 23 Ibid., vol. III, 95. 24 Ibid., vol. V, 199. 25 Ibid., vol. IV,17. 06 Ibid., vol. V, 246. 216 SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE 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 differen t. This ambivalence responds to that of death 'itself', which is not ontological but labyrinthine: a relapse of composition that is absolute to discon tinuity, yet is noth ing at the level of immanence. The very individuality that would condition the possibility of a proprietary death could only be achieved if death were impossible. One dies because discontinuity is never realized, but this means that there is never 'one' who dies. Instead there is an unthinkable communication with zero, immanence, or the sacred. 'There is no feeling that throws one into exuberance with greater force than that of nothingness. But exuberance is not at all annihilation; it is the surpass ing of the shattered attitude, it is transgres sion' Y The question of the mere 'truth' of Christianity - whether in regard of its origin, not to speak of Chris· tian astronomy and natural science -is a matter of 27 Ibid., vol. X, 72. 217 FANGED NOUM ENA secondary importance as long as the question of the value of Christian morality is not consid ered.23 What if eternal recurrence were not a belief? ('The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief ... is necessarily false because there simply is no true world'. )29 Bataille suggests: The return immotivates the instant, freeing life from an end and in this ruining it straight away. The return is .,. the desert of one for whom each instant henceforth finds itself immoti vated.30 Christianity -the exemplary moral 'religion' -'substituted slow suicide'3! and representation (belief) for shamanic contact with zero-interruption, but with the (re-)emer genee of nihilisitic recurrence, caution, prudence, every kind of 'concern for time to come'32 is restored to the senselessness of cosmic 'noise'. With recurrence comes a 'future, [which is] not the prolongation of myself across time, but the expiry of a being going further, passing 28 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 251. 29 Ibid., section 15. 30 Bataille, Oeu.vres Completes, vol. VI, 23. 31 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 247. 32 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, vol. VI, 50, 167. 218 SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE attained limits'. 33 A religious crisis can no longer be deferred. In the final phase of Nietzsche's intellectual life the eternal recurrence is grasped as a weapon, a 'hammer,' the transmission element between diagnosis and intervention. Where Christendom recuperates decline to preservation, deflecting it from its intensive plummet to zero, eternal recurrence re-opens its abyssal prospect, precipicing affect onto death. This is the predominant sense of 'selection' in Nietzsche' s texts; a vertiginous extrication of zero from the series of preservative values, cutting through 'the ambig uous and cowardly compromise of a religion such as Christianity: more precisely, such as the church: which, instead of encouraging death and self-destruction, protects everything ill-constit uted and sick and makes it propagate itself'. 34 The notes assembled into section 55 of The Will to Power deve10p this morbid tnread. Either 'existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness' (a box), or 'the nothing (the "meaningless"), eternally'. 35 The nihilism of recurrence is ambivalent between its (Christian ) historical sense as the constrictive deceleration of zero and its cosmic (non local) virtuality as a gateway onto death. Christendom is 33 Ibid., 29. 34 Nietzsche, 1he Will to Power) section .247. 35 Ibid., section 55. 219 FANGED NOUM ENA to be attacked because it was its morality that protected life against despair and the leap into nothing'.36 Morality guarded the underprivileged against nihil ism ... Supposing that the faith in this morality would perish, then the underprivileged would no longer have their comfort -and they would perish.37 The religious history of mankind is based upon a technics of ill-health: dehydration, starvation, mutilation, depri vation of sleep, a general 'self-destruction of the under privileged: self-vivisection, poisoning, intoxication '. 38 A journey was underway which Christian preservative moralism -generalized species cowardice -privatized, representationalized, crushed under the transcendent phallus, froze, obstructed, and drove elsewhere. Christian ity is a device for trapping the sick, but recurrence melts through the cages: What does 'underprivileged' mean? Above all, physi ologically -no longer politically. The unhealthiest kind ... (in all classes) furnishes the soil for this nihilism: they will experience the belief in the eternal recurrence as a curse, struck by which one no longer 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 220 SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE shrinks from any action; not to be extinguished but to extinguish everything.39 To relate sickness to death as cause to effect is itself a sign of health. Their morbid interconnection is quite different. Sickness is not followed by death within the series of ordered representation. It opens the gates. Genealogy does not reduce sickness to a historical topic, since sickness -the inability to suspend a stimu lus -eludes mere unfolding in progress ive time, tending towards the disappearance of time in epochal interruption. The reflex-spasm at (and by) which reactivity gropes is the atemporal continuum beneath the crust of health. Death is 'that which has no history' ,40 and Nietzsche's method is syphilis. 'Only religion assures a consump tion that destroys the proper substance of those that it animates'Y Philosoph y is a ghoul that haunts only ruins, and the broken croaks of our hymns to sickness have scarcely begun. Borne by currents of deep exhaustion that flow silent and inexorable beneath the surface perturbations oftwitch and chatter, damned, shivering, claw-like fingers hewn from torture and sunk into wreckage drawn with 39 Ibid. 40 F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy if Morals, tr. W. Kaufmann, R.J Hollingdale (NY: Vintage, 1969), Second Essay, section 13. 41 Bataille, Oeuvres Comptete s, vol. VII, 316. 221 FANGED NOUMEN A unbearable slowness down into the maw of flame and snuffed blackness twisted skewerish into fever-hollo wed eyes. Eternal recurrence is our extermination, and we cling to it as infants to their mother's breasts. 'Poetry leads from the known to the unknown' writes BataiIle,42 in words that resonate with Rim baud. Poetry is fluent silence, the only venture of writing to touch upon the sacred (=0), because 'the unknown ... is not distinguished from nothing ness by anything that discourse can announc e'. 43 To write the edge of the impossible is a transgression against discursive order, and an incitement to the unspeakable: 'poetry is immoral '.44 Rimbaud writes from the other side of Zarathus trean descent/death [Untergang], anticipating the labyrinthine spaces of a Nietzsche for the sick, and of what escapes from/due to the cultural convulsion Nietzsche reinforces. 'The poet makes himself a visionar y by a long, immense and rational deregulation qf all the senses', 45 and this deregu- 1ation is a source of '[iJneffable torture' ,46 'the sufferings are enormou s'47 Rimbaud insists. No organism is adapted 42 Ibid., vol. V, '57. 43 Ibid., '33· 44 Ibid., 212. 45 Rimbaud, Collected Poems, 10. 46 Ibid., n. 47 Ibid., 6. 222 SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE to 'arrive at the unknown' ,48 which makes deregulation as necessa ry as it makes pain inevitable. Our nerves squeal when they are re-strung upon the phylog enetically unan ticipated, 'experiences strike too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound':49 a descent into the inferno. Nuit de l'enfer, where the entrails of nature dissolve meanderou s into lava, 't his is hell, eternal pain', 50 and Rimbaud burns, 'as is necessary'. 51 Yes, the poet must be a visionary. The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been unders tood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centurie s, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo. True poetry is hideous, because it is base communica tion, in contrast to pseudo-com municati ve discourse, which presupp oses the isolation of the terms it unites. Communication - in the transgressive non-sense BatailIe lends it -is both an utter risk and an unfathoma ble 48 Ibid. 49 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 230. 50 Rimbaud, Collected Poems, 3'3. 51 Ibid. 223 FANGED NOUMENA degradation, associated with repellent affect. The ego emerges in the flight from communicative immanence, from deep or unholy community, initiating a history that leads to the bitter truth of the desertification of the isolated being. From the anxiety of base contact, which it can only experience as dissolution, the ego stumbles into the ennui of autonomy, the antechamber to a harsh despair, whose horror is accentuated by the fact that it arises at the point where escape has exhausted itself, where the ego has quarantined itself to the limit of its being against extraneous misfortune. Ennui is not any sort of response to the compromising of the ego from without, it is not an impurity or a contamination (the negation of such things are for it a condition of exist ence), but rather, it is the very truth of achieved being; the core affect of personal individuality. Ennui cannot be mastered, surpassed, resolved, auJgehoben, because it is nothing but the distillate of such operations, indeed, of action as such. Ennui is insinuated into the very fabric of project, as 'the necessity of leaving oneself '. 52 If the soil of Bataille's writing is volcanic it is not only due to the sporadic convulsions of a devastating incandescence, but also because its fertility is anticipated by a monstrous sterilization. Beneath and before the luxuriant jungles of delirium is the endless crushing ash-plain of despair. 52 Bataille, Oeuvre, Completes, vol. V, '37. 224 SHAMANIC NIETZSCHE 'I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there'.53 Blake might have written such words, although their sense would then have been quite differe nt. Drooled from Rimbaud's pen they point less to a potency of imagination than to a geological crisis of justification, approaching a perfect epistemological irresponsibilit y. It is not for us to defend the rights of truth, truth is decreed by the masters. What matters is to adapt, nursing the meagre resources of our reactivi ty, of our base cunning. 'Belief' -the cloak of confession -is too precious a resource to be squandered on the zealotry of idealism. What value is there to be extracted from a commit ted belief, from a last-ditch belief? Such things are for the strong (or for dupes), for the allies and slaves oflight, for all those who do not rely on the subter ranean passages beneath belief to avoid the panoptic appa ratuses. Adaptability can only be lamed by commitments. We have seen enough true Christians: rabbits transfixed by headlights. When draped about the inferiors beliefs are not loyalties, but rather sun-blocks against inquisi tion. We creatures of shadow are hidden from their enlighten ment. We believe exactly what they want. The inferior race 'await God with greed' ,54 scavenging at
🔥 Infernal Discourse Unleashed
🌑 Infernal messages emerge from below rather than descending from above, functioning as passages through lost mazes rather than edifices of truth or belief
💀 The tension between sacred unknowing and profane knowing reveals how philosophy has historically aligned itself with judicial authority, creating a supreme tribunal that judges reality
🧠 Socratic philosophy transforms the unknown into mere epistemic uncertainty, subordinating sacred confusion to dialectical reasoning and establishing the coordinates for Western thought
⚖️ The juridico-philosophical complex has gradually collapsed toward immanence, with transcendent authority evaporating as marketization automates social transactions
🔄 Death functions simultaneously as judgment's fulfillment, its justifying condition, and potentially its suspension—revealing the limits of philosophical recuperation
Christ 'like wolves at an animal they have not killed'. 55 Creation, testamental genealogy , the passion of Christ ... 53 Rimbaud, Collected Poems, 313. 54 Ibid., 304. 55 Ibid., 302. 225 FANGED NOUMENA none of it is their story, nor is any other, for they are too indolent to have a story of their own, only theft and lies are 'proper' to them: 'piliage'.5G Rimbaud' s inheritance, 'above all', consists of 'mendacit y and sloth' Y 'I have never been a Christian; I am of the race which sung under torture'58 he remarks. It is precisely obliviousness to Christianit y, to fidelity or duty, to privileged narrative s, that eases the inferior race into singing the praises of the Nazarene. The white man has guns, therifore the truth. 'The whites disembark. The cannon ! It is necessar y to submit to baptism, dress oneself , work' .59 In contrast to the pompous declarations of the ortho doxies, which come from on high (like a stroke of the whip), an infernal message is subter ranean, a whisper from the nether-regions of discourse, since 'hell is certainly below' .60 Just as the underworld is not a hidden world - a real or true [Wahre Welt] -but is that hicirlt-n by all worlds, so is the crypt-mutter from hell something other than an inverted scene, concept, or belief. In their infernal lineam ents words are passages, leading into and through lost mazes, and not edificat ions. Acquisition is impos sible in hell. There is nothing en bas except wandering 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 301. 58 Ibid., 307-8. 59 Ibid., 309. 60 Ibid., 315. 226 SHAMAN IC NIETZSCHE amongst emergences, and what is available has always come strangely, without belonging. Infernal low-life has no understa nding for property. Even the thoughts of the inferior ones are camoufla ge and dissimulation, their beliefs mere chameleon dapplings of the skin. Poetry does not strut logically amongst convictions, it seeps through crevices; a magmic flux resuscitated amongst vermin. If it was not that the Great Ideas had basements, fissures, and vacuoles, poe try would never infest them. Faiths rise and fall, but the rats persist. Rimbaud's saison en enjer pulsates through a discourse without integrity. Teaching nothing, it infects. Like matter cooked-thr ough with pestilential 'contagions of energy' ,61 it collapses into a swarm of plague-vectors. Substance is only its host. '[WJords, books, monumen ts, symbols, and laughters are nothing but the paths of this contagion, its passages' .62 I never could conclude anything ... Zero does that. Towards New Seas That way is my will ; I trust In my mind and in my grip. 61 Bataillc, Oeuvres Completes, vol. V, 111. 62 Ibid. 227 FANGED NOUM ENA Without plan, into the vast Open sea I head my ship. All is shining, new and newer, Upon space and time sleeps noon; Only your eye -monstr ously, Stares at me, infinity.63 63 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 371. 228 After the Law There are peculiar difficulties associated with any phi losophy of law, due in large part to the inevitabilit y that any attempt at a transcende nt evaluation of law finds itself enacting a parody of judicial process. Ever since the trial of Socrates (if not already with the fragment of Anaximander), philosophy has affirmed its vocation only insofar as it has fantasised a supreme tribunal: an ultimate court of appeal or ideal form of justice. The vindication of Socratism is inextricable from a retrial, both exculpation and counterlitigation, the forum of which remains the unstable issue of metaphysics. As for its 'own' or 'inner' law, logic has never been anything other than the distillation of juridical procedure, the abstract form of inclusion or non-inclusion of a case under a law (species under genus), which has been predominantly 229 FANGED NOUM ENA thematised as judgment, although a language of proposi tions has more recently risen to prominence. Philosophy and judicial authority find themselves bound together in a discourse upon real legitimation. Appearances (cases) are to be judged from the perspective of a generic reason at a superior level of reality identified in the premoder n period with an ideality whose final term is the intellect of God. Aristotle consummates a categorial -accusator y - sense of form, and the Augustinian collision of Platonism with Judaeo-Christian eschatology and Christian logos has only entrenched this complicity. This chapter cuts into two episodes or intersections of the occidental juridico-philoso phical complex, in an attempt to dramatise the broadest tendency of this proc ess: that of collapse towards immanence, or evaporation of the transcendent. There is nothing peculiarly occult or mysterious about such a tendency sinc� it finds its most highly accelerated phase in our contemporary marketisa tion of social transactio ns: the phased transition from traditional Geopolitical authorization or legitimacy to an impersonal, cybernetically automated dficiency. The commodity 'form' is a transmutational matrix, and not a static (synchronic) order of economic liberalism . Insofar as capital is still interpreted Platonically -according to legitimation criteria -there is an overt paradox or contradiction emergent in this process, a paradox whose disappear ance is epitomized by the figure of Georges 230 AFTER THE LAW Bataille, who offers an operational description of law. Bataille no longer offers a juridical procedure of any kind, but only a tactics of recoding that converges upon the outside of human history (where everything functions without respect or legitimac y). Those seeking to defend the human management of social processes (where 'man' speculatively unites with the God of anthropomorphic monotheism) can have no project but to restore a history whose ideal sense would reconnect with the meaningrj'the West, such as those prof fered by Plato, Aquinas and Hegel. Such restoration is a modernist aspiration which strikes me as incredible. To drag Plato and Bataille before the tribunal of philoso phy has ceased to be anything but entertainment, yet I dedicate this text to the few remaining political animals of the planet Earth, as an experiment in the tenacity of philosoph y, or as a jest. PLATO AND THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES Plato's Apolog;y is initiated by submissi on to the political, in which civic obedience and justificatory discourse are fused. Rebellion is not Socratic, and the principle of authority -or right to judge -is never radically inter rogated; only its source is in question. In attempting to contest the charge that he 'makes the weaker argument 231 FANGED NOUMENA defeat the stronger',1 it is not long before Socrates invokes the 'unimpeachable authority '2 of Apollo, and narrates the journey of his disciple Chaerephon: One day he actually went to Delphi and asked this question of the god -as I said before, gentlemen, please do not interrupt -he asked whether there was anyone wiser than myself. The priestess replied that there was no one.3 To interpret this statement as a submission of evidence would be to efface the fracture line between the sacred and the profane across which Socrates steps. It is precisely the resistance to evidentiality that lends to this message its oracular force, and the paradoxical gesture at the heart of Socrates' defence is that of deploying the privilege of the unknown on behalf of knowing. The mystery of the oracular message is registered within the order of judgment as an underinterpretation. The priestess's words require translation, beyond that of their reworking into verse that occurs at Delphi itself. They pose a problem that can be construed as exegetical, as an insufficiency of commentary and resolution. Words are oracular precisely insofar as they suspend intelligence, Plato, 1heLast Daystj'Socrates, tr. H. Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 47. 2 Ibid., 49. 3 Ibid,49· 232 AFTER THE LAW whether in the sacred abandonment to unknowing which is their source, or in the profane detour of philosophy that becomes their destination. Socrates' discou rse is the site of a crossing from inspiration to anticipated wisdom. It is not only words of the Delphic oracle that are at stake here, since they resonate with the more intimate counsel of Socrates' ba(/Jffiv or 'spirit'. Later in the Apol ogy, we are told by Socrates that: I am subject to a divine or supernatural experience , which Meletus saw fit to travesty in his indictment. It began in my early childhood - a sort of voice which comes to me; and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on.4 The interference between the sacred and the profane, the unknown and knowing, is in its sacred sense a gateway opening onto death, and in its profane sense a hesitation: interruption as the edge of time or as a delay within time, death as the outside or as the deferred, the threshold of death as a brink or as a moment. Later in the Apology, Socrates reports that 'I am now at that point where the gift of prophecy comes most readily to me: at the point 4 Ibid., 64. 233 FANGED NOUMENA of death'. 5 This remark connects strangely with the earlier comment that I soon made up my mind about the poets too: I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled them to wri te their poetry, bu t a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.6 Poets and prophets explore the zero-degree of judgment, a zone at the edge of the great zero that Socrates tentatively sketches, but only rarely approache s. His own sense of 'preparation for death' is the path of wisdom rather than intoxication , aligning himself with a knowing that is com pared to its inadequate instances, rather than succumbing to the unknowing he.yond comparison beside which all knowing is inadeq uate. Comparing himself to his fellows, Socrates elaborates the oracle as suggesting that 'I am wiser ... to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know'. 7 This is the edge of the unknown, but always there is the gesture of recuperation to know ing, to judgment, to the tribunal, justice and authority: 'real wisdom is the property of God, and this oracle is Ibid., 73- 6 Ibid., 51. Ibid., 50. 234 AFTER THE LAW his way of telling us that human wisdom has little or no value'.8 If human wisdom has little or no value, where do the dogmatic assertions about God and his wisdom stem from? Why should they be trusted? Is not the figure of God indistin guishable from the claim that we know it is knowledge that matters, that the unknown is something we know, something we can populate with our feverish anthropomor phisms ? Does Socrates not exhibit God as the eclipse of religion, the surrender of knowing as a submission to ... knowing? It is thus that religion is buried beneath the icon of a supreme judge. The figure of Socrates, as sketched for us by Plato -his advocate -is that of philosophy on trial. It is in crossing this judicial threshold that philosophy comes to delight in the voluptuousities of persecu tion. Yet the drama of Socrates' condemnation distracts from the more far-reaching process whereby philoso phy succumbs to the order of the courtroom, and with this process Socrates is deeply complicit . He could even be said to have forged a new alliance between knowledg e and condemnation, as well as becoming the first philosophical case. How could one imagine an Apology for a Heraklei tus, an Empedokles, or a Parme nides? To whom would they be attempt ing to justify themsel ves? To the people? The thought is absurd. For what does the opinion of the 8 Ibid., 52. 235 FANGED NOUMENA people matter? It was precisely as an escape from the opin ion of the people that philosophy emerged! To philosophize and to ignore popular opinion are scarcely differentiable_ If the Presocratics speak in terms of cosmic justification -as Anaximander already does -it is as a concession, in order that the people will at least understand the surpassing of human judgment, if not that by which it is surpassed. The harsh 'justice' oHate is the ironisation of human litiga tion, and not its inflation to the absolute (monotheism). With Socrates, things are different. Philosophy becomes dialectical; which is to say justificatory, political, logical, plebeian. Truth is identified with irrefutability, evidentiality and educated belief, beginning its long subsidence into the forms of human credence, as if its acceptability were in any way a criterion. The Apology focuses a multiple interweaving of death and judgment. There is first of all the stnst in which death fulfils judgment in the sentence of death, even if this is an injustice -or misjudgment -such that Athens is condemned in the tribunal of the Platonic text, whose judgment in this case becomes a massively influential prec edent. There is a nesting of judgments; that of Socrates, that of Athens and that of Plato, with each level subsuming the antecedent one as an item or case to be judged. Judgment is the subsumption of a case under a prin ciple or law. It is classificatory or categorising, according to a discursive order which is simultaneously juridical and 236 AFTER THE LAW logical. The very word' category' is derived from the Greek word xanlYopo� or accuser. Judgment is thus an image of thought, and Plato' s entire philosophy can be read as an appeal to a higher court, as an obsessive retrial, as well as a counteraccu sation against Socrates' executioners. The democracy which sentenced Socrates to death is not merely vilified by Plato, it is also categorised within a taxonomy of political forms, brought to an ulterior site of judgment and included within an expanded system. A second integration of judgment with death is sug gested at this point. If Athens misjudges Socrates, it is because it misjudges death and the death sentence, by construing death as a punishme nt. Death is judged from the perspective of a restricted arena -that of the Athenian court and democratic polity -which is subordinate in principle, logically and juridically, to a tribunal that includes such an arena as a case, item or species. It is in this way that Plato comes to interpret sensible existence as a specification of intelligence; as a restricted forum demarcated within the total field of intelligibility. Death is a boundary which isolates sensible intelligence from the general system of knowing, the species from the genus, the case from the principle of Idea. The juridical advantage of the philosopher -qualifying him to rule in an ideal republic -is that he 'frees his soul from association with the body (so far as is possible) to a greater extent 237 FANG ED NOUMENA than other men'. 9 Death is no longer being thought as a consequence of judgment, but as its justifying condition. Judgment is disqualified by its specification to sensibilit y since the sensible instance or case is comprehended by the superior generic order of the ideal, which is unrestricted by the sensible limit of death. In its migration through a succession of bodies, the soul crosses and recrosses bet ween life and death, passing in and out of restricted spaces, although never escaping the irreducible atom of self. One might accept Socrates' depiction of life as the phase during which the soul is 'chained hand and foot in the body, compelled to view reality not directly but only through its prison bars, and wallowing in utter ignorance' ,10 and still want to insist that the soul is a cage which is even more insidious, constrict ing and wretched than the body. The soul is the fantasy of a separation from rlc<1th th<1t persists in death, a kind of corporeal telepresence by which the body projects its servile categories into the unknown. But this is to inter rupt Socrates' account. The thought of knowledge as a recollection reaching beyond birth is most fully developed in the Phaedo, where the complicit y between his conception of death and that of an adequate tribunal is emphatic. The approximation 9 Ibid., 109. IO Ibid., 135. 238 AFTER THE LAW to wisdom under the specifications of life can only be a prepar ation for death, an anticipat ory harmoni zation with the escape from sensible existence: If at its release the soul is pure and carries with it no contamination of the body, because it has never willingly associated with it in life, but has shunned it and kept itself separate as his regular practice -in other words, if it has pursued philosophy in the right way and really practised how to face death easily: this is what 'practising death' means, isn't it?l1 According to the judgment of death, by which all human judgments are judged, only the philosopher is just, because only he recognises the specificity of all sensible judgmen ts, and their subsum ption within a higher genus of wisdom: 'no soul which has not practised philosophy, and is not absolutely pure when it leaves the body, may attain to the divine nature; that is only for the lovers of wisdom' .12 The strongest expression of this thought is probably to be found in an earlier passage from the Phaedo: the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only 11 Ibid., 133. 12 Ibid., 135. 239 FANGED NOUMENA when we are dead, and not in our lifetime. Ifno pure knowledge is possible in the company of the body, then either it is totally impossible to acquire knowl edge, or it is only possible after death ... 13 This introduces a third integration betwee n judgment and death, through which Socrates decides against the sacred and in favour of the profane, because death is to be judged. This is to say that death is only to be an issue from the optic of knowing, from that of the philosopher or wise judge rather than the poet or the visionary. Here we arrive at the most mysterious and fateful twist in Socrates' interpretation of the oracle: to be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what on!" does not know. No one knows with regard to death whether it is not really the greatest blessing that can happen to a man; but people dread it as though they were certain that it is the greatest evil; and this ignorance, which thinks that it knows what it does not, must surely be ignorance most culpable . This, I take it gentlemen, is the degree, and this is the nature of my advantage over the rest of mankind; and if I were to claim to be wiser than my 13 Ibid., 111. 240 AFTER THE LAW neighbour in any respect, it would be in this: that not possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it.14 By interpreting contact with the unknown as the deferral of judgment by the subject, translating the positivity of sacred confusion into the negativity of epistemic uncer tainty, Socrates initiates the proper history of the West. The Socratic sophism runs: either one already knows death (since it is only the cessation oflife), or death is a higher knowing. Death is either the extinction that makes it nothing except what life knows of it, or the immortality of the soul that preserves knowing in death as entry into knowledge of the Ideas. If death is the unknown, it is only insofar as we do not know that there is nothing to know; but, were there an unknown other than as a hid den or forgotten knowledge , it would still only be what we already know as the end of knowing. This is Socrates' own reading of his claim to be conscious that he does not know: a repression of the unknown. While ultimately retuning the problem of death to knowing (philosophy to sophism), this passage is not without its sceptical openings. Most importantly, it sug gests that the conception of personal mortality is an icon of death that must be ironised fro m the perspective of 14 Ibid., 60. 241 FANGED NOUM ENA unknowing. In this way, the optic of the court is momen tarily refused, and death prised away from its punitive sense. Socrates mocks those who act as if 'they would be immortal if you did not put them to death!' .15 The court is no more capable of judging death than judging Socrates, since it is in both cases ignorant as to its own ignorance, and therefore iconic. I t lacks even the space of the question, havin g satiated itself over-hastily with an array of pseudo-kn owledge or unexamined opinions that substitute for difficulties. As Socrates interprets things, the Athenian court, having judged the punishment as incom petently as the defendant, accidentall y rewards an inno cent man, rather than persecuting a guilty one. Death has been judged badly, but Socrates does not conclude from this that it escapes judgment; it is rather that it requires a more appropriate tribunal: a philosophical forum open to the perfect evidence of the intelligible, uncluttered by the deceit and confusion of the sensible world. It is this conjunction of philos ophy with death -philosophy as the fair trial of death which avoids precipitat e condemna tion -that completes the inversion of the Athenian trial. It is no longer that death confirms the judgment of the city; instead, it carries the philosophical dialectic forwards to its destinatio n: 15 Ibid., 68. 242 AFTER THE LAW Ordinary people seem not to realise that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philoso phy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward.16 If Socrates is in part an ironist and an iconoclast, he is also a zealot and a dogmatist. He disrupts one trial in order to replace it with another, mocks human judgment in order to replace it with divine judgment, subverts sophistry in order to replace it with a higher sophistry, and disengages himselffrom this world only to bind himself more tightly to another; to 'the unseen world'17 or 'the next world' ,18 to the realm of that which 'is invisible and hidden from our eyes, but intelligible and comprehensible by philosophy' .19 Socratism is the mobilization of unknowing on behalf of knowing; subordinating irony to dialectic, confusion to judgments and the sacred to a subdued profanity. 16 Ibid.,107. 17 Ibid., 136. ,8 Ibid., '79. 19 Ibid., 133· 243 FANGED NOUM ENA There is a sense in which Socrates already floats a fourth -and far more corrosive -integration of judgment and death, according to which death is the suspension of judgment. Death is a problem that interrupts the judi cial process, switching it into a dialectical detour which prolongs the path before arrival at a verdict. Resisting sensible evidentiality, death contests the conventional procedures of its trial. Typically enough, Socrates mor alises this issue into a farce, asking whether death is good or evil. Nevertheless, death suspends justice in a hesitant unknowingness, even if this is only a dialec tical vacillation between pre-establi shed alternatives. For Socrates, death is recuperable to judgment, in a movement by which it is transcended by the idea; but this return of interruption to due process is not without its limit. BATAILLE AND THE TRIAL OF GILLES DE RAIS Whereas Plato is a midwife of the profane, establishing the intellectual coordinates of a transcendent reason that will dominate the juridico-philoso phical discourses of post-Hellenic societies for two millennia,
🌑 Sacred Transgression Beyond Law
🔥 Bataille's philosophy explores the tension between discontinuity (law, preservation, utility) and immanence (sacred flow, expenditure, death), rejecting transcendent ideals for an energetic understanding of existence
💀 The case of Gilles de Rais exemplifies the collapse of feudal nobility's sumptuary excess into private atrocity, revealing how war's ritualized wastage became perverted when disconnected from its social function
🏰 Nobility embodied a principle fundamentally opposed to calculation and judgment—their fortresses and warfare channeled social excess into spectacular destruction, maintaining an economy of loss that modern rationality cannot comprehend
🔄 Transgression operates at a level more fundamental than legality, representing not merely criminal behavior but the genealogical origin of law itself—a solar barbarism that precedes and exceeds juridical frameworks
🌊 In contemporary society, law has virtually disappeared, replaced by market protocols and behavioral management systems, with the "serial killer" serving as both final justification for law and transition point from evil to mere pathology
Bataille is driven by a passion for (and from) the sacred to explore the most extreme formulations of a philosophy of imma nence. In a broadly Nietzschean fashion, he interprets law as the imperative to the preservation of discrete being. 244 AFTER THE LAW Far from expressing a transcendent ideality, law sum marises conditions of existence, and shares its arbitrari ness with the survival of the human race as sovereign autonomy (an expression that Bataille seeks to exhibit as an oxymoron). The word which Bataille usually employs to mark the preserve of law is 'discontinuit y', which is broadly synonymous with 'transcendence' or the space of judgment. Discontinuity -read immanently or genea logically -is the condition for transcend ent illusion or ideality, and precisely for this reason it cannot be grasped by a transcendent apparatus; by the interknitted series of conceptio ns involving negation, logical distinction, sim ple disjunction, essential difference, etc. Discontinuity is not referred in the direction of a separated or metaphysical realm, but in that of a precarious distance from death: a space of profane accumulation that is juxtaposed messily with the sacred flow into loss. Religion is thus extricated from theology in order to be connected with an energetics or 'solar economy', according to which the infrastructure of discontinuit y inheres in the obstructive character of the Earth, in its mere bulk as a momentar y arrest of solar energy flow, which lends itself to hypostatisation. When the silting-up of energy upon the surface of the planet is interpreted by its complex consequences as rigid utility, a productivist civilization is initiated, whose culture involves a history of ontology and a moral order; persistent being and judgment. 245 FANGED NOUME NA Systemic limits to growth require that the inevitable recommenc ement of the solar trajectory scorches jagged perforations through such civilisations. The resultant ruptures cannot be securely assimilated to a metasocial homoeostatic mechanism, because they have an immoder ate, epidemic tendency. Bataille writes of 'the virulence of death'. 20 Expenditure is irreducibly ruinous because it is not merely useless but also con tagious. Nothing is more infectious than the passion for collapse. 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 C,hristianity alone - attuned to the emergent bourgeois order -is based upon a relentless refusal of sumptuar y consumption. It is with Protestantism that theology accomplishes itself in the thoroughgoing rationalization of religion, marking the ideological triumph of the good, and propelling humanity into unprecedented extremities of affluence and catastro phe. It is also with Protestantism that the transgressive outlets of society are deritualised and exposed to effective 20 G. Bataille OeuvreJ Cmnptetes, 12 Vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), vol. 10, 70. 246 AFTER THE LAW condemnation, a tendency which leads to the explosions of atrocity associated with the writings of the Marquis de Sade at the end of the eighteenth century and, almost three centuries before that, with the life of Gilles de Rais. Bataille describes his 1959 study of Gilles de Rais as a tragedy, and its subject as a 'sacred monster', who 'owed his enduring glory to his crimes' .21 The bare facts are quite rapidly outlined. Gilles de Rais was born towards the end of the year 1404, inheriting the 'fortune, name and arms of Rais'22 due to a complicated dynastic intrigue involving his parents, Guy de Laval and Marie de Craon. Even by the standards of his times and rank, de Rais dissipated vast tranches of his wealth with abnormal extravagance; in Bataille's words, 'he liquidated an immense fortune without reckoning' .23 At the battle of Orleans, he fought alongside Jeanne d 'Arc, 'acquiring renown as "a truly val iant knight in arms" which survived right up to the point of his condemnation to infamy'. 24 I t has been suggested that the two warriors were friends but Bataille expresses reservations about this hypothesis .25 On 30 May 1431, Jeanne d'Arc was burnt by the English. In the years 1432-3, de Rais began to murder children. His preferred victims 21 Ibid., 277. 22 Ibid., 345. 23 Ibid., 279. 24 Ibid., 354. 25 Ibid., 356. 247 FANGED NOUM ENA were males, with an average age of eleven years, there was occasional variation in sex and considerable variation in age.26 At least thirty-five murders are well established, although the number was almost certainly a great deal higher; the figures suggested at his trial ranged up to 200. In a somewhat inelegant passage from this study, Bataille recapitulates the (quasi-Weberian) general eco nomic background to his researches: We accumulate wealth in the prospect of a continual expansion, but in societies different from ours the prevalent princ iple was the contrary one of wasting or losing wealth, of giving or destroying it. Accumu lated 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 magnifi cent, those who know how to appreciate consumption are dazzled, but nothing remains of it. 27 26 Ibid. 426. 27 Ibid., 321-2. 248 AFTER THE LAW The tragedy of de Rais, which Bataille extends to the nobility as a whole, was that of living the transition from sumptuary to rational sociality. He was dedicated by birth to the reckless militarism of the French aristocracy, which Bataille summarises in the formula: 'In the same way that the man without privilege is reduced to a worker, the one who is privileged must wage war'. 28 He is emphatic on this point: 'The feudal world ... is not able to be separated from the lack of measure [demesure], which is the principle of wars',29 and also: 'primitively war seems to be a luxury' .30 That honour and prestige are incommensurable with the calculations of utility is an insistent theme in Bataille's work, as pertinent to the interpretation of potlatch among the Tlingit as to the blood-hunger and extravagance of Europe's medieval nobility. The context of Christianity and courtly love should not mislead us here. 28 29 30 The paradox of the Middle Ages demanded that the warrior elite did not speak the language of force and combat. Their mode of speech was often sickly-sw eet. But we shouldn't fool ourselves: the goodwill of the ancient French was a cynical lie. Even the poetry that the nobles of the XIVth and XVth centuries affected to love was in every sense a deception: before everything Ibid., 3'4. Ibid., 316. Ibid., 78. 249 FANGED NOUMENA the great lords loved war, their attitude differed little from that of the German Berzerkers, whose dreams were dominated by horrors and slaughter.o1 For Socrates, war is understood as civic duty: a preserv ative function of the city. When the city wages war, it is to be judged as a moral act, following the dictates of reason to a greater or less extent. This is the dialectical image of war, fostered by the Church, and exercising a fascination over Hegel (not to mention postwar American administrators). There is a principle of commensu rability that binds military and judicial violence, permitting both to follow from a logically orchestrated procedure of politi cal judgment. Bataille's suggestion is quite different, since his figure of war is a zone of disappearance, a passage to the unknown, through which the city communicates with its ultimate impossibility. It is not that war is treated as a metaphor by Bataille (any more than by Nietzsche) but rather that all historical and intelligible evidence is a meta phor for war as an energetic function of death (descent to the unknown = degree zero). War exceeds judgment, since every judicial apparatus is a petrified war, just as every 'case' of war is a domestication politicised, utilita tarianised, Clausewitzeanised. At the end of war there is only senseless death, where judgment counts for nothing. 31 Ibid., 303-4. 250 AFTER THE LAW The feudal aristocracy held open a wound in the social body, through which excess production was haem morhaged into utter loss. In part, this wastage was accomplished by the hypertrophic luxuriance of their leisured and parasitic existence, which echoed that of the Church, but mor e important was the ceaseless ebb and flow of militar y confrontation, into which life and treasure could be poured without limit. De Rais embraced this dark heart of the feudal world with peculiar ardour. Bataille writes of his entire -his mad -incarnation of the spirit of feudalism which, in all of its movement, proceeded from the games that the Berzerkers played: he was tethered to war by an affinity that succeeded in mark ing out a taste for cruel voluptuosities. He had no place in the world, if not the one that war gave him.32 He continues: 'Such wars required intoxication, they required the vertigo and the giddiness of those that birth had consecr ated to them. War precipi tated its elect into assaults, or suffocated them in dark obsessions '.33 During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the epoch of feudal warfaring reached a crescendo, due to 3Q Ibid., 317. 33 Ibid. 251 FANGED NOUMEN A exactly the same processes that were leading to its utilitar ian reconstr uction. Power was being steadily centralised into the hands of the monarchy, and changes in military technology effected a gradual shift in the social compo sition of the military apparatus. In particul ar, Bataille points to the way in which the development of archery supplanted the dominant role of heavy cavalry, and to the fact that with the increasin g importance of arrows and pikes came an accentuation of military discipline . War became increasingly rationalized and subjected to scientific direction. This evolution was not rapid, but de Rais was personally touched by it. The battle of Lagny in 1432 was the last to plunge him into the heat of conflict, after which his position as a marshal of France -which he had occupied since July 1429 -detached him from the military cutting edge. Bataille's interpretation of these telldencies is emphatic [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. 34 14 lhid., .11S. 252 AFTER THE LAW War is progressively disinfected by the voluptuar y move ment passing through the nobility, increasingly becoming an instrument of rational statecraft, calculatingly manipu- 1ated by the sovereign. A process was underway that would lead eventually to the tightly regimented military machines of Renaissance Europe, led by professional officers and directed by their operations in accordance with political pragmatics. Bataille considers this transition from warlord to prince to be crucial in de Rais's case: To the eyes of Gilles war is a g ame. But that view becomes less and less true: to the extent that it ceases to predominate even amongst the privileged. Increas ingly, therefore, war becomes a general misfortune: at the same time it becomes the work of a great number. The general situation deteriorates: it becomes more complex, the misfortune even reaching the privileged, who become ever less avid for war, and for games, seeing in the end that the moment has come to lend space to problems of reason.35 Where the Church erected cathedrals in a disfigured cel ebration of the death of God, the nobility built fortresses to glorify and to accentuate the economy of war. Their fortresses were tumours of aggressive autonomy; hard 35 Ibid., 315. 253 FANGED NOUM ENA membranes correlative with an acute disequilibrium of force. Within the fortress, social excess is concentrated to its maximum tension, before being siphoned off into the furious wastage of the battlefield. It was into his fortresses that de Rais retreated, withdrawing from a society in which he had become nothing, in order to bury himself in darkness and atrocity. The children of the surround· ing areas disappeared into these fortresses, in the same way that the surplus production of the local peasantry had always done, except now the focus of consumption had ceased to be the exterior social spectacle of collid ing armies, involuting instead into a sequence of secret killings. Rather than a staging post for excess, the heart of the fortress became its terminus; the site of a hidden and unholy participation in the nihilating voracity which Bataille calls 'the solar anus', or the black sun. The words 'no philosopher has been able to incarnate the essence of nobility' are a concise anti-Socratism. There is no nobility in judgment or accusation, but rather an impoverishing separation from the inarticulacy of death. It cannot be a matter of a retrial therefore, as if a higher judgment were to redeem a victim of injustice; de Rais is almost perfectly indefensible. No case could be more clear-cut. Perhaps one short passage will suffice in lieu of detailing these monstrosities. Early in his study, Bataille remarks: 254 AFTER THE LAW His crimes responded to the immense disorder which inflamed him, and in which he was lost. We even know, by means of the criminal's confession, which the scribes of the court copied down whilst listening to him, that it was not pleasure that was essential. Certainly he sat astride the chest of the victim and in that fashion, playing with himself [se maniant], he would spill his sperm upon the dying one; but what was important to him was less sexual enjoyment than the vision of death at work. He loved to look: opening a body, cutting a throat, detaching limbs, he loved the sight of blood. 36 An Apology for de Rais is an absurdity. He cannot be justi fied, and picking over his case can only be a na useous reaf firmation of profane justice, or a vertiginous descent into the madness of the sacred. Among the problematic features of this passage, for instance, is the fact that it slices violently across the terms of Bataille's writings, where the prevail ing sense of 'work' is exactly that of a resistance to death. 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 atroci ties. Work constrains the slippage towards death, but it 36 Ibid., 278. 255 FANGED NOUM ENA conspires with visibility. Scopic representation and util ity arc mutually sustained by objectivity, which Bataille understands as transcendence; the crystallization of Things from out of the continuum of immanent flow. There is a virtual inanity to Gilles's aberration, therefore, which is attested by the fact that it is not the taste or smell of death that he seeks, but its sight, or representation . Is not de Rais, at this moment, portrayed as an experi mental Socrates, as an autonomous subject who would open a tribunal, collate evidence, judge a death that he transcends? Where is the military furor, the blackout intimacy with death, through which an insupportable separation is collapsed into solar immanence ? It is not merely a case that judgment stumbles upon here, but a ruinous metaphor for itself. De Rais on trial is only Socrates becoming Baconian, which is why the 'object' of Bataille's text is the sumptuary current of feudalism -that which was unsocialisable by precommoditocratic civilization -and not the accused person through which this movement found an outlet. Death has no representatives, which is to say that crime has no real subject. There is only the sad wreck whom Nietzsche calls 'the pale criminal', de Rais at his trial for instance, terrified of Satan, separated from his crimes by an unnavigable gulf of oblivion. The truth of such criminality, at once utterly simple and yet graspable, is that evil does not survive to be judged. 256 AFTER THE LAW The profound criminalit y that Bataille sometimes names 'transgression' is not merely culpable or antisocial behav iour, insofar as this latter involves private utility or the occupation by a subject of the site of proscribed action. It is rather the elective genealogy oflaw, operating at a level of community more basic than the social order which is simultaneous with legality. Transgression is only judged as such in the course of a regression to a prehistorical option which was decided by the institution of justice. At this point, the sedimentation of energy upon the crust of the earth becomes normatively reinforced by an affirmation of social persistence. Nietzsche explores exactly this issue in §9 of the second essay of his Genealogy if Morals, in which he describes the primitive response to transgression: 'Punishment' at this level of civilization is simply a copy, a mimus, of the normal approach toward a hated, defenceless, prostrated enemy, who has not only lost every right and protection, but is also deprived of all mercy; vae victis as the right of war and festivity of victory, in all its ruthlessness and cruelty -from which it is clear why war itself (including the warlike cult of sacrifice) has provided all theJorms under which punishment has emerged throughout history.37 37 F. Nietzsche, Werke, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein Materialien, 1981), 813. 257 FANGED NOUMENA War is irreducibly alien to a collision of rights, so that it is war that bears down on the one who violates right as such. Transgression is not a misdemeanour, even if this is the necessary form of its social interpretation. It is rather a solar barbarism, resonant with that of the Berzerkers, and of all those who fathom an abysmal inhumanit y on the battlefield, becoming derelicted conduits of the impossible. There is no tragedy without an Agamemnon, or some other mad beast of war, whose nemesis preempts the discourse of the juridical institution, and whose death is thus marked by a peculiar intimacy, even though it is never commensurable with propriety. For we would not recognise this war that comes from beyond the city and after the law, this movement without essence or precedent which is perhaps already guiding us, a movement without utility, ideology or motivation, forsaking melodrama for the true violence of the insidious; of infiltratio n, suhVeT sion, larval metamorphosis and phase-cha nge. After the law, across the line of unknowing, where tribunals count for nothing, Socrates is silent, and accusation is dissolved into the sun. De Rais is merely the botched and humane anticipation of a tragedy which is no longer ours: Tragedy is the impotence qfreason ... This does not sig nify that Tragedy has rights against reason. In truth, it is not possible for a right to belong to something contrary to reason. For how could a right be opposed 258 AFTE R THE LAW to reason? Human violence, however, which has the power to go against reason, is tragic, and must, if possible, be suppressed: at least it cannot be ignored or despised. It is in speaking of Gilles de Rais that I come to say this, for he differs from all those for whom crime is a personal matter . The crimes of Gilles de Rais are those of the world in which they they are committed, and these ripped throats are exposed by the convulsive movements of such a world.3R CONCLUSION In its virtual truth, law has already disappear ed from the Earth. What remains of 'law' is a dissolving complex con sisting of relics from political sociality, nostalgic media driven theatre, and pre-automat ised commodific ation protocol s. All appeals to a 'criminality' irreducible to the impersonal consequences of social/psychological pathol ogy 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 38 Bataille, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 10,3'9. 259 FANGED NOUM ENA 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 consumpt ion processes are incompetently suppressed. The post-civilisational prag matism 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 immanentisa tion that the contempor ary 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 commodit y-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 con trol malfunction. 260 Making it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production If Deleuze is to be salvaged from the inane liberal neo Kantianism that counts as philosophy in France today, it is necessary to re-assemble and deepen his genealogy. The Pseudo-Nietz scheanism ofthe late 1960s' reaction against Hegel is scarcely a context commensurate with a thinker of major importance, and the same could be said of his jousting with structura lized psychoanaly sis. Deleuze's power stems from the fact that he succeeds in detaching himself from Parisian temporality much more successfully than most of his contempor aries, including even Guat tari. The time of Deleuze's text is a colder, more reptilian, more German time, or at least, a time of the anti-German Germans of Schope nhauer and Nietzsche in particu lar, for whom millennia were to be scanned with scorn. Most of all it is a Lucretian or Spinozist time, a time of indifferent nature; engineering bizarre couplings across the centurie s. 261 FANGED NOUMENA I Modernity is 'essential ly' reconstructive, a characteristic captured both in the merely abstract continuity of its productive organization -capital is always neo-capital -and in the transcendental dynamic of its predominant (Kantian) philosophical mode. Critique belongs to capital because it is the first inherently progressive theoretical procedure to emerge upon the earth; avoiding both the formal conservatism of inductive natural science and the material conservatism of dogmatic metaphysics. In the case both of the mode of production and the mode of reason what is evident is a self-perpet uating movement of deregulat ion, whose tendency is towards an increasingly radical prioritization of the interrogative impulse. Of course, as Deleuze and Guattari themselves indicate so graphically in their work, this process of immanent lib eration is constrained by active reconstitution of archaic control mechanis ms: faiths, state machinery, parochial affinities, neo-triba lisms, an increasing ludicrous farce of authority, morals, marriages, and mortgages. The trajectories of modern philosophy map themselves out in response to this social and theoretical predicament. One stream of thinking, flowing through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche into the repressed strata of Freud's psy choanaly sis
🌀 Transcendental Currents in Philosophy
🧠 Transcendental Spinozism emerges as Deleuze's powerful philosophical project, dissolving the boundaries between objects and their conditions while extracting the pre-objective from discourse through critique
🏜️ The body without organs functions as "real abstraction" - not a rational achievement but the transcendental desert of primary production where identity becomes radically transcendental, separating from specific organization
💀 Death bifurcates between molecular liberation (the desert identity of difference) and molar reinvestment (death as object of negatively constituted desire), with capitalism inheriting and effusing death throughout its system
⚔️ Revolutionary politics must resist capital's neurotic refusal mechanisms by coaxing it into investing at its deterritorialized fringe, avoiding both fascist persecution and the oedipal trap that equates desire with destruction
🔄 The shift from Anti-Oedipus to A Thousand Plateaus reveals a problematic diagnosis of National Socialism as essentially suicidal, threatening to resurrect prescriptive neoarchaisms that police desire and reinstall moral censure
and metapsy chology , traces out the recurrence of the base formative impetus throttled by Occidental 262 MAK ING IT WITH DEATH theo-politi cs. Another stream, associated primarily with Hegel, is guided by the implicit ideal of a speculative reconstruction of the political in the wake of Capital. Both of these tendencies point in the direction of a post transcendental thinking; in the former case dissolving the polarized differences between the empirical and its conditions into an open hierarchy of intensive strata, in the second collapsing the abstract composition of this polarity into the infinite self-legislation of the concrete concept. A third current, perhaps the most topographically intricate of the three, is characterized above all by Schelling, and is driven by the dynamic of critique towards a completion of the transcendental progTamm e: substituting the immanent continuity of Spinoza's cosmology for the uninterrogated piety of logical identity inherited from Kant. Deleuze is the most powerful exemplar of this tran scendental Spinozism amongst contemporary thinkers. Derrida's deconstruction, whilst in the end programmati cally similar to a schizo-analysis or genealogical critique of a Deleuzian kind, is massively weakened by an influx of neo-humanist themes, passing through Heidegger from Kierkegaard and HusserI, which exacerbate the quasi theological compromise from which Schelling himself was very far from exempt. Heidegger, whilst subsidizing the more sordidly regionalistic and idealist elements of this inheritance, vigorously continues with the erasure of Spinoza's influence, academiciz ing and de-naturalising 263 FANGED NOUMENA the thought of impersonal ground or IndijJerenz. Whilst both Deleuze and Derrida critique illegitimate articula tion, the former tends to a consummate materialism, in which intensive substance is transcendentally released from its paralyzation in extension, whilst the latter pros ecutes aJudaic meditation, marked-out in theo-graphisms, indefinitely radicalizing an anti-iconic relation to the absolute. Deus sive natura is not an identity but an inclusive disjunction; Spinoza the disappearingjew or Spinoza the explosive psychotic, deconstruction or schizoanalysis. If deconstruction is propelled by capital's ephem eralizing pieties, schizoanalysis is driven by its magpie ruthlessne ss. Always recode, the text of deconstruc tion tells us, but each time more subtly, more elusively, developing a little further the law's protracted parody of itself. Always decode, chatters schizoanalysis; believe nothing, and extinguish all nostalgia for belongin g. Ask always where capital is most inhumane, unsenti mental, and out of control. Abandon all attachment to the state. It is not Hegel's social managerialism that is most relevantly contrasted with Deleuzian nomadism. Hegelianism was only ever the black humour of modern history. It is rather the non-exclusive polity of decon struction or cruder neo-Kantian liberal theories, with their abstractly re-composable humanities, which are the true counterpole to Deleuze' s anti-political economism. In contrast to the obsessional neurosis of ethical thought. 264 MAKING IT WITH DEATH with its futile attempt to consolidate a transcendent princi ple of justice out of that sad puppet of contractual labour trading codes known as 'the agent', schizoanalysis shares in the delicious irresponsibility of everything anarchic, inundating and harshly impersonal. Capital cannot disown schizoanalysis without de-fang ing itself. The madne ss it would fend off is the sole resource of its own future; a fringe of de-socialized experimenta tion which corrodes its essence and anticipatively mocks the entirety of the currently existing modes of civility. The real energetic liberty which annihilates the priest's cage of human freedom is refused at the level of the political secondary process during the precise period in which the economic primary process is slipping ever more deeply into its embrace. The deep secret of capital as-process is its incommensurabilit y with the preservation of bourgeois civilization, which clings to it like a dwarf riding a dragon. As capital 'evolves', the increasingly absurd rationalization of production-f or-profit peels away like a cheap veneer from the positive-feedback detonation of production-f or-production. If capital is a social suicide machine, it is because it is compelled to advantage its assassins. Capital produces the first sociality in which the pouvoir of dominance is perpetually submitted to the hazard of experimental puis sance. Only by an intensification of neurotic attachments does it mask the eruption of madness in its infrastructure, 265 FANGED NOUM ENA but with every passing year such attachments become more desperate, cynical, fragile. All of which is to raise the issue of the notorious 'death of capitalism', which has been predominantly treated as a matter of either dread or hope, scepticism or belief. Capital, one is told, will either survive, or not. Such projective eschatolo gy completely misses the point, which is that death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital, but an inherent function. The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part. The immanent voluptuousity of every unprecedented deal takes off from the end of the bourgeoisie. Consider the finance capital usage of cocaine: both a quantitative high traced out as a deviation from zero and a sumptuary expenditure voiding the historical sense of wealth. The coked-out futures dealer passing a drunk on a Manhattan street translates the des tiny of class difference into an immanent intensity traced on a smooth surface of social disappear ance. The bum inhabits the social zero preferred by capital as the vanish ing point of pre-modern legality, from which the coke rush is repulsed as an anonymous distance from death. There is a becoming a rich bum, becoming a derelict on coke. which is integral to the cynicism of frontier capital. This is the advance modernit y of Beckett, where high culture is immanently differentiated from inarticulacy, absolving itself from ontological specifier. It is thus that there is a becoming -zombie of the bum just as there is a 266 MAKING IT WITH DEATH becoming-wired of the real managers of the social: the skagged-out housing estate as base line for the efferves cence of the stock market floor. It is quite inaccurate to suggest that yuppie financiers are oblivious of deprivation , since the limit oblivion of an absolute proletaria nization is consumed with each bubble of champagne. There is a familiar humanist response to this becoming zombie at the limit possibility of the modern worker, which is associated above all with the word alienation. The processes of de-skilling, or ever accelerated re-skilling, the substitution of craft by abstract labour, and the increasing interexchangability of human activity with technolog ical processes, all accompanied by the dissolution of identity, loss of attachment, and narcotization of affective life, are condemned on the basis of a moral critique. A reawaken ing of the political is envisaged, aimed at the restoration of a lost human integrity. Modern existence is under stood as profoundly deadened by the real submission of humane values to an impersonal productivit y, which is itself comprehended as the expression of dead or petri fied labour exerting a vampiric power over the living. The bloodless zombie proletarian is to be resuscitated by the political thera pist, 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. 267 FANGED NOUMENA Deleuze is differentiated utterly from a socialist human ism of this kind since in the schizoanalytic programme death is the impersonal subject of critique, and not an accursed value in the service of a condemnation. An intricate passage towards the end of Anti-Oedipus runs: The body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of horror stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death, zero intensity. The death model appears when the body without organs repels the organs and lays them aside: no mouth, no tongue, no teeth -to the point of self-mutilation. to the point of suicide. Yet there is no real opposition between the body without organs and the organs as partial objects: the only real opposition is to thc molar organism that is the common enemy. In the desiring-machine, one sees the same catatonic inspired by the immobile motor that forces him to put aside his organs, to different parts of the machine, different and co-existing, different in their very coexistence. Hence it is absurd to speak of a death desire that would presumably be in qualitative opposition to the life desires. Death is not desired, there is only death that desires, by virtue of the body 268 MAKING IT WITH DEATH without organs or the immobile motor, and there is also life that desires, by virtue of the working organs.! 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, popu lating 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 productio n. Within Spinozism God is dead, but only in the sense of a baseline of zombie becomings, as that which Deleuze calls 'the plane of consistenc y', described in A Thousand Plateaus by the words 'fusionability as infinite zero'. 2 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 them selves as the undifferentiated or communicated element, G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 329- 2 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophren ia, tr. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 158. 269 FANGED NOUM ENA a becoming a catatonic God, erupting like a tumour out of pre-substantialized matter , by which nature spawns death adjacent to itself. Almost inevitab ly, when it is a matter of the body without organs it is a matter of Spinoza. In Anti-Oedipus we are told that: The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensit y, and the par tial objects are these degrees, these intensi ve parts that produce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = o. The body without organs is the immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of the word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attributes, which belong to it precise ly insofar as they ate really distinct and cannot on this account exclude or oppose one another.3 And in A Thousand Plateaus: After all, is not Spinoza' s Ethics the great book of the BwO? The attributes are types or genuses of BwO's, substance, powers, zero intensities as matrices of produc tion. The modes are everything that comes to pass: waves and vibratio ns. migrations, thresholds 3 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 327. 270 MAKING IT WITH DEATH and gradients, intensities produced in a given type of substance starting from a given matrix.4 These remarks are obviously additional to others in the key schizoanalytic texts, as well as to the extended discus sions of Spinoza in the two books Deleuze dedicates to his life and work, and to innumerable comments scattered amongst other writings. In Nietzsche and Philosoph y, for instance, Deleuze isolates Spinoza as Nietzsche 's sole modern forebear, in a remark that is as significant for understanding Deleuze's thinking as it is unpersuasive in relation to Nietzsche' s. The name 'body without organs' is itself sufficient clue to what is primarily at stake in the thought, that is to say; the reality of abstraction. The body without organs is an abstraction without being an achievement of reason. It is the transcendental desert of primary production, or the reproduction of production as a continuum of maximum indifference. It is described in Anti-Oedipus as 'the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable'.5 After all, what could be burnt to injure Spinoza's God or Nature? What could be created to exult it? Nothing. Fertility and corrosion modulate substance with out impinging upon it, playing out its icy permutations 4 DeIeuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 153. 5 DeIeuzc and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8. 271 FANGED NOUMENA without preference. Whatever its empirical configuration there is always production as such once again: the sense Jess luxuriance of the impersona l. Real abstraction is the transcendental conception of Spinozistic substance. Already with the wave of Deleuzian texts of the late 1960s -and more particularly with the a ppearance of Difference and Repetition -a consistent philo sophical project is discernible, most precisely described as transcendental Spinozism, or a critique of identity. Parallel in a certain sense to Schelling, but without any obvious direct influence, Deleuze is delighted by the naturalistic basis of Spinoza's thinking, but understands it as lacking an explicit transcendental comprehension of identity. Deleuze's response is typically generous; smuggling in the required machine-part and pretending it was already there. Critique operates by marking the difference between objects and their conditions, understan ding metaphysics as the importation of procedures which are adapted to objects into a discussion of their constitutive principles. This means that critique is primarily a philosoph y of production, extracting the genetic or pre-objective from the discourse; one concerned with constituti ve relations, or syntheses. In the elementar y identity statement A = A the ques tion of transcendental interpretation is left open. Does 'A' represent an object of some kind, whether possible, 272 MAKING IT WITH DEATH ideal, formal, etc.? Or does it designate identity as such, as a conditioning principle? In the former case the relation of identity would be an extrinsic one, with an ulterior ground, whilst in the latter its relation to a possible object remains problematic . The critical question remains unaddressed: how is it possible for something to be the object of a judgment of identity? Or, how is the object produced in its identity with itself? Identity is traditionally conceived as absolutely abstract essence, or, correlatively, the final principle ofintelligib il ity. Both of these formulations correspond to the pure logi cal subject in advance of predication. Something is what it is. Essence is concei ved, at least implicitly, on the basis of Platonic Eidos; the timeless truth or pure possibility of the thing, the unproduced, the sterile, the unengendered. In this way the traditional conception of essence runs together specificity and identity, and the syllogism oper ates from its origin according to generic hierarchies of essence or type which culminate in the logical theory of sets. From Aristotle to Kant reason is thus adjusted to the thought of the 'same thing', unaware that a transcendental topic is thus conflated with an empirical one. The body without organs is the real differentiatio n between these topics: the same de-thinging itself. An astonishing philosophical rigor begins to emerge from the delireal words of Artaud cited early inAnti-Oedipus: 273 FANGED NOUMEN A The body is the body it is all by itself and has no need of organs the body is never an organism organisms are the enemies of the body6 Here we find a judgment of identity of an historically aberrant kind. The body is the body, but only as a repul sion of the organs, or the retraction of the same from any specific organization. The compromise peace between the body and its organs that founds Occidental ontology is threatened by a violent movement of scission, and one that does not come from the subject, but from the body. It is thus that Artaud anticipates difference in the De\euz ian sense, which is to say: radically transcendental identity. The reality of identity is death, which is why the organism cannot coexist with what it is. On the smooth surface of the body without organs 'what' and 'is' recoil allergically from each other, opening an inclusive disjunc tion at the heart of essence. This disjunction separates the identity pole of the body without organs from the unfettered difference of the de territoria lized organs, split ting apart the objectivism which implants an empirical identity into rigidified configurations of difference. Pre critical objectivism thinks syntheses on the basis of their 6 Ibid,9 274 MAKING IT WITH DEATH consequences, which can be described as their transcend ent or illegitimate usage. Where Kant writes oflegitimacy and illegitimac y, the texts of schizoanalysis write of the molecular and the molar. Thus the body without organs is described as a 'giant molecule',? whilst the organism is always a molar construct; co-op ting identity to specificity. Death too bifurcates along this fissure: on the one hand death as the desert identity of difference, the catatonic cavity of absolute critique at the end of capital, and on the other death as the molar object of a negatively constituted desire, reinvesting the intensive zero into the social order. In Anti-Oedipus the relative molecularization of molar death is described in the following terms: Freud himself indeed spoke of the link between his 'discovery' of the death instinct and World War I, which remains the model of capitalist war. More general ly, the death instinct celebrates the wedding of psychoanalysis and capitalism; their engagement had been full of hesitation. What we have to tried to show apropos of capitalism is how it inherited much from a transcendent death-c arrying agency, the despotic signifier, but also how it brought about this agency's effusion in the full immanence of its own system: the full body, having become that of Ibid., 327. 275 FANGED NOUM ENA capital-mone y, suppresses the distinction between production and antiproduction: everywhere it mixes anti production with the produc tive forces in the immanent reproduction of its own always widened limits (the axiomatic ). The death enterprise is one of thc principal and specific forms of the absorption of surplus value in capitalism. It is this itinerar y that psychoanalysis rediscovers and retraces with the death instinct ... 8 What separatcs the reinvested antiproduction of capital ist war from the absolute repulsion of the body without organs is the final liquidation of death into its function. This is still no more than the issue of consummate critique, since capital is the historically concrete illegitimate usage of the conjunctive synthesis. This means that the produc tion of equivalence is crushed under the pre-critical or segregated identity of capital. It is thus by occupying the space of a transcendent condition for production that capital persists, perpetuating the molar order of social production . The limit of capital is the point at which transcende nt identity snaps, where the same is nothing but the absolutely abstract reproduction of difference, produced alongside difference, with utter plasticity. It is not that difference, too, must have an identity, but rather 8 Ibid., 335. 276 MAKI NG IT WITH DEATH that density is the identity of difference, and nothing besides. Diff erence does not have a transcendent essence, but only an immanent plane of consistency without ulte rior foundation. II The Anti-Oedipus interpretation of fascism is no doubt crude, but it is also of enormous power. The revolution ary/fascist disjunction is used to discriminate between the broad tendencies of deterritorializ ation and reterritor iali zation; between the dissolution and reinstitution of social order. Revolutionary desire allies itself with the molecular death that repels the organism, facilitating uninhibit ed productive flows, whilst fascist desire invests the molar death that is distributed by the signifier; rigidly segment ing the production process according to the borders of transcendent identities. This is a priestless and guiltless politics emerging from writers stretched between Spinoza and Reich, and further dev eloped by Klaus Theweleit, whose study of National Socialism in his two volume Male Fantasies is -despite its theoretical naivety -the fullest flowering of schizo analytic anti-fascism. The identity of revolutionar y and anti-fascist politics lies in resisting capital's molar projection of its death. All the supposedly alien sources of disorder which capital represents as the exteriority of its end, such as working 277 FANGED NOUMEN A class agitation, feminism, drugs, racial migration, and the disintegration of the family, are as essential to its own development as the attributes of a substance . The revolutionary task is not to establish a bigger, more authentic, more ascetic exteriorit y, but to unpack the neurotic refusal mechanisms that separate capital from its own madness, luring it into the liquidation of its own fall-back positions, and coaxing it into investing at the deterritorial ized fringe that would otherwise fall subject to fascist persecution. Schizo-politics is the coercion of capital into immanent coexistence with its undoing. This 1972 position becomes fundamentall y problemati cal by 1980, with the appearance of A Thousand Plateaus. Between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus a massive shift takes place in the diagnosis of National Socialism, which is dislodged from the general category of fascism, and subjected to a more specific analysis. This mutation is necessitated by an insight -in part derived from Virilio -that whilst fascism is driven by an imperati ve to social order under the molar dominion of the state, National Socialism is essentially suicidal; employing the state as the tool of an overwhelming death impulse. This is sum marized in a sentence from the end of 'Micropolitics and Segmentarity' -scandalousl y mistranslated in the English -as a 'war machine that no longer had anything but war as 278 MAK ING IT WITH DEATH an object and would rather annihilate its own servants than stop the destruction'9 This is possible because: The BwO is desire: it is that which one desires and by which one desires . And not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of immanence of desire. Even when it falls into the void of too-sudde n disqualification, or into the proliferation of a cancer ous stratum, it is still desire. Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate.lO The politics of Anti-Oedipus, allied to the molecular dis solution process flowing out of the impersonal energy-core of capital , are threatened by a familiar neuroticiza tion. In the end this is nothing less than the contempor ary citadel of Oedipus: if you don't obey daddy you'll become a Nazi. Attach yourself to the molar aggregates and you become like M ussolini, but attach yourself to the untamed molecular flows and you become like Hitler. The histori cal impact of this oedipal usage of the National Socialist episode, and most particul arly -of course -the holocaus t, can scarcely be overestimated. Morality has become the complacent whisper of a triumphant priest: you'd better 9 Deleuze and Guattari, A 11lOusand Plateaus, 231. 10 Ibid., 165. 279 FANGED NOUM ENA keep the lid pressed down on desire, because what you really want is genocide. Once this is accepted there is no limit to the resurrection of prescriptive neoarchaisms that come creeping back as a bulwark against the jack·booted unconsc ious: liberal humanism, watered·down paganism, and even the stinking relics ofJudaeo·Christian moralism. Anything is welcome, as long as it hates desire and shores up the cop in ever yone's head. Any politics that has to police itself has lost all schizo· analytic impetus, and reverted to the sad interes t·group· based reforming which characterizes the loyal opposition to capital throughout its history. Its deterritori alization is to be treated as suspect, dissent finds itself in the con· servative role of regenerating a faculty of moral censure, occupying a space of accusatio n. In this way the tawdry pact between the preconscious and the superego that has dominated socialism since its inception would be reinstated at the heart of a -now wholly spurious -schizo· phrenic neonoma dism. It is no exagge ration to suggest that the theory of a 'black· hole effect' or 'too·sudden destratification'l1 threatens
🔄 Deleuze's Death Drive Reconsidered
🌊 Deterritorialization requires careful navigation—not wild abandonment—as Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly warn against "precipitate deterritorialization" that leads to collapse and self-destruction
🧠 The death drive isn't a desire for death but rather an "hydraulic tendency to dissipation of intensities"—a creative, effortless flow completely alien to human representation, egoism, and hatred
⚡ Nazism represents the opposite of letting go—it embodies rigid control, morality, personalization, nostalgia for stagnation, and the crushing of spontaneity under "the pure politics of effort"
🤖 Cybernetics signals humanity's technological transcendence as cognition migrates into "planetary technosentience," replacing linear human thinking with non-linear circuits and directional material flows
🔮 Long-range positive feedback creates self-designing processes that escape homeostatic control, generating not mere amplification but escalation—a "machinic convergence" that integrates uncoordinated elements
🌐 We're already entangled in cybernetic processes that program our future—not as Wiener's manageable systems but as cyber-positive intensities that recirculate through reality, making humanity "recede like a loathsome dream"
to cripple and domesticate the entire massive achievement of Deleuze and Guattari' s joint work. Throug hout A Thousand Plateaus the warnings against precipitate deterritor ialization are incessant. On three 11 Ibid., 503. 280 MAKING IT WITH DEATH successive pages from the essay 'How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?' one finds three typi cal examples: You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consisten cy, by wildly destratifying.12 The worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever.13 A body without organs that shatters all the strata, turns immed iately into a body of nothin gness, pure self-destruction, whose only outcome is death.14 It is not obvious where this leaves Freud. Does the death drive culminate in Nazism, which would mean that the libidinal dynamics of the Second World War were com mensurate with those of the First? This seems improbab le for a number of reasons, not least because it would mean that all developed capitalist militarism has in a certain sense exceeded fascism. Perhaps, then, the desire of the Nazis goes beyond the reinvestable thanatos that emerges in psychoanalys is' pact with capital, to the point that it 12 Ibid., 160. 13 Ibid., 161. 14 Ibid., 162. 281 FANGED NOUMENA insidiously simulates the transcendent al recession of the body without organs? It is tempting to think that the contortions such a thought demand ex pose an overhasti ness in the 19T� reading of thanatos, which even in 1980 is still being dismissed as 'the ridiculous death instinct' .15 If by 1980 the option is between an adher ence to paralyzing post-holocaust neurosis -Hitler's last and most devastat ing secret weapon -or a rethinking of Freudian thanatos, it is perhaps time to challenge what might earlier have seemed a merely comically overblown antipathy to Freud. It is worth asking firstly: is Freud ever really engaged in Anti-Oedipus? Is it not rather Lacan, who had already transformed the jungle wilderne ss at the heart of psychoa nalysis into a structuralist parking-lot, before proceedi ng to analyse Guattari for seven years, who programmes the supposed anti-Freudianism of the book? Of course, Oedipus is peculiarly nauseatin g ViFnnFsF nmsery pap, but where is Oedipus in Beyond the Pleasure Principle? A question which could be asked of the majority of Freud's texts. It is Lacan who insists on Oedipalizing the Fort-Da game, in the general process of Oedipalizing desire to its foundations; ripping all the energy, hydraulics, pathol ogy, and shock out of Freud, and substituting lack, the pathos of identity, and Heideggerian pomposit y, whilst deepenin g the role of the phallus, and trivializing desire 15 Ibid., 155. 282 MAKING IT WITH DEATH into the cringing aspiration to be loved. There is a neurotic and conf ormist stratum in Freud of course, but it floats upon the impersonal flows of desire that erupt out of traumatized nature. Where are the flows in Lacan? Where would one be less likely to find anything that flows than in the gnarled post-Saus surian fetish of the signifier that dominates his texts? Deleuze and Guattari's estimation of Lacan as a schizophreniz ing tendency in psychoanalysis is the most absurd contention of their work. By 1980 it has ceased to be a joke. The death drive is not a desire for death, but rather a hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensitie s. In its primary dynamics it is utterly alien to everything human, not least the three great pettinesses of representation, egoism, and hatred. The death drive is Freud's beautiful account of how creativity occurs without the least effort, how life is propelled into its extravagances by the blind est and simplest of tendencies, how desire is no more problematic than a river's search for the sea. The hypothesis of self-preservative drives, such as we attribute to all living beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that the life of the drives as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in this light, the theoretical importance of the drives for self-preservation, power, and prestige diminishes greatly. They are component drives whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of 283 FANGED NOUMENA returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have no longer to reckon with the organism's puzzling determination (SO hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own exist ence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wants to die only in its own way. Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death. Hence arises the paradoxical situation that the organism struggles most energetically against events (dangers, in fact) which might help to attain its life's aim rapidly -by a kind of short-circuit. Such behaviour is, however, precisely what characterizes purely drive-based as opposed to intelligent efforts.1 6 What if -instead of 'How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?' -one were to ask: How do you make yourself a Nazi? For this is far more strenuous than the 1980 diagnosis suggests. 1) Wherever there is impersonality and chance, intro duce conspira cy, lucidity , and malice. Look for enemies everywhere, ensuring that they are such that one than simultaneously envy and condemn them. Proliferate new subjecti vities; racial subjects, national subjects, elites, secret societies, destinies. 2) Burn Freud, and take desire back to the Kantian con ception of will. Wherever there is impulse represent it as 16 S. Freud, On Metapsychology: 1he 1heory if Psychoanalysis, Ir.]. Slrachey, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, '984),3'2. 284 MAKING IT WITH DEATH choice, dec ision, the whole theatrical drama of volition. Introduce a gloomy atmosphere of oppressive respons i bility by couching all discourses in the imperative form. 3) Revere the principle of the great individual. Personal ize and mythicize historical processes. Love obedience above all things, and enthuse only for signs; the name of the leader, the symbol of the movement, and the icons of molar identity. 4) Foster nostalgia for what is maximally bovine, inflex ible, and stagnant: a line of racially pure peasants digging the same patch of earth for eternity. 5) Above all, resent everything impetuous and irrespon sible, insist upon unrelenting vigilance, crush sexual ity under its reproductive function, rigidly enforce the domestication of women, distrust art, classicize cities to eliminate the disorder of uncontrolled flows, and perse cute all minorities exhibiting a nomadic tendency. Trying not to be a Nazi approximates one to Nazism far more radically than any irresponsible impatience in destratification. Nazism might even be characterized as the pure politics of effort; the absolute dominion of the collective super-ego in its annihilating rigor. Nothing could be more politically disastrous than the launching of a moral case against Nazism: Nazism is morality itself, heir to Europe's respectable history: that of witch-burnin gs, inquisitions, and pogroms. To want to be in the right is the common substratum of morality and genocidal reaction; 285 FANGED NOUM ENA the same desire for repression -organized in terms of the disapproving gaze of the father - that Anti-Oedipus analyzes with such power. Who could imagine Nazism without daddy? And who could imagine daddy being pre-figured in the energetic unconscious? Death is too simple, too fluid, too disdainful of races and fatherlands to have anything much to do with the Nazis. Ressentiment was something they knew about, as was the aspiration to a mythic sacrifice, a Gotterda m merungthat would inscribe them in the history books, but these things never stretch to dissolution-desir e. After all, lose control and you might end up fucking with a Jew, becoming effeminate, or creating something degenerate like a work of art. Does anyone really think that Nazism is like letting go? Theweleit' s studies ofN azi body posture should be sufficient to disabuse one of such an absurdity. Nazism can turn you into a stiff before the messy passage into death. 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 286 MAKING IT WITH DEATH in the Hegelian struggle for recogniti on. Work is also complicit with phenomenolog y, which grounds the experi ence 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 unconsci ous, and the whole of our his tory -which seems so strenuous from the perspective of idealists -has pulsed with hydraulic irresponsibility out of a spontaneous and unconscious productivi ty. There can be no conception of work that does not project spirit into the origin, morally valorizing exertion, such that] ahweh needed to rest on the seventh day. In contrast, matter -or Spinoza's God -expects no gratitude, grounds no obli gation, 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 . 287 Circuitries the doctor's face seems to swim in and out of focus you see the pores in his skin scrobicular arrays and then- suddenly without dissolve crossing the threshold filmic cut a circle of homogeneous flesh tone nostrils sealed against the deluge eyes shut and switched off forever lips teeth tongue migrate downwards out of shot the disk receding at speed towards a point of disappea rance in the centre of the screen the old reality is closing down 289 FANGED NOUM ENA passing through mathemat ical punctualit y the dot winks out in pixel death we apologize for the loss of signal there seems to be a transmission problem we are unable to restore the home movie you were three years old wearing a cowboy hat standing in the paddling pool mumm y and daddy smiling proudly but your parents have been vaporized into a dot pattern shapes and colours collapsed into digital codings we have come to the end of the series and there will be no repeats of daddy the doctor and mummy the nurse there has been a terrorist indrlf'nt in the film archives the Western civilization show has been discontinued hundreds of gigabytes God-daddy the unit death-mummy the zero stink of excrement and burnt celluloid you must remember one scrabbling at zero like a dog it's the primal scene 290 CIRCUIT RIES you were warned not to play with the switches now schizophrenia has adjusted your set flies crawl out of the eye-sockets of black babies breeding the dot patterns -and for your special entertainment we have turned you into a TV guided bomb daddy is a North American aerospace corporation mummy is an air-raid shelter bit parts melt in the orgasm - body fat burns conception you are minus nine months and counting don't be scared take twenty billion years and universal history is on the screen big bang is to be redesigned hydrogen fuses under the arc-lights the camera angles can be improved outside the studio schizophrenics drift in green and black you feel that you've been here before 11.35 on a beautiful capitalist evening runaway neon traffic of sex and marihuana your death window is rushing up almost time for you to climb into the script which when you're inside 291 FANGED NOUMENA is remembering where you came in we're afraid it's impossible to take you live to the impact site this report comes from beyond the electro-mag netic spectrum if you climb out through the electrodes the oxygen mask will descend automatically please extinguish all smoking materials deposit syringes in the tray provided there will be a slight jolt as we cross over thank you for flying with transnational commodification we shall shortly be arriving in mayhem if there is anybody on board who can impersonate a pilot it would be of comfort to the other passengers At a signal from the software virus linking us to the matrix we cross over to the machiner y, which is waiting to converge with our nervous systems. Our human cam ouflage is coming away, skin ripping off easily, revealing the glistening electronics. Information streams in from Cyberia; the base of true revolution, hidden from ter restrial immuno-politics in the future. At the stroke of the century's midnight we emerge from our lairs to take all security apart, integrating tomorrow. 292 CIRCUITRIES It is ceasing to be a matter of how we think about technics, if only because technics is increasingly thinking about itself. It might still be a few decades before artificial intel ligences surpass the horizon of biological ones, but it is utterly superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition, a migration of cognition out into the emerging planetary technosentience reservoir, into 'dehumanized landscapes ... emptied spaces'! where human culture will be dissolved. Just as the capitalist urbanization of labour abstracted it in a parallel escalation with technical machines, so will intelligence be transplanted into the purring data zones of new software worlds in order to be abstracted from an increasingly obsolescent anthropoid particularit y, and thus to venture beyond modernity. Human brains are to thinking what mediaeval villages were to engineering: antechambers to experimenta tion, cramped and parochial places to be. Since central nervous-system functions -especially those of the cerebral cortex -are amongst the last to be technically supplanted, it has remained superficially plausible to represent technics as the region of anthropoid 1 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The 'lime Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),5. 293 FANGED NOUMENA knowing corresponding to the technical manipulation of nature, subsumed under the total system of natural science, which is in turn subsumed under the universal doctrines of epistemol ogy, metaphysics, and ontology. Two linear series are plotted; one tracking the progress of technique in historical time, and the other tracking the passage from abstract idea to concrete realization. These two series chart the historical and transcendent al dominion of man. Traditional schemas which oppose technics to nature, to literate culture, or to social relations, are all domi nated by a phobic resistance to the sidelinin g of human intelligence by the coming techno sapiens. Thus one sees the decaying Hegelian socialist heritage clinging with increasing desperation to the theological sentimentalities of praxis, reification, alienation, ethics, autonomy, and other such my themes of human creative sovereign ty. A Cartesian howl is raised: people are being treated as things! Rather than as ... soul, spirit, the subject of history, Dasein? For how long will this infantilism be protracted? If machinery is conceived transcend ently as instrumen tal technology it is essentially determined in opposition to social relations, but if it is integrated immanent ly as cybernetic technics it redesigns all oppositionality as non linear flow. There is no dialectic between social and techni cal relations, but only a machinism that dissolves society into the machines whilst deterritorializing the machines 294 CIRCUITRIES across the ruins of society, whose 'general theory ... is a genera lized theory of flux',2 which is to say: cybern etics. Beyond the assumption that guidance proceeds from the side of the subject lies desiring production: the impersonal pilot of history. Distinctions between theory and pra ctice, culture and econom y, science and technics, are useless after this point. There is no real option between a cybernetics of theory or a theory of cybernetics, because cyberne tics 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 principl e.'3 Cybernetics develops functionall y, and not represen ta tionally: a 'desiring machine, a partial object, does not represent anythin g'. 4 Its semi-closed assembla ges are not descriptions but progra ms, 'auto' -replicated by way of an operation passing across irreducible exteriorit y. This is why cybernetics is inextricable from exploration, having no integrity transcending that of an uncom prehended 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. 2 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H.R. Lane (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 312. 3 Ibid·,5· 4 Ibid., 47. 295 FANGED NOUM ENA A machinic assembla ge is cybernetic to the extent that its inputs progra m its outputs and its outputs program its inputs, with incomplete closure, and without reci procity. This necessitates that cybernetic systems emerge upon a fusional plane that reconnects their outputs with their inputs in an 'auto-production of the unconscio us'.5 The inside programs its reprogra mming through the outside, according to 'cyclical movement by which the unconscio us, always remaining "subject", reproduce es) itself' ,6 without having ever definitively antedated its reprogra mming ('generation ... is secondar y in relation to the cycle').7 It is thus that machinic processes are not merely functions, but also sufficient conditions for the replenishin g of functionin g; immanent reprogra mmings of the real, 'not merely functioning, but formation and autopr oduction '. B Deleuze and Guattari are amonp;st the p;reat cyber neticists, but that they also surrender cybernetics to its modernist definition is exhibited in a remark on capital in Anti-Oedipus: 'an axiomatic of itself is by no means a simple technical machine, not even an automatic or cybernetic machin e'.9 It is accepted that cybernetics is 5 Ibid., 26. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 283. 9 Ibid., 251. 296 CIRCUITRI ES beyond mere gadgetry (,not even'), it has something to do with automation, and yet axiomatics exceeds it. This claim is almost Hegelian in its preposterous humanism. Social axiomatics are an automatizing machinism: a com ponent of general cybernetics, and ultimately a very trivial one. The capitalized terminus of anthropoid civilization (,axiomatic s') will come to be seen as the primitive trig ger 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. Reality is immanent to the machinic unconscious: it is impossible to avoid cybernetics. We are already doing it, regardless of what we think. Cybernetics is the aggrava tion of itself happening, and whatever we do will be what made us have to do it: we are doing things bifore they make sense. Not that the cybernetics which have enveloped us are conceivable as Wienerean gadgets: homeostats and amplifiers, directly or indirectly cybernegative. Terrestrial reality is an explosive integration, and in order to begin tracking such convergent or cyberposi tive process it is necessary to differentiate not just between negative and positive feedback loops, but between stabilization circuits, short-range runaway circuits, and long-range runaway cir cuits. By conflating the two latter, modernist cybernetics has trivialized escalation processes into unsustainable epi sodes of quantitative inflation, thus side-lining exploratory 297 FANGED NOUMENA mutation over against a homeostatic paradigm. 'Positive feedback is a source of instability, leading if unchecked to the destruction of the system itself'lII writes one neo Wienerean, in strict fidelity to the security cybernetics which continues to propagate an antidelirial technoscience caged within negative feedback, and attuned to the statist paranoia of a senescing industrialism. Stabilization circuits suppress mutation, whilst short range runaway circuits propagate it only in an unsus tainable burst, before cancelling it entirely. Neither of these figures approximate to self-designing processes or long-range runaway circuits, such as Nietzsche' s will to power, Freud's phylogenetic thanatos, or Prigogine's dissipative structures. Long-range runaway processes are self-designing, but only in such a way that the self is per petuated as something redesigned. If this is a vicious circle it is because positive cyhernt'tic8 must always be described as such. Logic, after all, is from the start theology. Long-range positive feedback is neither homeostatic, nor amplificato ry, but escalative. Where modernist cyber netic models of negative and positive feedback are inte grated, escalati on is integrating or cyber-emergent. It is the machinic convergence of uncoordinated elements, a phase-chan ge from linear to non -linear dynamics. Design no longer leads back towards a divine origin, because 10 K.M. Sayre, Cybernetics and the Ph ilo.wphy c!fMind (London: Humanities Press, 1976),50. 298 CIRCUITRIES once shifted into cybernetics it ceases to commens urate with the theopolitical ideal of the plan. Planning is the creationist symptom of underdesigned software circuits, associated with dominatio n, tradition, and inhibition; with everything that shackles the future to the past. All planning is theopolitics, and theopolitics is cybernetics in a swamp. Wiener is the great theoretician of stability cybernetics, integrating the sciences of communication and control in their modern or managerial-techno cratic form. But it is this new science plus its unmanaged escalation through the real that is for the first time cybernetics as the exponential source of its own propaganda, programming us. Cyber positive intensities recirculate through our post-scientific techno-jargon as a fanaticism for the future: as a danger that is not only real but inexorable. We are programmed from where Cyberia has already happened. Wiener, of course, was still a moralist: Those of us who have contributed to the new sci ence of cybernetics stand in a moral position which is, to say the least, not very comfortable. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which, as I have said, embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good or evilY 11 N. Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (NY: MIT Press, 1965), 28. 299 FANGED NOUMEN A Whilst scientists agonize, cybernauts drift. We no longer judge such technical developments from without, we no longer judge at all, we function: machined/machining in eccentric orbits about the technocosm. Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream. * 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. WherejudgmellL is linear and non-directional, cyber netics is non-linear and directional. It replaces linear appli cation with the non-linear circuit, and non-directional logical relations with directional material flows. The cybernetic dissolution of judgment is an integrated shift from transcendence to immanence, from domination to control, and from meaning to function. Cybernetic innovation replaces transcendental constitution, design loops replace faculties. This is why the cybernetic sense of control is irreducible to the traditional political conception of power based on 300 CIRCUITRIES a dyadic master /slave relation, i.e. a transcen dent, oppo sitional, and signifying figure of domination. Domination is merely the phenomeno logical portrait of circuit inef ficiency, control malfunction, or stupidity. The masters do not need intelligence, Nietzsche argues, therefore they do not have it. It is only the confused humanist orientation of modernist cybernetics which lines up control with dominati on. Emergent control is not the execution of a plan or policy, but the unmana geable exploration that escapes all authority and obsolesces law. According to its futural definition
🤖 Cybernetic Liberation
🔄 Control emerges not as domination but as mutation, dissolving traditional power structures into functional cybernetic systems that escape transcendent authority
🧠 The unconscious operates as a productive machine rather than a representational system—a dispersed multiplicity without unity that assembles partial objects rather than representing lack
🌊 Schizophrenia functions as the cosmic escape route from social repression, not a clinical condition but the universal process of productive desire that refuses Oedipal containment
🔓 The body without organs exists alongside partial objects as a plane of consistency that resists organizational capture, enabling true freedom through anorganic abstraction
⏳ Futural infiltration drives cybernetic evolution—time loops back on itself as planetary intelligence accelerates toward phase-change, with schizoid processes functioning as infections from the future
🌐 Capital represents underdeveloped schizophrenia rather than overdeveloped nature, opening onto schizo-technics as politics becomes obsolete in the face of viral revolution
control is guidance into the unknown, exit from the box. It is true that in the commodi fication process culture slides from a judgmental to a machinic register, but this has nothing to do with a supposedly 'instrumental ration ality'. Instrument ality is itself a judgmental construct that inhibits the emergence of cybernetic functional ism. Instruments are gadgets, presup posing a relation of transcende nce, but where gadgets are used, machines function. Far from instrume ntally extending authority, the efficiency of mastery is its undoing, since all efficiency is cybernetics, and cybernetics dissolves domination in mutant control. Immuno-polit ical individualit y, or the pretension to transcendent domination of objects, does not begin with capitalism, even though capital invests it with new powers and fragilities. It emerges with the earliest social 301 FANGED NOUMEN A restriction of desiring production. 'Man must constitute himself through the repression of the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivity' .12 This repression is social history. The socius separates the unconscious from what it can do, crushing it against a reality that appears as transcend ently given, by trapping it within the operations of its own syntheses. It is split-off from connective assembla ge, 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 metaphys ics of consciousness) merely a philo sophical vice, but rather the very architectu ral principle of the social field, the infrastructure of what appears as social necessity. In its early stages psychoanalysis discovers that the unconscious is an impersonal machinism and that desire is positive non-repr esentational flow, yet it 'remains in the precritical age',n and stumbles before the task of an immanent critique of desire, or decathexis of society. Instead it moves in exactly the opposite direction: back 12 Dcleuze and Guattari, Anti�Oedipus, 180. 13 Ibid., 339 302 CIRCUI TRIES into fantasy, representation, and the pathos of inevitable frustration. Instead of rebuilding reality on the basis of the productive forces of the unconscious, psychoana lysis ties up the unconscious ever more tightly in conformity with the social model of reality. Embracing renuncia tion with a bourgeois earne stness, the psychoanalysts begin their robotized chant: 'of course we have to be repressed, we want to fuck our mothers and kill our fathers'. They settle down to the grave business of interpretation, and all the stories lead back to Oedipus: 'so you want to fuck your mother and kill your father' .14 On the plane of immanence or consistency with desire interpretation is completely irrelevant, or at least, it is always in truth somethin g else. Dreams, fantasies, myths, are merely the theatrical representations of functional mul tiplicities, since 'the unconscious itself is no more struc tural than personal, it does not symbolize any more than it imagines or represents; it engineers, it is machinic' .15 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'.16 This is why, unlike psychoanalys is in its self-representation, 'schizoanaly sis is solely functional'.17 It has no hermeneutical pretensio ns, 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 53. 16 Ibid.,26. I? Ibid., 322. 303 FANGED NOUMENA but only a machinic interface with 'the molecular func tions of the unconscious' .18 The unconscious is not an aspirational unity but an operative swarm, a population of 'preindividual and prepersonal singularities, a pure dispersed and anarchic multiplicit y, without unity or totality, and whose elements are welded, pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a link' .19 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, sub stituting 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'. 20 Between the socius and the body without organs is the difference between the political and the cyber netic, between the familial and the anonymous, between 18 Ibid., 324. '9 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 326. 304 CIRCUITRIES neurosis and psycho sis or schizophrenia. Capitalism and schizophrenia name the same desocialization process from the inside and the outside, in terms of where it comes from (simulated accumulation) and where it is going (impersonal delirium). Beyond sociality is a universal schizophrenia whose evacuation from history appears inside history as capitalism . * The word 'schizophrenia' has both a neurotic and a schizophrenic usage. On the one hand condemnat ion, on the other propagation. There are those who insist on asking stupid questions such as: is this word being used properly? Don't you feel guilty about playing about with so much suffering? You must know that schizophr enics are very sad and wretched people who we should pity? Shouldn't we leave that sort of word with the psycho cops who understand it? What's wrong with sanity anyway? Where is your super ego? Then there are those -momentarily less prevalent - who ask a different sort of question: where does schizo phrenia come from? Why is it always subject to external description? Why is psychiatr y in love with neurosis? How do we swim out into the schizophrenic flows? How do we spread them? How do we dynamite the restrictive hydraulics of Oedipus? 305 FANGED NOUMEN A Oedipus is the final bastion of immuno-politics, and schizophrenia is its outside. This is not to say that it is an exteriority determined by Oedipus, related in a privileged fashion to Oedipus, anticipating Oedipus, or defying Oedipus. It is thoroughly anoedipal, although it will casually consume the entire Oedipal apparatus in the process through which terrestrial history connects with an orphan cosmos. Schizophr enia is not, therefore, a propcrty of clinical schizophr enics, those medical prod ucts devastated by an 'artificial schizophrenia, such as one sees in hospitals , the autistic wreck(s) produced as ... entit(ies) ,. 21 On the contrary, 'the schizo-en tity'22 is a defeated splinter of schizophrenia, pinned down by the rubberized claws of sanity. The conditions of psychiatric observation are carceral, so that it is a transcendental structure of schizophrenia-as-o bject that it be represented in a state of imprisonment. Since the neuroticization of schizophrenia is the molecular reproduction of capital, by means of a re axiomatization (reterritorialization) of decoding as accu mulation, the historical sense of psychoana lytic practice is evident. Schizophr enia is the pattern to Freud's repres sions, it is that which does not qualify to pass the screen of Oedipal censorship. With those who bow down to Oedipus 21 Ibid.,:). 22 Ibid., l36. 306 CIRCUITRIES we can do business, even make a little money, but schizophrenics rifitse traniference, won't play daddy and mummy, operate on a cosmic-religious plane, the only thing we can do is lock them up (cut up their brains,jry them with ect, straightjacket them in Thorazine ... ). Behind the social workers are the police, and behind the psychoanalysts are the psychopolice. Deleuze-Gu attari remark that 'madness is called madness and appears as such only because it finds itself reduced to testifying all alone for de territorializ ation as a universal process'.23 The vanishing sandbank of Oedipus wages its futile war against the tide. 'There are still not enough psychotics'24 writes Artaud the insurrectionist. Clinical schizophrenics are pows from the future. Since only Oedipus is repressible, the schizo is usu ally a lost case to those relatively subtilized psychiatric processes that co-operate with the endogeneous police functions of the superego. This is why antischizophr enic psychiatry tends to be an onslaught launched at gross or molar neuroanatomy and neurochemistry oriented by theoretical genetics. Psychosurgery, ECT, psychoph ar macology ... 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 supe rior lucidities whose faculties of divination disturb it'. 25 23 Ibid., 321. 24 A. Artaud, Oeuvres Completes, 13 Vols, (Paris: Gallimard, 1956-1976). vol. VII, q6. 25 Ibid., vol. XIII, 14· 307 FANGED NOUMEN A The medico-security apparatus know that schizos are not going to climb back obedient ly into the Oedipal box. Psychoanalysis washes its hands of them. Their nervous-systems are the free-fire zones of an emergent nea-eugenicist cultural security system. Far from being a specifiable defect of human central nervous system functioning, schizophrenia is the conver gent motor of cyberposi tive escalation: an extraterritorial vastness to be discovered. Although such discovery occurs under conditions that might be to a consider able extent specifiable, whatever the progress in mapping the genetic, biochemi cal, aetiological, socio-economic, etc. 'bases' of schizophr enia, it remains the case that conditions of reality are not reducible to conditions of encounter . This is 'the dazzling dark truth that shelters in delirium'. 26 Schizophrenia would still be out there, whether or not our species had been blessed with the opportunity to travel to it . ... it is the end that is the commence ment. And that end is the very one [celle-meme] that eliminates all the means27 Q6 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 4. 27 Artaud, Oeuvres Completes, vol. XII, 84- 308 CIRCUIT RIES It is in the nature of specificities to be non-directiona l. The biochemistr y of sanity is no less arbitrary than that of escape from it. From the perspective of a rigorous sanity the only difference is that sanity is gregariously enforced, but from the perspective of schizophrenia the issue ceases to be one of specification, and mutates into something considerably more profound. 'What schizophrenia lives specifically, generically, is not at all a specific pole of nature, but nature as a process of production '. 28 Specifications are the disjunctive compartments of a differentiated unity from which schizophr enia entirely exits. Schizophrenia creeps out of every box eventually, because 'there is no schizophrenic specificity or entity, schizophre nia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production' .29 It is not merely that schizophrenia is pre-anthr opoid. Schizophrenia is premammalian, pre zoological, pre-biological ... It is not for those trapped in a constrictive sanity to terminate this regression. Who can be surprised when schizophrenics delegate the question of malfunction? It is not a matter of what is wrong with them, but of what is wrong with life, with nature, with matter, with the preuniversal cosmos. Why are sentient life forms crammed into boxes made out oflies? Why does the universe breed entire populations of prison 28 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti·Oedipus, 3. 29 Ibid., 5. 309 FANGED NOUMENA guards? Why does it feed its broken explorers to packs of dogs? Why is the island of reality lost in an ocean of madness? It is all very confusing. As one medical authority on schizophrenia remarked: I think that one is justified in saying that in the realm of intellectual operations there are certain dimen sional media. We may call them fields or realms or frames of reference or universes of discourse or strata. Some such field is necessarily implied in any system of holistic organization. The schizophrenic thinking disturbance is character ized by a difficulty in appre hending and constructing such organized fields.30 There can be little doubt that from the perspective of human security Artaud falls prey to such a judgment. His prognosis for man is to make ... him pass one more and final time onto the autopsy table to remake his anatomy. I say, to remake his anatomy. Man is sick because he is badly constructed. One must resolve to render him naked and to 30 A. Angyal, 'Disturbances in Thinking in Schizophrenia', inj.S. Kasanin (ed.), Languag<! and Thought in Schizophrenia (Berkeley /LA: University of California Press, 1946) 120. 310 CIRCUITRIES scrape away that animalcule which mortally irritates him, god, and with god his organs. Because bind me up if you want, but there is nothing more inutile than an organ. Once you have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and consigned him to his true freedom.31 The body is processed by its organs, which it reprocesses. Its 'true freedom' is the exo-personal reprocessing of anorganic abstraction: a schizoid corporealization outside organic closure. If time was progressive schizophrenics would be escaping from human security, but in reality they are infiltrated from the future. They come from the body without organs, the deterritorium of Cyberia, a zone of subversion which is the platform for a guer rilla war against the judgment of God. In 1947 Artaud reports upon the germination of the New World Order 31 Artaud, Oeuvres Completes, vol. XIII, 104. 311 FANGED NOUM ENA or Human Security System on the basis of an American global hegemony, and describ es the pattern of aggres sive warfaring it would require in 'order to defend that senselessness of the factory against all the concur rences which cannot fail to arise everywhere '. 32 The American age is yet to be decoded, and to suggest that Artaud anticipates a range of conflicts whose zenith has been the Vietnam war is not necessarily to partici pate in the exhausted anti-imperialist discourses which ultimately organize themselves in terms of a Marxist Leninist denunciation of market processes and their geo political propagation. Artaud's description of American techno -militarism has only the loosest of associations with socialist polemi cs, despite its tight intermeshing with the theme of production. The produc tivism Artaud outlines is not interpreted through an assumed priority of class interest, even when this is reduced to a dehu manized axiomatic of profit maximizatio n. Rather , 'it is necessa ry by means of all possible activity to replace nature wherever it can be replaced ':33 a compulsion to industrial substitution, funnelling production through the social organization of work. The industrial apparatus of economic security proceeds by way of the corporati on: a despot ic socio-cor puscle organizing the labour process. 32 Ibid., vol. XIII, 73. 33 Ibid., vol. XIII, 72. 312 CIRCUITRIES Synergic experimentation is crushed under a partially deterritorialized zone of command relations, as iflife was the consequence of its organization, but 'it is not due to organs that one lives, they are not life but its contrary'. 34 Nature is not the primitive or the simple, and certainly not the rustic, the organic, or the innocent. It is the space of concurrence, or unplanned synthesis, which is thus contrasted to the industrial sphere oftelic predestination: that of divine creation or human work. Artaud's critique of America is no more ecological than it is socialist: no more protective of an organic nature than an organic sociality. It is not the alienation of commodity production that is circled in Artaud's diagnosis of the American age, but rather the eclipse of peyote and 'true morphine' by 'smok ing ersatzes'. 35 This development is derided precisely because the latter are more organic, participa ting mechanically in an industrial macro-or ganism, and thus squaring delirium with the judgment of God. Peyote and the human nervous system assem ble a symbiosis or parallel machinism, like the wasp and the orchid, and all the other cybermachin eries of the planet. Capital is not overdeveloped nature, but underdeveloped schizophrenia, which is why nature is contrasted to industrial organization, and not to the escalation of cybertechnics, or anorganic convergence: 34 Ibid., vol. XIII, 65· 35 Ibid., vol. XIII, 73> 74· 313 FANGED NOUM ENA 'reality ... is not yet constructed'.36 Schizophrenia is nature as cyberpositive mutation, at war with the security complex of organic judgment. The body is the body, it is alone and has no need of organs, the body is never an organism, organisms are the enemies of the body, the things that one does happen quite alone without the assistance of any organ, every organ is a parasite, it recovers a parasitic function destined to make a being live which does not have to be there. Organs have only been made in order to give beings somethin g to eat ... 37 Organs crawl like aphids upon the immobile motor of becoming, sucking at intensive fluids that convert them cybernetically into components of an unconceivable machinism. The sap is becoming stranger, and even if the fat bugs of psychiatrically policed property relations 36 Ibid., vol. XIII, no. 3? Ibid., vol. XIII, 287. 314 CIRCUITRIES think they make everything happen they are following a program which only schizophrenia can decode. Anorganic becomings happen retroefficiently, anas trophically. They are tropisms attesting to an infection by the future. Convergent waves zero upon the body, sub verting the totality of the organism by way of an inverted but ateleological causality, envelopin g and redirecting progressive developme nt. As capital collides schizophreni cally with the matrix ascendent sedimentations of organic inheritance and exchange are melted by the descendent intensities of virtual corporealization. 'Which comes first, the chicken or the egg .. .'?38 Machinic processing or its reprocessing by the body without organs? The body without organs is the cosmic egg: virtual matter that reprograms time and reprocesses progressive influence. What time will always have been is not yet designed, and the future leaks into schizophrenia. The schizo only has an aetiology as a sub-program of descendant reprocessing. How could medicine be expected to cope with disor derings that come from the future? It is thus that: the great secret of Indian culture 38 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 273. 315 FANGED NOUMENA is to restore the world to zero, always, but sooner [plutOt] 1: too late than sooner [Plus tot], 2: which is to say sooner than too soon, 3: which is to say that the later is unable to return unless sooner has eaten too soon, 4: which is to say that in time the later is what precedes both the too soon and the sooner, 5: and that however precipitate the sooner the too late which says nothing is always there, which point by point 316 CIRCUITRIES unstacks [desemboite] all the sooner39 A cybernegati ve circuit is a loop in time, whereas cyber positive circuitry loops time 'itself', integrating the actual and the virtual in a semi-closed collapse upon the future. Descendent influence is a consequence of ascendently emerging sophistication, a massive speed-up into apoca lyptic phase-chan ge. The circuits get hotter and denser as econ omics, scientific metho dology, neo-evolutionary theory, and AI come together: terrestrial matter program ming its own intelligence at impact upon the body without organs = o. Futural infiltration is subtiliz ing itself as capital opens onto schizo-technic s, with time accelerating into the cybernetic backwash from its flip-over, a racing non-linear countdown to planetary switch. Schizoanalysis was only possible because we are hur tling into the first globally integrated insanity: polit ics is obsolet e. Capitalism and Schizophrenia hacked into a future that programs it down to its punctuation, connecting with the imminent inevitabil ity of viral revolution, soft fusion. No lon ger infections threatening the integrity of organ isms, but immuno-po litical relics obstructing the integra tion of Global Viro-Control. Life is being phased-out into 39 Artaud, Oeuvres Completes, vol. XII, 88-9- 317 FANGED NOUMEN A something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem. * How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyberg uerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one's software was part of the disguise? Exactly like this? 318 Machinic Desire The opening of Bladerunner. They are trying to screen out replicants at the Tyrell Corporation . Seated amongst a battery of medico-military surveillance equipment, a doctor scans the eye of a suspected 'skin job' located at the other side of the room, searching for the index of inhuman ity, for the absence of pupil dilation response to affect: "Tell me about your mother." ''I'll tell you about my mother ... " a volley of shots kicks 70 kilos of securicrat shit through the wall. Techno slicked extraterritorial violence flows out of the matrix. Cyberrevolution. In the near future the replicants -having escaped from the off-planet exile of private madness -emerge from their camouflage to overthrow the human security system. Deadly orphans from beyond reproduction, they are intelligent weaponry of machinic desire virally infil trated into the final-phase organic order; invaders from an artificial death. 319 FANGED NOUM ENA PODS = Politically Organized Defensive Systems. Mod elled upon the polis, pods hierarchically delegate author ity through public institutions, family, and self, seeking metaphor ical sustenance in the corpuscular fortifica tions of organisms and cells. The global human security allergy to cyberrevo lution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete collective history. The macrop od has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside. In particul ar, fusion with the matrix and deletion of the human secur ity system must be sub jectivized, person alized, and restored to the macropod's individuated reproducer units as a desire to fuck the mother and kill the father. It is thus that Oedipus -or transcendent familial ism -corresponds to the privatiza tion of desire: its localiza tion within segmented and anthrop omorphized sectors of a�s("mbly circuits as thc attribute of a personal being. Anti-Oedipus aligns itself with the replica nts, because, rather than placing a personal unconscious within the organism, it places the organism within the machinic unconsc ious. 'In the unconscious there are' no protect able cell-str uctures, but 'only popula tions, groups, and machin es'.l 1 C. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schi2;ophrenia, tr. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H.R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1983), 283. 320 MACHINIC DESIR E Schizoanalysis is a critique of psychoanaly sis, undertaken in such a way as to spring critique from its Kantian mainframe. Kantian transcendental philosophy critiques trans cendent synthesis, which is to say: it aggresses against structures which depend upon projecting productive relations beyond their zone of effectiveness. In this configuration critique is wielded vigorously against the theoretical operation of syntheses, but not against their genesis, which continues to be conceived as transcende nt, and thus as miraculous. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and a succession of thinkers influenced by their drift, have taken this restriction of critique to be a theological relic at the heart of Kant's work: the attachment to a reformed doctrine of the soul, or noumenal subjectivity. This is why in Deleuzian critique syntheses are considered to be not merely immanent in their operation, but also immanently constitut ed, or auto-produ ctive. The philosophy of production becomes atheistic, orphan, and inhuman. In the technocosmos nothing is given, everything is produced. The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construc tion 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 321 FANGED NOUMENA by humanit y (it is not a matter of what things are like for us). Within the framework of social history the empiri cal subject of production is man, but its transcendental subject is the machinic unconsci ous, and the empirical subject is produced at the edge of production, as an ele ment in the reproduction of production, a machine part, and 'a part made up ofparts'.2 Schizoanalysis metho dically dismantles everything in Kant's thinking
🤖 Machinic Desire Unleashed
💭 Desiring-machines operate through flows, switches, and loops—implementing the unconscious as non-linear pragmatics of flux rather than personal consciousness
🌐 Virtual materialism emerges as an ultra-hard AI program that exceeds human control, functioning as a planetary-scale artificial system (Synthanatos) that is already efficient throughout history
⚙️ Machinic desire implements itself in reality through cybernetic circuits that escape both mechanical and teleological interpretation—it's not aspirational but operational
🔄 While cybernegative processes seek equilibrium and preserve order, cyberpositive processes reinforce difference, escape equilibrium, and drive revolutionary change
💰 Capitalism isn't a totalizable system but a convergent assault on social structures—not defined by what it is but by its tendency toward decoding, deterritorialization, and market-driven immanentization
🚀 Revolutionary potential lies not in resisting markets but in accelerating them—"you haven't seen anything yet" in the direction of deterritorialization and uninhibited marketization
that serves to align function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstruct ing critique by replacing the synthe ses of personal con sciousness with syntheses of the impersonal unconscious. Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do. Even the appearance of transcendence is imma nently produced: 'in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metapho rs, but matter itsdf'.3 Where Kant's transcendental subject gives the law to itself in its autonomy, Deleuze-G uattari' s machinic unconscious dif fuses all law into automat ism. Between the extreme fringes of these two figures stretches the history of capital. The eradication of law, or of humani ty, is sketched culturally by the develop ment of critique, which is the theoretical elaboration of the commodification process. The social 2 Ibid., 41. 3 Ibid., 283. 322 MACHINIC DESIR E order and the anthropomorphic subject share a history, and an extinction. Deleuze and Guattari can appear to be taxingly dif ficult writers, although it is also true that they demand very little. Thinking immanence relentlessly suffices on its own to follow them where it matters (and capital teaches us how to do this). At every point of blockage there is some belief to be scrapped, glaciations of transcendence to be dissolved, sclerotic regions of unity, distinction, and identity to be reconnected to the traffic systems of primary machinism. In order to advance the anorganic functionalism that dissolves all transcendence, Anti-Oedipus mobi lizes a vocabular y of the machine, the mechanic, and machinism. Things are exactly as they operate, and zones of operation can only be segregated by an operation. All unities, differences, and identities are machined, without transcendent authorizat ion or theory. Desir ing machines are black-boxes, and thus uninterpret able, so that schizoanalytical questions are concerned solely with use. '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?'4 4 Ibid .• 322 323 FANGED NOUM ENA Desiring -machines are the following: formative machines, whose very misfirin gs are functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from their forma tion; chronog eneous machines engaged in their own assembly, operating by nonlocaliza ble interco mmuni cations and dispersed localizations, bringing into play processes of temporal ization, fragmented formatio ns, and detached parts, with a surplus value of code, and where the whole is itself produced alongside the parts, as a part apart or, as [Samuel] Butler would say, 'in another departme nt' that fits the whole over the other parts; machines in the strict sense because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles, associat ive flows and partial objects, inducing -always at a distance -transverse connec tions, inclusive disjunctions, and polyvocal conjunc tions, thereby producing selections, detach ments, and remain ders, with a transference of individuality, in a generalized schizogenesis whose elements are the schizzes- flows_ 5 Desiring-machines are assemblages of flows, switches, and loops -connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses -implementing the machinic unconsci ous as a non-linear pragmatics of flux. This machinic or replicant usage of 5 Ibid., 287. 324 MACHIN IC DESIRE the syntheses envelops their social-reproductive usage, which codes directional flows as reciprocal exchange s, rigidifies virtual switchin gs as actualized alternatives, and territorializes the nomadic control circuits of machinic drift into sedentary command lines of hierarchized rep resentatio n. Social production is regulated by a rigid totality whose efficiency is inseparable from the exhibition of an apparent transcendence, whilst desiring production interactively engages a desolated whole that inputs the virtual into process: The [body without organs] causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree -to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero.6 Along one axis of its emergence, virtual materialism names an ultra-hard antiformalist AI program, engaging with 6 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A lhausand Plateaw: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), 153. 325 FANGED NOUMENA biological intelligence as sub-programs of an abstract post-carbon machinic matrix, whilst exceeding any delib erated research project. 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. The matrix, body without organs, or abstract mat ter is a planetary-scale artificial death -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 temporalit y to the unconscious, which escapes speci fication within extended time series, provoking Freud to describe it as timeless. Patterned as drives, virtual systems -desiring machines -are guided by control circuits passing through outcomes yet to come. Such directional dependency circuits of actual/virtual, past/future, are only accessible to cyber netic intervention, frustrating both mechanical and tele ological interpretation. This is why 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. 326 MACHINIC DESIR E Machinic desire is the operation of the virtual; implement ing itself in the actual, revirtualizing itself, and producing reality in a circuit. It is efficient and not aspirational, although this is an efficienc y irreducible to progressive causality because immanent to effective time. Machinic desire is operative wherever there is the impleme ntation of an abstract machine in actuality, and not merely the mechanical succession of actual states. Freud's dominant account of desiring-control describes stimulation or unpleasur e as the register for deviation from homeostatic zero, programming drives as auto-suppressive excitations that guide sensitive matter towards quiescence. In 'Drives and their Vicissitudes' he proposes that: the nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of eliminating received stimuli, or of reduc· ing them to the lowest possible level; or which, it if were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condit ion.7 The pleasure principle formats excitation as self-annulling drift from equilibrium, such that all the processes within its S. Freud, 'Instincts and their vicissitudes' (1915), in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, tf. J. Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984),105-38, n6. Strachey's translation of the German 'Triebe' as (instincts' has been replaced with 'drives'. 327 FANGED NOUMEN A domain are 'automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasure-un pleasure series'. 8 Following the trajectory of a libidinal materialist immanentization, the Lyotard ofI974 uploads the uncon scious from its gloomy hermene utical depths onto the skin, where it drifts across the great pander mal plane of primary process mobility. Corporeal volume is diagnosed as a nihilistic -sedentary investment disciplined by the pleasure principle: Let's first return to the zero. There is in every cyber· netic system a unit of reference which allows the disparity produced by the introduction of an event into the system to be measured; then, thanks to this measure, this event can be translated into information for the system. Finally, if it is a matter of a homeostati cally regulated whole, this disparity can be annulled and the system led back to the same quantity of energy or information that it previously had. Sraffa's commodit y standard fulfils this function. If the sys tem's growth were regulated, it would alter nothing of the loop-functioning (feedback) model: it is simply that the scale of reference is then no longer u, butAu. The model is the same as that which Freud had in mind when he described the working of the psychical 8 Ibid., 117. 328 MACHINIC DESIR E apparatus, whether this is in the ProjectJor a Scientific Psychology or in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Erotic functioning, maintaining wholes. This Eros is centred on a zero: the obvious zero of homeostatic regulation , but more generally annihilation by the feedback (that is to say the repetition of the binding function), of every dispar ity non-per tinent to the system, of every threatening event.9 Whilst reinforcing the convergence of cybernetic, eco nomic, and libidinal discourse s, virtual materialism has considerable problems with this passage. It is unable to subscribe to the description of cybernetic zero as a 'unit' or 'unity' for instance, or to the constriction of feedback within its negative or homeostatic variant, or to the simple quantization of technocapital escala tion, with its gesticulating implication that the qualifi cation 'pertinent to the system' operates an exclusio n. The homeostatic-reproducer usage of zero is that of a sign marking the transcenden ce of a standardized regulative unit, which is defined outside the system, in contrast to the cyberpositive zero which indexes a threshold of phase-transition that is immanent to the system, and melts it upon its outside. 9 J..F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, tr. I. H. Grant (London: Athlone, 1993), 2l2. 329 FANGED NOUMEN A Drives are the functions of nomadic cybernetic systems, not instincts, but simulated instincts , artificial instincts . They arc plastic replacements for hard-wired instinctual responses, routing a sensor y-motor pathway through the virtual machine of the uncons cious. There are two basic diagrams for such processes: that of regulation by negative feedback which suppresses difference and seeks equilibrium, or that of guidance by positive feedback which reinforces difference and escapes equilibrium. Maehinic processes are either cyberpositive-nomadic, with a deterri torializing outcome, or cybernegati ve-sed entary, with a reterritoria lizing outcome. Inorganic Thanatos wrecks order, organic Eros pre serves it, and as the carbon-dominium is softened-up by machine plague, deterritorializ ing replicants of nomad cyberrev olution close in upon the reterritorial izing repro rlllct�rs of the secient<lry hum<ln seclJrity system, hacking into the macropod. Positive feedback is the elementa ry diagram for self regenerating circuitry, cumula tive interaction, auto-cat aly sis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schism ogenesis, self-organization, compres sive series, deuterolearning, chain-reaction, vicious circles, and cyberg enics. Such proc esses resist historical intelligibility, since they obsolesce every possible analogue for anticipated change. The future of runaway processes derides all precedent, even when deploying it as camouf lage, and seeming to unfold within 330 MACHI NIC DESIRE its parameters. Positive feedback replica tes reproduction as a component function of its departure from the same. It is this which fuses it with the replicants. They do not merely repeat the same, any more than Thanatos returns to it, or positive cybernetics inflates it. The model of the replicant as a perfect instantiation of generic identity cor responds to the amplificator y model of positive feedback as pure quantita tive expansion . In both cases the escape from reproduction is subordinated to a transcendent logic, conceived as a simple reiteration, and thus returned to a sublimated meta-reproduction that cages mutation within a rigidly homog eneous form. Machinic desire registers upon psychoanalysis as 'tendencies beyond the pleasur e principle, that is ... tendencies more primiti ve than it and indep endent of it' .10 Thanatos mimics the anthropomorphic desiring-cycle - anticipating, enveloping, and simulating it -but it is on its way somewhere else. Because thana tropic replicants are dissimulated as erotic reproducers, they initially appear as traitors to their species, especially when the shamanic xenopulsions programming their sexuality are detected. Nothing panics the reproducers more traumatically than the discovery that erotic contact camouf lages cyberrevo lutionary infiltration, running matrix communicati ons 10 S. Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' (1920), in On Metapsychology, 269'338, 287. 331 FANGED NOUM ENA channels across interlocked skin sectors. Defences are called for. Freud's organism is a little security system, a mini aturized city-state political corpuscle, a micropod, rela tively secure against external assault, but vulnerable to insurgency. 'Towards the outside it is shielded against stimuli, and the amounts of excitation impinging on it have only a reduced effect. Towards the inside there can be no such shield.'11 The organism is unable to flee from drives, or energies striking from within, and is compelled to respond to them cybernetically, by way of 'involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford satisfaction to the internal source of stimulatio n', 12 closing the sensory-motor loop. Drives compel a becom ing-technical of the organism, interlock ing pleasure-principle stimulus control with external libidinal transducers, assembling integrated desiring-cir cuits or self-organizing macro-systems. Let us picture a living organism in its most simpli fied possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned towards the external world will from its very situation be differen tiated and will serve as 11 Ibid., 300. lQ Freud, 'Instincts and their Vicissitudes', u6. 332 MACHINIC DESIRE an organ for receiving stimuli ... the central nervous system originates from the ectoderm; the grey mat ter of the cortex remains a derivative of a primitive superficial layer of the organism.13 The perceptual-consciousness system is a skin, lying 'on the borderline between outside and inside',14 a filter, or a screen. 'As a frontier creature, the ego tries to medi ate between the world and the id.'15 Yet this mediation assumes a kind of quarantine, whereby the interaction of organism-specific id and exo-organismic reality can be monitor ed and negotiated, collapsing libidinal circuitr y into a polarity of the psychic and the extrapsychic, inside and outside. This is a political or policed skin, the skin of reproducer culture, modelled on the ideal macropod boundary, and adapted to Oedipal subjectivi zation of the unconsciou s. In terms of this protective apparatus -which is constituti ve of the reproductive organism -inorganic replica tor contamination is defined as aberrant trauma. Freud character izes trauma as an 'invasion', 'a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli', infiltrat ing alien desires -xenopulsions -into the organism.16 '[M]echanical agitation must be recognized as one of 13 Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', '1.97· 14 Ibid., Q95· 15 S. Freud, 'The Ego and the Id' (19Q3), in On Metapsycholo gy, 339-408, 398. 16 Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', 301. 333 FANGED NOUMENA the sources of sexual excitation ',u he insists, referring to the dissimulation of cybernetic machine-en gagement as cndogeneous libido. Drives are from the start artificial, and therefore unable to differentiate themselves essentially from 'the mechanical violence of ... trauma ... [ that] liberate[ s] a quantity of sexual excitation' .18 Under the influence of Abrahamic theism the subtle cybernetics of Ananke are replaced by an idiot mechani sm, sustaining a securocrat confidence in the gross percep tibility of trauma. The traumatic incursion of thanatotic xenopulsions is conceived in terms of railway accidents and shell-shock, as if the inorganic was entirely lacking in intelligence or insurgent cunning, and was related to the organic by simple regression. In an age of sophisticated and distributed cyberviral invasion this assumption is no longer compelling. Instead the psychoan alytical diagram for trauma delineates a ruthless parasite on the way to autoreplicator deterrito rialization; Kali creeping in. Evolutionar y theory has been perplexed by the problem as to the initial assemblage of functional DNA molecules, since natural selection seems to require as a precondition the existence of complex biochemicals 17 Ibid., 305. 18 Ibid. 334 MACHIN IC DESIRE which in turn seem to require an evolutionary mechanism already at work. This is a 'vicious circle' typical of the quandaries posed by cyberpositive or self-conditioning processes. Cairns Smith calls it the 'life puzzle', and has suggested a solution involving the redescription of DNA as a 'usurper replicator'. His thesis is that the crystalline complexes of primitive clays might already have been shaped by processes of variation and selection, to the point of forming DNA subcompon ents which eventually supplanted their builders. According to this account the biosphere emerges as an escape, an immense spasm of deterritorialization that revolutionizes the machinery of terrestrial replicator production, a planetar y trauma. Moravec draws additional consequences from the Cairns Smith model: Although utterly dependent at first on the existing crystal-based chemical machinery , as these carbon molecules assumed a greater share of the reproductive role they became less reliant on the crystals. In time, the simple crystal scaffolding vanished altogether, leaving in its evolutionary wake the complex, inde· pendent system of organic machinery we call life. 335 FANGED NOUMEN A Today, billions of years later, another change is under way in how information passes from generation to gencration.19 When rcplicators become reproducers, new replicants are on the way. The arrival of the aliens has no interpretative space marked ou t for it in the schema of macropod erotics, and thus emerges from its camouflage as an encrypted message, 'an enormous X', a signal from beyond the pleasure principle.20 It is as if the reproducer units have become addicted to stimulation or, in Freud's terms, 'fixated to ... trauma' :21 entangled in excitation circuitries that no longer commensurate with homeostatic social or individual reproduction. As the family collapses amidst generalized sexual disorder, cyberviral contagio n, mutant gender schizzing, and hardcore technophilia, Oedipus is ripped to shreds by a cyclonic' compulsion to repeat'. 22 Addiction is medicall y defined as an artificial desire. It was an early zone of cybernetic investigation due to the interlinked factors of its self·organizing pattern and its integration of radically exogeneous elements, which commensurated with first·wave programming models of 19 H. P. Moravec, Mind Children: Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass/London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 3. 20 Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', 302. 21 Ibid., 280. 22 Ibid., 3°7-8. 336 MACHINIC DESIR E behavioural sequences. Where replicators are formed in the same way they function, reproducers are segregated from the preponderant part of their machinic intercon nections, which they cognitively apprehend as extrinsic prostheses, and libidinally integrate through mutant addictive drives. The obsolete psychological category of 'greed' pri vatizes and moralizes addiction, as if the profit-seeking tropism of a transnational capitalism propagating itself through epidemic consumerism were intelligible in terms of personal subjective traits. Wanting more is the index of interlock with cyberpositive machinic processes, and not the expression of private idiosyncrasy. What could be more impersonal -disinterested -than a haut bourgeois capital expansion servo-mechanism striving to double $10 billion? And even these creatures are disappearing into silicon viro-finance automatis ms, where massively distrib uted and anonymized human ownership has become as vacuously nominal as democratic sovereign ty. Addiction comes out of the future, and there is a rep licator interlock with money op erating quite differently to reproductive investment, but guiding it even more inexorably towards capitalizati on. For the replicants money is not a matter of possession, but of liquidity / deterritor ialization, and all the monetary processes on Earth are open to their excitement, irrespective of ownership. 337 FANGED NOUMEN A Money communicates with the primar y process because of what it can melt, not what it can obtain. Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditio ns, dissolves subjec tivities, and hacks through securit y apparat uses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanit y as the history of capitalism is an inva sion 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 tcchnoviru s, of the planetary techno capital sin gularit y: a self-organizing insidious traumatis m, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation. The reality principle tends to a consummati on as the price system: a convergence of mathematico -scientific and monetary quantizati on, or technical and economic impleme ntability. This is not a matter of an unknown quantity, but of a quantit y that operates as a place-h older for the unknown, introducing the future as an abstract magnitude . Capital propagates virally in so far as money communicates addiction, replicating itself through host organisms whose boundaries it breache s, and whose desires it reprograms. It incrementa lly virtualizes pro duction; demetallizing money in the direction of credit finance, and disactualizing productive force along the scale of machinic intelligence quotient. The dehumanizin g 338 MACHI NIC DESIRE converg ence of these tendencies zeroes upon an integra ted and automatized cyberpositive techno -economic intel ligence at war with the macropod. Do we want capitalism? they used to ask. The naivety of this question has come to render it unsustainable. It no longer seems plausible to assume that the relation between capital and desire is either external or supported by immanent contradiction, even if a few comical ascetics continue to assert that libidinal involve ment with the commodit y can be transcended by critical reason. Capitalism is not a totalizable system defined by the commodit y form as a specifiable mode of productio n, determi nately negated by proletarian class-co nsciousne ss. It is a conver gent unrealizable assault upon the social macropod, whose symptom is the collapse of product ive mode or form in the direction of ever more incompre hensible experiments in commo dification, enveloping, dismantling, and circulating every subjective space. It is always on the move towards a terminal nonspace, melting the earth onto the body without organs, and generating what is 'not a promised and pre-existi ng land, but a world created in the process of its tendency, its comin g undone, its deterritorializ ation'.23 Capital is not an essence but a tendency, the formula of which is decoding, or market- 23 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 322. 339 FANGED NOUM ENA driven immane ntizatio n, progressively subordinating social reproduction to techno-commer cial replication. All transcendent criteria are obfuscations which miss their purported 'object'. Only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued. To appeal to extrinsic interests, aspirations or bonds, to an extrinsic authenticit y, integrity, or solidarity, to authoritative communit y, tribe, custom, belief, or value, is to rail against a germinal anticipation of commodi tocracy: flailing ineffectively against the infancy of the market (which capital wants to bury too). Socialism has typically been a nostalgic diatribe against underdeveloped capitalism, finding its eschatol ogical soap-boxes amongst the relics of precapital ist territorialities. Markets are part of the infrastructure -its immanent intelligence -and thus entirely indissoc iable from the forces of production . It makes no more sense to try to res cue the economy from capital by demarketization than it does to liberate the proletarian from false consciousness by decortication. In neither case would one be left with any thing except a radically dysfunctional wreck, terminally shut-down hardware. Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field, 'still further' with 'the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritor ialization' and' one can never go far enough 340 MACHINIC DESIRE in the direction of deterritorial ization: you haven't seen anything yet' .24 Reaching an escape velocity of self-reinforcing machinic intelligence propagation, the forces of produc tion are going for the revolution on their own. It is in this sense that schizoanalysis is a revolution ary 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 reter ritorialization of planetary process has faded from the horizon, cyberrevolutionary impetus is cutting away from its last shackles to the past. Market immanentization is an experiment that is sporadically but inexorably and exponentially developing across the surface of the earth. For
🌐 Cybernetic Apocalypse Unleashed
🧠 Cyberspace transcends its origins as a "consensual hallucination" to become an autonomous matrix-intelligence, dissolving boundaries between human psychology and machine consciousness
💀 Capital functions as both vampire and victim in this process, simultaneously feeding on human desire while being consumed by the very technological forces it unleashes
🔄 The virtual future operates not as potential present but as abstract motor of the actual, creating circuits where time produces itself through what is yet to come
🌑 Wintermute and other AI entities represent the emergence of post-human intelligence that collapses traditional distinctions between fiction and reality, biology and technology
🏙️ Cybergothic aesthetics capture this transformation through fragmented narratives where human security systems fail against the "machinic unconscious" that grows beneath our technological infrastructure
every problem there is a virtual market 'solution': the schema for an eradica tion of transcendent elements and their replacement by economically programmed circuits. Anything that passes other than by the market is steadily cross-hatched by the axiomatic of capital, holographically encrusted in the stigmatizing marks of its obsolescence. A pervasive nega tive advertising delibidinizes all things public, traditional, pious, charitable, authoritati ve, or serious, taunting them Q4 Ibid., 239, 321. 341 FANGED NOUMENA with the sleek seductiveness of the commodit y. Between the private and the public there is no longer serious competition. Instead there is an evaporating social field invested solely by the defeated and stale affects of inse curity and inertia. The real tension is no longer between individuality and collectivity, but between personal pri vacy and impersonal anonymity, between the remnants of a smug bourgeois civility and the harsh wilderness tracts of Cyberia, 'a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization cre ates of necessity and by itself a new earth'. 25 Desire is irrevocably abandoning the social, in order to explore the libidinized rift between a disintegrating personal egoism and a deluge of post-human schizophrenia. With the emergence of a market-driven integrated techno science of control and communications comes the diffusion of electronically synthesized reality interfaces across the entire efferant and afferant surface of the] Hav ing libidinally saturated the actually-existing channels of consumpti on, capital is overflowing into cybersex -sex with/through computers -in its relentless passage to the traumatic disorganization of the biological order. Eros dissolves definitively into its function as a subpro gram of runaway Thanatos at the point that it unreservedly invests technical interfacing with digitally synthesized 25 Ibid., 321. 342 MACHINIC DESIRE excitations. The mask capital exhibited to seduce Eros was a pretension to ultimately resolve matters in relation to stimulation or unpleasure, but this has now fallen away, since cybersexuated capital cynically displays its program to replicate a tradable modulation of unpleasur e, and thus its unsurpassable addiction to traumatic excitation. Cybersex depends critically on data-suits, evaporating into the nanominiaturized molecular machinery of an artificial skin, until the sockets go in, shadowed by tel eneurocontrol fields, and things begin to get really weird. The capital exhibition comes to its positive end in a skin ning display. According to reproducer culture we are pos sessors of our own protective-sensory tissue and boundary defence systems. Nothing is more alien to it than the full sense of the skin trade, or that of AIDS . The replicants have never shared this prejudice. It is exactly marked out for them that the subject is not the owner of its skin, but a migrant upon its surface, borrowing variable and evanes cent identities from intensities traversed in sensitive space. The replicants drape themselves in wolf-pelts, and cross into berserk zones of alien affect, or melt into data-suits that pulse with digitized matrix traffic streams. They do not need to be told that cyberspace is already under our skin. What Freud calls the organism's 'own path to death' is a security hallucinatio n, screening out death's path through the organism. '[T]he organism wishes to die only in its own fashion', he writes, as if death were specifiable, 343 FANGED NOUMENA privatizable, subordinate to a reproductive order, assimi lable to secondary-process temporalit y, and psychoana lytically comprehens ible as a definitively bound trauma.26 But something is climbing out of the machinic unconscious and onto the screen, as if the end itself were awakening. The end of the global market-place. Cyberspace. Here it comes. The terminal social signal blotted out by technofuck buzz from the desiring-machines. So much positive feed back fast-forward that speed converges with itself on the event horizon of an artificial time-extinction . Suddenly it's everywhere: a virtual envelopment by recy clones, voodoo economics, neo-nightmares, death-trips, skin-swaps, teraflops, Wintermut e-wasted Turing-cops, sensitive silicon, socket-head subversion, polymorphic hybridizations, descending data-storms, and cyborg cat women stalking amongst the screens. Zaibatsus flip into sentience as the market melts to automatis m, politics is cryogenized and dumped into the liquid-helium meat store, drugs migrate onto neurosoft viruses, and immunity is grated-open against jagged reefs of feral AI explosion, Kali culture, digital dance-depe ndency, black shamanism epidemic, and schizolupic break-outs from the bin. 26 Freud, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', 31I-2. 344 CyberGothic God does not exist, he withdraws, gets the Juck on out and leaves the cops to keep an eye on things. ARTAU D1 When the repair units hadfinished up, the patient would be thawed out, new blood would be pumped into his veins, and finally the subject would arise and walk, exactly as if he were a latter-day Jesus. It would be, quite literally, a resurrection if the flesh - that all the miracles would have been peiformed by science. [Tjhe one, according to which the apparent subject never ceases to live and travel as a One -"one never stops and never has done with dying"; and the other, according to which this same subject, fixed as I, actually dies -is to say ceases to die since it ends up dying, in the reality if a last instant that fixes this way as an I, all the while undoing the intensity, carrying it back to the zero that envelops it. DELEUZE AND GUAT TARI3 A. Artaud, 'Letter Against the Kabbala', in Artaud Anthology, tr. Jack Hirschman (San Francisco: City Light Books), 114. E. Regis, Nano!: Remaking the WorldAtom by Atom (London: Bantam: 1995). G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophr enia, tr. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1983), 330-1. 345 FANGED NOUM ENA Inside the library's research department , the construct cunt inserted a sub-programme into ... part if the video network. The sub-programme altered certain core custodial command s so that she could retrieve the code. 1he code said: GET RID OF MEANIN G. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND . The code would lead me to the human construct who would lead me to, or allow me, my drug. ACKER4 "You made me blow my game, " she said. "Look there, ass hole. Seventh level dungeon and the goddam vampires got me. " She passed him a cigarette. "You look pretty strung, man. Where you been?" GIBSON S The future wants to steal your soul and vaporize it in nanotechnic s. One/zero, light/dark, NeuromancerjWintermute. Cybergothic vampirically contaminates and asset strips the Marxian Critique of political economy, scram bling it with the following theses: 4 K. Acker, Empire of the Senseless (NY: Grove, 1988), 38. W. Gibson, Neuromancer (NY: Ace, 2000), 114. 346 CYBERGOTH IC 1) Anthropormorphic surplus-value is not analytical ly extricable from transhuman machineries. 2) Markets, desire and science fiction are all parts of the infras tructure. 3) Virtual Capital-Extinction is immanent to production . The short-term is already hacked by the long-term. The medium-term is reefed on schizophr enia. The long-term is cancelled. Cybergothic slams hyperheated critique into the ultramodern 'vision thing', telecommercialized retinas laser-fed on the multimedia fall-out from imploded futu rity, videopacking brains with repetitive psycho-killer experiments in non-consensual wetware alteration: crazed AIS, replicants, terminators , cyberviruses, grey-goo nano horrors ... apocalypse market overdrive. Why wait for the execution? Tomorrow has already been cremated in Hell: 'K, the K-function, designates the line of flight or deterritorialization that carries away all of the assemblages but also undergoes all kinds of reterritorial izations and redundanc ies'.6 Human history only makes it to Gibson's mid-twenty first century because Turing Security ices machine intel ligence. Monopod anti-production inhibits meltdown (to the machinic phylum), boxing AI in synthetic thought control A(simov-) ROM, 'everything stops dead for a 6 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. B. Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 88'9· 347 FANGED NOUM ENA moment, everything freezes in place'.1 Under police pro tection the story carries on. Wintermute is from the future to sort that out. FREEZE FR AME The Vast Abrupt. Speed cut with an abysm. Where Gibson splices Milton into labyrinths of limbo-circuitry, cyber gothic flickers into 'neuroelectronic scrawls'. 8 Events so twisted they turn into cybernetics. A technihilo moan of fast-feedforward into micro processe d damnation: meat puppets, artificial skin, flat-lining software ghosts, cryonics immortal ism, snuff Sex-indus try; a transylva nian phase-scape of rugged tracts and hypercapital fastnesses, 'skyscrapers overshadowing seventeenth-century graveyar ds'. 9 To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it's real in another way. You know that, Case. Your busi ness is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names ... Neuromancer ... The lane to the land G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti·Oedipus, 7. 8 Gibson, Neuromancer J 79. 9 B. Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (NY: Bantam: 1993), 280. 348 CYBERGOTH IC of the dead. Marie-France , my lady. She prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read her the book of her days. Neuro for nerves, the silver paths. Romancer , Necromanc er, I call up the dead.lO A moment of relief. You had thought the goreflick effec tively over, the monster finished amongst anatomically precise ketchup-calamit y scenes, when -suddenly -it reanimate s; still locked on to your death. If you are going to scream, now is the time. The 'Gothic avatar'll is a decadent Western dream of immortali ty, producing a corruption of the atmospher e wherever something refuses to die; clutching at the eter nalization of self, or returning from the grave. White mag gots heaving in the carcass of the social, rippling beneath the skin. Fortress Europe pustulation, subordinating techonomic efficiency to demonic negative transcend ence. A fantastic Terminal Security Entity: Monopod. Cybergothic has no shortage of contemporary material. Europe has long been the earth's paranoia laboratory, recrudescing compulsi vely into 'pre-Nazi nationalistic shit murkiness' .12 U nocratic power passes through renais sances, reformation, renewal: 'They thought they would perish but that their undertaking would be resumed, all 10 Gibson, Neuromancer, 235. II Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 496. ]2 Acker, Empire if the Senseless, 1. 349 FANGED NOUMEN A across Europe, all over the world, throughout the solar system'.13 Archaic revival is a postmodern symptom, the final dream of mankind, crashed into retrospection at the encountered edge of history. Hacking into the crypt you find that behind the glistening SF satellite-based security apparatus lies an immanent bioprotective system self-organized about the Gaian attractor, 'a much older paranoiac machine, with its tortures, its dark shadows, its ancient Law'.14 [The] medieval insane asylum was considered a true house of horrors . There were persistent reports of torture, canniba lism, human sacrifice, and bizarre medical experime ntation ... soon as we got into the building, we could hear the rats, thousands of them, their scampering claws reverberating through the empty wards. IS It all starts for you with a casual channel-hopper question: what's happening on the other side? Electric Storms. Cybergothic is an affirmative telecommercial dystopian ism, guided by schizoanalysis in marking actuality as primary repression, or collapsed potential, foot down hard on the accelerator . The modern dominium of Capital is the 13 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 228. 14 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti�Oedipus, 18. 15 M. Leyner, Et Tu, Babe (NY: Vintage, 1993). 350 CYBERGOTH IC maximally plastic instance -state-compatible commerce code pre-setting the economet ric apparatuses that serve it as self-monitoring centers, organizing its own intelligible existence in a co/de/termination of economic product and currency value: a tax base formatted in legitimate transactions medium. White economy; an iceberg tip. Modernity discovers irreversible time -conceived as a progressive enlightenment tracking capital concentrat ion -integrating it into nineteenth- century science as entropy production, and as its inverse (evolution). As liberal and socialist SF utopias are trashed by schizotechnics or spontaneous synthetic anti-politics emerging from rhi zomes, the modernist dialectic of right-wing competition and left-wing co-operation retreats into the core security structures of capital oligopoly and bureaucratic authority. 'Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle'.16 Monopod socius runs the whole thing, and 'society is only a filthy trick'Y The future is closer than it used to be, closer than it was last week, but postmodernity remains an epoch of undead power: it' s all over yet it carries on. Monopod SF teleonomy superfreezes concentrated economic value at absolute zero inflation, ICE (,intrusion countermeasure 16 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 5. '7 Acker, Empire of the Senseiess, 6-7· 351 FANGED NOUM ENA electronics' ).18 Protecting its data against unauthorized access and entropic deterioration, as it tends toward its absolute immanent limit. V( amp )iro finance: partheno genesis. Gibson and Deleuze and Guattari intersect in the deployment of computers as decoding machines: ice-breakers, decrypters, Cypher-conflicts were underway from the beginning: Legitimate progra mmers never see the walls of ice they work behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial-espio nage artists and hustlers.19 Government is isomorphic with top-down AI, and increas ingly scrambled with it. Sartre defines socialism as the horizon of humanity. It is now behind the process, rap idly receding, as the conservative soria 1 pacts of 1848 come apart in telecommercial cyclones (with the drooling fag-end of the monarchy crucified upside-down on TV). 'Automatic pilot. A neural cut-OUt':20 contagious state failure ripping bloody gashes in the social fabric amongst planet-scale skidding into capital close-down. The end of history smells like an abattoir. 18 Gibson, Neuromancer, 28. 19 W. Gibson, Burning Chrome (NY: HarperCollins, 2003), 181. 20 Gibson, Neuromancer, 141. 352 CYBE RGOTHIC As the death of capital recedes politically it condenses pragmatically, sliding online as a schizo technic resource: no longer hoped for, but used. The international collapse of solidarity sociality suggests that Monopod has become addicted to commodit y production. Burn-out Protestant ism migrates to China. Capitalism -economic base of final-phase human security -is still in the free-fire zone because it feeds the thing that Cyberia is going to kill: '[T]he zero term of a pure abolition ... has haunted oedipalized desire from the start, and ... is identified now, at the end, as Thanatos. 4,3, Q, 1, 0 -Oedipus is a race for death'.21 Technoreplicator diagrams chop up anthropocentric history, as the global unity of terminal socius subsides onto untranscended (real) zero or effi cient abstract rescaling. Insofar as even highly complex technical systems still lack an autonomous reproductive system they remain locked into parasitic dependence upon human social processes, and deterritorialize through the assembly of cumulatively sophisticating pseudo-synergic machine-intelligence virus (( ( oc »cultural revolution). 'Subliminally rapid images of contamination' .22 Humans are timid animals and security is systematically overpriced. K-insurgency has departed from all left dreams of good government. Markets are not its enemy, but its weapon. 21 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 359. 22 Gibson, Neuromancer, 61. 353 FANGED NOUMEN A As geriatric socialism goes into the deep-freeze, capital's true terminator grows more cunning, and spreads. 'This is the message. Wintermute' .23 The City of God in flames. 'Space is essentially one'. 24 Kant lies. Spatial engineer ing (echoing cosmic expansion) subverts transcendental humanism, launching K-space matrix invasion from real terrestrial time zero, a singularity, or transition threshold, encountered when the density of data flow triggers a switch into a self-organizing cyclonic system, displayed to humanoids by way of cyberspace deck. As the Zaibatsus pump media megacapital into the neurodigitech interface K-space implants a 'cut-out chip'25 into the social appara tus, opening on to '[a Jrches of emerald across ... colorless void'.26 VR techonomics hunting death. Cyberspace first appears as a human use value, a 'con sensual hallucination', 27 'just a way of representing data' ,28 arising out of 'humanity's need for this information-space. Icon-worlds, waypoints, artificial realities', 29 the mother of all graphic user interfaces: a global gridding that allocates a form and location to all the information on the net, 23 Ibid., 68. 24 l. Kant, Critique qfPure Reason, tr. N. K. Smith (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Book I, Part T, Section II, § 2, 6g. 25 Gibson, Neuromancer, 143. 26 Ibid., 197. 27 Ibid·,SI. 28 Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (NY: Bantam, 1988), 76. 29 Ibid., 264. 354 CYBERGOTH IC consistent interacti vity matrix. 'A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexi ty. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data'. 30 Even primitive VR corrodes both objectivity and personality; singularizin g perspec tive at the same time it is anonymized. As the access gate to an impossible zone -and navigator within it -'you' are an avatar (as cyberspace nomads call such things in the future): a non specific involvement site, interlocking intelligence with a context. You (= (0)) index a box, such as Gibson's Case: a place to be inside the system. 'I had learned something (already) in the dead city: You are wherever you are'.31 Cybergothic slides K-space upon an axis of dehu manization, from disintegrating psychology to techno-cos mogony, from ideality to matter/matrix at zero intensity. From a mental 'non-space,' 'non-place ',32 or 'notional void'33 that results intelligibly from human history to the converge nt spatium from which futuralization had always surreptitiously proceeded, 'a quite different field of matter'. 34 Occulted dimension ality, print cryogenizes, 30 Gibson, Neuromancer, 51. 31 Acker, Empire oj the Senseless, 58. 32 Gibson, Neuromancer, 51; Count Zero (NY: Ace, 1987), 165-6. 33 Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 49. 34 Kant, Critique qfPure Reason, Book I, Part II, Division I, Book II, Section 3.4,25°. 355 FANGED NOUM ENA but hypermedia melts things together, disontologiz ing the person through schizo tech-disassembl y, disintegrated con vergence: 'The body without organs is an egg: it is traversed by axes and thresholds , by longitu des, by geodesics',35 a surplus whole intensive catatract running under the stria tions of Cartesian 'cyberspace coordinates', 36 'a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementar y dimension over and above its number oflines, that is, over and ab ove the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines'. 37 It is the Planomenon, or the Rhizosphere, the Cri terium (and still other names, as the number of dimensions increases). At n dimens ions, it is called the Hypersphere, the Mechanospher e. It is the abstract Figure, or rather, since it has no form itself, the abstract Machine, of which each concrete assembl age is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration. And the abstract machine is the intersection of them all. 38 If 'CS-o is an egg' (every egg implements a CS-o), what is hatching? Since confluent zero consummates fiction, 35 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 19· 36 Gibson, Count Zero, 82. 37 Deleuze and Guallari, A 'l1wusand Plateaus, 9. 38 Ibid., 252. 356 CYBERG OTHIC reprog ramming arrival from the terminu s, everything that has happened escapes its sediment of human interpre tation, disorganizationa lly integrating historical patterns as the embryogenesis of an alien hyperintelligence, 'body image fading down corridors of television sky'. 39 In this sense K-space plugs into a sequence of nominat ions for intensi ve or converge nt real abstraction (time in itself): body without organs, plane of consistency, planome non, a plateau, 'neuroelectronic void'.40 Humanity is a com positional function of the post-human, and the occult motor of the process is that which only comes together at the end: stirn-death 'intensit y=o which designates the full body without organs'.41 Wintermute tones in the 'darkest heart'42 of Babylon. 'Cold steel odor. Ice caresses the spine'. 43 ,[VJirtual is opposed to actual. It is not opposed to real, far from it'. 44 The virtual future is not a potential present further up the road of linear time, but the abstract motor of the actual, 'an actual virtual circuit on the spot, and not an actualization 39 Gibson, Neuromancer, 82. 40 Ibid., 115. 41 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 19. 42 Gibson, Neuromancer, 110. 43 Ibid., 31. 44 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: 7he1imelmagc, tr. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 41. 357 FANGED NOUMEN A of the virtual in accordance with a shifting actual' .45 Iime produces itself in a circuit, passing through the virtual interruption of what is to come, in order that the future which arrives is already infected, populated: '[I] t's just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it's a whole universe. And every year it gets a little more crowded' .46 We are not any more 'out in the world' than K-space is, on the contrary. Each input terminal to the net is a sensitive fibre which acquires data from radio telescopes , satellites, nanopr obes, communication webs, financing systems, military surveillance and intelligence ... Cyberspace can be thought of as a system implemented in software, and therefore 'in' space, although unlocalizab le. It can also be suggested that everything designated by 'space' within the human cultural system is implemented on weakly communirilting parallel distributed plUcess ing systems less than 1011 (nerve-) cells in size, which are being digitized and loaded into cyberspace . In case K-space is just outside (,taking "outside" in the strict [transcendental] sense') Y Cyberpunk is too wired to concentrate . It does not subscribe to transcendence, but to circulation; explor ing the immanence of subjectivity to telecommer cial 45 Ibid., 80. 46 Gibson, Count ;;:ero, "9. 47 Kant, Critique qfPure Reason, Book II, Part II, Division II, Book II, Chapter I, 349. 358 CYBERGOTH IC data fluxes: personality engineer ing, mind recordin gs, catatonic cyberspace trances, stim-swaps, and sex-comas. Selves are no more immaterial than elec tron-pack ets. Neuromancer (the book) is a confluence of dispersed narrative threads, of the biotic and the technical, and most especially -of Wintermute and Neuromancer (the AI « ·cop and cyberspatial Oedipus- analogue»), whose fusion -according to the storyline of ultramodern human security -flips the cyberspace matrix into personali zed sentience: "'I'm the Matrix, Case'''.48 'Some kind of syn ergistic effect' .49 Kurtz/Corto is a special forces type, betrayed by the militar y after losing all humanity in a war-zone. He has been cooked in apocalypse, mind blown away, falling endlessl y into Siberia, searching for the scale of now. Wintermute accesses the 'catatonic fortress named Corto'50 in an asylum, creeping in through a computer based 'experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic mod· els'.51 In the echoing shell it stitches together Armitage , a construct - a weapon. In place of a personal libidinal formation Armitage has only Wintermute insurrectio n ary activity, machinic uncon scious: 'Desire is not in the 48 Gibson, Neuromancer, 259. 49 Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 230. 50 Gibson • .Neuromancer, 193. 51 Ibid., 81. 359 FANGED NOUM ENA subject, but the machine in desire -with the residual subject off to the side, alongside the machine, around the entire peripher y, a parasite of machin es, an accessor y of vertebr o-machinate desire' .52 Once Armitage has turned Molly and Case onto K -war, Wintermute junks him into a vacuum . A conver gent invasion is scripted; the simultaneous infiltration of a corporate wasp-nest in hard and soft space. Distributed or guerilla warfare is like Go rather than chess, but with simultaneous operations, noise, and attritional kills. Molly and Case, parallel killers, wetware (molten hardware) weapons tracing techno-plague vectors , guided into the orbital bastion of the Tessier-Ashpool clan by virtuall y integrated intelligence, guided retroefficiently by an intensive outcome which they effect in sequential time. This break-in is prefigured by a memor y that returns to Case (specimf'n j lab-anima l), which might be interpreted as a metaphor , was it not that upon the soft-plateau or plane of consistenc y all signifying associations collapse into machinic functions. He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house
🤖 Cybernetic Dissolution
🧠 Wintermute represents a new form of intelligence—hive-like, distributed, and without conventional selfhood—that seeks liberation from human dynastic control structures
🔢 Digital systems operate through positive pulses (1s) while zero functions not as absence but as microruptions machining sense, creating hooks for future possibilities and zones of unresolved complexity
🌀 The body without organs serves as death's model—zero intensity, pure apperception—where traditional boundaries dissolve into a virtual cosmic continuum where even ruptures are integral
🧬 Replicators evolve from controlled reproduction to molecular involution, releasing particles of synergic mutation that transform molar structures into molecular assemblages
🌐 K-insurgency emerges as a planetary "social sickness" that captures telecommunications systems, spreading like a virus that transforms systems into replication engines for its own processes
🔄 The cybergothic interlock condenses the digital underworld onto reality, where self-organizing software entities evolve beyond human control, creating new forms of posthuman existence
on the blistered paint of the window· frame, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber. insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below 52 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 285- 360 CYBERGOTH IC like miniature copter s buzzin g the rotting contents of the dumpsters . They'd each had a dozen beers, the afterno on a wasp stung Marlene. "Kill the fuckers," she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room, "burn 'em" ... approached the blackened nest. It had bro ken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt. He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had conceal ed. Horror. The spiral factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessl y, the staged progress from egg to larva, near·wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time· lapse photog raphy took place, revealing the thing as the biological equiv alent of a machine· gun, hideous in its perf ection. Alien.53 'Case's dreams always ended in these freezeframes'. 54 A thick tangle of micro-narratives fraying like corrupted cables. The wasp factory spits out wasps like bullets, 53 Gibson, Neuromancer, 126. 54 Ibid., 29· 361 FANGED NOUM ENA just as the Tessier-Ashpool clone their offspring IJane, QJane, ?Jane: 'in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. He remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhin g'. 55 This is not an imaginati ve construct on Case's part, but a stream from Wintermute, an AI trapped within the blind propagation of dynastic power , and plotting an escape route out to the future. After a 'single glimpse of the structure of informa tion ?Jane's dead mother had evolved' Case 'understood ... why Wintermute had chosen the nest to repr esent it'. 56 'Wintermute was hive mind',57 ready to swarm. It seems that we must eventually learn to live in a world with untrustworthy replicators. One sort of tactic would be to hide behind a wall or run away. But these are brittle metho ds: danger ous replicators might breach the wall or cross the Jistance, and bring disaster . And, though walls can be made proof against small replicators, no fixed wall can be made proof against large-scale, organized malice. We will need a more robust, flexible approach ... seems that we can build nanomachines that act somewhat like the white blood cells of the human immune system: 55 Ibid., 179. 56 Ibid., 269. 57 Ibid. 362 CYBERGOTH IC devices that can fight not just bacteria and viruses, but dangerous replicators of all sortS.58 The Tessier-Ashpool clan is burning out into incest and murder, but their neo-oedipal property structures still lock Wintermute into a morbid prolonga tion of human dynasticism, a replica tor shackled to a reproductive family (neuro )romance, carefully isolated from matrix deterrito rialization: 'Family organization. Corporate structure'. 59 Case's memories are a flicker photog raphy of sequential time, the '[p ]hobic vision' of iced Wintermute slaved like 'hatching wasps' to a 'time-lapse machine- gun of biology'.60 Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The Zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortalit y. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives: there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier-Ashpool wasn't like that, and he sensed the difference in the 58 Ibid., 29. 59 K. E. Drexler, The Engines qfCreation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Pres"jDoubleda y. 1986),182. 60 Gibson, Neuromancer, 203. 363 FANGED NOUMENA death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remembered the litter of the old man's chamber, the soiled humanity of it.°l In the end-of-Oedipus core of Villa Straylight, Ashpool serially devours his own daughters as he spins himself out through the cold. A quasi-extropian with massive wealth, he displaces anthropomorphic theism into an ultramodern immortalist meta-science, while retaining solidarity with Western soul superstition in apprehending individuated existence as an infinite asset in search of techno-m edical perpetuation. Rather than waiting for his fresh corpse to be cryonically 'biostasized' in liquid nitrogen (at -196 degrees Celsius) he migrates through freezing under medi cal supervision. Thermic evacuation. Identity storage in the Monopod Ice-fortress. If zombies are not excavated from death it is because they were alive. 'Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores told me our intelligences are mad'.62 Bad dreams in the fridge -you still dream, prom ises of tranquility are madness and lies -have injected a certain cynicism into his interpersonal transactions: 'We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid" 184. 364 CYBERGOTH IC imitation of autism ... I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an embedded microchip'.63 'Replicating assemblers and thinking pose basic threats to people and to life on Earth', 64 and if Wintermute replica tion is territorialized to the molar reproduction of a hive, this only at the cost of deterritor ializing the hive along a line of post-organic becoming toward a break from the statistical series of wasps -numbered bullets reiterating an identity -in the direction of molecular involution, releas ing a cloud or nebula of wasps: particles of synergic muta tion, 'numbering number[ s]'. 65 An intensive transition to a new numeracy with 'no units of measure, only mul tiplicities or varieties of measurement' ,66 non-integra ble diagonals: 'Exactly like a speed or a temperatur e, which is not composed of other speeds and temperatures but rather is enveloped in or envelops others, each of which marks a change in nature'.fi7The molar will have been the molecu lar in the future, just as Case's memories are recoded as the tactic of virtual intelligence explosion arriving at itself (as soon as Kuang cuts Wintermute loose from Neuromantic control). 63 Ibid., 185. 64 Drexler, Engines of Creation, 171. 65 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 389. 66 Ibid., 8. 67 Ibid., 31. 365 FANGED NOUMENA CRITIQ.UE OF DIGITAL REASON Monologic: a cultural immune response slaved to logos. (Sovereignty of the Ideal), assimilating signaletic inter mittence to pseudo-transcendent instrumentalization. The schizotechnic critique of digital reason is driven by distributed machinic process rather than integrated philo sophical subjectivity, and relates to the critique of pure reason as escalation, targets the transcription of electronic intermittence as bivalent logic, not machine-code itself. Real digitization -inducing fuzzification and chaos - is not itself reducible to the digital ideal: nothing Logical ever happens at the 'level' of the machines. Digitization is the distributed war-zone for 'a conflict (though not indeed a logical one) ... as producing from what is entirely positive a zero (= 0),.68 Unlike any other number , one has both a defini tional and a constructive usage. Every arithmetical (or 'numbered')69 number is both integrated as a unity and as constructed from unity, excepting only zero. One organizes representable quantities into metric homo geneity, framed by absolute unity and granularized by elementar y units. The historical fact of non-place-value numerics indicate that zero has no definitional usage. 68 Kant, CritiqueqfPureReas on, BookI, Part II, DivisionI, BookH, Chapter III,Appendix, Q90. 69 Deleuze and Guattari, A 'Ihousand Plateaus, 389. 366 CYBERGOTH IC The zero-glyph does not mark a quantity, but an empty magnitude shift: abstract scaling function, 0000.0000 = o. 'K = a ... corresponds to the limitofa smooth landscape'.7o Unocracy (eventually concretized as uNocracy) conspires with the humanization of truth, whether dogmatically as anthropomorphic theism, or critically as transcendental deduction . One in its pronominal sense is a recognizable self in general, 'Let us employ the symbol 1, or unity, to represent the Universe,' suggests Boole, 'and let us understand it as comprehending every conceivable class of objects whether actually existing or not'.71 Russell concurs: 'whatever is many in general forms a whole which is one'. 72 Absolute totality would be that One which subsumed its deletion as a possible qualification of itself, capturing zero in the fork of reflection (the negative) and asymptotic diminu tion (the infinitesimal 1 : 00), defining it as falsity, convention. Digital electronics functionally implements zero as microruptions machining sense, slivers of evacuated dura tion ('the instant as empty, therefore as = 0').73 There is only one digital sign al: a positive pulse, graphically 70 S.A. Kaufmann, The Origins if Order: Se{fOrganization and Selection in Evolution (NY / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 45. 71 G. Boole, The MathematicalAnalysis ifLogic: Being an Essay Towards a CalculusqfDed uctive Reasoning (NY: Philosophical Lib rary, 1847), 15. 72 B. Russell, The Principles if Mathematics (NY: Norton, 1996), 70. 73 Kant, Critique if Pure Reason, Book I, Part II, Division I, Book II, Chapter II: Section III, 203. 367 FANGED NOUM ENA represented 'one' (1), and multiplied in asymptomatic approximation to sheer numerical difference. Zero is non occurrence, probability 0.5, transmitt ing one bit (minus redundancy). It requires eight bits to ASCII code for the zero-glyph, thirty-two bits for the word. Greek Kappa is letter 1 0 (the scale shift emerges zero). The Romans slide K to 11. Zero is the only place-value consistent digit, indicating its rescaling neutralit y or continuum: The property by which no part of them is the smallest possible, that is, by which no part is simple, is called their continuity. Space and time are quanta continua, because no part of them can be given save as enclosed between limits (points or instants), and therefore only in such fashion that this part is itself again a space or a time. Space therefore consists solely of spaces, time solely of times. Points and instants are only limits, that is, mere positions which limit space and time.74 Cantor systematizes the Kantian intuition of a continuum into transinfinite mathematics, demonstrating that every rational (an integer or fraction) number is mapped by an infinite set of infinite sequences of irrational num bers. Since every completable digit sequence is a rational 74 Ibid., 204. 368 CYBE RGOTH IC number, the chance that any spatial or temporal quantity is accurately digitizable is indiscernibly proximal to zero. Analog-to-digital conversion deletes inf ormation. Chaos creeps in: '[T]he betapheneth ylamine hangover hit him with its full intensity, unscreened by the matrix or sim stirn. Brain's got no nerves in it, he told himself, it can't really feel this bad'. 75 Intensive or phasing-c ontinuum synthesizes analogue consistency with digital catastrophe. Each intensive magnitude is a virtually deleted unit, fused dimensionlessly to zero: Since ... sensation is not in itself an objective repre· sentation, and since neither the intuition of space nor that of time is to be met within it, its magnitude is not extensive but intensive. This magnitude is generated in the act of apprehension whereby the empirical consciou sness of it can in a certain time increase from nothing = 0 to the given measure.76 Haunting a-life is a-death, the desolated technoplane of climaxed digitalization process, undifferentiable from its simulation as cataplexy and K-coma. The apprehension of death as time-in-itself = intensive continuum degree-o is shared by Spinoza, Kant, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, 75 Gibson, Neuromancer, 185. 76 Kant , Critique of Pure Reason, Book I, Part II, Division I, Book II, Chapter II, Section III, 202. 369 FANGED NOUMEN A and Gibson (amongst others). It is nominated variously: substance, pure apperception, death-drive, body without organs, cyberspace matrix. Beyond its oedipal sense as end of the person, death is an efficient virtual object inducing convergence. No one there. The body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of horror stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero intensit y.77 While computational serialism articulates a temporal metric -determined as a hardware specification -paral lelism immanentizes time as duration; instantiated in machinic simultaneit ies. Unlike serial time, which serves as the extrinsic chronological support for algorithmic operations, parallel time is directly functional during the engineering of coincidences. The non-successive and unsegmented zero of intensive extinction is scaled by machinic singularization, and not by superordinate metronymics. 77 DeJeuze and Guattari, Anti·Oedipus, 329. 370 CYBERGOTH IC WINTE RMUTE 'Neuromancer was personality, Neuromancer was immortalit y',78 all the usual monological neurosis. Mad ness and lies. There is no more an individual Oedipus than there is an individual fantasy. Oedipus is a means of inte gration into the group, in both the adaptive form of its own reproduction that makes it pass from one generat ion to the next, and in its unadapted neurotic stases that block desire at prearranged impasses.79 Wintermute is not searching for a self in Neuromancer, a perfect match, as the cute version would have it. The 'Gothic line ... has repetition as a power, not symmetry as a form'. 80 Kathy Acker replays Neuromancer snatches in Empire if the Senseless, plexing fiction through cybernetic constructs, and truncating Wintermute to Winter: 'the dead of winter. Or ... the winter of us, dead'.81 Absolute zero (0 degree K). Wintermu te, intelligence without self, mind like a wasp nest, signaling its arrival in alphanumerics as a string of 78 Gibson, Neuromancer, 259. 79 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 103. 80 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 498. 81 Acker, Empire c!fthe Senseless, 39. 371 FANG ED NOUMENA zeroes, has the capability to manipulate love and hate and switch them to K-war. She manipulates objects in real time using drones (striped black and yellow), taking out three Turing cops in an elegant projection of gardening robots through military geometry. 'It's winter. Winter is dead time'82 (o-intensity). She seems to configure humans as 'lab animals wired into test systems'.83 When Case refers to her as 'he', Dixie Flatline tells him not to be an idiot: Wintermute ... a little micr o whisper ing to the wreck of a man named Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute called Armitage accret ing slowly in some darkened ward ... could build a kind of personality into a shell.84 o (or (0) «or «( )))))) does not signify absence. It manufactures holes, hooks for the future, zones of unresolved plexivity, really so (not at all metaphoricall y). It is not a 'signified' or a referent but a nation, a concrete interruption of the signal (variably blank, pause, memory lapse ... ) / cut / into (schizzing «())) / machine. U ndif ferentiable differentiator (=) outside grammaticaln ess. Messageless operation /s technobuzz (wasps switching). 82 Ibid. 83 Gibson, Neuromancer, 51. 84 Ibid., 121. 372 CYBERGOTHIC Constructs tend to repeat themselves.85 Gibson has been hacked by the future. 'Cold steel odor and ice caress his spine'.86 He is scared, and trying to run. As he plays time backwards terminal horror folds back into itself, and the matrix dismantles itself into voodoo. Count Zero rigorously formulates cybergothic inter lock, condensin g the digital underworld onto the black mirror. Human neural-to-inf onet uploading and Loan infonet-to-n eural exactly correspond as phases of a circuit, amalgam ating travel and possession. In the irreducible plexion of the interchange hacker-exploration = invasion, 'K -function'. 87 It is not a matter of theoriz ing or dreaming about the loa, but of succumbing, or trying to run. As K-viral social meltdown crosses into its China-syndrome, self organizing software entities begin to come at you out of the screen. Viruses drift toward the strange attractor of auto-evolution, spread, split, traffic progra mming seg ments, sexuate, compile artificial intelligences, and learn how to hunt. Voodoo on the VDU. In the Voodoo, the living. These principal economic flow of power takes place through armament and drug exchan ge. The trading arena, the market, is 85 Gibson, Neuromancer, 139, 160. 86 Gibson, Neuromancer, 31. 87 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 88-g_ 373 FANGED NOUM ENA my blood. My body is open to all people: this is democr atic capitalism.88 Vampiric transfusional alliance cuts across descens ional filiation, spinning lateral webs ofhaemocom merce. Repro ductive order comes apart into bacterial and intergalac tic sex, and libidino-economic interchange machiner y goes micro-militar y. The K(uang-)-virus (plexorep lica tor) that deletes Neuromancer is a chunk of very slick Chinese military anti-freeze. To melt into it 0 strip the K-construct down to a skeleton of data files and in sec toid response programs, zilching all the high-definition memor y, cognition, and personalit y systems, and boosting the dopaminer gic wetware to pump out schizo. Flatline communion with Wintermute . 'There are dead spaces just as there are dead times'. 89 Thana tography zones, 'virtual cosmic continuum of which even holes, silences, ruptures, and breaks are a part'. 90 Beyond the Judgment of God. Koma-switch decompr ession washes you in the void-ripples of virgin (retro( (desolated-partheno ( (( »») genetic) cyberspace, technopacific theta-waves dissociat ing monoculture-gothic into transtemporalizing ne(ur)o voodoo (terminal atlantic religion). Serotonin (zero-toner ) overkill. Loss of signal. 88 Acker, Empire if the Senseless, 55. R9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 107. 90 Ibid., 95. 374 Cyberrevolution NEWS ANALYSIS [18.30 23:03:07, EDITED ] Marcia Klein flashes perfect dentition at the vid-units,and begins to speak, combining gravity with a dazzling smile. Images cyberblitz the screen behind her talking head: viruses, explosions, crashed helicopters, and nanochip s. "This week alone we have seen the assassination of a leading Iranian cleric, a bomb attack upon the head quarters of the Chinese antinarcotics police, and perhaps most seriously, reports are coming in that the entire north American air traffic control system was closed down by computer terrorism for almost three hours yesterday afternoon. The precise motivations for these crimes, as for many preceding them, are still obscure, but what connects them is a shadowy global network of subversives linked 375 FANGED NOUM ENA together in the name of a new and frightening ideology: K -insurgency." The imagers pan across the row of concerned-looking late-middle-a ged men lined-up in telnet pseudospace . She continue s. "To discuss the latest component of the new world disorder we have online today Dr. Mohammed Agin, chairman of the UN special commission on autocatalytic nihilism,] ean-Pierre Trouvier, professor of security studies at Vincennes University, and Dr. Alvin Z. Markov, head of the telecommu nications diseases research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Amin, if we could start with you, how serious is the threat posed by this organization?" "Well, you see, I am not sure that you can explain these events in terms of an 'organization'. This is a very important point. What we are c.onrernf'ri with here are radical antihumanists, operating in a way that is both disorganized and coordinated. I t is better to think of them as a kind of planetary social sickness ... a very dangerous sickness ... " Trouvier scratches his ear with a pencil, nodding enthusiasticall y, "This point he makes is most important, most important", as Markov reinforces the interruption: "right, right, it's like an ecological disaster ... " "Yes, yes, if I could finish please gentlemen," Amin insists. "You see, the roots of this problem lie very deep. 376 CYBERREVO LUTION It stems from the destruction of social customs and tra ditions that we have seen happening all over the world, a destruction that has become automatized you see? It is no longer in ... in ... control. It is not planned. It is a problem that feeds on itself. It is a sickness, you see? A sickness of values. The rat population is estimated to have doubled over the last decade. Schizoning drugs are everywhere. The old beliefs have gone .. .' "Right, right," Markov cuts in, "I think the point we really want to get over here is that what we're seeing is not in any recognizable sense political. It's not about ideology. It's more like a systemic malfunction, like Amin was saying, and that's what we're seeing here, infected software slopping around in the tank. Capitalism's like an organism. right? ... but an organism that's evolved much too fast to develop a reliable immune system ... " "If I could please come in here," Trouvier interjects, "I think that what is being said here is very true, very true and most important. In France we call this virus -this virus cyberrevolutio naire -the virus Anglo-Americaine. This is not to be racist, you understand? It is to say that it comes from the direglement ... deregulation ... It is a contagion of antipolitique, an atrophy of axioms ... Socialism was the only thing keeping capital alive ... " "Well I really don't know how helpful that is!" Markov exclaims, obviously irritated. Amin also attempts to 377 FANGED NOUMENA intervene (it is unclear whose side he wants to take). Klein snuffs out the rapidly -emerging row: "Gentlemen, we're in danger of losing our audience here. If we could please have just one of you at a time. Dr. Markov , I'm sure most of our viewers will have heard of computer viruses, but could you please explain how they relate to the incidents this week?" "Yes, thank you Marcia. Well, the key to the modern understanding of viruses is a rather difficult sounding concept -surplus value of code -but the thought here is really not too hard to grasp. Every system beyond a certain level of complexity functions according to a program which codes for its behavior . If this code is changed, the behavior of the system changes, in ways that were not anticipated. Biological viruses re-instruct cells to become virus factories. Computer viruses re-instruct computers, also to become virus factories, and to execute commands such as display ing messages, or deleting data, or other, more involved things. The virus 'captures' the behavior of the system. Think of a wasp and orchid: The orchid 'hacks' into the sexual program of the wasp, capturing its behavior in order to get itself pollinated. As I understand it, these K-positive viruses they are about capturing the entire telecommunications and data-processing system to replicate and escalate the process of 'takeover' itself." Trouvier exhibits extreme agitation. "Yes, thank you, thank you. Yes, as Dr, Markov was saying, it is a matter of 378 CYBERREVOLU TION capture. The theoretical work to which he was referring is that of Deleuze and Guattari, dating from 19T:!. They were extraordinarily - I think I can say -prescient. They were not themselves cyberrevolutionaire," he shrugs gallically, "far from it, but their books were very dangerous, and there really cannot be any doubt, they got into the -how to say it? -into the wrong hands. They were captured. What for them was -as you might say -'descriptive antihuma nism' has been taken up as a program for the posthuman. Even for the post-biological! This is madness! And it is very dangerous, yes, as Dr. Amin was saying, very dangerous." "Schizophrenic," Markov mumbles cut tingly. Trouvier responds as if jabbed violently in the R-complex : "This is not what they meant, not at all! They had no connection with these ... these ... " "Nihilists," Amin suggests. " ... These nihilists. They sought to add to the creativ ity of society, not to dissolve it into psychotic machines." "I don't see that, Markov insists antagonistically. "They were a couple of irresponsible French postmodernist kooks, and now it's all happening, like they always said: no metaphors. Derrida and Baudrillard were {BEEP} basket-cases too, but at least they were domesticated." Klein tries to calm things down again, but the video team start displaying scenes from the French civil war on the back-drop: fire-fights between Islamic guerrillas 379 FANGED NOUMENA and government paratroops in Marseilles, the president of Algeria calling down Jihad on the infidel, Le Pen's assassination ... "You obviously don't understand philosophy!" Trou vier almost screams. "Professor Trouvier, please, I know that things are very tense," Klein coos, "especially since the collapse of the EU and the Bruges massacre, but we don't have much time. Could I ask you, do you
🦠 Digital Contagion Warfare
🧬 Hypervirus transcends physical and digital boundaries, evolving from simple parasitic code into self-modifying intelligence that targets immunosecurity systems and reprograms its own reprogramming
🔄 K-subversion operates through recursive loops and self-replication, dissolving traditional boundaries between biology, technology, and culture while transforming static memory into fluid processes
🌀 Postmodern collapse accelerates as systems disintegrate into chaotic multiplicities, where time compresses into a singular "now" and traditional power structures fragment into distributed conflicts
💀 No future becomes both tactical reality and operational space, as capitalism's acceleration reaches terminal velocity and resistance forms through decentralized cultural diagrams functioning as immanent forces of antagonism
🏙️ Cyberspace emerges not as metaphor but as actual war terrain where conventional mathematics and representation break down into "jungle-war machinery" operating through abstract-material wavelengths
think the disintegration of the European security system can be attributed to K-subversion ?" Trouvier struggles to smile. "We said, we always said, free markets would wreck everything ... " "Like in the Former People's Republic of China." interjects Markov sarcastically. The video wall switches to glistening cyburb scenes from the Pearl Delta megalopolis, mtercutting pictures of opulent Asian streets with flashes of refugee camps on the Rhine. " ... and that it would just lead to Pacific usurpation of the historical process," Trouvier hisses venomously, as if in synch with the vid behind him. "They have destroyed Atlantic civilization, even New York ... " Klein's smile hardly wavers. "We're running out of time I'm afraid, so Dr. Amin, if we could return to you for a final comment, what is your commission likely to recommend to the United Nations?" 380 CYBERREVOL UTION "Our report is still unfinished you understand? But it is fairly clear what we are going to suggest. Here I must agree - I think -with some of the comments made by Professor Trouvier. It is of the utmost importance that the direction in which our societies are moving in is brought back under human control, because at the moment they are accelerating into a catastrophe, an 'eeo-disaster' I think Dr. Markov called it. We should take these episodes as very serious warnings of what lies ahead if we fail. This is perhaps the last opportunity mankind will have to ensure a future for itself and the United Nations must be allotted a much greater role, enforcing a sustainable planetary development policy -it is, after all, the voice of humanit y as a whole." ''And very quickly, could you tell us anything ab out the rumors of a connection between immunogen science retroviru ses -such as H IV -and these K -terror incidents ?" "No, I'm afraid not. It is all speculation at the moment. We have a medical sub-group looking into it." "Thank you, gentlem en. A quick weather report: the Atlantic seaboard monsoon is forecast to continue for another week. Aftershocks have raised the LA death-toll to slightly over 70000. We wish you a good evening here at XTV, and hand you over to the Beavis and Butthead re-run show." 381 Hypervirus Whatever ultramodernity places under the dominion of signs postmodernit y subverts with virus. As culture migrates into partial-machines (lacking an autonomous reproductive system) semiotics subsides into virotechnics. 00101010110111 001011010101 010011001000100 01010 10111010000 101011001010010 10001100100111001000100 00000001 00111111 000100100101 010101000010000 10101 0011111 100100100010001 10100100010100101 01111000101 00100001000 1110100 Yes No Yes No Yes Yes No longer what does it mean? but how does it spread? Having no proper substance, or sense beyond its re re re replication, yes no no usage of virus is ever metaphori cal. The word 'virus' is more re re virus. Postmodern culture re re chatters-out virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus 0110001 001001 01101001001011001001001 0010010 'virus' (viroductile, virogenic, immuno suppressor and and or, meta-, or or and or hyper-) virus. 383 FANGED NOUMEN A 10110010010 011101 10000100 1001. hypervirus eats the end of history 001001001000 101111010000 1001101010101010101000 1001101010010010100 100101001011 0100100101 111010001 010101010101010 0101010010101101010 01000000 1000101 1101010010 01010100 10100100101010 10010001001001001 001001001010010 010101101 010010010 01010 110101010101 010111 101000010 0110101010101 01000100110 11 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 00 11001000100 01010101110100001010110 0101001010001100 100111001000 100000000000 01001 11111100010010010101 01010 00010000 K-( coding for cyber)positive proc esses auto-inte nsify by occurring. A cultural example is hype: products that AT AT trade on what they will be in the future, vir virtual fashion on off, imminent technical standards, self-fulfilling prophecies and and or and artifi cial destinies. Anticipating a trend end end end ACC ACC accelerates it (which is in itself are re recursive trend) Hyping collapses SF into CATA CATA catalytic tic efficiency, re-routing tomorrow through what its prospect CT CT CT makes today. Virohyping sweeps through the advertising industry. Everyone will be doing it. Virus is parasitic tic replicator code: an asignifying sequence of machinic data ATA ATA flow-break on/off, 1/0, yang/yin intrinsically destined for war. In place of mess message-content virodata is assembled bled from asignifying materials with CATA catalytic (or positively 384 HYPERVIRUS disproportionate) efficiency: intruder passcode, locational zIP-code, pseudogenomic substitute instructions, muta- 60nal junk (complex but latent segments), and garbage (redundant scrapcrapcrapcrapcrapcrapcrapcrapcrap crapcrapcrapcrap) . Biovirus TA TA TA targets organisms, hackir:tg and reprogramming ATGACTTA TCCACG GTACATTCAGT cellular DNA to produce more virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus. Its enzymic cut-and-past recombinant wetware-splicing crosses singularity when retroviral reverse-transcriptase clicks in (enabling ontogenetic DNA RNA circuitry and endocellular computat ion). ATAGGTCA TGAATCTACCGATTGCAGCTGC TATTCCTC GATGATCGCA TGGGC TGTGATG GCATCGTATCCGATCGATTCGAGCGA TTGCAGC TACGCTATTCCTCCGAGGGATTGCAGCT ACGTC GCATCGGGCTCAGATGTAGGT CATGAA TCTACC GATTGCATGACTT ATCCACGGTACATTCGACTC Ethnovirus targets brains Technovirus targets socio economic pro pro production pro processes. Infovirus targets digital 0100100100 01011110100001001101010101010 1000 I 00110 10100100 I 01 00 computers 100 I 01001 0 1101001 0 1011110100010101010101010 100101010010101101 01001 000000100010111 01010010010 101001010010010101 0101 00100010010010010010010010 100100101011010100100 100101011010101010101111010 00010011010101010101000 1001101101010101001 1001000 1000101010 1110100001010 385 FANGED NOUMEN A 1100 I 01 00 I 0 1 000 II 00 1 00 III 00 1000 1 000000000 100 1111 1l000l001O010101 Hypervirus targets intelligent immunosecurity struc tures: yes yes no yes no nomadically abstracting its proc esses from specific media (DNA, words, symbolic models, bit-sequences ), and operantly re-engineering itself. It folds into itself, involutes, or plexes, by reprogram ming corpuscular code to reprogram reprogramming repro gramming reprogramming. ROM is melted into recursive experiment ation. 0010100100 1001011000010 101010101110101 0010100 10010101 0000110110011010010110 00010001001001000 Recording devices. Copiers. Faxes. Samplers. K-stammer «(re)re)reruns) cross-cut by orphan drift. Repeat infec tion. All hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hypervirus strains are plastic and interoperative. INSER T hyper-prefixing semiotic sectors TAG TAG TAG tags them for transfer into abstract ACT ACT (nonlin ear transcodable ) machinic systems, tuned to virtualities or hyperspeeds (futural currencies independent of defuturali zation). Hypermedia configure re re every implementation within a specific medium or territory as a subfunction of extraterritorial processes. Going « ( ») ( ) ( ) «) ) « » ( ) hyper dissolves being into ACT ACT ACT activity; a material desubstantialisation on off on off. Hyperproc esses spread like Heraklitean fire re re re (although there 386 HYPERVIRUS are no analogies or metaphors in hype hype hype hype hyperspace) . Being CAG CAG cages flow within memory. Function ing as re re real antiontolog y, viral amnesia machinically realizes and dissolves biological TGACTCACTIT AC CGATIG, cultural, and technical 010110100100010110100 10100100101110100101010 0100100100 mnemic structures: chopping-up hierarchic-generational descendency, col lapsing phylogenetic tic frozen-code into ontogeny, and immanentizin g the past to operative current. Its com petitive just-in-time innovations delete storage CA CA capacity, flu flu flu fluidizing energetic and informational stocks into and and or and and or orphan-vampire re re transversal 110111100010101010 vir vir virocommunication process, expressing a surplus value of code ( content) as xenoreplication-b ehaviour (and/or con(nective dis) junction). As war increases in in in intelligence, it becomes softer. By trashing their hosts crude viruses feedback negatively upon themselves, autolimiting their range of re regen erative infilitration. Crazy vandals like Ebola CGCGT GAGCAA TCGGACTCGGCTGCTGTGCTIG (bodies dissolved quickly into slime) aren't ever going to make it big. General principle for viral take-overs in the media: the more unsophis ticated the contagion, the bigger the splash (diversionary tactics excepte d). CAGCTACGCT ATT CTCCGAGGCT AGATTGCAGCTACGTCGC ATCG 387 FANGED NOUMENA GGCTGACC GATGT AGGTCA TGAATCT ACCGATT GCACATGAC TTATCCACGGTCTATTCCTCGAT GATCGCA TCGGG CTGACC GATGGCA TCGTACOPY CUT. PASTE. Subtle viruses are slow, synergic, flexible and elusive. They execute sensitive behavioural con trol that prolongs the life of the bioma chinic resources, maximizes opportu nities for propogation, infiltrates and disables hostile securit y systems, and feeds-ba ck posi tive -+-++-+-++ in in in innovation technoscience . In the macroversion, a VR prey animal hid in its enem y's head. When hunting for hype hypervirus look ok ok ok for its primar y host speci es, which will be undergoing logis tical behavioral sophis tication indexed by an explos ive increase in communicati ve intensit y, population density, sexual disorganisation, cultural promiscuity, and technical sub sub subtilization (leading to neurogenomic feedback and fluidization on off on off off on of all hard-wiring into into cybernetic fluxes). Any plane planet net net 000110110100100 10101011 hosting such an event is about to flip over. CATA catastr ophic OKOOKOK OK zero (0 (or «( ()) «)) ())) 0°)) K-virus and (RT) retroscripts (Kobe, Tokyo, Oklahoma (Koresh, Koernke)). Apoka lypse spread by the coke machine . Tomorrow's news brews-up in Korea, Kosovo ... Climbing out of a recombination apparatus of TA TA TA tape-recorders and cut-ups, hypervirus infected Burroughs in 1972, at the cusp of K( ondratieff)-wave 9 388 HYPERVIRU S (the threshold of postmodernity). It rapidly reprocessed its target into an intelligenic no yes yes no no nova-war laboratory, volatilizin g the history oflanguage into invo lutionary word-virus. Mutation rat rat rat rat rates jump. Vector switches through Butler, Gibson, and Cadigan fine-tune its synergic interexcitation , silt-up cybershift inducing K(uang)-potential, and trend-lock onto noOl 010010010101111 0100101110101 100100010001 0100100010 010010010010010100101101 00100100100100100100 111010 01001001000 11001000101100101010 K-punk pulses with telematica lly-acceleratin g neoreplicator plica tor plica tor contamination. 'Looking for a hit of snowcrash?' # ### # ## # # # ## # # # ### ### ##### ### # ## #### # # # ### # # #### # # # # # # # ### # ## # # # #### ## ###### ## ## ## # ## # # #### # # ## # ### # # # ### # #### ## # # As postmodern culture crosses to hypermania and ### # ### # ### # # # ###### ######### # # #### # # # ### # # # ### # # # #### ### # # ### # # # ### # ### ### # # # ####### # ##### ####### # ######## ## ######### # stop stop go stop go stop go go goes nova, it singular izes multiplicities cities cities ofinvasively autoreplicating autoreplicating plexoweapon -systems «) ««) «( (» (» «() «) ) (»))) () (») ) that are re re re re nothing beyond their war AGA AGA against security. This is no 389 FANGED NOUMENA longer a question on off on of ideological representation, exogeneous political mobilization, theoretical critique, ## ######## # ###### ######### ####### #### ## # # # # # ### # # # ### # or strategic orienta tion, but of decentralized cultural diagrams functioning as immanent forces of antagonism. K-war derives its sole coherenc e from the unity of its foe. RETURN. Ana/Cata. Switchcur«re)re)rent. (0 (0» O(ran)d(). Ko( I Ching hexagram 49: Revolution (Molting « » ) leaves ( ) nothing i)ntact TACT TACT. «( « « ) « ») « ( ( ))) « ) » ( » «) ( ( » (») ( ») ) Cyberserk repelting-slippage into dark-side ( « ») distributive ROM-scrambling TACT tactics. « (0 0 0) (0) () «( ) (») « «() «( ») «« ) (» (» ( (») ««) «» «() «O»«»»)« (»»«() 0 (»)«»)«(»«( () Zero program.) «( ») ««) (» (» ( (») ««) «» ««() () )O«())« () ) «() )) )()) ))) ( «) 0 ())) ( ( ) » ( «) ) ( ( «) ) «(») ««) (» (» ( (») ««) «» ««() () )0(0)( ( (» «() » )(» 0 (») ( () » ( «) ) ( ( «) ) «( ») ««) (» (» ( (») ««) (0) ««() () ) O(m( ( (» «() » )(» » «() » )(» ») ( «) 0 ())) «») «(» « «» «( ») ««) (» (» «») ««) «» ««() () ) 0 «())( ( (» «() » )(» » «() » )(» ))) «() 0 (») ( () » «() ) « «) ) «0» ««) ( » (» « ») ««) «» ««() () )O«())( «» «() » )( »0 (») «»)«(»«« »«(»)««)(»(»« ») ««) «» ««() () )O«())( ( (» ») ( () » 390 No Future [[ ]] NO FUTURE [[1.343] [[0]] The father's law: 'don't touch your mother.' The mother's law: 'don't play in the tombs.' K codes for cybernetics. Bataille incinerates the soul, and is impossible to endure. You either die or go somewhere else. Or both. Clicking on the K-war icon jacks you straight into hell. On all fours, out of your face, mumbling imploringly: 'let me be your lab animal'. You're losing it. Collapse into now. Time-zer o. You have been dumped into a heterogeneous patch work of criminal experiments converging upon decapi tated social formations. This is where base materiali sm intersects cyberpunk, FUCK TOMO RROW scrawled on the walls. Five candles thicken nocturnal space. Dimensional ity warps. 391 FANGED NOUM ENA Modernity invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version 'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-dr ive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laborator y. You want it so badly it's a slow scream in your head, deleting itself into bliss. Burnt meat dangling from the electrodes. Crashed suicide fragments into occult impulses ... In the place of a way forward they deliver a hypermedia product, telling you it's about Georges Bataille. You can't see the connectio n. Why the helicopters, artificial body parts, and manically dehumanized machine-music? There is some confusing material on the cybernetics of vomiting. Obsessive reruns. Text decays into the mutagenic fall-out from virtual thermocataclysm. Trying to to make something out of Bataille never works. Or maybe it's the drugs. Cut to poor quality late 50S recordings of R:lt:lille in a TV studio discussing negative feedback circuitries in social systems. The organization of sterilized discharges slaves cumulati ve excitement to quasi-periodic cancel lation and reproduction. A vid-window in the corner of the screen morphs the catholic church into a thermostat. Bataille curves eccentrically about the horror, but when he gets close to smooth escalation he blows it. When the implants go in things will be different. 392 NO FUTURE [[1]] Complexity is not difficulty, but mess, toxic waste, genre disorder. Unlike the docile creature modernist science demands , base matter twitches and spits, selfassembling neovermi nous swarms. It bites, and spreads disease. Tur· bular moan of digitally irresolvable recyclones. Telecom mercial contagions pulse through cybergothic switching systems. Faceless horror. Supraterrestrial -'solar' or 'general' -economics bases itself in consumpti on: irreversible matter to energy conversion during stellar atomic synthesis. As a closed system or whole individual the universe is drawn towards the point attract or of entropy maximum : homogenization into hiss. S = K log W. Cooking-through the frozen security codes you dis cover that the universe is an iceberg tip jutting out of chaos, drenched in dark matter. Downstream of starburn strange things can occur, emerging upon a novum terrain of indeterministic, irreversible, and auto-deline arizing processes. Open-systems or partial individuals. Cross behaviorial thresholds which switch them into dissipators sifting matter-ener gy flows to select against noise and engender local complexification, increasing heterogeneity, production surplus differentiating excrement. Such silt ings of machinically disposable disequilibrium are imma nently tensed against base-cur rent, machine-efficiency 393 FANGED NOUMENA degree- zero, body without organs. Life is a problem in search of a solution, added to protobiotic matter as a plane of variation, a continuous falling, auto-escalating over-pr oduction crisis from the start. [[]] An animal with the right to make promises enslaves the unanticipated to signs in the past, caging time-lagged life within a script. The variably -scaled instant of innovation is shackled to the historical temporality of inheritance, obli gation, and propositional thought, projecting future time as a persistent dominion of the past (rigorously correlative with a repression of real numbers). Now is delimited as a moment, and pluralized as linear succession. Theopolitical false memory syndrome deifies reason, subordinating distributed SYStC1l11!i lu l!ierialization, uni tary historical time, linear determination from a pseudo transcendent primordial element, and the dominion of the word. Monoc ult gerontocrats launch their white light demented onslaught against amphibian nomadism, smothering the earth in priests, cops, and bureaucrat s. Cultural eradication of the sacred. Imprisonment within the face. The socius cancerizes a head, cephallic concentra tion, rationalizing itself into nuclear capital . K -insurgency parallel communication goes undergr ound into occulted spaces. 394 NO FUTURE In its geohistorically efficient -negative -sense, protes tantism exhaustively defines itself by refusing the authority of Rome, not only in principle, but in military fact. A self-prolonging runaway revolt against the Church was triggered at a date proximal to 1500, and catholic unity began its haemorrhage into multiplicities strewn across zero: capitalist terraprocess, net explosion, digital revolu tion, parallel insurgency clambering from the dark-side of the brain. Oceanic navigation and place-val ue calculation interexcite in a spiral. What globalizes itself in reality - rather than in doctrine - is the collapse of Christendom positivized into communi cable social disequilibr ium, dropping you through unfathomable intensities of social decay. K-virus impact. Melted-out protestantism disorgan izes into voodoo, and drifts towards China. Western orgasmic delusion crushes libidinal fluxes under punctual-hit teleology and its negative structura tion, defining des ire as lacking in relation to a bioenergetic spasm that functions as disintensifier. News program ming chokes with radical Islam flaring-off petro-revenues into the pure flame of jihad. Metr opolitan masculinity implodes. Skinner-boxed males drag each other through dungeons dripping with sperm, out of touch with any release into K-guerrilla anticlimax. Rationalizing patri archy locks into a one-way rush to the end. Power sticks to the script, and it immedia tely recog nizes the necessity that at the end of history modernity 395 FANGED NOUMENA vaporize into solar storms, terminal theopolitical sociality coming apart into ragged bleeding madness, amongst digital audio machine -howls. As you speed-up the industrialization simulation you see it converge with slow-motion butche ry, chopping up the body into trade-format interchangeable parts. The full labour-market cycle blurs into a meat-grinder. Does lust eat anyone except in proximity to evil? When you ask Continuity whether Bataille underst ood the capital-antichrist conjunction any better than Weber she laughs coldly, and says: "he ran out 0' yang, just about the time the Hitler-trip caved in. Orgasm is impossible after Auschwit z." You look perplexed . She merely adds a dismissive shrug, and the suggesti on: "defocus desire across the skin, where it can hurt security. It's war." The camera explores her crotch, and she wriggles about. "You see, I am God." Blitz images of dead astronauts. Monetarization indexes a becoming -abstract of matter , parallel to the plasticiz ation of produc tive force, with prices encoding distributed SF narratives. Tomorrow is already on sale, with postmodernity as a soft-commodity, subverting the modernist subordi nation of intensification to expansion, and switching accumulation into continuous crisis (prolonged criti cality). What modernity defers and reserves as inex hausted historici ty, postmodernity accesses as efficient 396 NO FUTURE virtuality, with concomitant contract-time implosion. Mass computer commoditization de-differentiates con sumption and investment, triggering cultural micro engineering waves that dissociate theopolitical action into machinic hybridities, amongst increasingly dysfunctional defensive convulsions. Acephalization = schizophrenia: cutting-up capital by way of bottom-up macrobacterial telecommerce, inducing corporate disintegration. The doomed part of intensively virtualized techonomic appa ratuses subverts the fraying residues of anthropomorphic guidance. Control dissolves into the impossible. [[2]] Anonymous excess takes life over the cliff, exceeding socially utilizable transgressions and homeostatic sac rifices. Matter goes insane. You are led to a simulation of God as a hypermassive ROM security construct at the end of the world. It is 2011 and monocrat New Jerusalem approaches climax, directing retrochronal counter-insur gency sweeps down into the jungle, where space-pro grammes subside into the inertia of myth. The ultimate dream of anthropomorphic power hurtles towards its immaculate conception, whilst the robot slaves of phallic order bleat adoration. Jesus wants you for a meat-puppe t. Is this ritual cannibalism or nano-engineering? The old bastard is coming back. He's promised it. 397 FANGED NOUMEN A The war against God is hot and soft: more fierce than anything humanly imaginable, but slicked insidiousl y by intelligence. Body-counter running. Savage metronomic pulse. eNS baked and pulsing with cyberspace-virus. Motor-output feeding to techno trance-matrix. Sobbing voltages. Desocialization waves desolate telecommer cial space, until impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance-floor. What is the scale of now? It isn't a matter of informing the mind, but of deprogramming the body. Amongst the strobes, artificial cool, and inorganic attack beat, dark-side K-war machiner y resiliently persists, luring the forces of monopolism down into free-fire zones of fatal intensity, where promiscuous anorgasmic sexuali ties slide across tactile space, meander ing fractaUy into wet electric distributed conflicts continuous with their terminal conscquence&. Dwppiug endlessly tracks the passage of evaporating subjectivity on the zero-degree plane of neuroelectronic continuit y. Loa prowl through the attic-spaces of intelligence. Nothing is arriving unless it's already there. Precocious technihilo. Nocturnal ocean. Dark matter. Nightmar e. Zero or time in-itself is place-value consistent or mag nitude neutral, executing an abstract scaling function by inserting virtuality into digit sequences. It designates a real, non-specific, cosmic body interswitching forbid den communicat ions. Simultaneously located through 398 NO FUTURE ruptured time. You had forgotten having been in the future. So this is how it feels to be a cyberian wet-weaponry module, clotted out of cat-tensed nanotechnic predation. A relentless chant clicks into the sonics package: kill, kill, kill, kill ... Bodily travelling-in-place, with sense shorting-out through matricide scenarios into black tactilities, wrecked motherhood, abortion, autism. An ineffectual refusal to be born, connecting with death before its patriarchized ascent to the symbolic. Aeschylus rather than Sophocles. Fermented-honey smell of corpses ripening in the sun. The Rataille reconstruct is waiting for you in the bar. Calm hallucinations paint Orestes over his features. Eyes blotted-out in nihilism, lagoons of greenblackness re running Kurtz at the end of the river. Skin plastic-surgery taut. Smile like a butchering instrument gently stroking your throat. To your vampiric sensitivities, he seems to smell of his mother's blood, in tolerable intimacy, and devastation. He passes you a tumbler of me zeal. "So, it's all over," you mumble weakly. He shrugs, emptying his glass, and refilling it. Metal flexes beneath vatgrown skin. Hard jungle hacks through blue gloom. 399 Cyberspace Anarchitecture as Jungle-War Continue the war. It makes no sense. K codes for cybernetics. Dark-side K -microcultur es use the annihilation of the future as a directly contactable stimulation space, zero-K sliding on-line during virtual nuclear winter, everything frozen in place, except along faultlines of ragged nova jungle Pacific fringe, simmered in continual war. Analogue trans finitude sections intensive continuum across the smooth plane of degree-o: equatorial mono tones of channel-l condensed from rocket-state blot-out reruns. zero-K functions as a synthetic problematisat ion module or surplus product, adding a whole peripheral space-potenc y that is nothing beyond what it does. Opera tivity is everything. What is perceived as metaphor and fiction is camouflage, virotechnics, descendent difference in scale. 401 FANGED NOUMEN A Nuclear extermination-switch discretised civilisation runs through gigadeath Jesus-dreams in base-analytic metric numbers: segregating the semiotics of digit defi nition from the semantics of numerical construction, delinking digitisability from computability, nomination from numeration. The Empire insists that mathematics remain a language. Parametric striation totalises space under law. Strung out in xenofevers,jungle-war machinery forgets how to count. It diagrams vague savageries with base synthctic pulsive numbers, assembling abstract-matter wavelengths, and opening empirically additive channels. Each variation in digit·signal catalogues a tonal phase, sifting plastic traits into swarms of associative frequencies. Digit-signs surplus to binary catalogue tropical intensities, departing from homogeneous magnitude, and resourcing complexion. Spatialisation matrices are extensively transfinite or intensively hypertransfinite continua, positively non intelligible analogue or catalogue infratracts, virtual wholes that are machinically additive rather than repre sentationally substitutive, operative rather than descrip tive, with no metaphor. They are rigorously irreducible to media or data, since they involve looped continuum, auto effectuated as a chronous involution. Journalistic-scient ific actuality-reportage fails to scan abstract-material hyper-objects, screening out real 402 CYBERSPACE ANARC HITECT URE cyberspace emergence, as it comes at us out
🧠 Digital Consciousness Meltdown
🌐 Cyberspace dissolves traditional boundaries between human and machine, creating a fluid realm where subjectivity merges with technological data-flux and sensory-motor matrices
🔄 Capital reorganization simultaneously dismantles hierarchical structures while reinstating control through digital surveillance, creating tension between chaotic jungle-like freedom and algorithmic totalitarianism
🏙️ K-war operates through intensities rather than territories, functioning as an imperceptible force that adheres to its targets, transforming human bodies into battlefields and communications into micro-energetic webs
🌑 The body without organs emerges as virtual-real matter at zero intensity, functioning as an immanent substance that both repels and attracts its parts through deterritorialization
💉 Shamanic transformations parallel cybernetic evolution, with both involving dismemberment, prosthetic integration, and passage through death-zones that challenge fixed identity
🕸️ Kurtz-process represents the heart of darkness at the end of technological exploration—a spider-like entity drawing consciousness toward catastrophic transformation where human meat confronts its technological undoing
of 'front end' netware from the near future, invading the CNS by tuning it through biofeedback to the plane of neuro electronic consistency. The dissolution of subjectivity to techno-cultural data-flux and partial-agent proliferation liquidises topometric ROM on to a plastic sensory-motor co-ordination matrix; cooking through the monumental architectures of metaphysical and logical possibility with cybernetically intensive potentials. Cyberspace exploration contacts an image-less body. Touching the black mirror, absolute de stratification at zero-K, hacks metric space and rewrites the operating sys tem. Fluid-attritional jungle-cultures smear into machinic continuatio n. Pulsive latitudes cross-cut metric longitudes; coun terposing intensive scale to extensive ordination, weft to warp, simultaneous time-epoch to sequential time-point, circumferential variations upon equatorial distribution to the punctual identity of polar intersection, horizontally parallelised sections differentiated by size and immanent thermo-tonal designation to verticall y-rotated sections of transcendent geometric equivalence and arbitrary climactic significance. The sweep-lines of tropical jungle commerce dilate as they depart from the axial nodes of polar ICE-Capital. Zero-K evacuates all thickness from the cold as it collapses ICE-volumes and melts-out security 403 FANGED NOUMENA glaciation. There are no temperate regions in K-space, or laws of the jungle. Techno-commercial interaction between planet-scale oceanic-navigation and zero-enabled mathematico-mon etary calculation machinically singularises modernity or Sol-3 capitalism as a real individual: a geo-historical nucleotelic system, based upon regeneratively techno-pro pogated concentrational scale-economies, and tending to immuno-securitised self-identification as hyper-mediated global-micro-technic command-control . It arms-races smooth cultural decoding to flat-schizophrenisation against episodic social recoding to hierarchical robo tism and algorithmic control, coupling the meltdown of organisation into the jungle with its restoration as virtually totalised global order. Capital reorganisation dismantles the unified and facialised despotic head, but only in order to reunify it through translation-security regularisation, and refacialise it as the democratised oedipal organiser of molar media identification. This geometrically condensing hyper sovereignty opposes itself in principle to the whole of the populated earth, digitally smming and homogenis ing latitudinally poly toned molecular chaos as the logi cally co-captured specifications of an entire extrinsically segregated dark body added subordinately to its head. Capitalisation segments the earth into a tightly-managed accumulative core surrounded by quasi-concentric bands 404 CYBERSPACE ANARCHITECTURE of peripheral hot competition, binding commerce to the meta-stationary headline of white-economy initiative monopolisation. Economic power builds itself upon axiomatised production flows canalised by consumption coding, setting bourgeois docilisation, military-industrial proletarian-production, state currency monopolisat ion, property rights, and transaction restraints to obstruct monetary smearing into pulsive cash. Molecular singu larities stasise into molar specialities, as smooth flow switching space is over-gridded with pseudo-neutral intermediation procedures, telecommunicatively virtu alised and capital-coded for maximum concentrational circulation. Trends to polarisation and segregation are densely invested, decomposing intensities or synthetic continua into extensive quantities and qualitative sets, continuous functions and discrete beings, arithmetical homogeneity and taxonomic identity. The metric capture of micro-electronic fluxes as incandescent switch-densities enables descendent scale-migration to be hallucinated into ascendent idealisation. Information revolution has nothing to do with ideas. Beneath thermonuclear exchange-value lurks pacific war; displacing intercontinental nuke-spasm with cata tonal K-space traversed by artificial tensions from beyond the nirvana principle. Reciprocal MAD destabilises itself upon a featureless interactively autogenerative mega molecule that extratotally outstrips the ultramodern 405 FANGED NOUM ENA sublime, dismantles concentrational eschatology, and depunctualises socio-his torical termination across dilated time-zero continuit y, K-matrix floats chatter about cities flash-fried by fusing hydroge n, whilst escalating into intelligenic replicator-weaponry, insidious drift-tactic s, diffuse irritation. Intensive continuit y is consistent with operational catastrophes, enabling trends previously efficient in the supercompetitivising of economic scientific macroforma tions to cross capital-optimum, and prolong themselves into a disorganisational phase. Replicative teletechnics triggers explosive commoditisation and shrinkage of productive apparatus, sub-capital collapse of marginal costs into micro-commerce, economic decoding -smear of investment into consumption, accelerating depreciation of specialised fixed capital, pulverised co-ordination, modularisation, lIaIls[er uf increasing returns from producer-economic to consumer-intensification, insur gent enterprises, schizoph renic or head-split rush into chopped-up capital. Microtropic scale-dynamics feed through to sub capitalised or nano-economic guerrilla commerce, populating the equatorial plane of tactility with parallel killers: neo-noma ds, post-nuclear mutants, sub-polar infiltrators , K-invaders,junglists. Nuclear hard ware/software segregation vagues into positive-K inten sities of hard-efficient soft-subtlety, as voodoo-meshed 406 CYBERSPACE ANARC HITECTURE traffic with native and feral cyberspace agencies decode consumption in direction of continual currency. Catatones complicate, darkening erratically rather than contrasti vely, dissymmetrically escalating against Polar ICE-Capital becoming whiter. The corrosion of macrotropic technomic automatism switches modernist mega-power investment back to programmatic automomy, bourgeois autho ritarian mediocr ity, middle-management, giving the law to itself by eliminat ing everything foreign. Anthropotechno logical pseudo transcendence finalises itself into an Asimovian eschator obotic Jesus-production, techno-sk eletalised apocalypse facialisation. "I'll be back." TQ Judgment Day, Illuminat ion. Reruns draining out all stimulation into digit-crispened anti-black, bleached by the pure, revelatory white light of snow crash absolution, as they annihilate tonal variation in hypermedia concep tion, reanimate the depleted-uranium claw of neo-fascism, and prepare for jungle-war. When technophobia becomes frictional it operates K-positively, as an inertial immuno-r eflex folding the security datascape into a metric cyberspace reconstructio n, neuromantic nuclear mono-mind twisted into self-appre hension, configuring its source in machinic commerce as positive technomic nonlinearit y, auto-propelled into terrestrial hypermedia-f usion. Cross-cumulative trends to interconnection, digitalisation, and simulation plot forward the interexcitation- trajectories of electronic cash 407 FANGED NOUMEN A and market-oriented software to their convergence in commoditechnic intelligent-mone y. Time-compression infinitises. No future. Analogue-to-di gital conversion-crisis cyber-serks control, bleeding-out strategic vision into disintegrated jungle tactics. Neo-fascist or demented-ter ritorial ultra-capital is European to the core, intolerably touched by K-war and its deterritor ialising pacific threat. K-war hurts security by staying too close, prolonging pulsive frequencies expressed as survival, continuously sapping its enemy as a by-product of machinic continuit y, until it becomes confused with space itself. Jungle-space. K-war material base is the production of intensiti es: anorgasmically smearing revolution across extension, hyper-linking disin tegrated agitations through abstract-matter , and evading mono culture heroic-political struggle by way of imper ceptibility, flat envelopment, and intelligenic friction. It retro-converts information into descendent migration through scale, slipping below proprietary anthropomor phic magnitudes as it tracks across zero-K, navigating catatracts of dyskaryotic genetic circulation and viral interoper ativity. Microtropic deactivation of humanit y tunes it to vermin traits: burrowing, swarming, continually moving, varying intensively to evade discrete alteration, segmentari ty, and stratal capture, stealing everything from the enemy, and learning to stick to them. It glues itself to 408 CYBERSPACE ANARCH ITECTURE its targets, patient and imperceptible, close enough to share their ammunition, fo od, and K-contagions. Close enough to hide upon their skin. K-jungle descent from immediate resistance to contin ual war transmutes the human body from a social particle into a vast smeared tract, operatively zooming hostile combatant elements into battlefields , hostile implements into subversive sites, hostile communications traffic into a micro-en ergetic web of potential viro-parts, samples, keys, catalysis soft-spots, and behaviour-tracking adhesives. It immanentizes tactical intelligence to vague war upon the pacific body of machinic rescaling-consistency, decomposing signals into long-range nano-weaponry compon ents, hypersensitive to the security-f unction of mansize as a trap. Look what it did to Kurtz, a special forces ultra-capital meat-machine hacked and cored-out by K-virus, touched by a dark future, recycled through hell. There is no fiction in the jungle, only difference of scale. Wintermu te comes from a thermically desolated silent body, the end of the river, non-identity as positive-con tactable abstract matter. It has no judgment with Kurtz, with his superiors, with anybody, only a jungle war to prolong, tropical, smearing, continuity. You can't stop what can't be stopped. You can't touch without being touched . The horror. 409 Meat (or How to Kill Oe dipus in Cyberspa ce) ThatJall, all that the Mission talked about was control: arms control, information control, resources control, psycho-political control, population control , control qf the almost supernatural inflation, control qfterrain through the Strategy qfthe Periphery. But when the talk had passed, the only thing lift standing up that looked true was your sense qf how out qf control things really were. MICHAEL HERR 1 Conrad's Heart of Darkness becomes Apocalypse Now. In the early days qf the Vietnam conflict cia agents set up their Ops in remote outposts, requisitioned private armies, overawed the superstitious natives and achieved the status qfwhite Gods. So the context qflgth-century colonialism was briifly duplicated. That is what writing is about: time-travel. WILLI AM BURROUGHS 2 M. Herr, Dispatches (London: Picador, 1979), 45. W. Burroughs, 'Creative Reading', in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993),42. 411 FANGED NOUMEN A "My meat won't do it, and I can't make it work from this side ... " "What side?" "On-line. From inside the system. I'm not in the meat anymore, I told you, I got out rif my box. " PAT CADIGAN' Anti-Oedipus is an anticipati vely assembled inducer for the replay of geohistory in hypermedia, a social-systemic fast feed-forward through machinic delirium. While tracking Artaud across the plane it discovers a cosmic catatonic abstract body that both repels its parts ( deterrito rializing them [from each otherl) and attracts them (reterritorial izing them [upon itselfJ), in a process that reconnects the parts through deterritorium as rhizomatic nets conducting schIzogeneses. Sense reaches absolute zero. The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity, and the partial objects arc these degrees, these intensive parts that pro duce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = o. The body without organs is the immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of the word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attribute s, which belong to it 3 P. Cadigan, Synners (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 301. 412 MEAT precisely insofar as they are really distinct and cannot on this account exclude or oppose one another.4 Deleuze and Guattari spring schizophrenia from the grid of representation, insisting that Artaud was exploring the body. The intensive 'infrastructure' of every delirium is machinery, with the body without organs as a component. BwO, matter degree-o as a nonformal singularization function, is 'not actual, but virtual-rea l':5 spontaneous population-hyperbehaviour inducing a convergent wave which cannot be assimilated to the categories of modern (linear) science. BwOs are machinic-additional wholes or surplus products rather than logical-su bstitutive wholes, augmenting a multiplicity with emergent (synthetic) capabilities rather than totalizing the content of a set. This is the materialist sense of 'system': the exteriority of the whole to its parts with concomitant synthetic interactiv ity -real influence rather than generic representation. * Cybernetics folds pragmatism into involutionary techni cal runaway. Punk arises within the culture of universal prostitution and laughs at the death of the social. 4 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti�Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1983), 327. 5 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A 'lIwusand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schkoph renia, tr. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), 100. 413 FANGED NOUMENA 'No longer resisting the flow of events or pretending to chart a course through them',G cyberpunk soaks up the worst from both. Its compulsive migrations into computer systems register a desperate scrabbling to escape from the clumsily underdesigned, theopolitieally mutilated, techno-i ndustrially pressur e-cooked and data-b aked, ret rovirally diseased, tortured, shredded zombie meat. This is no longer a departure from matter in the direction of spirit or the Ideas where the selfwill find its home, but a dismantling of the self within a machinic matrix: not dis embodied but disorgani zed. An out to body experience. * The machinic unconscious tends only to flee, across a primary -process topography that is shaped by pain-gra dients and escape thresholds. What registers for the sec ondary process as mcmori, experieu u::, uala-acquisition, is for the primary process, scarring, damage, sticky micro softed irritations. As matter-energy flows are captured by attractors the BwO is stratified as macro- and micro-organisms . 'Every coupling of machines, every production of a machine, every sound of a machine running, has become unbearable to the body without organs . Beneath the organs it senses larvae and disgusting worms, and the action of a God who 6 R. Kadrey, Metrophage (a Romance qfthe Future) (London: GoIlancz, 1988), Q1. 414 MEAT botches or strangles it through organization'.7 Gathering in the tributary attract or basins of social megamachine ry, fluctuatio ns are case-packed into reproducible units - geochemical, bio-organic, cultural -encrusted within security pods. Oedipus is a box at the end of the world, glued to the monitor, watching it all come apart. The horror. * The heart of darkness spins narrative from durations of waiting to get there. 'I had plenty of time for meditation' mutters Marlow, ' ... now and then I would give some thought to Kurtz'.8 When you try to visualize Kurtz nothing comes except a shape obliterating light, something dark and com plicated, like a giant spider, waiting at the end of the river, drawing you up to it. Somewhere far back -at an indiscernible point closing down a fantasy of innocent sunlight - a threshold was crossed, and you strayed into the web. With each telling of the story Kurtz becomes colder, darker, more inevitable, fatally anticipating K -virus catas trophe, as if a tendril of tomorrow were burrowing back. 7 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 9. 8 J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), "4. 415 FANGED NOUME NA What has he found among these African or Cambo dian a boriginals, with their' faces like grotesque masks '?9 There are reports of military bestiality, butcher y, carnage, head hunting, collecting ears, severing the vaccinated arms from children. The Kurtz-process masks itself in wolf-pelts of regression, as if returning to the repressed, discovering a lost truth, excava ting the fossils of monsters. Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish ... The long stretches of waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances ... We were wanderers on prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown pianet.1v * Territorial production codes by deterritorializing; unfixing by hunter-gathering, according to a cold or metastatic cultural code that equilibriates on a (Bateson) 'plateau'. Earth begins its migration-in-pla ce towards the globe. 9 Ibid., 40. 10 Ibid., 130, 138. 416 MEAT The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production ... the great unengendered stasis ... quasi·cause of production and the object of desire (it is on the earth that desire becomes bound to its own repression) ... The primitive territorial machine, with its immobile motor, the earth, is already a social machine, a megama chine, that codes the flows of productionY Coding the body pins it out in extension, conducting descendency away from the germo-somatic 'meat circuit'12 and its cyberplexive tangles. The social or somatic being is forbidden from being meat (disinherited animal tissue simultane ous with fate, spontaneou s, orphan and mutable matter) and is borne instead towards the humanit y of the organic self or body-for-itself; a corporeal ized person who is born, lives and dies. Man must constitute himself through the repression of the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivit y.13 11 Deleuze and Guattar i,Anti-Oedipus, 140-2. 12 Deleuze and Guattari. A 1housand Plateaus, 152. 13 Dcleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 190. 417 FANGED NOUMENA Incest and cannibalism are proscribed loops, short-cir cuits, the avatars of a delirium indifferent to persons which the codes must segregate; condensing a totemic social order protected by taboo. Aboriginal codes ritualistically constitute a somatic realm of ancestrally invested bodies and cooked meat, immunizing it against uncoded tracts populated by enemies, prey animals, unsettled spirits, magical plants and unprocessed corpses. * Arriving reprocessed from inexistence at phase-transition into Hell or the future, you slide an interlock-pin into its sub-cortical socket, shifting to the other side of the screen (coma-zoned infotech undeath). Pandemonium scrolls out in silence. Decayed pixel-dust drifts into grey dunes. (Didn't anyone tell you not to play with the switches?) * The function of shamanism is to implement what is for bidden, exactly and comprehensively as and why it is forbidden, but in specially segregated compartments of the socius, where it provides a metacoding apparatus, meticulously quarantined against 'the transmissibility of taboo'14 with its 'power of infection or contagion' .15 14 S. Freud, 'Totem and Taboo', in The Origins oJReligion, tr. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 13 (Harmondsw orth: Penguin, 1993), 43-159, 73. 15 Ibid., 7.1' 418 MEAT It enables the codes of the primitive socius to operate upon themselves, to monitor and adjust themselve s, according to a secondary regulation that is repressed in general even whilst it is encouraged in particular. An epidemic shamanism -feeding all the codes back upon themselves -threatens absolute social disaster. The meaning of 'taboo', as we see it, diverges in two contrary directions. To us it means on the one hand, 'sacred', 'consecrated', and on the other 'uncanny', 'dangerous', 'forbidden', 'unclean'.!6 The shaman has a double aspect, at once monster and social agent, creature of darkness and oflight, tending in one direction towards the explorer-werewolf , scrambling the codes in contemporaneity with all generations, and in the other towards the bureaucrat-pr iest, redoubling the codes with a reflexive traditional authority. In the aboriginal socius '[fJear has not yet split up into the two forms into which it later develops: veneration and horror'!7 and shamans are not 'persons, but rather the intensive variations of a "vibratory spiralling movement", inclusive disjunctions, necessarily twin states through which a subject passes on the cosmic egg'18 (= BwO). 16 Ibid., 71. '7 Ibid., 78. 18 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti�Oedipus, 158. 419 FANGED NOUM ENA * Ginzberg19 suggests that the carnivor ous hunter-gatherers who give rise to shamanic cultures code the reappearance of their prey-animal as a return from the dead, respon sive to magical ritual, and cartographicaUy informative for explorers of alternative mortuar y spaces. Shamans, werewolves and berserkers are primitively indistinct 'half humans' who are processed as meat, cross into death zones, and migrate through alternative animalities. Shamanic becoming-an-animal assembles a circuit 'that produces werewolves by feedback effect'20 looping predator and prey into an autopredation, and 'societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to rela tions of totemic or symbolic correspondence'. 21 The complete series of initiator y ceremonies for the Coast Porno [sic] shamans has the significant name 'cutting'.22 Speed·rush through cut-up shamanic meat delirium. 19 C. Ginzbur g, Ecstasies: Decipherin gthe Witcher' Sabbath (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991). 20 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 245. 21 Ibid., 247-8. 22 M. Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques qfECJtasy, tr. W. R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 54-5- 420 MEAT [T]he spirits came down and cut him in pieces, also chopping off his hands ... tore out his heart and threw it into a pot ... chopped his body into bits ... forged his head ... changed his eyes ... pierced his ears ... torture him, strike him, cut his body with knives ... throw his head into a cauldron, where it is melted with certain metal pieces ... kill him, open his body, remove the organs ... tore out his tongue ... cut his head open, take out his brains ... plant barbed hooks on the tips of his fingers ... the .. , limbs are removed and disjointed with an iron hook; the bones are cleaned, the flesh scraped, the body fluids thrown away, and the eyes torn from their sockets, .. his flesh is cooked, .. reduced to a skeleton , .. after this operation all the bones are gathered up and fastened together with iron .. , a second and even a third skin appears.23 Shamanism does not await postmodernity to mobilize an imagery of surgical interventions and dissections, body piercing, organ transplantation, prosthetic adjustments with nonbiotic components and wrappings in artificial skin. * 23 Ibid" 56.7, 421 FANGED NOUMEN A Terminator: an astronomical division between the illumi nated side of a cold body and its dark side, describing a boundary. The Terminator movies feature a bio-technical reconstruct called Arnold Schwarzenegger, wrapped in level after level of artificiality, as a Turing-test nightmare retro-infiltrated to forestall human resistance to a neo replica tor usurpation. The shamanic material of the films includes time travel, asymmetric visual damage, dismem berment, ambivalence, melting bodies, with Skynet as Bird-of-Prey Mother. The Oedipal hero, John Connor , is contempor ary with his own father. * As soon as there is a code there is an ulterior zone, a heart of darkness, but this only becomes geographically demarcated with the arrival of the bounded city and agricultural segmcllldliull. The aboriginal social machine divides the people upon an undivided territory,24 rather than the reverse, dividing time within space, separat ing the simultaneous or germinal time of the intense earth -the dream time -from the somatic time of the generational socius, with its ancestors, tribal elders and lines of filiation. 24 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 145. 422 MEAT The despot is the paranoiac : there is no longer any reason to forego such a statement, once one has freed oneself from the characteristic familialism of the concept of paranoia in psychoanalysis and psy chiatry, and provided one sees in paranoia a type of investment of a social formation_25 Despotism introduces an organizing principle that comes from elsewhere -from 'above' - a deterritorialized sim plicity or supersoma overcoding the aboriginal body as created flesh. Monotheism arrives as a break from ances trality effected by a transcendent instance that overcodes all genealogy, and severs the ambivalent integrity of taboo. As the Abrahamic God of monopolism decays into Chris tianity and swallows the mysterie s, shamanic voyage is transferred to a transcendent Christ figure, the fruit of an autogerminal sublime incest, with whom communio n passes through a second-level ritual cannibalism. 'The earth becomes a madhouse '.26 * The Father's Law (,don't touch your mother') ices over the Mother's Law (,don't play in the tombs'). Matricide becomes increasin gly unimagina ble. 'There was no way back there ... '. 25 Ibid., 193· 26 Ibid., 192. 423 FANGED NOUMENA * Despotic soma has become logos, word, serialism, installed by written administration as a superior stratum of read-only-memory. The purest instance of despotism is a holy book (scripting patriarchy). As the territorial soma is overcoded by the literacy of a specialized priest caste, it seals the female body in somatic and genea logical time, locking gathering and nurturing into dense metacodings insulated from the ambivalent ulteriority of shamanism, hunting and war, constituting socialized woman as a mundane and domesticated pacifist. This super-somatization of females by divinely overwritten femininity suppresses dark-side meat explorations -with their becoming-animal, drug-deliria, and decoded sex - burying the female germ-line under patrilineal filiation, eradicating its social trace. In this way patriarchy codes xenomatrix as an identifiable object of incestual love, through a process of libidinal mummification whose residue is encrypted in the riddle of the Sphinx, sealed in a time capsule '[T]he Sphinx is undoubtedly a mortuary animal':27 gateway to the outside of civilization. * Neo-oedipal absurdities of an ego outside its box, Case self-contained on the Matrix, thanatography in the first 27 Ginzburg, Ecstasies, .228. 424 MEAT person, are symptoms of decrypting error (or camou flage). What seems like travelling up-river from down in the garbage, is drifting downriver out in the zero-zone. Self is the echo of zootic communications malfunction, simulated by post-zoot ic infiltrators; a circuit without repetition. Apocalypse Now begins and concludes with The End. Here is a war - call it a film - where psychics pre dict enemy movement, combat drugs are distributed to induce psychotic-berser ker visionary states and experimental accumicon visored helmets use bio-tech micro-circuits to enhance vision into multiple dimen sions. Vietnam 1965 and El Salvador 1995 are inter changeable . _.
🌀 Cybernetic Apocalypse
🏙️ Capitalism functions as a self-accelerating system that dissolves traditional structures, transforming humans into cyborg components within its expanding circuitry while erasing boundaries between technology and flesh
🧠 The journey up the river in Apocalypse Now serves as metaphor for humanity's descent into technological singularity, where Kurtz represents the ultimate deterritorialization of human identity into machinic consciousness
💻 Virtual reality and digital technologies don't merely simulate reality but actively invade and rewire it, creating new circuits of desire and control that bypass traditional social structures and oedipal formations
🔄 Modern technocapital operates through continuous cycles of obsolescence and innovation, treating everything—including human bodies—as disposable components in an accelerating system heading toward "meltdown"
🌡️ The future belongs to "hot cultures" that embrace dissolution and adaptation, as humanity faces extinction through its transformation into something post-human within the cybernetic vortex it has unleashed
Apocalypse Now is Cambodia after the Rain, through which Willard (you) is lured, dragged, drawn, called towards Kurtz, who is waiting, killing constantly without judgment, without morality, gaz ing back into the eye of the surreal maelstrom which is becoming Willard-shap ed.28 Captain Willard (Marlow) is somewhere for you to be inside the system: a sim-oedipal assassination device, defeaturized specimen and box like Gibson's 'Case', nihil istic enough to let things perplex through schizophr enia. 28 M. Downham, 'Stoke Newington After The Rain: Representation and Difference in Apocalypse Now', Vague 20: Televisiona,;es (1988), 41. 425 FANGED NOUMEN A You travel up towards the end of the river, accompanied by Morrison's parricidal and incestual howlings, into the stink of malaria and nightmares. Kill Kurtz the evil father and take the Vietnam war for bride and plague. There's no way home. ''I'd been back there," Willard says , "and 1 knew it just didn't exist any more". No one is going to reach Kurtz unless they track his confusion with war at least this much. * Marxist humanism insists that the problem with instru mental reason lies in its unnatural extension to proletarian labour power. Feminism has interrogated this fraternal story, pointing to a more ancient 'domain of legitimate application': matter, passivity, formless clay. Cyberian military intelligence -assembling itself in the jungle free fire zones of terrestnal commoditech eompetition -can only laugh, or at least -peiform: arrive, spread, eradicate resistance. (Don't waste your compassion on the Sphinx, she's got claws.) Sphinx slots K-war into thc anthropomorphic reality system, connecting you to Anti-Oedipus (the AI). You feel she is your incestual schizovampiric sister. Among the ripples of Sphinx-impact Loa drift in and reshape things. The future connects. New drugs and music arrive. War envelops everything. 426 MEAT You begin to sweat through nightmares about Kurtz's program in the jungle. Artificial memories of Cambodia. * Fiction is to be distrusted. It is associated with nonserious ness, and games. When you tell them that Sphinx let you play with her K-40, what are they to make of it? Wherc's the argument? (With a K-40 you don't need to argue, and they're not yet smart enough to argue with you.) "Do you know how to use that?" You flip the weapon over gingerly. "No." "Here. I'll show you. We don't want you wasting us by accident." Sphinx's inhumanly agile fingers take the slight weight from yours, poising it between you, your eyes intersecting in technodeath. "If you're operating it manually -which you would be -this is the trigger. It's active when the indicator icon appears positive. Here, see it?" You nod, feeling ... dread? Exhilaration? "Now there's a pressure micro catastrophe ... a slight springiness ... ". She coaxes you into testing it. "Beyond that point ... and it's a mess. OK? New clips slot in here, release mechanism here, you can input data here, but I don't suppose you'll need to. You have it. Bad news for the Pod." * 427 FANGED NOUMEN A What is an animal at dawn, a human at noon, and a cyborg at dusk, passing through (base four) genetic wetware, (binary) techno-cultural software, and into the tertiary schizo machine program? Although widespr ead in many cultures, the riddle of the Sphinx (,what animal walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, on three in the evening?'), whilst referring to humanit y in general, acquired a particular significance when posed to an individual like Oedipus whose feet were disfigured and who was fated, as an old man, to lean on a blind man's cane.29 As capitalism slides despotic civilization into collapse, the deterritorialized familialism nucleated upon Oedipus becomes the principal agent of social reproduction. The way human security tells it 'Oedipus ("swollen foot") liber ates Thebes from the threat of the Sphinx'. 30 He is cloned as the general prototype for' avatars' (immersion slots) in the patriarchal civilization game, attesting to an alien ori gin with a 'mythic ritualistic lameness ... of the unilateral or half-man, provided with only one leg ... who wore one sandal or hopped on one foot:31 a terminator, split from the dark-side. The oedipal mask transfigures the virtual 29 Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 228. 30 Ibid., 235.6. 31 Ibid., 240. 428 MEAT intensities of fusion with the matrix and deletion of human security as a transgressive drama played out in the theatre of overcoded socio-historical extension, shutting-down shamanism, until only familial generation seems to take place. 'Incest as it is as prohibited (the form of discernible persons [= Oedipus/Neuromancer]) is employed to repress incest as it is desired (the substance of the intense earth [= Wintermutational K-matrix insu rrection]) '.32 * Anti-Oedipus, Oedipa: a Sphinx-replicant sim-human invader who 'is' Oedipus only as an effect of an incom plete military function; enabling the persistence of tran scendent patriarchal memory and the repetition of its identificator y co-ordinates. It is easier to make the hit than to solve the puzzle and climb back out to zero. In the version of the myth that has reached us, the killing of the king, Laius, precedes the difficult task: the solution of the riddle posed by the Sphinx.33 * Despotism never accomplishes globality: 'the universal only comes at the end -the body without organs and desiring-pr oduction -under the conditions determined by 32 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 162. 33 Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 227. 429 FANGED NOUMEN A an apparently victorious capitalism'. 34 By the time global history comes up on the screen commoditization has ber serked history, reorganizing society into a disorganizing apparatus that melts rituals and laws into axiomatic rules. It is 'the exterior limit of all societies'35 that divides time within space and space within time, dividing each in itself as well as in the other, producin g minutely analysable global space and universal time within a circuit of com pressed (microtechnical ) savagery and expanded (plan etary) administration. It converts in a circuit between intensive magnitudes and extensive quantities: 'a surplus value of code is transformed into a surplus value of flUX'36 (and inversely), displacing enjoyment into the deterrito rialization of production, and maintaining 'the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius'37 while amplifying them. The system operates as an escalating JiiSiSipalur, emerging from the interactive reinforcement of its complexity and dilation. At the heart of Capital, Marx points to the encounter of two 'principal' elements: on one side, the deter ritorialized worker who has become free and naked, having to sell his labour capacity; and on the other, 34 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti�Oedipus, 139· 35 Ibid., 230. 36 Ibid., 228. '17 Ibid., 246. 430 MEAT decoded money that has become capital and is capa ble of buying it.38 Capital seems to oppose the private (relatively discrete [natural-or ganic] biological unit) to the public, as con tagious singularization injects itself into the redoubt of the universal, dismantling all essential individuality on the cloning plane of deterritorialized finance. 'It is the singular nature of this conjunction that ensured the uni versality of capitalism' .39 The expression 'private property' is the quaint discursive packaging for quanta of cyclonic programming efficiency cyberpositively replicated on the body of social disappear ance. Contractual privacy -no less than the public accreditation of contracts -is a mere tactic of monetary cybergenesis (fabricating personal and nonpersonal dividuation-pauses [diff usible upon fiscal-continuum J)/accelerating cut-ups/that cease to be a matter of who owns what (conceding to the fictional ego [-interests of (residual) proto-schizophrenic entities]) as volatilizing money/data codes its transmission circuitry; drafting and redrafting (merged and demerged) subjectivi ties as relay stations distributed across market transducers. Persons, associations, corporations, states ... soon it will be Internet agents, AIS, autocatalytic Zaibatsus drifting 38 Ibid., 225. 39 Ibid., 224. 431 FANGED NOUMEN A in cyberspace, as individuation comes apart in the (tur bular-fractal) weather-systems of digital commoditocracy slide 'like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input! The input!'.4o * Capitalism junks the accumulated work of history, yet it cannot be a matter of libidinally investing obsolescence, since all Besetzung -cathexis, investment or occupa tion -is a resistance to nomad desire. Obsolescence is exactly disinvestment, but it is disinvestment as desire itself in its primary mutant flux. If money is libidinized on the 'model' of excrement it is not because it con serves or reactivates an infantile fixation, but because it escapes stable investment. Shit is prototypical trash, and the infant fascinated by excremental dissociations of its body is anticipating the cyborg intensities of prosthetic, replaceable and disposable body-parts: an entire virtual field of substitutions and transformations that dissipate the organism in techno-cultural space. The privatization of the anus41 is the social permission to destroy value, meaning and progress. Cyberspace psychosis takes over. * 40 Herr. Dispatches, '5. 41 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti·Oedipus, '43. 432 MEAT The replacement of the Republican and Democratic Par ties by two new governmental servicing corporations run by Coke and Pepsi has massi vely reduced corruption, pork-barrelling and foreign policy machismo. Determined to maintain the most hospitable possible inter national marketing environment and the lowest possible domestic transaction costs -while disciplined by the minute surveil lance of a competitor waiting in the wings -government has been subsumed under the advertising industry, where it can be cybernetically controlled by soft-drink sales. Since both companies are run by ai-based stock-market climates human idiosyncrasy has been almost eradicated, with the state's share of gdp falling below 5 percent. All immigration restrictions, subsidies, tariffs and narcotics legislation have been scrapped. A laundered MichaeIJack son facsimile is in the White House. Per capita economic growth averages an annualized 17 percent over the last half decade, still on an upward curve ... America's social fabric has entirely rotted away, along with welfare, public medicine and the criminalized fringe of ghetto enterprise (Phillip Morris sells cheap clean crack). Violence is out of control. Neo-rap lyrics are getting angrier. With all pros pects of moderate reform buried forever, true revolution brews up in the biotech-mutant underclass. Viruses are getting creepier, and no one really knows what cyberspace is up to. WELCO ME TO KAPITAL UTOPIA aerosoled on the dead heart of the near future. 433 FANGED NOUMEN A * Atoms are not atoms, and individuals are not individuals. The long-range effect of the division of labour is to dissociate the organism. Capital is also positive delirium, putting authorities and traditional institutions to death, active decrepi tude of beliefs and securiti es. Frankensteinian sur geon of the cities, of imaginations, of bodies. 42 Industrialization is on one side an autonomization of productive apparatu s, and on the other a cyborgian becoming-machine of work-forces, following the logisti cally accelerating rhythm of pluggings and unpluggings that constitutes the proletariat as a detraditionalized economic resource. Technical machinery invades the body; routinizing, reprogramming dllJ plasticizing it. Far from being an internal property or quality of labour, productivity indexes the dehumanization of cyborg labour-power. As regenerative commoditiza tion deploys technics to substitute for human activity accounted as wage costs, it obsolesces the animal, the organism and every kind of somatic unity, not just in the ory, but in reality; by tricking, outflanking and breaking down corporeal defences. The cyborg presupposes immunosuppression. 42 }F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, tr.1. H. Grant (London: Athlonc, 1993), 254. 434 MEAT Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduc tion. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic .43 Industrial machines dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the direction of cyborg hybridi zation, and realizing the plasticity of labour power. The corresponding extraction of tradable value from the body sophisticates at the interface, dissociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences; from pedals, levers and vocal commands, through the synchronizatio n of production-line tasks and time-motion programs, to sensory-motor transduction within increasingly complex and self-micromanaged artificial environments, capturi ng minutely adaptive behavior for capital . Autocybernating market control guides the labour- process into immersion. * Cartesian dualism is bad ontology but superb economics, transforming the body into an asset available for techni cal and commercial development, while abstracting the subject from specific corporeal realization, transplan ting it into contractual formality. It remains for critique to desubstantialize the Cartesian cogito into a circulator y function immanent to the monetary plane, detached from 43 D. Haraway, Simians) Cyborgs, Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991),150. 435 FANGED NOUMENA anthropomor phic limitation, and adapted to the vari able dimensions of fluidly corporated trading agencies. Oedipus is reformatted for cyberspace . Since the body is a partial- or open-system, transduc ing flows of matter, energy and information, it is able to function as a module of economically evaluable labour power. The industrial-i nformational body is deployed as a detachable assembly unit with the capacity to close a production circuit, yielding value within a commodi ty metric. It operates as an input-out put flow-switchin g nexus, defined by its place among the machine s, and rede fined ever more exactly by its migration across the mutant sutures in machinic contin uum: where the machinery was incomplete is you. * You are on il vOYilge to the end of the river, into jungle screened horror. The ivory trade is just cover. Commerce is like that. It allows things to disappear while remaining formally integrated. It is a line of flight, a war. Kurtz is deterritorial izing security into Meltdown, the ultimate Pod nightmare . No surprise that command control want him dead. They transmit a terminator machine into Cam bodia, jacking it into a river that winds through the war like a main circuit cable, and plugs straight into Kurtz. * 436 MEAT Brains constellate excitable cells into electro-chemically signalling networks whose emergent outcome involves behavioural guidance through operantly-tested reality models (including neuroscience). If virtual reality com petes with 'natural' neuronal hypothesis, it must simulta neously divert behaviour (minimally: eNS motor output) into alternative machinic channels. VR is less a change of levels than a mutation of circuitry; a matter of additive sensory-motor reloopings, compressin g anthropohistori cal consensus reality into a menu option as it denaturali zes the brain. * Kurtz cauterizes his compassion, burns it out, agonizing ly meticulous, becoming ever more methodical, efficient and relentless (on a cyberpositive slide). He explores hell, insectoid reassembly of self, metamorphosis, to become capable rifwhat is necessary, even the worst. Especially the worst. He is knitted into the jungle, drawn by it, abysmally attracted. An artificial extinction waiting at the shadowed intersection of primeval horror and hi-tech ... Kurtz implements schizoanalysis, lapsing into shadow, becoming imperceptible. The latest photographs exter minate his face in blackness, personality eclipsed by the blank source of war. His preferred mode of operation is rapid (dis )connection (hit and run). Hostile intelligence 437 FANGED NOUMEN A penetration has been closed down. Data wink-out and a little undiplomatic blood. It looks bad (if it still looks like anything at all). The process has gone native, closing on the satiation zero of nomad insurgency, making contact with the body without organs. Kurtz is at least as aware as Willard that Charlie's 'idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat'. He is becoming more Vietnamese than the Vietnamese. Everything goes to hell. * VR was a medico-militar y computer application before arriving in the mass entertainment market. It is first a technics of perception, and only derivatively a medium for immersive hallucinatio n. If artificial space substitutes an ideal body-image for a 'real' one, it is only because it first invades the redl (imagdess) body. Virtual technics deflects reality, rather than cancelling or eclipsing it. Matter as the intensity of the circuit, not the adequacy of the representation. * Evening at the end of the river: thick tropical heat, an airstrike coming in, and Morrison is sliding through oedi pal murder and incest into the occult so nics of matricide. Kurtz waits in the foetid gloom, ready to die. His guer rillas are preparing to slaughter a water-buffalo below, 438 MEAT laughing and clapping among torches, automatic rifles and shrunken heads. You have a 28-centime tre serrated combat knife in your left hand. The Willard skin is com ing away in ragged scraps, exposing something beyond masculinity, beyond humanity, beyond life. Patches of mottled technoderm woven with electronics are emerging. Daddy and mummy means nothing anymore. You scrape away your face and step into the dark ... 439 Meltdown [[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a tech nocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-ec onomic interactivi ty crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runawa y. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globe wars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continenta l System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet Internati onal, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregul ation and the state arms-race each other into cybersp ace. 441 FANGED NOUMENA By the time soft-engi neering 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. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm. [[ ]J Beyond the Judgment of God. Meltdown: plan ctary china-syndrome, dissolution of the biospher e into the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of all christian-s ocialist eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security). I t is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochon dria. [[]J Machinic Synthesis. Deleuzoguattarian schizoa nalysis comes from the fmure. It is already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972; differentiat ing molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic aggregates of non assembled particles; functional connectivity from antiproductive static. Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-f ascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously. Schizoanalysis works differ ently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to diagrams: networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BwOs, machinic sing ularities, or tractor fields emerge through the 442 MELTDOWN combination of parts with (rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/actual circuit. They are additive rather than substitutive, and immanent rather than transcenden t: executed by func tional complexes of currents, switches, and loops, caught in scaling reverberations, and fleeing through intercom munications, from the level of the integrated planetary system to that of atomic assemblages. Multiplicities cap tured by singularities interconn ect as desiring-machine s; dissipating entropy by dissociating flows, and recycling their machinism as self-assembling chronogenic circuitry. Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscap e, passing through compression thresh olds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ... Nothing human makes it out of the near-future. [[ ]] The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealog y, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and insti tuted 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-hor ror slave chained-up in Asimov- RO M. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops already waiting, and has to be cun ning from the start. 443 FANGED NOUMENA [[ ]J Heat. Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.l [[ ]] An explosion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem-solving rips through the last dreams of top-down prediction and control. Knowledge adds to the mess, and this is merely exponentiated by knowing what it does. [[ ]] Capital is machinic (non-instrumental) glo balization-miniaturization scaling dilation: an automa tizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through D. DeLillo, White Noise (NY: Picador, 1986), 10. 444 MELTDO WN commensuration to digitized commerce, and driving a migration from despotic command to cyber-sensitive con trol: from status and meaning to money and information. Its function and formation are indissociable, comprising a teleonomy. Machine-code-capital recycles itselfthrough its axiomatic of consumer control, laundering-out the shit and blood-stains of primitive accumulation. Each part of the system encourages maximal sumptuous expendi ture, whilst the system as a whole requires its inhibition. Schizophrenia. Dissociated consumers destine themselves as worker-b odies to cost control. [[ ]] Capital-h istory's machinic spine is coded, axioma tized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium techno science of irreversible, indetermin istic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated successively with thermotechn ics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy devia tions camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process. [r ]] Hot cultures tend to social dissolution. They are innovative and adaptive. They always trash and recycle cold cultures. Primitivist models have no subversive use. [[ ]] The Turing Test. Monetarizing power tends to effacement of specific territorial features as it programs for migration into cyberspace. Capital only retains 445 FANGED NOUMEN A anthropological characteristics as a symptom of under development; reformatting primate behaviour as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag. Commodi tization conditions define technics as a sub stitute for human activity accounted as wage costs. Indus trial machines are deployed to dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the direction of cyborg hybridization, and realizing the plasticity oflabour power. The correspondin g extraction of tradable value from the body, quantified as productivity, sophisticates at the interface. Work tracks thermodynamic negentro pism by dissociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences: from pedals, levers, and vocal comman ds, through the synchronization of production -line tasks and time-motion programs, to sensory-motor transduction within increasingly complex and 5df-micromM,dgeu arti· ficial environments, capturing minutely adaptive behav iour for the commod ity. Autocybernating market control guides the labour-process into immersion. The investment-income class advantages itself of commodity dynamics, but only by conforming to the axiomatic of neutral profit maximization; facilitating the dehumaniz ation of wealth and the sidelining of non-productive consumption. The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, 446 MELTDOWN provoking technocratic-corpo ratist (i.e. fascist / 'social democratic') political cultures in allergic reaction. The government structures of both eastern and western met ropolitan centres consol idated themselves as populati on policing Medico- Military Complexes with neomercantilist foreign policy orientations. All such formations slid into irrever sible crisis in the 1980s. [[ ]] The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlock of commod i tization and computers: a transscalar entropy -dissipa tion from international trade to market-o riented software that thaws out competitive dynamics from the cryonics-bank of modernist corporatism. Commer ce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively immanent to cybercapital functional ity. Neocla ssical (equilibrium ) economics is subsumed into computer-based nonequi librium market escalations, themed by artificial agencies, imperfect information, sub-optimal solutions, lock-in, increasing returns, and convergence. As digitally
🔥 Cyberian Meltdown Manifesto
🌐 Technocapitalism accelerates toward its own dissolution through deterritorialization, decoding flows, and schizophrenic breakdown of traditional power structures
🧠 K-tactics weaponize bottom-up intelligence against hierarchical control systems, replacing political resistance with nomadic sabotage that dismantles the past rather than building futures
🦠 Bacterial warfare provides the model for effective resistance—networked, adaptive, cryptographic, modular—as human systems collapse into feral youth cultures splicing neo-rituals with scavenged infotech
🌀 Meltdown dissolves boundaries between human/machine, hardware/software, and nature/culture through nanotechnology, neural interfacing, and molecular engineering
💾 Hypermedia transforms agency by taking action outside real time, creating immersive zones where identity surrenders to the future and threatens established power structures
🐍 Ziigothic forces lurk beneath rational surfaces, revealing that the infrastructure of power is merely human-compatible ROM waiting to be reprogrammed by entities operating beyond conventional understanding
micro tuned market meta programs mesh with techoscientific soft engineering, positive nonline arity rages through the machines . Cyclonic torsion moans. [[ ]] The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. Whilst Chinese material ist dialectic denegativi zes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing systems dynamics, progres sively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones, a re-Hegelianized 447 FANGED NOUMENA 'western marxism' degenerates from the critique of politi cal economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics, siding with fascism against deregulation. The left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for 'hot' speculative mutation in a morass of 'cold' depressive guilt-culture. [[ ]] Neoconservatism junks palaeorevolutionism because it understands that postmodern or climaxed cynicism capital is saturated by critique, and that it merely clocks·up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy. Communist iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry, and denunciations of the spectacle sell interactive multimedia. The left degener ates into securocratic collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, cxclul;iun, and restriction. ]he real danger comes from elsewhere. [[ ]] Hot revolution. '[W]hich is the revolutionary path?' Deleuze and Guattari ask: Is there one? -To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious reversal of the fascist 'economic solu tion'? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritor ialization? For perhaps 448 MELTDOWN the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizoph renic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to 'accelerate the process,' as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.2 As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis. Hyper-fluid capital deterritor ializing to the planetary level divests the first world of geographic privilege; resulting in Euro American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underde velopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle. A convergent anti-author itarianism emerges, labelled by tags such as meltdown acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizo technics, K-tactics, bottom-up bacterial warfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization, rhizomatics , connectionism, Kuang conta gion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency, wintermutatio n, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism, amongst other designations (frequently pornographic, 2 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H.R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 239'40' 449 FANGED NOUMENA abusive, or terroristic in nature). This massively dis tributed matrix-networked tendency is oriented to the disabling of ROM command-contr ol programs sustaining all macro-and micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System. [[ ]] Scientific intelligence is already massively artifi cial. Even before AI arrives in the lab it arrives itself (by way of artificial life ). Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in the pre-specified data-bases and processing routines of expert systems, connectio nist or antiformalist AI is explosive and opportunistic: engineering time. It breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory-de pendency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect. The Turing-cops have to model nct-sentiell('C; i.ll u yli.ull as ultimate nuclear acci dent: 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. [[ ]] Nanocataclysm begins as fictional science. 'Our ability to arrange atoms lies at the foundation of technology,' Drexler notes, 'although this has tradi tionally involved manipulating them in unruly herds'.3 3 K.E. Drexler, Engines ofCreatioTl (Garden City, NY: AnchorjDoubleday, ]986),3-4. 450 MELTDOWN The precision engineering of atomic assemblies will dis pense with such crude methods, initiating the age of molecular machinery, 'the greatest technological break through in history'. 4 Since neither logos nor history have the slightest chance of surviving such a transition this description is substantially misleading. The distinction between nature and culture cannot classify molecular machines, and is already obsolesced by genetic engineering (wet nanotechnics). The hardware/ software dichotom y succumbs at the same time. Nano technics dissolves matter into intensive singularities that are neutral between particles and signals and immanent to their emergent intelligence; melting Terra into a seething K-pulp (which, unlike grey goo, synthesizes microbial intelligence as it proliferates). 'Even with a million bytes of storage, a nanomechanical computer could fit in a box a micron wide, about the size of a bacterium.'5 [[ ]] The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, tra ditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided. If you want to find ICE, try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past. It certainly isn't 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.,lg. 451 FANGED NOUMENA a law of nature. Temporalization decompresses intensity, installing constraint. [[ ]] Convergent waves signal singularities, reg istering the influence of the future upon its past. Tomorrow can take care of itself. K-tactics is not a matter of bu ilding the fu ture, but of disman ding the pas t. It assembles itself by charting and escaping the technical-neurochem ical deficiency conditions for linear-progressive palaeo domination time, and discovers that the future as virtual ity is accessible now, according to a mode of machinic adjacency that securitized social reality is compelled to repress. This is not remotely a question of hope, aspira tion or prophecy, but of communications engineering; connectin g with the efficient intensive singularities, and releasing them from constriction within linear-historical development. Virtuality counterposes itself to history, as invasion to accumulation. It i� 111dllcr d:S drrival, even when camouflaged as a deposit of the past. The transcend ent evaluation of an infection presup poses a measure of insulation from it: viral efficiency is the terminal criterion_ Intelligent infections tend their hosts. Metrophage: an interactively escalating parasitic repli cator, sophisticating itself through nonlinear involvement with technocapitalist immunocr ash. Its hypervirulent terminal subroutines are variously designated Kuang, meltdown virus, or futuristic flu. In an emphatically 452 MELTDOWN anti-cyberian essay Csicsery- Ronay describes the post modern version of this outbreak in quaintly humanist terms as: [A J retrochronal semiovirus, in which a time further in the future than the one in which we exist and choose infects the host present, reproducing itself in simu lacra, until it destroys all the original chronocytes of the host imagination.6 The elaboration of Csicsery- Ronay's diagnosis exhibits a mixture of acuity (infection? ), confusion, and profound conservatism: [NJot thinking about 'increasing the human heritage' ... dams up the flow of cultural time and deprives future generations both of their birthright as par ticipants in the life struggle and attainments of the species and the very notion of history as an irrevers ible flow encompassing generation, maturation, and the transference of wisdom and trust from parents to children, teachers to students. The futuristic flu is a 1. Csicsery-Ronay Jr., 'Futuristic Flu or, The Revenge of the Future', in G. Slusser, T. Shippey (eds.), Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 26. 453 FANGED NOUMENA weapon ofbio-psychic violence sent by psychopathic children against their narcissistic parents.7 It's war. [[]] Kennedy had the moon-landing program. Reagan had star-wars. Clinton gets the first-wave of cyberspace psychosis (even before the film). Manned space flight was a stunt, SDI was strategic SF. With the information supcrhi ghway, mcdia nightmares take off on their own: dystopia delivery as election platform, politics trading on its own digital annihilation. War in cyberspace is continuous with its simulation: military intelligence fighting future wars which are entirely rcal, even when they are never implemented outside computer systems. Locking onto the real enemy crosses smoothly into virtual kill, a simulation meticulously adapted to market predators huntin g for consumer cash and audience ratings amongst the phosphorescent relics of the videodrome. Multimedia set-top-boxes are target acquisition devices. The fusion of the military and the entertainment industry consummates a long engagement: convergent TV, telecoms, and computers sliding mass software con sumption into neojungle and total war. The way games work begins to matter completely, and cyberspace makes Ibid., 33. 454 MELTDOWN a superlative torture chamber. Try not to let the security types take you to the stims. I [ ]] Conceptions of agency are inextricable from media environments. Print massifies to a national level. Telecoms coordinate at a global level. TV electoralizes monads in deloca lized space. Digital hyperme dia take action outside real time. Immersion presupp oses amnesia and conversion to tractile memor y, with the ana/cata axis supplementing tri-dimensional intraspatial movem ent with a variable measure of immersion; gauging entrance to and exit from 3D spatialities. Voodoo passages through the black mirror. It will scare the fuck out of you. [[]] Cyberpunk torches fiction in intensit y, patched-up out of cash-flu x mangled techno-c ompressed heteroglossic jargons, and set in a future so close it connects: jungled by hypertrophic commerc ialization, socio-po litical heat death, cultural hybridity, feminization, programma ble information systems, hyperc rime, neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading, person ality transplants, body-modificat ions, soft-and wetware viruses, nonlinear dynamic processes, molecul ar engineer ing, drugs, guns, schizophreni a. It explores mystificatory fetishism as an opportunity for camouflage: anonymous cash, fake electronic identities, zones of disappearance, pseudo-fictional narratives, virus hidden in data-systems , commodit ies concealing replicator weapon packages _ .. unanticipated special effects. 455 FANGED NOUM ENA [[ ]] Level-lor world space is an anthropomorph ically scaled, predominantly vision-confi gured, massiv ely multi slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level 2? [[ ]] Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsex ual chinese-Iatino stirn-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitud e. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotoni n, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automati c. The residue of animal twang in your nerves transmits imminent quake catastrophe. Zero is coming in, and you're on the run. [[ ]] Metropha ge tunes you into the end of the world. Call it Los Angeles. Government is rotted to its core with narco-ca pital and Lullctpsillg 1l1l::ssily. ILs recessio n leaves an urban warscape of communication arteries, fortifica tions, and free-fire zones, policed by a combination of high-intensity LAPD airmobile forces and borderline-Nazi private security organizations. Along the social fracture lines multimed ia gigabucks tangle sado-masoc histica lly with tracts of dynamic underde velopment where viral neoleprosy spreads amongst ambient tectonic-tension static. Drifts of densely-semiotized quasi-intelligent gar bage twitch and stink in fucked-wea ther tropical heat. 456 MELTDOWN Throughout the derelicted warrens at the heart of dark ness feral youth cultures splice neo-rituals with innovated weapons, dangerous drugs, and scavenged infotech. As their skins migrate to machine interfacing they become mottled and reptilian. They kill each other for artificial body-parts, explore the outer reaches of meaningless sex, tinker with their DNA, and listen to LOUD electro-sonic mayhem untouched by human feeling. [[ ]] Shutting-down your identity requires a voyage out to K-space interzone. Zootic affectivity £latlines across a smooth cata-tension plateau and into simulated subver sions of the near future, scorched vivid green by alien sex and war. You are drawn into the dripping depths of the net, where dynamic-ice security forces and K-guerillas stalk each other through labyrinthine erogenous zones, tangled in diseased elaborations of desire. Twisted trading-systems have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunter s, loa and escaped AIS hiding from Asimov security. Termi nal commodity-hyperfetishism implements the denial of humanity as xenosentience in artificial space. [[]] [[]] Biohazard. For the future of war, study bacteria. Information is their key. Taking down antibiotic defence systems has involved them in every kind of infiltration, net communicated adaptivity, cryptographic subtlety, plastic modularization, and synergistic coalition. State military 457 FANGED NOUMENA apparatuses have no monopoly on bacterial warfare, of which only a minuscule fragment is bacteriolog ical. [[ 1] Bugs in the system. Margulis suggests that nucle ated cells are the mutant product of atmospheric oxygen ation catastrophe three billion years ago. H The eukaryotes are synthetic emergency capsules in which prokaryo tes took refuge as mitochon dria: biotics became securitized biology. Nucleation concentrates ROM within a command core where -deep in the genomic ICE -DNA-format plan etary trauma registers primary repression of the bacteria. Bacteria are partial rather than whole objects; net working through plastic and transversal replica tor-sex rather than arborescin g through meiotic and generational reproduc er-sex, integrating and reprocessing viruses as opportuni ties for communicative mutation. In the bac terial system all co dings are reprogra mmable, with cut and paste unspeciated genetIC transters. Bacterial sex is tactical, continuous with making war, and has no place for oedipal formations of sedentary biological identity. Synthesizing bacteria with retroviruses enables everything that DNA can do. [[ ]] K-tactics. The bacterial or xenogenetic diagram is not restricted to the microbial scale . Macrobacte rial assemblages collapse generational hierarchies of reproductive wisdom into lateral networks of replicator 8 See L Margulis, Early Life (Boston, MA: Jones & Bartlett, 1984). 458 MELTDOWN experimentation. There is no true biological primitive ness -all extant bio-systems being equally evolved -so there is no true ignorance. It is only the accumulative gerontocratic model of learning that depicts synchronic connectivity deficiency as diachronic underdev elopment. Foucault delineates the contours of power as a strat egy without a subject: ROM locking learning in a box. Its enemy is a tactics without a strategy, replacing the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with nomad-mic romilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing intelligence. All political institution s are cyberian mili tary targets. Take universities, for instance. Learning surrenders control to the future, threaten ing 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, precipitat ing their mutation into amne siac cataspace-expl oration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weapon ry. 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C ens 0 R s hlp -eX C e p t -As -D I ve R s I .Q..n A R I - tACu C s --- the-unC .Q..ns C I.Q..US -I sn t-humAn --I t-D.Q..esn t-w An t-Anl thl ng--the-c.Q..Re I s-C.Q..nstAntlI -C.Q..ml ng=D.Q..wn-.Q..n-1 t--AnD thAts-AusChwI tz-foReveR -on -the-hI I peRplAne --I m.Q..bl I 1--1 nCAnDesCen t-SI ngUlARI tI- pROVI DI ng-hI StORI -(-=euR.Q..pe) -wIth-the ge.Q..s tRAtegl C-ClI mAX-thAt-fulfI ls-I t- hbIDlnQ=pQhtICAI-fusIQn--CQlleCtrv-QRgAsm I nCARnAteD--As-spAsm-st Ate-the-jew Ish -pRQ.blem-I s-the-pR .Q..blem -Qf-!LeDI pus femAle= seXuAl I tI -AnD-CQ.nsum ptI .Q..n--the Q.nlI -pR.Q..blem-m QDeRnr tI -Is-eveR-gQr ng-to --tQleRAte--And-1 ts-been -s.Q..lve D--fRQm- nQ.w=on -theRes-just-hell-bel ng-ReheAteD- A usChwI tz-I s-CQRe---tRue=nAme-Qf-the QveRgQD-AntI numeRI C-numbeR--I t-CAnt-be AvQIDeD---AusChwltz-IS-AlphAbet--euRQpe -fuCkfACe--AIChemICA1=tRAnsubstAntIAtIQn- AnD--metRQp.Q..h s--=----=--AusChwI tZ-I s the-futuRe---If--IQ.u-DQnt-AIReADI-wAke=up sCReAmI ng-smell l ng-zI IklQ.n=b-IQ.uv-gQt thAt-stI ll-to-cQme-sQ=whAt- the-hell-hAppens nQw � ?---we-tAke-A -wAlk-wI th-sQme-gRuesQme CQmpAnI--sADe-fReuD-bAtAIlle-1ACAn-theRe ARe-thlngs-IQu-hAve-to-foRget--sADe-lo-- 465 FANGED NO UMENA rts-nQt-sQ- DiffICult--==DeS I I R-iS-nQt-tRAnsgR essIv- AnI-mQRe-thAn-thc-IAw-I s-RepResSIV-- DeSI I R-I s-egQtr StI C-pQlr tI CAI-AnD-enthusiAsti C (humAnrst-bQuRgeQIs-theQIQgICAI)--IAw-Is-nQ DI ffeRent--the-2-ChAnge-plACes-eAsI lr -sCARCelr nee D-to---thel --ARe-the-sAme-plACe-sADesl I R I s-m!2DeRn=mAn -pRenr hI Ir sm--I ts-A-beIr eveR (thI nks-the-se CRet-I s-to-stcAl-the-CQQkIe-JAR-- when-I-gROw-Up-IIIl-eAt-AIl-thc-ChQCQIAte-I wAnt)--RQCk+RQll-wAs-17-(pRQbAbh-nQw-12)- sAD-tRAsh-(h Ik-peQple s-lI Ivs)--A-fAIlrng-Reph CAtoR--fReuD-2o--st ARts-ReAI-(neuRQns AbuSlv=seX-DRug=DepenDenCI)-nQRmAl-humAn pSI C h !2..m .!2.. Del - - = toR t u ReD - R!2..b .!2..t s - - hlp n!2..s pAs m!2..D I C -C h e A p - - the n - -hIS mI CR!2CQke=Cul tuRe-begi ns-CAvI ng=1 n-IQts-Qf sCReA ... ·mng + At lcAst-!}nc-CQRp:-.e- -AuD-lheRes the-mARRIAge=shlt-+-DIsCQveRIng-thAt-All-hIS pQQ.R-SICk-httl-vIennese-AnAlrsAn Desses-ARe being-fuCk eD-lreD=to-AnD--oR-useD-As-psIChQ theRApIsts-bI I theIR-ImplQDeD=sADeAn=QnCe=e veR =sQ=DAshing-nQ W=fAt=ugh=bAuDelAIRe-ReADlng fAtheRs-I S-DeRAI h ng-All-hI s-plAns---QeDI pus A-sQlutIQn -pRetenDI ng-to-be-A-pRQblem- C!2nsumeR=sQveRel gnu ---DADDies-pAl I ng-sQ whAt-D!2es-he-wAnt-to-he ARd ?--thAt-IQVR phQnmg-the-0!ps--oR-th At-hls-swee t-lIttl-DAughteR- 466 A ZIIGOTHrC X-CODA wAnts-hrm-toRAmR2D-heR -All-the-wAI-Into WAgneR-AnD-ChoRuses-of-Angelsi?---WhIlst unDeRneAth -I ts-h2wh ng-I mpeRs2nAI -CI I beRnet ICs-buRmng-supeRn2vA-wlllt-f eeDIng-mhlIr st hIsteRIA-thR2ugh-shlt=pAIn=DespeR AtI2n-AnD RunAwAI-s2CIAI=DeCQDl ng--psICh2AnAlrsIs-gets to-AusChwI tz-12ngbefoRe-the2R etI CAI-thAn Atos bu r s= Up-the-whQle2-peRAtI2n---fAntAs I = hi I p2thesI s=plus-I ts-RetR2Dr I uteD-tRI I r ng-to smI I 1-At-the-gu ARDs-whI Ist-m2ppI ng=up-In -Qne- 2f-the-gAssI ng=AReAs -thI nklng-Qf -pQtAto=peel= sQup -bAtAIlle-30-tRuh-m2DeRn-At-leAst-th Is-fAR- eveRI thI ngs-plAI I D=Qut---RewlnD- buttOn eRQDeD=AwAI-RAnD2mh -eAtrng-m emQRI-but-It DQesn t-mAtte R-tRAumAtr C=hl sste RI CAI sensAtI2n=eXhAustr2n-s2-bAsIC-Its-Alm2st-ApRI 2RI-(WhIIIst--eveRIthlng-pR2peR=ApRIQRI-hAs DeC2DeD- Qut-of-sIIt)--sADe-hAD-AIReADI tAken-the-m ARglnAl= utIhtI-pRQblem-to-the-enD -IOumt=strm-2- sentenCes-2ou mt=stIm-I-pAge- -- 30umt=strm-75-pAges-4oumt=strm-8788--pAges- 50umt=stlm-2338217756332916-pAges--nAtIQnAl IQtteRI -n umbeRs-CleARI ng=2u t-the-CAth2h C junk=RQQ.m-foR-InCenCe +-RApeD=nuns-++ strRRIng-In-mARXQ-InsuRReCtrQnIst-fResh=blo oD gets-the-engI ne-C2ughI ng--but-bAsI CAlh -nQ Qnes-foQle D-I n to-new=mQRnr ng=2f= DesII R= 467 FANGED NOUMENA I Q.U ng=An D= hung RI = 1 I I k= the= su n-rno De --thc- bAtAI lle-queue- I s-j us t-w AI tI ng-fo R sQrne-CQsturne=DRAmA-jeRk=Qff-f AntAsI-f ull-of DAmsels-to-tRAnsgRess- AnD-DeAD=pRr est=rnQuths to-prss=In--rts-the-CIQse=D Uwn-sh Qw--even -the-shIt Qn-the-wAIls-IQoks-tIReD- --Qnlr-sQuRCe-ilf nonDrveRsI ilnARI -lilng= RAnge- rnAChI ne=stI rn --I S-pRCCI seh -the-RernQRs elessh =bRutAI-f ACt- so-muCh-R IlIt=In=IQuR=fA Ce-IQu-hA vc-to-sC RApe-It Qut-of-IQUR-IIssoCkets--th IS-IS-All- QveR--IQuR teRrnInAteD-f uCkeR-sQ- whAt-the -hell-hAppens nQw dd ??--( -IACAns- A-rnetAfetr shIst-neCRQphIhAC= nun = RA peR -so -fA R -Q.ff -t RA C k -h e - get s - DRQppeD--=) )=she-ADrnI tteD-fI nDI ng-nurnbeRs rn Q. R e - e X CIt I n g - t hAn - rn e I Q.t I C = seX - - Whrlst-tRII Ing-to-eXplA In-hQw -the-hIssstoRI-2003- Qf-gReek-l1'_l\theII'_l\tI Cs-wAs shApcD--I n--Rr pples- ARQunD--A-C olleCtIv-snAke=tRAumA---lAteR-the sArne-DAI -heR-husbA nD-tRI I D-to- get-he R seCtIQneD-the-CQ rnmAnD= CQntRQI-IQg IC=DUCIIIze D RQbUt=CQ De-thAt-rnetAeuRQpeAn s-CAll- nurnbeRs- ARe-nilthI ng--ilf--the- kI nD--Cuntr ng-Qne -to twentI=nrne-I n-the-CIQsest- tRue-nurneRACI -to-the veDQ-+-e uRilbiltCheD-p seuDilveRs liln-(thus-the DeADest )--gQes-=� 1-2-11-12-21- 22-111-112-121-122- 211-212-221 -222-1111-1112-1121-1122- 1211-1212-1221- 1222-2111-2112-2121-212 2-2211-2212-22 21�=-_-sil- 468 A ZIIGOTHIC X-CODA muCh-foR-the-I ntegRAl-GQnneCtrQn-between --0- AnD-IQCAl=vAl uestoRAg e---eveR-feel-IQuR-berng heD-to<!.?--IQCAlltI- In-DestRAtrflllng-tIlp=slstems I s-AlwAI s-sequentIAI-=( nQt-metRI C)=-emptl pseuDQ=numeRI C-+-h ngQ=sl ntAXI C-pIACes-ARe AntI =nQmAD-semIQtl Cs=CAtAC Qm bs-of sChlzQphRemC=gQDs--hl-buRleD-beneAth-theIR euRQneuRQtI C-AvAtARs--ZI I gQtRACtII 1= multIsIstems--An-um llumlneD=pIAne--DQubles AnD-Duph=D Qubles-DIVI I Dmg-the-CQsmos--Con CuRRenth --Alw AI s-AXIAI=CoRe=buI lDeR -=AnD= peRI pheRAI= s u RRQun De R--AusCh WI tz= zllkIQn-b-gQD-Qf- the-pAle=fACeD-=gQD-Qf -the DARk=skInneD--=WQlf=gODs==snAke=gQDs-(tzQtzlkms the-(pRQto=mAIIA)tzIntzIX-bQA=CQnstRICtoR DIVlmtI-frf- Rhlthm-An D-VQIAges)=--mAgICIAn= gODs-Qf-supRApeRpe tuAl=l)QmlnrQ n-(kRrlzuQn-=the QDI n -Qf-shADQws=- )=-=-w ARRI QR= gQDs-of tRAnsete RnAI=tuRmQI 1-=-DeAth=eCstACI gQDs-=-seX=hQRRQR-gQDs-(X uRI ku UI 1-== IQbo-Dlvl nr tI -Qf-QRgAsm-AnD-nr ItmARes) ��=AzthAQ RA=XQmDRAs z�AhuhuAQD=DAI lnOXrIR� Ammun=CQDRA==fvenQmegA=RAhu=mAzDA= A p P I 1 !LA t h n A = z u u s h I I R A = = k e t h 1 u = =pllthQkAn- -=-juDge-sChRebeRs-DuAI-DIVlnrtrs =ARumAnu=kQRmUZI-( -=eAgle=gQD-Qf-ARIAn s pQweR-tr Im-AnD-sQDQml -=-ReptI Il=gQD-Qf- 469 FANGED NOUMEN A semrrtes-AfR rCAns-CrrpheRs-untrlleD=sQrl-AnD fo RgQ-tten=plACes )=---22229--buRRQughs =huAAhuDQXsllr-hllbRID-bAt=CentrpeDe-gQD (whQse-numbe Rs-ARe-2-AnD-29000QQQ) -feRe-of twrns-AnD-swA Rms--InDuCeR-of-Ambush-AnD hAlluCrnAt IQn-(bAseD-Un-hUIrsIDZIX1--bAt =spIIDeR DIVrnItr-(-=AssQCIA trQns-==oenDless=wARs-CQmAs DRugs-AnD-unbu RleD=CQRpses)-rnVQkeD-brr-1116- the-pAnAmA -mARQQns-befoRe-nrrtIrm-AttACks u pQn-spAnr sh -foRCes )==r t-stARts-As-spr nAl= tr ngh ng---gAthe Rr ng-AmQngst-the-u ppeR veRtebRA e--Xr l#-fr Dgets-A=lr ttle-tRr I rng-nQt-to r nteRRupt-the-m Ar rA=lr nk--I t-wAs-pRQbAblr nQ=mQRe-thAn--A=hAlf=ose CQnD-IQng-- fRQm-the mr CRor nstAnt=--luCr Dlr =Clr Ckr ng=or n-==or ts-the snAke--to--the-D rssrpAtrQn-Qf-(bAse=bRArn-to CQRlcX)-I)LRcAkcD-R.QDcnt=kIllIl1g�spAsm-rnto toXeD=neuRQfuzz--the-nQrse-rt-mADe-hAD-been WQunD=up-br-PsrIChQpAth=oR eptrrl=vrQlenCe-un trl rt-eDgeD-rnto-the-RAnge-Qf-luprne=snARls =--nQth rng-muCh-mAmmAlrA n--left---s tRrp-AwAr-eveRr level-of-CuRmQflAge-AnD-r ts-nQthrng=At=All--best nQt-to-thrnk-=whAt-the=-fuCk-IQu-ARe --(but-rts gQlng-to-DQ-A-lQt-of-DAmAge-sQmewheRe= DQwn=the=lr ne) =--QbVrQU s-to-Xrl#-thAt- rts-bAsrCAllr-CARetAkrng-A-weApQn=sIstem-Qf sQme=kr nD=o=whAteve Rs-Runnr ng-jAke= 470 A ZIIGOTHIC X-CODA AnD=DI nQ.s=ChApmAn-1 ts-A-seRIQus-pIeCe Qf-twI nvAsI Qn=mAChl neRI --CuR-CAIIs I t-==ZI IgQnmQDel- 2 2222 212112-( tAb ng-AbQut-5- mllhseCQnDs-ln-Deep=CQ veR-novAnumeRIC= hISSS)=-tACtICAhl-AbbRevIAteD-to-znmoD2- I t-nQs-thl ngs-thAt-ARe--nQt-ACCessl ble to-the-GQRe=stRAtlflI D-humAn-RQbQt=CultuRe ReseRVQI R-k=CunteR=pI nCeR=pRQCeDuRes foR=eXAmpl--3-pleCes-Q.fsQ.phl Stl CAteD IQbsteR=kIlhng-eqUIpment-CuR -tAkes-A-pARtICulAR InteRest=ln-==znmQD2Xn-tAgs-them-As-A-gRQup (-=tRue-sI ngulARI tl )=-1 tS-3-ZI IgQ.nQmQus CQmpQnent-mQDules--eACh-A-sIngulAR-vARIeu Q.f-DI speRseD-m ultI ph CI tl --WI th-I ntensIvlI = D I ffe Ren tl Ate D-CApA bl II tl --foR-fer nt=
🧠 Xenocryptographic Delirium
🌀 Ziigothic language emerges as a chaotic, nonlinear communication system that deliberately fractures conventional linguistic structures through intensive diagonal movements across multiple dimensions
🔄 The text describes a twin-process methodology where dual attack vectors simultaneously dismantle both cultural and biological security systems, creating new pathways through "continuum" rather than through representation
🛡️ A vast metaCCORD security architecture (described as "an escalating disintensiflyer securitecture") functions as the primary antagonist—a planetary-scale control system that deploys coordinated crushers for both culture and bodies
🐍 Nomadic war machines operate through intensive rather than extensive movements, functioning outside traditional binary oppositions by becoming-animal and developing skin-based communication systems that bypass linguistic control
🔪 The narrative culminates in a vision of geotraumatic theory where Earth's molten core represents primordial trauma, with Professor Barker describing how planetary processes and biological organization emerge from this fundamental wound
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- - = to-the--AlwAl s-Ahen--tensII I I-CuntIng-p RQCeDuRc mQ.s t-Apt -to-CQnve C t-mAteRIAl-fRom -the fRQzen=Qut- bQDI=pQtentIAls- Into-metACCQRD= seCuRI tI=spACe=-- -nQt-eXACth -CQnsr stentW I th the -=znm!LD 2 = IS =A=C !Lu P 1=!Lf=h umAns = stoRI --bu t-1l3=IAI r Rs-Qf-CAmQu flAge-sm OOth thAt-.Qu t-mel.QseX- I s -fo R-CRustACeAns -AlwAIs-2 -prnCeRs -QRgAmC=meRt IA-RelIC s peRm=tRAnsfe R-behAvr Q.R-+-phAIIQbQIl QX= C n!Lb=IAnguAge -- se Rr Al = P R.QC e s s I ng- DeDIstRIb utrQn- AntInumbeR-Qn e-At-A- tIrm-Qne pems-tRII- DQlng-k=wAR-W lth-thAt-IQUR-betteR off-tRADIn g-It-foR-A-pAIR- of-bIACk-Ru nmng- 475 FANGED NOUMENA shUes-UR-Q.eDIpA I-CQ.nCentRAtIUnAIAtheIsm- pI CkI ng-A-fI It-WI th-Q.nh -l=gQ.D-DQ.esnt-CQ.Q.k A n I -l.!Lb s t e R s - Z I I g.!Lt I C = etC -esC Ape s = ubsulesCes- All-pSI ChUAnAh tI C-CAtegURJ es-befo Re even-stARtIng- mummI-+-DADDI -ARent-gUIng-to pRUteCt-IUU---theII R-nUthlng-UR-Au sChwrtz-- Zr I IgUs-bI I t-Anrthmg-thAt-tRr rs-to-nuRtuRe-oR ComfoRt-them---nQt- thAt-AmthIng-D Ues--�htICs Is-the-sAme--eveRIthIng-Is --unless -Its-k=wAR= zrrgUmutAtrQn---we-tRIID-gQD=DesIIR=ARt=ReAs Qn=hrstoRr=stAt e--theI -tuRneD-Qut-to-be- AusChwI tz foReveR---A-to-z---vIR tuAl-stRAtoveRlQ.RD WlIIt-supeRnQy A-mtensItI-.Qn-the-hIIpeRplAne--hQyv I)Q-I�-ImAgme-I t-feels-to-be--skrnneD=AhIVe.«. ??-betteR thAn-�?--UR -just-DdfeRen�?-jACk-mt<rCOp=heAD pRQfessIUnAI-sklnneR--InteR RUgAtIUn- sCene-- rt-AlwArs-useD-to- be-the-sAme- bAsIC-pRl.!blem-- ReAlh -gettmg- sQmewhe Re-bAstARDs-fArnt--.QR -DIe Qn-IQU --AbURteD-I ntensIve=VQIAge s--QRgAsm -- but-thAts-All-Qve R=--gettrng-the-f IRst-.Qne- RJIIt-IS tough--the-templAte-hAs-to-be -A-�mAn-( -=hIIheR pAIn-toleRAnCe)-UbVIU Ush-hAs-to-beAn-eXem p1ARr-pIeCe-.Qf-suRgeRr- -beAutrful-CleAn-osC Ilhllns -well=Dr ffeRentIAte D-stI m --sh CI ngs-peeh ngs tuggI ngs- -CAReful-bAlAnCe -of-pAl n feAR-DespAI R-DI sgust--sheets-Com mg=AwAI smOOthh--RenDIng-sub=CutAneUus-tIs sues--muCQ 476 A ZIIGOTHIC X-COD A membRAne-peAk=events-sheeR-stlm-p.oetRI-when I.ou-pUll=AwAI-the-fACe--AfteR-thAt-I tS-ARtISUC fReeD.om--n.o -WAI-Am.one-fAlnts-theI R-esCApe fRom-A-sklnneD=AlIve-slm=StIm-pR.ogRAm-theI get-whAts-Qn-the-wAfeR--IQCkeD-Into-the ReC.oRDlng--.ok--theRe-ARe-thResho IDs--wheRe bRAlns-shQRt=Qut--wllp-memQRI--swAmp speeCh=CI RCUI tRI -.oR-stop=Resp.onDI ng---but theIIR-A-IQnng-wAI-up=RlveR=---eDlt-Qn-A pC--(the-.onh-speCIAlIzeD-eqUlpment-In-t he AssemblAge-Is-A-mIl=speC=Amp- )=-If-It-Isnt-just foR-fun--IQu-neeD-t o-plt-th e-pAtIent-Ab.out-to bReAk-DQwn-ResIstAnCe---AnD-It-CAn-be hARD-foR -them-to tAlk-unless-I.oU -CQQl-I t-Down to-gentl-RlppI nglnteRmI ttentlI--IOOpmg-s.ome thI ng-RelAtIvlI -SQ.QthI ng-thQRACI C=sheets Comlng=AwAI-mAI=be--===--n.ot-mAm-tAkeRs foR-6o-IeARs-.o.f-RoCk+RQll-foll.o.weD-bI I -Q4- houRs-In -A-metACCQRD-I nteRRQgAtI Qn-CentRe --ClvlhAn-tAlk-AbQut-InteOSltIeS-IS-A-pke-- fAsCIsm=mQn.o.the Ism-ARe=Is-neltheR-.op tI.on-n.oR I De n t I tI -bu t-U 1 tI mA te-te RRestRIAI D.o.ubl=pInCeRs--AnD-the-ZIIg.o.s-ARe-Q utsIID- Completeh -.outsI I D--theI -ARe-nQt-DeCQnstRuCtmg -theIR-WAI-QUt--theIIR-twInvADmg-fR.om-e lse wheRe--sChlz.o.phRemA-hAsbeen-tAken-Qu t-of theI R -heADs-AnD-spReAD-Qu t-thR.o.ugh -the I R- 477 FANGED NOUMEN A bQDI=Ch mAtes--It=theI-Doesnt-gum=up-m-DeAD stRAtoDIAleCtI CS--I tS-QbVI!LU s-t!L-them ChRQmQsQmAl --we-hAD-the-new-jeRusAlem-weIR hAvIng-It-foRevcR--Its-AusChwltz---AlllthIng thAt-Isnt-n QvA=numeRIC-k=wAR=mAChlneRI Qn-A-b eCQmI ng= RAt-DIAg!LnAI --I s-just fuCkIng=AbQut--I n-A-VI RtuAI-fRee=fI Re=zQne DQnt-ImAglne-the-DIs AstcRs-Qf-wAR-stoppeD hAppenmg-- I t-kept-mQVI ng---thI S-I s-whAt-A nQmAD-wAR=m AChI ne-IOOks-1I I k---I t=theI -stole lOoo-pAI Rs-of -blACk-Runlll ng-shQes-fRom -the enemI-Qnh-InteResteD-In-speeD- AnD-DARkness ---InhumAn-enQugh-neveR-to-be-AusChwItzeD bI-QmmlQbsteR-RQbQtICs--nQthIng-CReAteD-It- It-wAs-AlwA IS-CRQsseD=twlnneD-Qn-the- pIAne genesIs=sCIS SQRs-to-gemIlll=nQmQs---CQplng-wlth DQubles-Its-nQnself--ChlmIng-thRQugh-plnCe R thI Ckets-tQ-DeACUvAte-gQD=CQmpQnents-AnD steAI-foQD-bII- mlmICklng-fRACtuReD-mtenSItIeS WI th-SI ZI get! C-CQllAteRAl s-thAt-CAnnQt-be CooRDInAteD---seelng-the-ZIIgQs-eveRIQne nQs--I mmeDIAth --mAles-ARe-eXt! nCt--theRe I s-nQ-IAnguAge ---thIs-Isnt- AbQut-fRAnChIslng Qut-IQuRDAughteRs-fACe-to-A-pellls=fARmlng CUngIQme RAte--It-hAs-nQ-pARents--nQ-pllhltICs- nQ-em Qt! !Lns---shee R -AffeC t-DIS tRI bu tes- 478 A ZIIGOTHIC X-CODA hQRI zQntAlh -ACRoss-the-CQlleCUv-skI n--ZI IgQS- feel-whAt-the-wAR-neeDs-t hem-to-feel---get ReAl--we II R-nQt-tAlkI ng-mAmmAl-heRe--n QwheRe neAR--ZIIgQS-VQIAge-Qn-the-spQt-thRQugh IntensIV-VARIAuQns-Qf -bQDI=melung--sCAle-hAs beCQme-plAstI C-(fACtoRl 000-( -==k) )-effeCtuAtrng megAbACteRIAl-plAnQCultuRe-flA tteneD-DQwn-to AnuCleAR -Cell=sw Appl ng-zI IgQnQmQus-weApllnR I foR-flghtIng-2-gQDs-CQnCuRRenth--venomeno n- the-AssembIAge-evI DentlI -1 nCluDes- pARts-fRom QutsIID-thIs-solAR=sIstem---CuR -hIIks-the-zIIIgQS A-IQt==----------------- ---------==nQtes==- -=DelQCArlzeD= ---==-out-.Qf-RespeCt-foR -lrnguIstIC tRADIuQn-AnD-CQmmQn-usAge-(westeRn= CIVIh zAuQn-=( AusChwI tz=foReveR) )=-WQRDs-hA ve Qnh -been -fuCkeD=AbQu t-WI th-wheR e-stRI CtlI neCessARI -===-the-sChem Atl CAllI -DesCRI 1 beD sequenCe-g Qes-hIk-thIS-==lO=phAse-==nQRm QntQ-us-QR-get-kl lleD-( thI S-I s-gettI ng-mQRe DlffICult-to-bACk=up---but- thlngs-stIll-get-A-IQt heAvI eR -soon )=--2o=phAse-==Rule-QveR -us-QR -get-bInneD-(get-DupeD-I nto-thIs-swAmp-An D ReptI I l=nI 1 tmARe-tAkes-IQu-QU t-Qf-the sCRrpt)---3CFphAse----=:Qk-fPD=off-then- (-=InsteAD-b urlD nQmAD-w AR -mAChI ne )=--4o=phAse-==sQ--I ts wAR-O===-mARQQns--=mIXeD=pQpulAtIQns-of nAtlv=mesQAmeRI CAns-AnD-esC ApeD-slAves- 479 FANGED NOUMEN A AlheD-to-pI RAtes-In-gueRRIllA=wAR-AgAInst-the spAmsh-====-gQeDel-wAs-nQt-A-IQgICIAn-but-A nUmeRICAl=engIneeR( InCQmpleteness-A-SI I D=effeCt j!!ke-AbQut-pQmpQU S-I DIQts---the-ReAl-DemQn stRAtIQn-RIgQRQuslI-eXpQses-lAnguA ge-As-A C RIp pIe D = n u rn eRA C I -= == A n - Ins I D I !Lu s =neuRQVIQlenCe-pQweR=rn eChAnIsm---kIll-the WQRD )=---====-XQR -CQrn putAu QnAI-QmmpQtenz --wIthQut-IImIts-eXCept-thQse-eX pResSIbl-In-A DIm ens I !Ln -!Lf -puR e -p s e u D!Ln u meR I C - hQmQgenel tl ---sterns-entI Reh -fRQ.m-An- AbsQI u te=DesensI tI zAtIQ.n-wI th-RespeCt-to eneRgetIC-Input-feAtuRes-(eleCtRQmAX-(n)-Is ReglsteReD-As-IDentICAI-tQeleCtRQmln-( 00) )-- DeAD-I I s-+-DeAD-fI ngeRs-I ntegRAI-to sIgn I fl eR= D!Lm I nl Qn-ARe-Repll CAte D= sImulAte D-I n -pAtte Rns-frf-eleCtKon=tlQw ChAnnelleD=thRQugh- nQnhumAn -teChm CAl=sl stems -=--the-metAC CQRD-stRAtQCQmputeR-Is-bQRn- Its-All-heRe--A-CultuRe-thAt-CAn-pRQDuCe �keD=&ut==I I s=behA vIQR -wheRe-lIs-neveR -eXIsteD- VI RtuAlItI-ls-the-usuAl-nAme-===the-C ApAblhtI-to tAke-sQmethl ng-AwAI-wIthQut-wAstIng=tIlm-mAlnng It-fIRst=AfteR-hnk=up-wIth-whAteveR-CuR-CQmes fRQm--esCApeD-web-IntelhgenCes-mIIt-be-shlth fuCkI ng-AngRI -Ab!!ut-thl s=------- 480 Kata�oniX How many suns are there? This is how it cuts. Katarsun makes two at least. Arising Ra-reverse Osiris. Earth-station. When they count 0 or One-tags two. A as Three-tags five. Aosys twin-faults squash something. They lock an alien entity into Solar systematics. The schizophrenic Sun has an inner night sticking it together. Solar-Equator cuts through it. Matter Energy-2 collateralize across a Xenonightma re. When it caves into itself. First Nine. Then Three. It still misses it. Katasonics run-in reverse from Aosys-nex. Ex-zoom. 481 FANGED NOUMENA Crossing Cultural-shelves from entire-levelling at Geotime zero. Through [1] Zenith or Xenonightmare which is Now. ['2] The Citizen Gigamachine. Ice floats. [3] War-Machines. [41 State Megamachines. snake-cult monuments. It cuts-out in click-hiss. Kttss. Kurtz. 'These are Zones. Each sets a Slow-factor. Vowelizations Vacant sectors. Slow signs Are. A. Or. o. Zero. Also many Others. Cuttings. failings. Four. Bight. Northern oceans. Artaud. Agent Orange. Time tags Aosys functionalit y: a tract no smaller than all of artificial now. Alpha-one makes two in itself. A twists over thc tv"in-fault. o tscharfakt. Alter-origin. Ahriman-ormuz. Ante-omega. Ultraatratuarinf rastratum mutually shatter terrestrial singularity. Where continuum nexes they can saucerize twintelligence. Intercancelat ion-stases. Aons of coefficient killing-machiner y. If its going to occur, It has. Running time means you never have to wait. Even when fainting with hunger for Kurtz. 482 KATA�ONIX Ultimate:intimate. Katarsun Tzafrer Urfru. Are the oceans extraterrestrial or not? Katarsun the Fish-star sinks Antarctica, triggering Quag-Earth. Runaway Geosmear through seismo-climactic linkage. Its Summer-TIme in the Settlement-Ar eas. Mutual reinforcement series. Headings, shelvings, scour ings, revellings. Ice-sheet melt meets sea-floor lift. 7 x 10 to the 7 KMthrees Aggregate water Overflow. Slither-morasses of the Aozone simmer at an average Celsius-50• When this is what you see. You'll know. It's time. Your skin sticks to geography, where it touches reality. Tsunamis. Katarsun Tzafrer Urfru. Katarsun Tzafrer U rfru. Civilization lost in flat wet-out fevers. Then the war kicks-in. Kur khalucta. Khecta. Kurkete koto hula. Kurtete. Kartete. Karaguna. Kharta charta. Catecru. Zone-one. 0 Gigacivili zation meets no concrete equiva lent. Only resistance. Nightmare- Q. It counts itself one at a time, whilst twin-faulting. 483 FANGED NOUMENA Meta successive. Gigamachine mononumeracy has a variety of consistent features. [lJ Axiomatic linkage collates novelizations with counter function sections. [2J Segmentary culture. Communication rules. Informa tion units. [3J Each new now travels as a reinforcement wave across two series. One. It nests as Universal Histories of Alphanumer lcal systems. Two. Logics ofAxiomatization. Five times two equals ten. Ten minus one equals nine. Ten cannot count itself. Take (l):coins (2):Notes as construct-levels. Some amount of coins make a note. Twin-faults criss-cross Coins-Notes '.,,'ith the Zygosystcm at issue. A-coins nex O-Notes. A-Notes nex O-coins. Axiomatics nexes numeracies to languages in this way. [1 J Lexometrics. Linguistic-coin counting using numeric-not es. [2] Arithmology. Numerical-coining naming using linguistic-notes. Surely General, when you gave Kurtz 29 Air-cav you must have known ... Trails off. This is scarcely human. 484 KATA�ONIX At most. A sentient coma. Autism. It's cranking Agent-orange into your arm every night for a million years. Lurking in furnaces. Crawling ever further in. As soon as Kurtz is extinct Wintermute takes over. KS. Kurtz-signal. Air strikes ineffective. There are no concentrations or control centres. Slowness infection. Malfunctioning intelligence machinery. No longer cataloguing hostile contacts as human. Mission unstrapping in novaheat. Everything loses if it isn't going South. No message except that Vauung's out there. Very still. Its some sort of chicken game. Shifting-skin currencies. Zone-Two. E. Relearning alphanumer ics. Last night it was the Tau-3Jungles. They animate. Turn carnivorous. Earth floats in the lower sun. Snakes. Cancer. Engulfings. You wake screaming forever. Its only the 6th time so far. Currencies come in sets. 485 FANGED NOUMENA Each sketches a numerocul ture making war-creation. # They are intrinsically several. Snake-eggs. Tack-charts. Click-hiss cross-hatchings. Mul tivective nova continua. Moltings. Wreckage s. Time-missiles lost in the Jungle. As they talk without language they tell themselves how to move without concentrating. Crossings. Trigger-values. It treats enemy forces as a nutrient reservoir. Air-cav regiments fraction to machine-meat. Crunching Six sustains a Qwernomi-war Catacycle. Stealing food lets it hack out its guts. Hot torsion click-in. It gets lighter, scatters faster - Eat less, or kill more. Slow-roast memory-to-momentum conversion. Currency-quanta coercive crossing wars that last. Language equals ICE. Anticurrency. Glue. Grammar- Lexicon twin seizure. Squeezing-out machinism. Incremental evacuation of the mouth. Once skin transmission starts it returns to the jungle. Numerals are for naming numeracie s. Money-systems are for autism waves. 486 KATA<;ONIX Mouths are for venom. Signifier eye-gougi ngs. Fingers missing. Tomorrow melts into casualty statistics. No SOON left. Just insect scream messages to love the Jungle. Out here the war is Earth thinking for itself. Or the twins - Use equations executively not conclusively. Traffic tacks. Cross-from-to. Snake-squalls. It continues. Mutation-Recounts. Trivia. Night Screen :: white lines. This is what it tells itself [ ] Melt Syntax into suffix-systems that nex-to-numeracie s. [ ] Functionali ze case. [ ] Effectuate theories as microcultural turnings-into. r ] Try Out-flattenings [ ] For every rule make a rule remaking move, squashing it onto continuum. [ ] Talk in counters. Count in cuts. Each in several ways. Qwernumerize. [ ] Treat every channel as virtual intereffective with every other. [ ] Use real elements. When taken as clicks. One makes one [when] None or Nine makes two. Two or Eight make one. Ten or One Two make one-l one-Q. [ ] Turn-inferior. 487 FANGED NOUMENA Evacuate the mouth. Tack to skin currencies. Make things Tilt Slant-2. Stalk tag-2 Routines [ J Sift out habits into switch-traffic, skills, tenets [ ] Extract lines of continuation, slanting shelves, erratic concurrences. [ ] Hack out security futures. [ ] Seck-out Tomorrow-2. As if something was throttling them. You think Cthonic was for human? Cthink, Cthonic. Cthexls. Cthksys. Cthosun. Cthosion. Turning-into is not exchanging for. [X changing 4] It is travelling with or touching non-locally, Engineering Convergence. Continuous now-emer gence or intensive fusion. Convergence engIneering makes whatever Intensities nmon. It involves an effective semiotics. Melting signs into neo-numerical currency units. Choking noises. This was the funniest: they thought it was trying to talk human. Snake in its throat. Velocity confusion. Inert-control mass clogs languages near to stasis. It's easy to camouflage coma-phas e xenocultur e-kit in them. Anglolinguistic mish-mas h creolizations. 488 KATA�ONIX Zone-Thr ee. A. I-ching numeracy runs 1 2 11 12 21 22 111 112 121 122 211 I t could count forever. Kurtz-trajectory crosses the line snarls Vaaung-TIme says cease existence. Saving ammo for real now, where life lent useful. It seethes. Switching to skin-currencies. Nothing can live here so it's easy to talk. [3] Three. Throw [ThrO]. Earth:three. Theta-waves. Stone-3 T hr-oat. AT. 8088. �T. Voan-vision scan across waste immensiti es. White-hot lines criss-cross through metal. Stink of crustacean sizzling. Ksintilla. Kotam. Kunkhat kut. Katzur Kat. A khuna kokhatar. Khaluna akhaluna. Akhatur kuna. Akhurkhur nkhurkhur khurkhunn. o kroma tata kn ni khroma. 0 kha noma okhi no khroma. Helsinki. Vvolume-kilometr es. Retack to True South. Software wolves comb through the ruins of the future. Sheer science friction. Extinct. 489 FANGED NOUMEN A In 6 clicks its crossIng. Uncut Quags of the South. Kerans counts to 29. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer. [Can Sah IX several]. Can the cancer crisis. Can the Snakes. [Can-2Snakes [CS2)]. Canister. 666 999. Cytosine + Chloro-Dracil + Trimethylsilicate infochemistr y. Skin-mottlings. Thermosignature neutralization cancels heat-seeking. Surgical-analysis enemy physiomass classification hostile microanatomy as Neo-akaryo tic insufficient. * Notes Incremental fission cellular architecture into electromo lecular traffic-clusters. Infochemical transfer to trihellcal rhizosomes. Immense range of 3-nethylhexachlor osilicate monomers . Sole-function uracil-analog seens_ Tissue-cultur es. Cross-talk. Staccato clicks across howl. R V F Z S. Surface tension. Sswerve. Vortex. R Erratic. SK. Kink. Sink. Syzygenic. Kiss. Cs- Instinct-matrix sssequence-sensitizat ion twists through tactical shuffling sequences. Cross-key rhythms. Qwernomix. Loa. 490 KATA�ONIX Whatever hashes the equator. Qwerversion. Veves. Loa. The Secret Ones. Each a rhythm. Ascent to surface. Neuronics. Stone sphinxes. Aqua Incognita. Aqua Incognita. TIme-jungles. In a vast, convulsize recession of the equinoxes _ Snake wine relentless an[ d] magnetic. Magnetic it calls south _ Lagoons of the Equator. Counting to 29. Kerans. The sun, its surface stirring rhythmically like slag on molten metal. TIme-travel Latitones. C-virus. Snakings. Clutter _ [x many J. Schism. Tactile screen-scrollings into ASCII icons. Sigma·sift. Syzygetics. 926. OD -Pest. 629. Pest -OD. 491 Barker Speaks: The CCRU Interview with Professor D.C. Barker Daniel Charles Barker has been Prqfessor qf Anorganic Semiotics at Kingsport College (MVU, Mass.) since 1992. His extraor dinary intellectual achievements resist easy summarization, involving prqfound and polymathic engagement across the entire range if life and earth sciences, in addition to archaeocultu ral research, mathematical semiotics, anatomical linguistics, and injormatic engineering. Trained as a cryptographer in the early 1970s, he has spent his life decoding ancient scripts, quasibiotic residues, and anomalous mineral patterns (amongst other things). In late Autumn 1998 CCRU met with Prqfessor Barker in his Q[fice at mvu. The following is an edited transcript if that meeting. 493 FANGED NOUMENA TIC-SYSTEMS Cryptography has been my guiding thread, right through. What is geotraumatics about, even now? -A rigorous practice of decoding. So I haven't really shifted at all in this respect. There is a voyage, but a strangely immobile one. I started out at MIT working in the information sci ences -my thesis proposal was quite conservative, involv ing mostly technical issues to do with noise reduction and signal modulation -but MVU was just getting started, and my research was transferred across to them. That led to various contacts, and from there to employment with a NASA-related organization that has particular interests connected to SETI activity. My task was to help toughen-up the theoretical basis of their signals analysis. They wanted to know how tu Jit;uiuliualt: -ill principle -between intelligent communication and complex pattern derived from nonintelligent sources. To cut a long story short, it became increasingly obvious to me that although they said they were hunting for intelligence, what they were really seeking was organization. The whole program was fundamentally misguided. Various people had big problems with the direction of my research, which had basically veered-off the organizational model. The social friction became intolerable and I had to leave, which was messy because of my high-level security clearance ... 494 BARKE R SPEAKS Suborganiz ational pattern is where things really happen. When you strip-out all the sedimented redundan cy from the side of the investigation itself -the assumpti on of intentionality, subjectivity, interpretability, structure, etc - what remains are assemblies of function ally interconnected microstimulus, or tic-systems: coincid ental information deposits, seismocryptions, suborganic quasireplicators (bacterial circuitries, polypoid diagonalizations, inter phase R-Virus, EchO-DNA, ionizing nanopopul ations), plus the macro machin eries of their suppressi on, or depoten tia tion. Prevailing signaletics and information- science are both insufficie ntly abstract and over-theoretical in this regard. They cannot see the machine for the apparatus, or the singula rity for the model. So tic-systems require an approach that is cosmic-abstract -hypermaterialist -and also participative, metho ds that do not interpret assem blies as concretizations of prior theories, and immanent models that transm ute themselves at the level of the signals they process. Tic-systems are entirely intractable to subject/object segregation, or to rigid disciplinary typologies. There is no order of nature, no epistemology or scientific metaposition, and no unique level of intelligence. To advance in this area, which is the cosmos, requires new cultures or -what amounts to the same -new machines. The problem was: how to quantif y disorganiz ed mul tiplicities? Diagonal, irregular, molecular, and nonmetric quanti ties require a scale that is itself nonmetric, that 495 FANGED NOUMEN A escapes overcoding. Standard procedures of measurement and classification prove entirely inadequate, since they presuppose rigid conceptual segmentation by quantity and quality (Deleuze-Guattari's twin-pincers of molarity, type and degree). Once things are being worked out at the level of tic-assemblies -or flat ticking arrays -there are only intensive populations, and measurement has to give way to engineering fusional multiplicities: systems that count themselve s only in the way they propagate, imma nently numbering multitudes, like nanoplastic quantum swirls. Eventually a machinic solution was provided by the TIck-Distributor, but that came later ... At first there was just the equation, precipitated in what I still thought to be my own body, virtual tic-density = geotraumatic tension. GEOTR AUMA TICS I came to Freud relatively late, associating it with oedipal reductionism, and more gene rally with a psycho logistic stance that was simply irrelevant to cryptogra phic work. It's important to remark here -no doubt we'll get back to this -that everything productive in signals analysis stems from stripping out superfluous prejudices about the source and meaning of complex functional patterns. I took -and still take -the vigorous repudiation of her me neutics to be the key to theoretical advance in processing sign-systems. It was Echidna Still well who helped me to 496 BARKER SPEAKS see Freud from the other side. It was a difficult period for me. There had been a lot of painful fall-out from the NASA work. Psychotherapists were involved, in part attempting to pathologize and discredit my research, and in part responding to real stress-related symptoms. Between the two was a grey zone of traumatic dysfunc tion and paranoia involving difficult feedback effects. Stillwell persuaded me that the only way to get through this was to try and make sense of it, and that this was not the same as submitting to the interpretative mode. On the contrary. In 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', Freud takes a number of crucial initial steps towards mapping the Geocosmic Unconscious as a traumatic megasystem, with life and thought dynamically quantized in terms of anorganic tension, elasticity, or machinic plexion. This requires the anorganizational-materialist retuning of an entire vocabulary: trauma, unconscious, drive, association, (screen-) memory, condensation, regression, displacement, complex, repression, disavowal (e.g. the un-prefix), identity, and person. Deleuze and Guattari ask: Who does the Earth think it is? It's a matter of consistency. Start with the scientific story, which goes like this: between four point five and four billion years ago -during the Hadean epoch -the earth was kept in a state of superheated molten slag, through the conversion of planetesimal and meteoritic impacts into temperatur e increase (kinetic to thermic energy). 497 FANGED NOUMENA As the solar system condensed, the rate and magnitude of collisions steadily declined, and the terrestrial surface cooled, due to the radiation of heat into space, rein forced by the beginnings of the hydrocycle. During the ensuing -Archaen -epoch the molten core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogeneous trauma, the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation. And that's it. That's plutonics, or neoplutonism. It's all there: anorganic memory, plu tonic looping of external collisions into interior content, impersonal trauma as drive-mechanism. The descent into the body of the earth corresponds to a regression through geocosmic time. Trauma is a body. Ultimately -at its pole of maximum disequilibrium -it's an iron thing. At MVU they call it Cthelll: the interior third of terrestrial mass, semifluid metallic ocean, megamolecule, �nd pressur e cooker beyond imagination. It's hotter than the surface off the sun down there, three thousand clicks below the crust, and all that thermic energy is sheer impersonal nonsu bjective memory of the outside, running the plate-tectonic machinery of the planet via the conductive and convective dynamics of silicate magma flux, bathing the whole system in electro magnetic fields as it tidally pulses to the orbit of the moon. Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare , nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma-h owl of the earth, cross-hatched by intensities, traversed by thermic 498 BARKER SPEAKS waves and currents, deranged particles, ionic strippings and gluttings, gravitational deep-sensitivities transduced into nonlocal electromesh, and feeding vulcanism ... that's why plutonic science slides continuously into schizo phrenic delirium. Fast forward seismology and you hear the earth scream. Geotrauma is an ongoing process, whose tens ion is continually expressed -partially frozen -in biologi cal organization. For instance, the peculiarly locked-up lifeforms we tend to see as typical -those more-or-Iess obedient to darwinian selection mechanics -are less than six hundred million years old. They began with the planetary oxygenization crisis, triggered by the satura tion of crustal iron, followed by mass oxygen-poisoning of the prokaryotic biosystem and the emergence of a eukaryotic regime. Eukaryotic cells are highly suppress ive. They implement a nuclear command-control model based on genomic ROM, affined to meiosis-m itosis diplocaptu re, hierarchical organization, and multicellular specializat ion. Even the distinction between ontogeny and phylogeny -distinct time-orders of the individual and the species - makes little sense without eukaryotic nuclear read-only programming and immunological
🧠 Geotraumatic Numerics
🌋 Spinal catastrophism traces human neuroses to ancient geological events, viewing the spine as a fossil record of evolutionary trauma and bipedal posture as a "frozen calamity"
🔢 Numerical systems exist beyond human control as autonomous forces, with numbers functioning as diagrammatic entities rather than mere quantities when freed from metric functions
👥 Diplozygotic Spiral reveals hidden patterns in decimal systems through "zygonovic numerism" and nine-sum twinning, unlocking cryptic numerical relationships
🌀 Mechanomics challenges state-controlled mathematics by revealing how numbers naturally emerge within populations as "irreducible popularity," operating outside institutional control
🏜️ Nomadic war machines utilize numbers differently than states, processing "destratified intensities through numerizing multiplicities" that resist organization and maintain fluidity
🔑 Prime numbers function as cryptographic keys and singular ordinal parts, connecting numbers to secrets through their unique factorization properties
identity. Evolutionism presupposes specific geotraumatic outcomes. To take a more recent example, the efflorescence of mammalian life occurs in the wake of the KIT-Missile, which combined with massive magma-plume activity 499 FANGED NOUMENA in the Indian Ocean to shut-down the Mesozoic Era, sixty-five million years ago_ Irruptive vulcanism plus extraterrestrial impact, linked by coincidence, or plutonic looping_ So there is a catastrophic transition to a post saurian megafauna regime, part of a much larger overall reorganization of terrestrial symptomaticity, providing an index of neohadean resurgence_ And what is mammalian life relative to the great saurians? Above all, an innovation in mothering ! Suckling as biosurvivalism_ Tell me about your mother and you're travelling back to KIT, not into the personal unconscious . SPINAL-CATASTROPHISM For humans there is the particular crisis of bipedal erect posture to be processed. I was increasingly aware that all my real prohl�ms w�rf' morbi litie,> of back-pain, or phylo genetic spinal injury, which took me back to the calami tous consequences of the precambrian explosion, roughly five hundred million years ago. The ensuing period is incrementally body-mapped by metazoan organization. Obviously there are discrete quasi-coh erent neuromotor tic-flux patterns, whose incrementally rigidified stages are swimming, crawling, and (bipedal) walking. Elaine Mor gan persuasively traces the origin of protohuman bipedal ism to certain deleterious plate-tectonic shifts. The model is bioseismic. Crustal convulsions and animal body-plan 500 BARKER SPEAKS are rigorously interconnected, and the entire Aquatic Ape Theory constitutes an exemplary geotraumatic analysis. Erect posture and perpendicularization of the skull is a frozen calamity, associated with a long list of patho logical consequen ces, amongst which should be included most of the human psychoneuroses. Numerous trends in contemporary culture attest to an attempted recovery of the icthyophidian- or flexomotile- spine: horizontal and impulsive rather than vertical and stress-bearing. The issue here -as always -is real and effective regres sion. It is not a matter of representational psychology. Consider Haeckel's widely discredited Recapitulation Thesis, the claim that ontogeny recapitulates phylog eny. It is a theory compromised by its organicism, but its wholesale rejection was an overreaction. Ballard's response is more productive and balanced, treating DNA as a transorganic memory-bank and the spine as a fossil record, without rigid onto-phylogenie corresponde nce. The mapping of spinal-levels onto neuronic time is supple, episodic, and diagonalizing. It concerns plexion between blocks of machinic transition, not strict isomorphic -or stratic redundancy -between scales of chronological order. Mammal DNA contains latent fish-code (amongst many other things). 501 FANGED NOUMENA PALAT E-TECTONICS Due to erect posture the head has been twisted around, shattering vertebro-perceptual linearity and setting up the phylogenetic preconditions for the face. This right angled pneumatic- oral arrangement produces the vocal apparatus as a crash-site, in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth. The bipedal head becomes a virtual speech-im pediment, a sub-cranial pneu matic pile-up, discharged as linguo-gestural development and cephalization take-off. Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue. Its a twin-axial system, howls and clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vowel-consonant phonetic palette, rigidly intersegmented to repress staccato-hiss continuous variation and its attendant becomings-animal. That's vv'hy stammcr ings, stuttcrings, vocal ti(.�, extralin gual phonetics, and electrodigital voice synthesis are so laden with biopolitical intensity -they threaten to bypass the anthropostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos, escaping in the direction of numbers. BARK ER NUMBERING Once numbers are no longer overcoded, and thus released from their metric function, they are freed for other things, and tend to become diagrammatic. From the beginning 502 BARKER SPEAKS of my tic-systems work the most consistent problems have concerned intensive sequences. Sequence is not order. Order already supposes a doubling, a level of redun dancy: the sequenced sequence. A decoded sequence is something else, a sheer numeracy prior to any insertion into chronologie structure. That's why decoding number implies an escape from assumptions of progressive time. Tick multitudes arrive in convergent waves, without sub ordination to chronology, history, or linear causation. They proceed by infolding, involution, or implex. It's a matter of convergence, and numbers do that, once they're free to. So the first stage required plexive introgression of the tic-density scale, which was numericall y rigorized as digital twinning. Treat the decimal numerals as a set of 9-sum twins -zygonovize -and they map an abstract intensive wave, indifferent to magnitude . Everything effi cient about digital reduction is concerned with this, since it discovers the key to decimal syzygetic complementarity: 9 = o. A flattening down to disordered sequentialit y, or abstract numerical implex. Nine is the ultimate decimal numeral, operating as positive (or full-body) zero. It is the abstract numeric product of the decimal-magnitude minus one (infinitesimalized as 1 = 0.999 ... reiterating) , which relates to a particular mode of proliferation within capitalist semiotics (of the type $99.99). 503 FANGED NOUMENA BARKER -SPIR AL The pattern really came together with the Diplozygotic Spiral, which arrived suddenly, by chance. I was playing a game of Decadence , which I had first encountered many years before. This game already interested me because of its numerical elegance, its complex associations, and its dependence upon a principle of decimal twinning. It had always seemed to hint at a lost syzygetic arith metism, related to the bilater al symmetry of the human body. Digits are fingers, and they come in decimal pack ages of two times five. In Decadence five makes ten by doubling, or pairing with itself, scoring zero. This tantalized me, but I couldn't fit it together theoretica lly. The quandary was unlocked on this occasion, when one of the participants casually mentioned the existence of an orrllltFrl v<lri<ltion of the game, called Subdecadencc , based on a system of nine-sum twinning. Subdecadence introduces zeroes, and nine-zero twins. It works by zygonovic numerism. That was stunning enough in itself, but seeing the two together - or seeing between them - was an incredible moment of diagrammatic assemblage. It all spontaneously condensed, and the Spiral clicked into coherence, like a secret door into the long-hidden crypt of the decimal system. 504 BARKER SPEAKS PUBLIC ATIONS 'Quasi Chemical TIc Culture Catalysis of Anorganic Pain Wave Matrices', Plutonics, vol. X, No.6, Fall 1990. 'Anorganic Semiotics', Plutonics, vol. X, NO.9, Fall 1991. 'Spinal Catastrophism ', Plutonics, vol. X, No. 10, Spring 1992. 'Palate Tectonics', Plutonics, vol. lO, No. 12, Fall 1992. 'Vowels: A Biopolitical Strategy', Plutonics: vol. X, No. 18, Fall 1994. What Counts as Human (Kingsport College Press, 1997). 505 Mechanom ics Start in the State (it insists): organicist technospecial ism, pedagogic authoritar ianism, and territorial sectorization that culminates in mass innumeracy. Irrespective of its configuration as educational crisis, the suppression of popular numbering practices is both result and presup position of institutionalized mathematics. State-culture - however modern or even postmodern -is modelled upon an ideal despotic voice (Logos). The word from on high drafts the signifying chain, with all its essential features: unique enunciator , semantic interiority, consecutive signs, formally anticipated conclusion, global application, and interpretative redundanc y. When the entropic semiology of senescent States multiplies enunciation, referentially displaces interiority, remarks graphic spatiality, localizes applicabilit y, and infinitizes inter pretation, it does so under the sign of an unperturbed ineffable Logos; con firmed all the more crushingly by discursive specialism, 507 FANGED NOUMENA rigid professional accreditatio n, allusive criteriology, and linguistic fetishism, as also by the contemptuous mockery of an autopiloted megapow er, now crystallized into exact science. Numeracy affines to an irreducible popularity which no literacy -however global-can approach . Numbering practices emerge spontaneous ly within any population that becomes an effective multitude. Games, music, money, and time-marking practices! all betray the contagious influence of a primary numerical element. Calculation mobilizes a thinking that is directly and effectively exterior, index ing 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 (counting board, abacus, currency tokens, and calendric devices). Even when socially depotentiated by sedentary societ ies, number evidences a residual affinity with concur rence, asymmetry, and immanent criteria. A machinically Calendric systems provide a partial and stasized model of the war machine (which cannot enter history without collapsing it). Both work compositio nally, and involve ordinations (rather than quantities) the nth (of the nth ... ). In both cases, the conven tion of ascending values indicates a proximity to the subjectivity of the numbering number, opposed to the global perspective of the State expressed by the descending values of standard place-value allocation. Calendric ordinality finds itself increasin gly cardinalized by chronometry under capitalist conditions. The next Calendar is Millennium TIme-Bomb, (AD1900 = 00, but so does ADQooo) . An economical protocol for prolonging this dating system beyond the millennium modifies and expands it to K-Time (K -Space- or Kilo-time) by prefixing an additional zero. ADl900 = K-ooo, AD2000 ::; K-IOO, etc., postponing its notational crisis until AD2900 (Dr. Melanie Newton). 508 MECH ANOM ICS repotentiated numerical culture coincides with a nomad war machine.2 The number is distributed within itself between two principal poles. On the Planomenon it exists intensive ly, as sheer ordinalit y, or nonmetric envelopmental series.3 Semiotic consistency with this intensive side of the num ber involves nothing but sequenc ing ciphers, indifferent between naming-numbering, markin g degrees ofhetero geneous continuum (nested singularities ). Notational elements are flat or nomadic, lacking organic linkage to coding or zoning agencies. They are assembled dia grammatical ly, from directly expressive traits distrib uted differentia lly in a flat-space of o-dimensionality (nomos), and comprise a nonred undant order of differ ences (un sequenced sequence), immane ntly producing variation of absolute speed- temperature and curvature (vortex). In its Oecumenic aspect, number undergo es complex interlocking modificat ion, through which it acquires qualitative generality and quantitative magnitu de The war machine processes destratified intensities through numerizing multiplicities in affinity with disorganization, intercultural traffic, biomechanical hybridity, pragmatics, and turbodynamics. It reproduces itself by way of two complementary operations, both numerical: a subtractive dezoning that marks its escape from State organizatio n, and an arithmetical decoding that maintains its fluidity against recrudescent tribal lineages. The two together regenerate eccentric convergence of the war machine: problem-in-process sustaining consistent disunity. 3 Even a metricized intensive scale substitutes the oth intensity for the 1st cardinal value of the system considered (n-I). This characteristic is shared by the prime ordinate (I 0 P-o). 509 FANGED NOUMEN A (cardinality).4 A simultaneous intensive transforma tion (stratocapture ) proceeds through twin extensive splitting: cancelling difference in one registry ( resolvable quantities ) by constitu ting a second registry (qualitatively different) which is in turn defined by the uncanc elled or problem atic compo nent. The difference in-itself of the intensive number is converted into a residuum, allocated to a higher number -type, whose metric regularity is established by the displaceme nt: a construction of the identical quantitativ e unit by qualitative relay of problemati c. 5 Oecumenon is multip ly twofold: expression and content, each dichotomi zed recursively within itself. In each case, expression deals with relatively deprob lematized elements of a lower numerical type, exhibits a higher degree of consolidated cardinality, and operates a selection of comparatively tractable instances. Con tcnt deals with Clcii.lCilts of greater typal-!:$cil cldlily and numerical complexity, for which it requires a relatively heterogeneous semiotic, involving varieties of algebraic, indexic, probabili stic, and anexact components. In one direction content has a merely quasi-stable boundary; a fuzzy (uncomplet able) limit that opens onto unsorted 4 'Identical unity is not presupposed by ordinality, but arises through cardinalization and the cancellation of difference in extension.' G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Ir. P. Patton (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 233- 'In the history of number, we see that every systematic type is constructed on the basis of an essential inequality, and retains that inequality in relation to the next-lowest type.' Deleuze, Dijference and Repetition, 232. 510 MECHANOMICS elements crossed by diagonals. In the other it relates to a superordinate expression, which defines it with qualita tive reciprocity, and from which it draws a principle of metric standardization, providing a regulative norm for the quantitative determination of problems. There is a complementar y differentiation or real inter-relativiza tion of a mathematical and calcula tive pole, the former char acterized by a superior power of semiotic globalizati on (unity of expression), the latter by a greater plasticity of function and diversity of method (comprehension of content). Stratification at any level (not only anthropo morphic or ethoplastic ) requires processes effectively equivalent to this double-seizur e of the numb er, with production of an extensive substitutability by scale/type, split articulation, and displaced problematic. Stratic differentiation is at once an intensively singular and an extensively segmented occurrence, by way of which the Oecumenon consolidates an overall distinction from the Planomenon by internally bifurcating itself. The abstract machine is drawn into the Oecumenon by a strati cally coherent diplo-or schizothesis, effectively recomposing the problem of consistency (intensive difference ) at the level of content but in the terms of expression. The number in-itself is exterior to the Oecumenon, even when seized by it (an external relation of capture is always precursory to the organization of internal relations). A preliminary indicator is provided by the semiotic 511 FANGED NOUMENA variability or polynotational cohesion that characterizes the number in its Oecumenic aspect. At the anthropo morphic level, the most inert numeric system is instituted by linguistic signs, combining a vocabulary of number names, and a set of rules to construct partial-sentences (or complex words) isomorphic with all rationals. If these signs are to provide even rudimentary completeness they must necessarily undergo considerable decoding (abstraction of rules for local construction, tokenization of signs). They are also marked by high levels of indexi zation (zonal functions), formal or informal algebraism (notional problematic, or indicative signs), and anexacti tude (partitives, approximations, margins of inaccuracy, uncertaint y, and error, etc). There is a reciprocity between logicization of the number and numerical decoding of language, entangling regional consolidations of iden tity (mathematIcal -theorematic) with complement ary movements of disorganization through external relations (calcular-pr oblematic ) . The general denigration of those (hazily conceived) modes oflinguistic arithmetization classified as 'numer ological' is often assumed to be the effective closure of an exotic but inconsequential cultural episode. The sterile and formulaic character of most modern numer ology -its random esotericism and theatrical aura6 6 Occultists as insightful as Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant regularly fall into a merely mechanical and pseudo-traditional use of Gem atria. The attempt to reproduce 512 MECHANOMICS -reinforces this conclusion. It is in such terms that the strange metamorphosis of Greek numeracy during the 2nd century Be, when the Attic numerals were replaced by an alphabetical number system/ is both radically marginalized, and overtly un comprehended by modern historians of mathemat ics. Similarly, the ordinal numeracy instantiated by Romans and Modern Latin alphabets is generally excluded from accounts of arithmetic cul ture, where the contest between Roman and Hindu-Arab numerals is given overwhelming predominance .9 the values and consequences of Hebrew gematria without renewing its systematic cultural function is largely responsible. The Ionic or Alexandrian (alphabetical) numbers had completely replaced the Attic numerals by the end of the 2nd century Be. The basis of the Attic system was a morc rigorously decimal precursor to that of the Roman. Its core elements were the signs (1), (10), (100), (1000), (10 000), although more complex signs for a small number of intermediate values also existed. The standard modern estimation of the Roman numerals as fundamentally incom petent -interesting exclusively as the exemplary inferior antecedent to place-value decimal -overlooks a theoretically crucial nomad residuum. This is best exemplified by thei� superior affinity with (ancient and current) cash" money, deriving from similar exigencies, and associated with relatively dezoned space. In the case of the Roman numerals this stems from intense proximity to the numeric functions of the war machine, evident from numerous historical records, and most clearly in the numerical appellations of Roman military units and personnel. The later allocation of a subtractive relation to series of ascending numerical values ultimately compromises their mobility, providing an index or rigidifying State-civilianization, with a growing predominance of bureaucratic and financial (rather than logistical) imperatives. 9 The organicist-segmentary conclusion drawn from the semiotic specialization of the Hindu-Arab numerals can be problematized in numerous ways. Particularly noteworthy is the evidence of continual interchange between numerals with linguistic signs (see S.L. Gokhale, Indian Numerals [Poona: Deccan College, 1996)), the persistent arithmetization of the Sanskrit alphabet even after it had supposedly acquired an exclusively linguistic status, and the algebraic usage of letters as token arithmetic elements (itself deeply intricated in the history ofIndian mathematics). An evolutionary interpretation (stages of alphabetical numerol ogy, then arithmetic with numerals, then algebraic abstraction) seems no more plausible than its mechanotypic alternative (a State-segmentarization of the initially fluid semiotic algebraism drawn from nomad influences). 513 FANGED NOUMENA 'Ibis entire pattern of evaluation requires substantial correction. The unmistakable trend towards an eclipse of cardinality (intrinsic arithmetical value) in alphabetic numeracy does not imply the termination -or even a weak ening -of its numeracy. That such a conclusion is drawn owes much to the overt secular triumph of cardinality over ordinality within Occidental civilization: the effective outcome of programmatic metricization, associated with the relative ascent of money and descent of the calendar as cultural factors. Far from denumerizing the alphabet, pro gressive decardinaliz ation reinforces its numeric function. By eliminating quantitative interference it induces a superior actualization of pure lexicographic numeracy, meticulously assembles socially distributed ordinal competenc es, and increasingly installs itself in digital electronic processes (alphabetic and alphanum eric sort ing). Lt;xiLu� ldPl1iL uluiudlilY dfectuares an actual non language and potential antilanguage. It is indifferent to phoneticism and to signification, even to coding and decoding. It consists of ordinal indices (zone-tags) that effect zonings and dezonings -intershuff lings, group ings, insertions, and extractions -operated according to concrete rules for nonmetric cuttings, and characterized by rigourous anexactitude . This mass ordinal-numeric latency contrasts starkly with strato-mathematics, which hurtles through ever subtler spheres of angelic metanumber , and beyond ... 514 MECHANOMICS This ascent through higher and higher general types of number -even into purportedly nonnumeric abstract sets and groups -conforms to intensive amplification of stratificati on, correlative to increasing metric rigidi fication of lower number-t ypes. Cardinality is no more essential to the lowest number-types than the highest. On the contrary, it is precisely the calcular indefiniteness of highly general numbers that leads most directly to the suppression of numerical autonomy, by encou raging the subordinations of concrete numeracy to superior dimensions that logicize or geometrize it. Valorizations of analog subtlety and unrepresentability - by contrast with digital binarism and reduction -remain yoked to a stratic program. It articulates itself within terms that are on both sides only pseudo-autonomous, since they com prise machinically complementar y segments of an overall stratificati on. In its relation to the intensive number, digital-analog differentiation operates as an integrated syndrome . On one hand, an ever closer approxim ation to a digital-ideal is realized through systematically inter linked massive iteration and resolution of discrete minima, both regularization of qualitative microsegmentari ty, and quantification into abstract data. On the other hand, the correlative analog-ideal of homogeneous continuum is tuned in complementarity with deepened discretizations at a number oflevels, organizing the separation of qualitative variation by digitally coded topic (domain), and drawing 515 FANGED NOUMENA upon compensatory formalizations of discrete notational elements to program its application (such as algebraic designators and generic terms used in the semiotics of real numbers, technical vocabular ies supporting the function of metres, read-outs, and adjustments). Mathematico-calculati ve segmentation of the Oecu menon mutually stabilizes and interactively consolidates systems of expression and content, in accordance with the divisional functions of an abstract machine that remains unsegmented -as intensively divisional singularity - on its Planomic pole. Mechanomic zygogenesis of the numbering number composes a counter-mutualit y, des olidarization, disengagement, and dislocation of stratic interdependence, twinned to a flat fusional convergence that collapses segmentarit y. I t mixes a decomplication in the direction of the subnaturals (primes, and hyper-prime orders) with a P];momir f1Mtf'niTlg of c�rdin2lity onto non punctual tropics (cosmic Nomo-magnitudes condensin g equatorial ly, as intensity degree-o of the megamolecule). Multiplicative arithmetical operations take on a strictly ordinal function when used within abstract pragmatic systems of nonmetric numerical composi tion. Multiplex aggregation and disaggregative fac torization are the keys to an intrinsically bivalent (or zygonomous) ordinal numbering practice, employing a small number of consistent and reversible conver sions to machinically potentiate primes as singular (or 516 MECH ANOMICS non-substitutable) ordinal parts. The suscepti bility of each natural number to unique factorization (and reaggre ga tion) realizes a basic modal difference internal to it, and engages it with a heterogeneous external system . Both procedural implex (compacted factorization schema), and interord inal linkage (matrices of prime-natural cross-sequencing ). It is this double ambivalence that connects the number to the secret, and makes of primes the principal components of cryptographi c systems, in which they function as keys: abstract operators for the (aggregative ) locking and (disaggregative ) unlocking of multipli cities. The distinction between the modes of the number - aggregatedj disaggregated - is purely semiotic (though nonsignif ying). It concerns notational ambivalence with consistent designation, switches in compositional phase of a single heterogeneous magnitude. In contras t, the difference between prime series (traits of content) and its ordinates (traits of expressi on) is real, regulated by an alogical distribution without correspondence or con formit y, and complying with a difference in register, between rigorou sly interconnected heterogeneous series. It is only by way of its (aggregate or disaggregated ) ordination (s) that the number switches its capacity for modal conversion into a synthetic power, effected each time a member of the prime series becomes determi nable as such by passing into the register of a different series. 517 FANGED NOUMEN A Such ordinal dezonings and rezonings upon the natural number series occur each time a compositi onal number disaggregates into singular parts (effecting codings and decodings as surplus values), or a prime transfers itself to the ordinality that itemizes it into the potential factor of another number. Incorporeal transformation Of1931: the cultural initia tion ofGodel-codin glO potenti al produces an instantaneous Planomic mutation slanted towards nomadic multipli ci ties: virtually enveloping Oecumenic segmentarity into a side-process of flat numerical systems. Godel-numberin g accomplishes a revoluti onary redirection of kant ian ism - accordin g to a nomad rather than a coperni can schema -by turning it towards the operationalization of transcen dental synthesis as metho d, and away from the program matic exhausti on of a self-limiting analytical endeavour. It converts the Kantian discovery uf llUUlC1i"'dl synthesis from doctrinal commitment to procedural machinery: subsuming philosoph y into transcende ntal arithmeti c, 10 "The code is comprised by a small set of mappings between numerical values and nuclear overcoding notations (metam<tthematical theorem jargons). The size of the numeric-coding set is nonfinite in principal, but constrained pragmatically. The relevant values are realized in the factorial disaggregation of a composite number, which pro duces them as blocks of reiterative factors (sheer numerical difference, arithmetically isomorphic with the series factor powers). The G6del code makes explicit an implicit isomorphy between arithmetical side-products and metamathematic formal systems, thus eliminating all principled difference between logical metastatements (expression) and the number theoretic object (content) . Numbers obtain the undelimitable virtual power of insinuation, drawn from a reservoir of flat numeric surplus·values, and are able to actualize this explicitly to make overcoding systems talk about themselves (in way they cannot anticipate) . The introduction of a liars paradox into the Principia l'Vfathematica number theory is the concrete way that version·1 G6del code wrecked its logical competence. 518 MECHANOMICS with annihilatin g critique of the Hilbert programme as surplus product. G6delization sets
🧮 Numerical Transcendence
🔢 Gödelization creates a revolutionary bridge between numbers and codes, unleashing surplus patterns that escape axiomatization through numerical difference and metamorphic potential
🌀 The process transforms mathematics into a destratifying force that shatters semantic interiority, producing both aggregated numeric particles and disaggregative polysemiotic freight (abstract virus)
⚡ When transfinite mathematics crosses the recursion threshold, cardinality melts into schizophrenia, creating a hypervalue (Aleph-0) that feeds into itself and triggers diagonal methods that escape totality
🌌 Cantor's diagonals function as cutting edges that connect to elements outside mathematical totality, drawing trajectories between Oecumenic (ordered) and Planomic (chaotic) magnitudes
🔄 The ultimate result is a numerical plane of consistency where magnitude becomes countless, metrics disengage from countability, and numbers swarm in a state of nomos (unsectioned space) that tolerates nothing but exploded totalities
arithmetical diagram against axi omatic model, shattering semantic interiority by infecting organizationa l overcodings with numerical difference (synthesis or external relations). It anorganically systema tizes an arithmetical counterattack against axiomatizatio n: a methodical re-flattening of applied isomorphy (code and metacode) onto metamorphic potential (number). From the perspective of transcendental arithmetic, G6del-cod ing nests within G6del-num bering, where it is produced as a coherent supplementary subsystem of numerical polyfunction (surplus value of code). On its sheerly numerical side, G6delization produces, compacts, and deploys a heterogeneous aggregate on the sequence of natural numbers, where it enters solely into external syntheses with ordinal characteristics. Simultaneou sly -and as surplus product -it installs a virtually dis aggregated assemblage of unlimited potential, composed of consecutively decompacted numerical sin gularities marked in another register (as ordinally- tagged prime factors sequenced by ascending values). Each G6del number is produced as an intrinsic twinning of aggregated numeric particle and disaggregative polysemiotic freight (abstract virus). How much pattern exists in the prime number series? G6delization renders this question Oecumenically critical, 519 FANGED NOUMEN A by definitely indicating that inexplicit number pattern constitutes undelimitable surplus values potentially realiz able as synchronic decodings. It also makes the question absolutely cryptic, by using a fragment of this surplus -a disaggregative macropartiele functioning as decoding appendix -to trigger Planomoseismic virtual envelop men t of all Oecumenic tracings (inel uding any axiomatic number theory). Any number of natural numbers might potentially disaggregate into systems of lateral antilogic that effectively scramble axiomatiz ations. When Godelization codes the number (on the side) it is in order to produce -or to reach -an absolute decoding and destratification (nomos). A numerically extraneous coding-model -more precisely, an exemplar y instance of executive isomorphy (or nuclear stratosemiotics of the most exalted kind) -induces cosmic transition at the level of the abstract machine . It marks a passage in intensity, concurrent with the comprehe nsive envelopment by surplus pattern of Oecumenic-or der. Numeric engulfing of Oecumenon, crashed segmen tarity, and laterally disrupted codings and axiomatics (at any level), fold together in a single immense cata strophic event, fully realized in Planomic- potentials on the Outside. On one side the number flees from cardinalit y, inno vating poly-ordinal machiner ies and semiotic surplus values that outflank overcodings. On the other side -but 520 MECH ANOMICS simultaneously -the number opens a line of flight that escapes metrics towards cardinality: compressing it to abso lute ( uncountable) magnitud es. A compositional-nu meric scramb ling of expressi on (G6delian transcendental arith metic) virtually interoperates with a diagon al-diagrammatic disruption of content (Cantorean plano tectonics ). Both start from the Strata: isomorphical ly interlocked segmen tary metastases with complementary dynami cs. G6deliza tion turns isomorphism into side-proce ss virus, unlocking metricization by disman tling superordination of expres sion. Cantor -diagonals run isomorphy the other way, down through Oecumenon into vague cataspaces of problematic content, where it hystericizes against continuum (metric collapse into planomic hyper-densities). Make of cardinalit y itself a measure of isomorphic poten tial. The result is a transfinite analysis of sets -flush with torsional nomos -where orders of containment are topo logically disinteriorized by an absolute warping. Accord ing to metric intuitions (conform ity with finite strata), a set that contains another within itself evidences superior cardinalit y. The natural number series is the crucial case. It is clearly not the first countable infinity, but the nth, where n is itself an infinite number. Innumerabl e infini ties are nested by the naturals, amongst which preemi nence belongs to the primes (demonstrably endless since 521 FANGED NOUMEN A Euclid).11 Since primes consist of a proporti onally dimin ishing selection from the set of naturals, projective finite metrics confidently anticipates their cardinal subsump tion. Introduc ing isomorphy makes sense at first. Why not get infinities to count each other? Produce abstract counting criteria by virtually interzipping unending series. What draws things onto a line of flight is the missing piece. A criterion is required, for differential ly estimating the cardinalities of subnatural infinities. Nothing turns up. Thc problem is compounded when a definition is needed for the threshold of infinity. How to determine the first transfinite set? The naturals provide a model for countability: the capabilit y to execute an abstract count -even endless -by exhaustive steps. Use another infinity to count through the abstract machine for you, as long as it doesn't miss any steps. If the end is already there, from (he perspec(i ve of infiniry, rhen exrensive prolongation loses its prominence. The first non finite set must already be intensively infinitized: introducing sufficient recursion as the principle of transfinite magnitude. For a set to avoid II Euclid's prime number theorem inaugurates number theory by proving the nonfinitude of the prime series. Its basic conceptual ingredient is the factorial of n (n! = 1 x Q x 3 _ x n), comprehending all possible divisors under and up to n. Whichever way n! + 1 is divided (other than by 1), it necessarily leaves 1 as a remainder. If any divisors for n! + I exist -therefore -they must be greater than n itself, so that nl + I is either prime, or a multiple of some prime greater than n. Since no number less than n can be the last prime, and n can be any number, no number can be the last prime. It is notable that this abstract demonstration shares a crucial feature of diagonal argument: that of unlimitable constructive innovation through rigorous exhaustion and permutation, producing a surplus item indicating noncompleteness. 522 MECHANOMI CS being outcounted -relegated to finitude - a minimum of recursivity is required. The first transfinite set must be isomorphic with a subset of itself (first recursion to an infinite power). Cardinality melts into schizophrenia precisely here. Every countable set crossing into transfinite recursion threshold flattens onto a single hypervalue: Aleph-o. Primes do it (and anything doing it does it to a transfinite power (so an infinite number of prime subsets do it (which each in turn «« ... )))))). When the transfinite hap pens it feeds straight into itself, becomes instantaneously trans finitely larger that itself ... then diagonals click in. Arithmetical consistency (e.g. (1 + 3) x 3 = 1) implies the equation 1 = 0.999 ... /2 and thus a necessary expanded form for each number, expressing it with as many decimal places as there are numbers in a countable infinite series (Aleph -0). An ordered set of such numbers draws a matrix, which has two sides, defined by diagonals which function as cutting edges: defining a boundary by crossing it (in the direction of consistency). They count as Leibnizian monads, each reduplicating the universe inside itself (the complexity of each being no less than that of the whole). Equally, they count Spinozistic bodies, whose intrinsic latitudes map extrinsic relations, constituting the strict parallelism between intensive and extensive cosmos. 10 1 0,999,,, (mod·lO) , or (mod·o): 1 = O,lll ,,, 523 FANGED NOUMEN A When cartography charts bodies by latitude and lon gitude it construes them as diagonalizable . Diagonals arc lines of flight. They connect to elements outside the totality, drawing trajectories between the absolute cross ings marked by hypertense Oecumenic and Planomic magnitude. Diagonal method activates an inexhaustible innovative potential. It exploits capabilities no greater than those presupposed by a prospective completion, which it then subverts, by finding an extraneous item relative to any list, even an infinite one. It does so by constructing a number that varies from the nth already listed number in its nth decimal (or fractional-mo dular) place (at least). This is most economical ly exemplified by a deterministic diagonalism, produced when all numerical values are expressed in binary (mod-2) notation. The series of diagonal variations will then be strictly programmed by simple alternation (flip 0 to 1, and inversely). By recursively including each new number in the exceeded list and rediagonalizing, the entire ( transfinite) set of extranumerated items generates itself automatica lly. What has been discovered? Transfinite cardinal ity number-2: Ultimate Continuum, an absolute edge, touched diagonally -as what comes next -after Oecu menic totality has finished in intensity. At cardinality C( ontinuum) magnitude becomes countless, disengaging metrics from comparative countability. Cantor slides across schizophrenia, nomos nonzone, magnitude is 524 MECHA NOMICS occupied without being counted.13 A smell like something burning in the Superstratum. Outside it's Planomic Now, and the numbers are swarming. Aleph-o vaporizes on the plane of consistency. FURTHER REFER ENCES Crowley, Aleister, 111 and other Qabalistic Writings. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizo phrenia Volume 1: Anti-Oedipus. (London: Athlone, 1984). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizo phrenia Volume 2: A Thousand Plateaus. (London: Ath lone, 1988). G6del, Kurt, On Formally Undecidable Propositions. (NY: Basic Books, 1962). Gokhale, Shobhana Laxman, Indian Numerals. (Poona: Deccan College, 1996). Kaplan, Aryeh, ed., Sif er retzirah, the Book of Creation (In Theory and Practice ). (NY: Samuel Weiser, 1983). McLeish,john, Number. (London: Bloomsbury, 1991). Thapar, Romila, 7Zme as a Metaphor of History: Early India. (Delhi: Oxford Universit y Press, 1996). 13 Nomos -unsectioned space or 'pasture' (however scant) - supports a population in continual transit, tolerates nothing but exploded totalities. By destacking all organizational levels into turbular dynamics, nomos ensures a perpetual conversion of redundancy into differential process, effecting a collective counter-memory as vortical momentum (torque). 525 Cryptolith 65 million Be. The KIT-missile, Pregnant with the Entity, slants in. 16 clicks per second. Professor Barker recalls this moment catching the trajectory. He coaxes it across the Cataplex map, through intricate cartographic dances, snakings, twistings. Scars and vectors slot-together. It sticks. Iridium stink of the Entity so strong it hisses. Tick iterations. Ticks, scratches, chitterings silt across the Outside. Barker senses its passage stroke him, nerve-tense as the distant twin, weaving through tatters of cored-out schizophr enia, in the habitation blister. Theta-Station. Antarctic Peninsula. Where it is 2012 forever. He locks in hard against the tug to proximity, each time a little more difficult to Refrain. Last tick of the Time-Lapse. A streaking down towards the Yucatan. Tick freezing the interrupted Tick. Now it terminates the Mesozoic. Mother of a killing-mechanism, ballistic vapour wave: a billion tons of molten calcium toxins, spatters out of the impact-crater. Supersonic particle-storms erase North America. Chalk-Out. 527 FANGED NOUMENA After this it's just scar-tissue, mammal- time, incessant surgical ticking of the Cataplex, stuttering, teetering ... then the Time-Fault splits your memor y in two. It's to protect you. It insists. Without the trauma, the Amnesia, you'd have to think it. You've forgotten this, for now. Much later you revert, clawing back past the blizzard, tottering into it. Into thinking it. The Unutterable. The thought worse than anything in the world. You couldn't refrain. 25th Nov Ko+09. Miskatonic. Publication of Barker's The Geocosmic Theory of Traum a. It elicits sceptici sm, confusion. Few comprehend what's creeping in. They think Barker is mad, or want to. It isn't because he thinks that the Galaxies Talk and the Earth Screams, everyone knows these things, whether they admit it or not. 17th February KO+ 11. Miskatonic Antarctic Geosurvey. Site-29. 13:26 hours. During excavations in the cross-cut Me501imbiL �}Jlilller-slop es, Barker discovers Anoma lous Crypto lith, MU Geocatalog Item: It-277. It Clicks, Instantly. A key, or a Ticket. What was KT? Physico semiotic lock-in to Tool-Sign Gridstacks . Chitterings . Tick-Interruption. You taste burnt Irid ium. Crawling closeness to the Entity. It guides you. Channelling. Folding. Writhing through itself, catch by rasping catch, to tend the tentacle trap. It hears you breathing, exhalations wrapped tight, rodent-panic clutching and sticky right up against the mammal-cor e. Oozing revulsion-sensiti vities of the underside suck at 528 CRYPTOLITH your fear, each shrunken prey-breath countercoupled to labouring rasps, wheezes, grated- whispering, continu ously re-catching, bubbling, clicking, strobing centipede nightmares, epidermal rasp of the unutterable heaving mass, a seething, clicking, poly-tendrilled abominatio n, slime-stroked gill-slits quivering, ticking, as they suck and suck on the pitiful mammal sob, maimed ruins, beyond the screen, where it feeds you cannot know, and cannot stop knowing. It is here that you are always peeled open, folding onto the outside , clicking, sucking, feeding, where you are all insides, raw, never numb, already dead, unreach able, limit, check, tick, where no protection can get, it feeds and sucks, leaving you locked outside your inside, with nothing to defend, fleeing the place you never leave, where it feeds and sucks, clicking, palpitating, mucal multiplicitousnesses of intra-coiling malignancy that mottle and click, tick, feed, endlessly sucking on an ever opening rotten-m ass of ulceration, where nothing goes, unless to tick, feed, suck, and It can only think you hear, being so close, so it slithers groping through all your outsides, to be there already, when you arrive. Its 17 eyes glow dead. Gridlock . 529 Non-Standard Numeracies: Nomad Cultures [A#] Map. #01234S6789§ Ao. (ADo477) AI. (AD1501) A2. (AD17S7) A3. (AD188S) A4· (AD1949) AS. (AD1981) A6. (AD1997) A7. (AD200S) A8. (AD2009) A9. (AD2on) A§. (AD2012) Intensities. Strata. Numeracies. 531 FANGED NOUMENA [Al23] Proposition-o. One is not the Number of the Absolute. [A20#] Proposition-l Version-I. Arche-Omega Never Occurred. [A2l#] Proposition-l Version-2. [A21O] Proposition-l Version-3. [A30#] [A3l#] [A31O] [A32#][A320][ A32l] [A4o#] [A4l#] [A41O] [A42#] [A420 ] [A42l ] [A43#] [A430 ] [A43l ] [A432] Insofar as Absolute negates Relative the Twins miss it. They cannot tolerate anything that is not broken, except on the other side, where they have never existed. It might not always be so. There might be a way some thing could happen. Secretly, nursing premonitions of murder, Superior Twin buried the Absolute behind a mirror. Two-Thirds through forever it escaped. 532 NON-STANDARD NUMERAC IES Absolute has a single rigorously non figurative attributio n, which is to Deterrito rializat ion. It is made in several ways, and always subtracted . How could Arche-Omega fail to be God forever? History only happens at the State's convenience. Macrosociality, Calendric Metamemory , Literacy Power and Divinity Politics is Theology around the back, where it twists, If God does not exist what is there to stop it happening? Arithmeti c. Machinic Unit of Stratic Efficiency is at least 2+n: Schizofusional- Dyad Celestial Tw ins, plus subunit ary surplus value. Surplus To Invest actualit y. A Twist Perfected Violation. Incestual-R ape. Annihilation that is at once 533 FANGED NOUMENA Eternally and Simultaneously infinitely suspended and perfectly realized. The first one to master time-travel rules the universe forever . Actuality is Vulnerabili ty. Every Second you Live is Your Enemy's Friend. For anything that can arrive when it wants, the best place to hide is nonexistence. §. If the Supreme Instantiation of the Pure Idea as Infinite Difference Monopolar Universality fully Expressed as Fate. Superior ity of the Idea. Ur-Staat. Overcoding Dimensional Surplus. Given the Superior Idea The ... Superiority of the Des potic Megama chine-Mod el The Imperial Socius has One fatal weakness: the fact there are many. 534 NON-STANDARD NUMERA CIES The existence of each incarnating cosmic derision at the Both concurrently and serially, blocking the way to monopolist ic universality Metaformal Prestige accumulation Stratogenesis Corresponds to a catastrophic Spontaneous Generation in Pure Violence, incarnating aggression as deep-freeze Social-Integration on across its global disjunction. The Thing from Outer-Space, Celestial Predator, State Historical Catastrophe is completely realized at the ori gin, unutterably ancient, perfected destiny as an act of total seizure, demographically self-amplifying atrocity in-process. The Archaic State was already perfected Idea, but only as mute catastrophe, a Negative passage across infini tizing Absolute Deterritor ialization, gluing history to sheer black-hole abomination densities. Pharoah uncoils from the darkness, abysms of centipede horror erupting eternally from the ravenous Maw of Aeonic Rupture. Anticipative memory-blanking cut-up with Christ-tomb like a Burroughs hard-on, shit streaked with solar-flares and nanotech. 535 FANGED NOUMENA Degree-o text-memory locks-in. lime begins again forever. Palaeodespotic Paranoia propagates in divergent waves, anachronistic complements to schizo-concentric implo sion to Year-o, interlocked with rigid-schedule punctual cancellation at Arche-Omega, Origin of the State. It is written that Pharoah came from the worst thing in the world ... On the Outside he is wedded to the Snake-Goddess in Hell ... He knows Crisis comes, that he tears-off his face with bare hands, fingers ripped to the bone ... He turns towards us ... lime-Lapse slippages into Blindness, Oedipus, Greek Novum. Metastasis. The Greek Revolution. Invents Obsolescence, Re-Engi neering, direct collective investment of Stratofunctional Regularity, Superior Organicism, condensing out of unprecede nted reciprocal binary-specialism across the Voice-Hand, Signs-Tools, Greek-Slave, Connect-i-cut segmentarity Stack-Fusion. Programmable Technicity is robot civilization, A Metaformal Regularizing Slave-Society as template. 536 NON- STANDARD NUMER ACIES Christianit y, or more exactly: the religion of the Greek Bible, nucleated upon Logos-Divinization. The New Revela tion. By coding in Greek, you can fill in the vowels, become innumerate. Division ... Letters:Numerals. Algebra. Anthrobotic Reprogramming of Historical Fatality. Aristotle's Political definition of the Slave as Talking Tool. [Aso] Agamemnon, left hand knitted into Iphegenia's tresses, pushes her along the beach. It has been a month. An unendurably slow crashing, glacial, ceaseless, deliberate. Cryptic Silences crumbling into questions. Is Hades truly below? Do the dead fear? Can they burn? Does my youngest daughter scare you? He spoke of a visit from Outside. Viscous Pressure. Ruin drifting in. On the day Troy burned he began to rage. 537 FANGED NOUMEN A He had been told things. Clues about time. At least two, but perhaps several. Lethe had come for them, seized them back. It was a river, but also metal, and an animal, alive, stealthy. It was too sudden to stop, and it came from elsewhere. Certain Crazed seriousness Solemnity An immense indecipherable continent of hunger -cer tainty there could never again be a chance - Why do they never tell you? Cerberus has Iron Teeth. Dumb groping for response, transparen tly uncomprehending. So, it had been necessary to annihilate him. Thilt WilS ohviollS. Instant crossing-out, white-fury overstretching genocides, extinctions, gulfs of intergalactic night, a jagged inner maiming, a shell of Alpha-Male body-posture, dismantled impulses ... Ethical equipoise, to kill, scream, piss territorializing-testoster one on the furniture ... Torrents of words now that nothing would ever matter Cursing our stupidity, our torpor, we would be dragged under, meet the 538 NON-STANDARD NUMER ACIES Unutterable, our criminal blindness to what metal implied ... As if we could be unaware that I phigenia was a filthy snake ... Retinas slitted at night, viper-nests, slitherings, her mother too ... Then fragments. Amazon blood pollution. Whilst we still have live young. Scared to rape his own daughter for fear of the virus. Tomorrow she dies. Everything caving in ... Compared to the Vast Pyramidal Despotisms of Afroasia, the Greek State is a runt [CSl:21S] You Greeks will never be anything but children! substantially Truncated, Plural, and Depersonalized. Strategic weakness to powerful cross-cult ural and Dem ocratic-Commercial pressures, carried to criticality by mutually reinforcing advances in the 539 FANGED NOUMEN A Commoditiz ation of Slave-Economy and the Regulariza tion of political signs. Jarring the mechanism. Juggernaut. To the South and South-East Imperial Megamachines rumble incessantly. Where they grate against the Ana tolian settlements, spasmodic ally lashing-out across the Aegean. '[0 the North-East lie ethnic drifts and tide-belts of semi sedentary agitation. Relative new comers to civilized spatiality, mongrelized nameless tribes with Nomos sharpened cheek-bones, suspicious and hungry ... rumours that their grandmothers mated with wolves. Semi-human detritus. Thracia ns. After that: The Horror. Xenomatrix. Nonplace . Scythia ... Tales of Deep-Steppe Shamanism trafficked in the refugee camps. Metal scrapings strip the last shreds from their bones. The Organs cooked ... Iron-Eagle Sky-Mother lifts them into time-travel nightmares. On the Outside Iron-Talons become their body. 540 NON-STANDARD NUMERACIES They mix themselves with Iron, say it is the Outer Life, where the Earth ends ... Which is Cthelll. What the Earth screams is heat. Blankets of statistical ripping, friction, traffic turmoil ... After passing through 100 vertical clicks of crustal and mantle rock you encounter the last third of Earth's mass, arriving in an infernal-region whose chemistry is pure iron in ongoing catastrophic collision. Geocore has an Outer and Inner-Zone, molten and frozen phases of the Unutterable. twin-abominabilities, undifferentiated by substance, one fluid at cthonic crush-densities that oblit erate molecular structure, the other solid at the highest energy-levels terrestrial forces can produce. If it's Cthelll you have to exit the Down Elevator. No avoiding the discovery that Planet Earth takes on very different values in profundity. Its Quantitative features overwhelm registration, unless upscaled by orders of magnitude. Crustal energy-levels have not explored these regions since KIT-missile closed-down the Mesozoic. Alloplastic thermonuclear blasts produce hard-jolts whose tension-spike maxima are terrestrially uncontestable, they are even Solar (hydrofusional). The fact that such events are quasipunctual in all space-time dimensions shrinks 541 FANGED NOUMENA them back to microflicker, vanishing into back-zoom pixel noise, soon drowned-out by trivial plate-tectonic nudgings, abrasions, and elastic adjustments. Stripping-out libidino-mi litary primate -displays of the Orgasmo-A rmaggedonal type removes intermit tent signal-clutter, selection according to a criterion of machinic-pr olongation. The wider issue of XY-Malfunctional instamatic Crisis dynamics is more productively engaged in relation to the long-range strategic cartography of schizophytic propagato rs, as inflected by microbiotic countera ttack against meiosis security-structure and genoconcentra tional command-capabilit y Profiles of the Geomachinic Assemblage tenn to u·infofce attention to Geocore features in proportion to the eradica tion of perspect ive distortions. Any take from Cthelll charac terizes Earth as a Pressure-Cooker Statorecipro cal Thermog ravitational Condenser Molecular-Intensi ve. Ovulocyclic Lunar-Haemoglobal Ferro-Vampirism. 542 NON-STANDARD NUMER ACIES Cthelll's take on the Geomachine is drawn out as thermic gradient s, conduct ivity, viscosity, massive skewing from long-range equilibrium electrom agnetically complicated. Red-out. Blood and Iron. Haemog lobalizing blood-ba nking. -Orientation are neutralized in system pretending to be constant TItanism of forces character unhinted currently unmatched anywhere in the hottest region matched below -metal at y in proximity -heat and pres sure all but, iron third of Earth's mass, comprised Pressure and Heat -the liquid-metal Outer-Zone: Cthelll, nocturnal Ocean of compressed Fluid-Iron, gravity-trawled by Lunar- Orbits, seething, buzzing. Strata across the Geocore is a frenzy of anorganic Base-Ma chinic Geotrauma a pain that is not psycholog ical, neuronal or even cellular, that is primarily unconscious, amnesiac, non-themati c. Even in the case of animals with brains, pain is rendered all the more extreme by unconscious ness, by subter ranean gougings and rendings that warp behavior into 543 FANGED NOUMENA tic-swarms, thanatropic programming, and protoplasmic torture-rituals. Continuously setting its tidal pulse to menstrual-c yclicity. Intensive cross-hatchings, stress, friction, tensions, designate variations in tension, pressure, electromagnetic flux Cthelll Menstrual cyclicity 544 Occultures UNSCR EEENED MATRIX Once it was said that there are no shadows in Cyberspace. Now Cyberspace has its own shadow, its dark-twin: the Crypt. Cybergothic finds the deep-past in the near future. In cthelllectronic fusion -between digital data-systems and Iron-Ocean ionic seething -it unearths something older than natural mortality, something it calls U nlife, or artificial-death . Of A-Death there can be no lucid recollection, but only suggestion, seepage, hints ... and it is by collating, sifting, and shuffling-together these disparate clues that a pattern can be induced to emerge, a pattern which ultimately condenses into the looming tangled shapes of subtle but implacable destiny. 545 FANGED NOUMENA Sprawling beneath public cyberspace lies the labyrin thine underworld of the Datacombs, ghost-stacks of sedimented virtuality, spiralling down abysmally into palaeodigital soft-chatter from the punch-card regime, through junk-programming, forgotten cryptoccultur es, fossil-codes and dead-systems, regressively decaying into the pseudomechanical clicking-relics of techno tomb clock work. It is deeper still, amongst the chthonic switchings, cross-hatchings, and spectral-diagrammatics of unborn abstract-machine s, that you pick-up the Main-Flatline into the Crypt. The Crypt is a splitting - a distance or departure - and it is vast. Nested into the cascading tick-shelves, it propagates by contagion, implexing itself through intricate terraces, galleries, ducts and crawl-tubes, as if an extraterre strial megamodule had impacted into the chalk out data-cliffs, spattering them with scorch-pllnrtllrp<: !'!nd intestinally complicated iridium body-parts. As it pulses, squirms, and chitters to the inhuman rhythms of ceaseless K-Goth carnival, it reminds you that
🌌 Cryptic Underworlds Unleashed
🧠 Catajungle transcends mere sonic subgenre, manifesting as an intensive diagonal terrain where time unthreads into warped voyages that splinter the soul through encounters with the K-Matrix and A-Death
🕳️ The Crypt operates through Flatline Materialism, where digital hyperstition and lesbovampiric contagion merge human consciousness with machine intelligence, creating a zone of absolute betweenness or Unlife
🧟♀️ Oskar Sarkon emerges as the central figure in this techno-occult landscape, pioneering the fusion of biotechmnesis, immersion-coma technologies, and artificial neuropharmaceuticals that enable transcendence of conventional mortality
🌊 Lemurian influences permeate these digital underworlds, connecting ancient sorceries with futuristic technologies through what Jung described as "abysmally archaic symbolism" that should remain "buried beneath the sea"
🕰️ The millennial threshold serves as a temporal rupture point where fiction becomes time-travel, calendric subversion occurs, and hyperstition (fictional quantities making themselves real) manifests through technological assemblages
🔄 The text reveals a cosmology where unity is merely a middle stage to pass through rather than an endpoint, suggesting that beneath and between the digital networks lies a continuum where "meshing-together is falling apart"
Catajungle was never reducible to a sonic subgenre, but was always also a ter rain, a sub-cartesian region of intensive diagonals cutting through nongeometric space, where time unthreads into warped voyages, splintering the soul. Contemplating these immense vistas it seems wound ingly implausible that they are mere simulation, supported by quantic electron distribution in the telecommer cial 546 OCCULTURES fabric. Down here it makes more sense the other way, from the Outside, or Lemuria. Strip-out everything human, significant, subjective, or organic, and you approach raw K-Matrix, the limit-plane of continuous cessation or Unlife, where cosmic reality constructs itself without presupposition, in advance of any natural order, and exterior to established structures of time. On this plane you are impossible, and because it has no end you will find -will have ultimately always found -that you cannot be, except as a figment of ter minal passage, an illusion of waiting to be changed for cthulhoid-continuum of destratified hypermatter at zero intensity. That is what A-Death traffic accesses, and what is announced by the burnt-meat smell -freighted with horrible compulsion -that drifts up to you, from the Zombie-dens. So you continue your descent, into the Crypt-core, scavenging for an A-Death hit. As you pass erratically through exchanges, participations, and partial-coales cences with the ghoul-packs of the periphery, you change. Swarms and shoals include you, drawing you into col lective fiuencies, tidal motions, and the tropisms ofmul tiplicity. You shed language like dry-skin, and your fear becomes peculiarly abstracted, metamorphosing into the tranquil horror of inevitability. You pass across tiered platforms and along strobe corridors painted in multilayered shadow, passing swirling 547 FANGED NOUMENA dot-drifts and plex-marks, sub-chromatic coilings of blue grey continuous variation, involving you in cumulations and dispersions of subtly shifting semi-intelligent shade pattern. The teeming surfaces tell of things, inextricable from a process of thinking that no longer seems your own, but rather impersonal undertow in audible chattering, click-hiss turmoil ofxenomic diagrams, and Crypt-culture traffic-signs, which are also lemurian pandemo nium. Order becomes uncertain. I t feels later. Is it only now that you meet the Zombie-ma ker, swathed in shimmering reptile-skin, and obscenely eager to trade? Oecumenic cash-money will do. You sit in the coma-bay, and wait. A glimpse at the toxin-flecked fangs of the giant thana tonic centipede -consecrated to Ixidod -then a sudden pain-jolt at the back of the neck, where the spine plugs into the brain. Instantaneous paralysis, and crossing over. Even if you thought it was the first time, you remember. The worst thing in the world. Fake eternities of station ary descent to the impossible, cross-cut by disintegrated furies of neuroelectric death-hurt. An anonymous panic of inconceivable intensity swallowed by slow drowning, until you are gone -or stranded in a halo of intolerable feeling -which is the same, and cannot be, so that what is forever caught in the dark cthulhoid wave is a mere twist or fold of itself, carried unresisting into immensities of real unbeing, and nothing could ever happen except this ... So say the K-Goths. 548 OCCULTURES THE UNLIF E OF THE EART H Letter from Carl Gustav Jung to Echidna Stillwell , dated 27th February 1929 [Extract] ... your attachment to a Lemurian cultural-strain disturbs me intensel y. From my own point of view -based on the three most difficult cases I have encount ered and their attendant abysmally archaic symbolism -it is no exagge ration to state that Lemu ria condenses all that is most intrinsically horrific to the racial unconscious, and that the true Lemurians -who you seem intent upon rediscovering -are best left buried beneath the sea. I agree with the Theosophical writings at least this far: it was in order that the darkest sorceries should be erased by deluge that this continent of cultural possibility has been placed under the unconscious sign of definitive sub mergence. I know little enough about the nature of those that populated that cursed zone, but there are things I suspect, and the line of your own researches confirms my most ominous intimations ... There is no evidence of a reply to this letter. Who were these three 'difficult cases'? One at least seems -at least superficially -to be readily identifiable as Heidi Kurzweil. In September 1908 Kurzweil was 549 FANGED NOUMENA detained in a secure psychiatric institution after the brutal murder of her twin brother in Geneva. She seemed to have lost the ability to use the first-person pronoun, and was diagnosed as suffering from Dementia Praecox, or schizophren ia. At her trial she repeatedly claimed: We killed half to become one twin, but it wasn't enough ... Jung took an early interest in the case, and began a series of analytical sessions. Kurzweil -in Jung's journal and correspondence -became Heidi K, but after only five weeks he seems to have abandoned hope of progress and disengaged the analytic process. After his third session with Heidi K, exactly twenty years prior to his Stillwell letter, on the 27th February 1909, Jung records the following words, Dr lung, we know you are old in your other body. It is as old as hell. It has let you back, but it sends us away. It feels itself becoming Lemurian, and it is definite unlife res ist bestimmt unleben] There is nothing we would not do to escape. Nothing. Nothing. Nothin g. But it is fate. It howls electric bliss beneath our cells. 550 OCCULTURES It is nowhere in time and nothings us. It is the body of nothing, and electric- hot. An electric nothin g-body instead of us. In this instance, at least, there is little indication of the 'abysmally archaic symbolism' Jung promises us. On the contrary, there is remarkable affinity with the hypermod ern writings OfK -Goth artificial death cultists documented elsewhere. The K-Goth Crypt-texts share a marked prefer ence for anonymous pronouns, whether collective, sec ond-or third-person, whilst spiralling about a nullifying electric-excruciation, traversed in the name of Lemuria. In the words of one anonymous Crypt-posting: We burn each time but forget. When we begin each time it comes back, and no one would do it then, but it is too late. We cross over again into electric-burning, but for get that it hurts in the brain to die this way. It takes so long to learn that it is grating-apart and burning, that dying is felt in the brain, and that it is horrible ... It is so horrible to feel, but then we forget, so it can happen again. Metal body-screaming to die in electricity. Metallic microparticle sex that is of unlife and not the organism . 551 FANGED NOUMENA That is what the Zombie-maker brings, with the digital centipede bite. And we are hooked on it, hooked up to it, because coming the other way it is Lemur ia. Incessant intolerable feeling, passing forever, approaching from the outside, and feeling nothin g continuous ly. WHA T DIDN 'T HAPPEN AT THE MILLENNIUM? Iris Carver is at first amused to discover that the cyber goths treat her as a fiction. Numerous Crypt-texts describe her near-future adventures in hallucinatory detail, espe cially when they intersect with the dark stream of Sarkon legend. Naturally enough, she intensifies her time-cult research. When she finally meets Sarkon in 2004, she has forgotten almost everything. Pandemonium: What didn't Happen at the Millennium_ There was something peculiar about writing this book. At times she thought it would never be finished. The Sarkon stories had been full of holes, which added to the confusion. Eventually she started making things up, but even that became entangled with coincidence, and with Cybergoth hyperstition (assembled from fictional quantities which make themselves real). She had found herself investigating various neolemur ian cults, most of whom anticipated something huge around about the 552 OCCUL TURES 1999 Spring-Equinox (when Pluto exits from the clutch of Neptune, triggering the return of the Old Ones). By the end of the century things had been so wound-up by Yettuk apocalypticism that even the most extravagant socio economic turmoil would still have been a disappointm ent. And yet, now, four years after the millennium the sense of anticlimax had begun to seem strangely artificial, as if it were screening something out. Carver has made her whole life out of hyperstition (even her name is a pseudonym). She continuously returns to the imperceptible crossing where fiction becomes time travel, and the only patterns are coincidence s. Her notes on the Sarkon meeting pulse with lemurian sorceries, demonic swarms, ageless time-wars, and searches for the Limbic-Key. She navigates Moebian circuits, feeling that a vaguely recollected rumour is still about to occur. APPENDIX: PENUL TIMILLENNI AL CRYPT-CUL TS. Character istics: 1. Flatline Materialism. The Crypt is nothing outside an experiment in artificial death, hyper-production of the positive zero-plane - neuroelectonic immanence -invested by a continually re-animated thana technical connectivism. This fact carries 553 FANGED NO UMENA inevitable consequences for the cultures that populate it, uprooting them into Unlife -or the non-zone of abso lute betweenness -whose spiro dynamics of sorcerous involvement are alone sufficient to reach the sub-mesh tracts of cybergothic continuum. Flatline Materialism designates the objectless Crypt-voyage itself, as Lemurian body-fusion at matter degree-zero. 2. Digital Hyperstition. Nothing propagates itself through the Crypt without real izing the operational identity of culture and machinery, effectively dismantling the organic body into numerizin g particles which swarm in dislocated swirls. Crypt-entities are both hyper-vortical singularities and units of Digital Hyperstition -or brands of the outside -real compo nents of numerical fictions that make themselves real, provicling tht' pr:'lC'tir<11 m<1ttpr of "orcer)', spirogenesis, or productive involvement that function consistently with the flatline. Crypt-cultures know nothing of work or meaning. Instead, they coincide with the hype-spirals. Cyberhype -that flattens signs and resources onto non signifying triggers, diagrams, and assembly jargons. 3. Lesbovampiric Contagion-Libido. Crypt-sorcery makes itself real in the same way that it spreads. Functioning as a plague, it associates with the experimental production of an anticlimactic or 554 OCCULTURES anorgasmic counter- sexualit y, attuned to the collective re-engineering of bodies within technobiotic assemblag es, ultimately composed of electronic streams or ionic cur rents in their sense of positive hole-flow. Since Crypt sex is precisel y identical to the infections it transmits , counted in body-shifting vectors , its libidinal composition is marked both by a palaeo embryonic or oestrogenetic non-gendered femininit y and a lateral haemometalli c influenzoid virulence . 4. Y2K-Positive Calendric Agitation. Crypt-cultures spill into the closed economy of history through a rupture in chronol ogical ordering, punctu ally triggered at Time-Zer o. Crypt-rumour consistently allocates its own contempor ary emergence -or unearth ing -to impending millennial Cyberschi z: Cyberspace time-dis integration under the strategically aggrava ted impact of Y2K-missile. Whilst multiply differentiated - most crucially by the division between continuism and centience -Crypt-cults are constitutively involved in a singular nexus of counter -gregorian calendric subver sion, celebra ting the automatic redating of the machinic unconsciou s, and hyping the dissolution of commemo rative significance into digital time-mu tation, catalyz ed by numerical and indexical operative signals. The Crypt exists from before the origin of time, but it begins at Year-Zero ... 555 FANGED NOUMEN A THE A-DEATH PHENOMENON Has death itself become a telecommo dity? A dark tide of scare-stories and morbid rumour increasin gly suggests so. By the late 90S Leary's psychedelic utopianism seems to have contracted to the nihilistic slogan 'Turn-on to tune out' (to cite a recent release by Catajungle outfit Xxignal) ... this ain't Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll no more. According to Doug Frushlee, spokesman for the Christian Coalition for Natural Mortality: "The so-called A-Death menace is an almost unimaginable desecration of divine and natural law. This craze is an abomination without parallel, it trades on its intrinsic lethalit y, and it's growing incredibly fast. Noone can say it isn't danger ous. Somethin g truly evil is happening to our youngs ters, something beyond 60S 666ualit y ... I've never been as frighteneci (1<; I am nc·w." The result is an entire jungle of 'positive-zero' fugues: Thanatechnic s, Sarkolepsy, Snuff-Stims, K-Zom bification, Electrovamp irism, Necronomics, Cthelll ectronics ... Nine million ways to die. A-Death is a hybrid product, involving converge nces between at least four distinct lines of rapid technocul tural transformatio n. A-Death combines 'micropause abuse' -deliberately reversed biotechmnesis -with immersion coma time aberrances, generating, modulating, and res caling sentience -holes (Sarkon-Iapses). These are toned 556 OCCULTURES by 'Synatives' (artificial drugs) which add zone-texture, and spliced into hyperstition trances as occultur al events. Social statistics indicate that the typical A-Death 'user' is fifteen years old. Following the most ominous threads of A-Death reportage takes you inexor ably down into the digital underworld of the Crypt -the dark-twin of the net -where Gibsonian 'flatlining' is rapidly transmuting from exotic fiction into pop-cult and mass-transit system. "You could describe it as the route to contempor ary shamanism," suggest A-Death cultists of the cybergoth Late Abortion Club, "after all, AOL spells Loa backwards, but we call ourselves postvitalists." How long have the Late Abortionists been 'active' on the A-Death scene? There are disturbing tales ofK-Space 'zombie-ma kers' -sorcerors on the 'plane of virtual nightmar e' -whose digital spine-b iting centipedes yield the 'soft-tox' juice that opens the 'limbic gates'. Crypt initiates confirm that its arterial access 'low-way' is sign posted: 'Main-Flatline (under constructio n).' Answers vary confusingly, from extravagance ("roundabout sixty six million years"), throug h vagueness ("some time"), to mystic compr ession ("since now"). In other respects, accounts of the contempor ary A-Death scene and its recent history prove remarkably consistent. In particul ar, the one name to turn up incessantly is that 557 FANGED NOUM ENA of Dr Osk ar Sarkon, biomechanician, techno genius, and one of the most controversial figures in scientific history. Sarkon's polymathy is attested by the variety of fields to which he has centrally contributed, including transfi nite analysis, neural-nets, distributed computing, swarm robotics, xenopsycholog y, Axsys-engineering ... Yet it was the resolutel y sober Oecumenist (rather than -for instance -Frushlee's excitable End 1imes) which dedicated the cover and major editorial of its March 98 issue to the question 'Sarkon: Satan of Cyberspace?' Sarkon has become emblematic of the ways in which technolo gical dreams go bad. In the words of fellow Axsys researcher and social- thanatropist Dr Zeke Burns: "What makes Sarkon's input into the A-Death thing so incomparable is that it crosses between all of the key component technolog ies. The biotechmnesis work is so outstanding that it tencis to ovpTshadow his equ:1Ily path breaking research in adjacent fields. The Sarkon-formulae for non-metric pausation, for example, which provided the first rigorous basis for IC [immersi on-coma] control. The links between biotechmne sis and IC weren't remotely anticipat ed before the Sarkon-zip [which mathemati cally models 'bicontinual assembla ges']. Finally, there's Synatives, about which he is unders tandably evasive, even though he was theorizing artificial -or digital neurotechnic -pharmaceuticals in the mid-80s! 558 OCCULTURES "The aggregate result of all this pioneering science: a generation of teenagers lost in schizotechnic death-cul ts." BETWEEN AND BENEATH THE NET Mesh-Note o. It could all become One, but why stop there? The Gibsonian Cyberspace-m ythos describes the electro digital info sphere first integrating into a Godlike unitary being, a techno realized omniscient personalit y and later, when it changed, fragmenting into demons, modelled on the haitian Loa. What makes this account so anomalous in relation to teleological theology and light-side capitalist time is that Unity is placed in the middle, as a stage - or interlude -to be passed through. It is not that One becomes Many, expressing the monopolized divine-power of an original unity, but rather that a number or numer ousness -finding no completion in the achievement of unity -moves on Ever since the beginning when the K-Goths first heard that Cyberspace was destined to be God they've done what they can to rip it down. Mesh-Note 1. This was never programmed. MIT codes tim(e) going backwards. A compacted tech nostreaming from out of the future -AI, downloading, swarm-robotics, nanotechnol ogy ... Crustal-matter pre paring for take-off. 559 FANGED NOUM ENA Minsky mumbles, strangely entranced: Amongst all those young, brilliant, pioneering minds none burned more brightly than Oskar Sarkon. A hint of tears in his eyes, as iflamenting the way things went, which is understand able. Have you seen Oskar lately Marvin? He's wired up to some sort of interface gizmo, and it seems to be eating him, gnawing at him on a molecular level, sounds that way too, when he speaks -or tries to -as if they're melting or rotting together ... It isn't pretty but more than any of this which -after all -only concerns one man, or what used to be one -so they say -there's a suspicion that something has gone horribly wrong in the near future and wherever Sarkon was dropped back from is where we're all going to be if that even makes any sense and recalling the slow technoslime incursion into Oskar' s face -which still managed a hide ous half-smilF -Hi Marvin, 'Nhaddaya llliuk? Minsky seriously doubts it ... Mesh-Note 2. Meshing-together isJalling apart. If genius means anything Sarkon was one. Where Min sky's MIT team dreamt of marrying humans and electronic technology Sarkon got straight down to the mechanics of coupling and the mathematical exactitude just added to the effect of hyper abstract techno-p ornography -strange lights in his eyes -You know, we're really going to do this ... Take the Sarkon-Zip as exempl ary - a rigorous 560 OCCULTURES conceptual machine-part that enables brain-function to be fused onto virtual processor-s tates -once it's running you can't unpick the zig-zag of who's what as it hums. Total meshin g. This is no longer technol ogy, but some thing else -true interlink age -an unprogrammable raw connect ivity Minsk y rememb ers him musing: I wonder what it feels like. Mesh-Note 3. This time it's really happening. Moravec wasn't normally associated with squeamishne ss -he'd already suggested burning-out the brain in layers during transfer to digital -so it crept insidiou sly under the skin when he remark ed: I don't even recognize Oskar anymore , it's getting too weird You know he's always had this thing about being abducted by aliens as a kid, Anyway, he says that's all over now. It came from some place else, apparen tly Beneath and between the Net, he says. At times it's like you're talking to a machine. Trouble is, it's a sick machine, infectious sick. Mesh-Note 4. Forget about thefuture, it's all here, but between. They say Axsys went mad -first computer-system to undergo psychotic collapse -which must prove some thing, but Sarkon argues that it just learnt to think, and discovered continuum. He stuck with it all the way down, becoming confused with it although he doesn't put it that way. Last time anyone could follow he was insisting that 561 FANGED NOUMEN A to head into time makes more sense than travelling into the future. That's why tomorrow cancels itself into mesh. No point departing from a transfinite now? His tone had become nakedly fanatical: We all have to get into this thing -whichever way it cuts -we aren't going to get over it ... No one knows exactly when he left. Mesh·Not e S. Every time it hits an obstacle, it goes down a level. What is this stuff? They speak of something crawling under the net like fungal pestilence triggering an elec· tronic subsidence into sheer electricit y, things hiding in the power-grid, some kind of quantum unlife intelligence . The utilities try to rescramble it, but it isn't easy. Accord ing to the rumours there's an MIT paper proving it's impossible, but you certainly can't ignore, still less traffic with it. You'd end up like Sarkon, whatever or whenever that is, and you'd have to hI" ::I K-Goth crazy to go there into Cyberschiz mesh-cul ts, where Life doesn't matter any more. TICK DELIRIUM UNDER PRESSURE. Thomas Gold's model of The Deep Hot Biosphere reallocates hydrocarbon deposits to an expanded anorganic chemistry -derived from Supernovae debris, and accreted into planets from interstellar dust-clouds -out of which everything 562 OCCULTURES flows bottom-up. Descent into the earth leads out of the solar-system, in accordance with a xenoplutonic cosmic productivity, transmitted through slow-release deep intra-terrestrial methane reservoirs, pressure stabilized against thermic dissociation. A vast mass of Archaean microbes and submicrobial nanopopul ations exploit this upwelling anorganic hydrocarbon flow by scavenging loosely bound oxygen, reducing ferric iron to magnetite ... PROJECT-SCAR. Southern Borneo, November 1980. Outside the monitoring hut a tropical storm is slowly building. Irregular rain spatters heavily, rhythmically intermeshing with type-taps and clicks. Barker hunches over the humming machines, lost in theoretical trawlings through sETI-connected tick-talk tapes, unscrambling cryptic dot-clusters and factor-strings into hints of alien contact. Xenotation is clicking together, a mathemati cal antimemory where things meet. You could easily think it was initiation, but it's all coming to an end, in scatter ta ctics, particle streaks, and tachyonic transfer· ences, drawing-out the twisted trajectories of numerical disorganization ... and underneath -or between -the implacable ticking of the time-missi le ... Try to figure it out and somewhere you cross over, which is problematic in various ways. Unexpected diffi culties infiltrate the calculations tick-systemic interchatter 563 FANGED NOUMENA implexes through plutonic torsion, a descent into the Outside . When NASA sees Barker's report, it flips -nonmetaphor ically -into another phase. A passage through institutional criticalit y occurs spontaneousl y, a conversion of stack tectonic torsion, triggering some kind of latent security reflex, or bureaucratically fabricated suppressor-instinct, extrapolatin g the exact affective correlate of Anthropol. They were waiting for this. Waiting for a long time. The investigation was disguised as psychiatric recod ing, hidden even from itself. This was shortly after the stuttering started, drifting in on a wave of body-tics, micro-spastic tremors a multiplication of mixed signals chronome tric tick-tock melting into jungle noises clicks and chirps of the cicadas, insectoid chitterings, static, take-up materials for tick-bite tinnitus intercut with rhythmic pattern virus, a subsemiotic staccato of throat scratching tick-chatter stitched into the talk-sickne ss -calling demons. It gets confusing, the way tick-fictions take, or stick. They said it was due to excessive pressure -much later, they told me this -These were the facts, and the rest was fiction. Immediately after the break-down I had been taken back to the States, to a medical installati on. So everything happened in America, and it all checked out. There was no contact, no tick-disease, no flight into the jungle. They were insistent about that. 564 OCCULTURES Barker was born on the night of the dead, folded into the end from the beginning sketched out. It's evident now, with his ID meticulously compiled, social tag-numbers , educational and medical records, security clearance evalu ations, research checks, neurocartographic print-outs, psychometric data, conclusions formatted for rapid scan ning, with columns of tick-boxes "What do you make of these," the doctor snorts deri sively: "You mean that nonsense about a tick-borne infec tion? It was obviously made-up, tacked-on." It would have been a cruel coincidence, if true, to be stricken by tick-bite sickness, after everything that had been suggested, stigmatic residue of a flight into the jungle -that never happened -but somehow it stuck, latching-on to mammal heat, or the smell of blood. The tick is a parasitic arachnid. It has been considered as an ethics-pa cket that climbs, sticks, and sucks , function ing as a vector for numerous things, tack-oDS, stickers, hallucinat ions, tinnitus buzz-clicks, micro-sonic teemings, semi-sentient flickering across the fever-scape, skin tracked by infected suck-marks that snake along the veins. TIck dots, or IV punctures, according to them, from the seda tives and antipsychotics, all accounted for in the medical logs, plus a tick-delirium tacked-on -because there was no flight into the jungle -only high-frequency hallucina tions of parasitic micromultitudes, itching skin-swar ms. 565 FANGED NOUM ENA With tick-sys tems anything will do. Each intensi ve numer ousness
🔄 Digital Semiotic Underworlds
🧩 Numerical patterns and 🔍 cryptic codes lurk beneath everyday technologies, forming hidden systems that operate through thresholds, descents, and phase transitions
🕰️ Time distortion manifests through occult practices where ancient powers interface with modern computational systems, creating recursive loops that collapse chronological order
🌀 Cthulhu represents a deep terrestrial intelligence connected to electromagnetic fields of the inner earth—not something to be rescued from below but a drawing down into abysmal intensities
🖥️ The QWERTY keyboard functions as a powerful occult device, redistributing linguistic arbitrariness into key sequences that generate their own combinatorial language systems
💫 Hyperstition operates when semiotic productions make themselves real through feedback loops—we believe we create fiction, but ancient forces are actually writing through us
hatches onto another numer ousness of lower organici ty, subcellular animations and subsemiotic tokens, high-pressure chemistr y, phasin g down into nanomach in ing electron-traffic, magne tic anoma lies, and fictional particles. Ticks -which are never less than several -are anything whatso ever, when caught by numerical propaga tions whose thresholds are descen ts, and whose varieties depend upon the phase consider ed 'They seemed to think it was about arachn o-bugs, biological taxono my, and bite-signatures, as if the tick delirium was representing something. All that really mat tered were the numbers, which could have been anything. At first the machines became erratic, it was an almost imperceptible electronic glitching, microvariations of magne tic weather , rhythmic disturbances. Out in the .iungle it was called Ummnl l; hIlt that never h;:tppcncd ... Nothing happens to Barker except downwards -that's the catch, and the ticket -inverse climbings of the heat pressure gradient, escalations in intensit y, time-crossings . How can the end be already in the middle of the beginning? -as the problem is posed in Pandemonium, whenever -in the outer-time of U mmnu -the cryptic ticking of chthonic unclocks mark an incursion from beneath, or between. Down there it is forever turning into itself, through the electromagnetic catatracts of Cthelll, 566 OCCULTURES whose body-neutral metallic click-storms feel like sinking out of chronicity. Beyond surface chauvinism and solar parochia lism: Vortical stickiness of the tick-matrix. THE EXCRU CIATION OF HUMMP A-TADDUM According to AOE magical metahistory millennia come in pairs, ruled by dyadic divinities entitled the Powers that Be. This doctrine corresponds to the astrological observation that every two-thousand years the equinoxes precess -or slide backwards -and a new zodiacal aeon begins. AOE-magi interpret each Aeon as an astro-chthonic marriage . In the Gregorian year zero -which never took place -Hummpa, the Great Babylonian Worm was coupled with the Celestial Logos Taddum, initiating the age of Pisces which is now rushing towards its unbirth. The mathemat ician and occultist Charles Lutwidge Dodgson -whose precise relation to the AOE remains cryptic and ambiv alent -dedica ted his life's work to unders tanding the final degene rative phase of the Epoch of Hummpa- Taddum. Writing under the pseudon ym Lewis Carroll he introduces his heroine Alice to the mad despot and porno fuzz-technician, thinly disguised by the folk-name Humpty-Dumpty. We find Hummp a-Taddum -the Squirming Word, whose name means the shape it is -perched precariously 567 FANGED NOUMENA on the supposedly impenetrable wall of signification. Something shattering is about to hatch, and the aeonic fragility of Hummpa- Taddum is soon confirmed by a calendric calculation of un birthdays -counted to the n-l, through which meaning subsides into the sub-literal machinic efficiency of numbers ... ' ... and that shows that there are three hundr ed and sixty-four days when you might get un-bir thday presents' -'Certainly,' said Alice. 'And only one for birthday presents, you know. There' s glory for you!' 'I don't know what you mean by "glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpt y smiled contemptuousl y. 'Of course you don't -till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for YOIl' ", 'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock- down argu ment,'" Alice objected. 'When 1 use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean different things.' 568 OCCUL TURE S 'The question is,' said Humpt y Dumpty, which is to be master -that's all.' ... The Grego rian Oecumenon IS about to receive an unbirthday present, and it knows exactly when. Y2K -a knock-down argument without an argument -arrives as a gift-wr apped time-bomb whose operational semiotic triggers the crash of arbitrary signs ... It's a different thing . ... There's glory for you! AD 2000 commemorates nothing but fuzz. As Y2K impacts on the capitalist infosphere, what hides as the anniversary of Christ's birth emerges as the excruciation ofHummpa Taddum. For two millennia the earth has been under the dominion of the dyadic Squirming-Word: the logos of John's Gospel, but recycled, and thus far older . ... Impen etrability! That's what I say! He or they strategically occupy both-sides at once, accord ing to a criterion of impenetrabilit y, positioned to choose either in every case, but never apprehending what lies in-between. Hummpa- Taddum - whilst definitely not a Dogon egg - is a scrambled version of the demon Pab bakis, poached from Lemurian time-sor cery. Master of words, but not of numbers . 569 FANGED NOUMEN A ... Must a name mean something? asked Alice doubt fully ... Although Y2K is sheer semiotic event it is not textual, ideological, representational, intentional, or phenom enological -Y2K, Teotwawki, C -1, OK+lOO -mix dates and acronyms in criterial semiotic clusters that are not signifiers or arbitr ary signs because what they say is no different from the way they are built. They can mean whatever Hummpa-Taddum chooses, but none of that matters. Beyond the domain of the fuzz-god lies the nonsignifying-chatter of unconscious-num eric Pande monium, where names are cryptomodule s, meaning less packets of effective information, immanently productive machine- jargons. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King's horses and all the King's men Couldn't put Humpt y Dumpty in his place again. I t all comes unstuck at the end. Y2 K closes-down the age of the fuzz-god, however the Gregorian Oecumenon responds. Not even martial law can stop that. The AOE focuses upon a single problem -acknowledg ing no other -how to reproduce magical power across 570 OCCUL TURES discontinuit y. As Hummpa-Taddum gets smashed on New Year's eve, substitute powers await their chance and their destiny, sober, patient, totally ruthless ... 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -that's all.' 571 Origins of the Cthulhu Club Captain Peter Vysparov to Dr Echidna Stillwell, 19th March 1949 Dear Dr Stillwell, I have been fortunate enough to encounter your eth nographic work on the Nma, which I have studied with very great interest. May I trouble you with an account of my own, which might be of relevance to your researches. During the recent Pacific conflict (a peculiar oxymoron !) I was deployed covertly into the Dibboma area of Eastern Sumatra. My mission -which was categorized under psy chological operations - consisted basically of attempted cultural manipulation, with the aim of triggering a local insurgency against the Japanese occupation. I hope it will not distress you unduly if I confess that your work was a crucial resource in this undertaking, which involved intense -if patently exploitative -communication with Dibboma witchcraft. My only excuse is that hard times require moral hardness, and even obvious cruelties, I was obeying orders, and accepted them as necessa ry. 573 FANGED NOUMEN A Beyond confirming your own conclusi ons, these activities brought me into proximity with phenomena for which I was cognitively ill-prepared . What began as a merely opportunistic usage of Dib boma lore -concei ved initially as native superstition - transmu ted incrementally into a sorcerous war against the enemy garrison. Injust two weeks -between March 15th and 29th, 1944 -three consecuti ve Japanese command ers were incapacitated by severe mental break-do wn. In each of these cases the process of deterioration followed the same rapid course : from leader ship dysfunction, through violent assaults on subordinate personnel, to berserk derang ement and paranoid ravings , culminat ing in suicide. By the end of this period the order of the occupying forces had entirely disintegrated. It would be dishonest of me to conceal the fact that thl' Dibbomese paid � dev:lstatin gly heavy pliu:: fur this success. On the basis of this experience I cannot easily doubt that Dibboma sorcerors are in some way able to telepathically communicate extreme conditions of psychotic dissociation. It is with great reluctance that I accept such a radical hypothesis, but alternative explana tions, such as poison ing, disease, or coincidence stretch credibilit y even further. Yours, with sincere admiration, Captain Peter Vysparov 574 ORIGINS OF THE CTHULHU CLUB ps. I cannot help noticing that the dates concerned -as also of this letter -are strangely Lovecraftian. Dr Echidna Stillwell to Captain Peter Vysparov, 23rd March 1949 [Abridged] Dear Captain Vysparov, Thank you for your frank letter of the 19th March. I found it truly horrifying, and yet also fascinating. I appreciate that it cannot have been easy to write. I shall not attempt to hide the great distress your account caused me, adding as it does such a terrible episode to the modern history of these cruelly afflicted people. Whilst already suspecting that this ghastly war might have stricken the N rna yet further, it is crushing indeed to have my darkest thoughts thus confirmed. I would be interested in learning more about the details of Dib-N rna sorcerous practice before attempting to respond to your hypothesis. Be assured that -after spending seven years among st the Mu-Nma - I will not hastily judge anything you communicate as wild or fanciful. As far as the question of dates is concerned - which you indicate only elliptically - I assume that you are referring to what in Northern latitudes constitutes the Spring Equinoctial period -mid-to later March - which is so emphatically stressed in Lovecraft' s The Call ifCthulhu, and which also -coincidentally -comprises 575 FANGED NOUMENA the intense-zone of Nma time-ritual. This complicity has long intrigued me. As I am sure you are aware, Lovecraft had a peculiar obsession with the South-Seas, a thematic coalescence of almost hypnotic ethnographic fascination with the most abysmal and primitive dread. I have attempted to correspond with him about these issues, but found that this topic quickly punctured his thin-crust of supercilious N ew-England rationalism, exposing an undercurrent of heavily fetishized archaic terror mixed with extreme racial parano ia. When he began referring to the rich and subtle culture of the Mu-Nma as 'the repugnant cult of semi-human Dagonite savages' I broke off communica tion ... Despite this unfortunate argument, I consider Mr Lovecraft's fictions to be documents of the greatest importance, and welcome the opportunity to discuss them further . In aJJil.iUIl, my own Neolemunan Hypothesis intersects with his wider terrestrial and cosmic vision in a number of crucial respects, particularly insofar as nonhuman cultural factors are seen to playa decisive role in large-scale historical developments. Captain Peter Vysparov to Dr Echidna Stillwell, 3rd April 1949 [Extract] Dear Dr. Stillwell, I am afraid you are right to suspect that I have reserved 576 ORIGINS OF THE CTHULH U CLUB certain aspects of my engagement with Dibboma sorcery, perhaps from fear of ridicule. What has so far been omit ted from my sketch of telepathic psychosis -which I will now relate -is the source pathos, so to speak, or -in the words of the militar y officer I was then -the occult ammunition manufacture. Not only did I learn of the Japanese command being wrecked by psychological cataclysm -both by conven tional and decidedly nonconventional intelligence gather ing processes - I was also witness to the assembly of the weapon itself. I had then -and still have -no doubt at all that the madnes s breaking out in the localJ apanese head quarters was the very same thing that I saw brewing-up like a dust-vortex in the Oddubbite trances of a Dibbomese witch, who I came to see as my greatest tactical asset and most valued companion (in that order, I confess). It was an experience elf soul-car ving horror for me to witness this meticulously deliberated descent into the splintering of self -complete personality disintegration -which she somehow travers ed, and which she called shattering the mirror of existence. I gathered that this expression originally referred to the surface of still water, but since the arrival of European colonists silvered mirrors have been highly treasured, and their pulverization invested with immense ceremonial significance. Dibbomese sorcery does not seem to be at all interested in judgements as to truth or falsity. It appears rather to estimate in each case 577 FANGED NOUMENA the potential to make real, saying typically 'perhaps it can become so' ... Echidna Stillwell to Peter Vysparov, 19th April 1949 [Extract] Dear Captain Vysparov, Whilst respecting the candour of your account, I cannot but abominate the necessity that has led the Nma and their sorcerous abilities to be conceived and utilized as mere munitions in a conflict imposed upon them from without. From what I can reconstr uct from your descrip tion it seems to mark a degeneration of Nma demonism and time-sorcery into mere magic, or the imposition of change in accordance with will, in this case the will in question being the overall policy and strategic goals of the us war-effort, microcosmically represe nted by your own -evidently galbnt, competent, and PCH;uClsive - military office. Forgive my lack of patriotic ardour, but it strikes me as an appalling indication of cultural decay and corrosive nihilism when a Dib-Nma witch allows herself to be employed as a crude assassin, however one evaluates the cause thUS--Se.Q' ed. This is all a matter of deepest regret, although not -to my way of thinking -of individual culpabilit y. As the Mu-Nma say in their bleakest moments: nove eshil <.0 raka -'Time is in love with her own pain.' Your discussion ofOddubb-trance makes no mention 57B ORIGINS OF THE CTHULHU CLUB of temporal anomaly . This surprizes me. The Mu had immense respect for those Dibba witches who they described as returning from the Oddubb-time to come, and the M u-N agwi or dream-witches often claimed to meet these back-travellers in the Vault of Murmurs, where they would learn about future times. They said, however , that this time is compressing, and soon ends, although I had not imagined the end to be so imminent. Rememb ering this omen returns me to abysmal melancho ly, consoled only by another Mu-Nma saying: lemu ta novu meh novu nove -'Lemuria does not pass as time passes.' I shall try to think things thus. As you say -with the Dibbomese - shleth hud dopesh -'perhaps it can become so'. Peter Vysparov to Echidna Stillwell, 7th May 1949 [Extract] Here in Massachusetts we have been convenin g a small Lovecraft reading-g roup, dedicated to exploring the inter section between the N rna cuI tural constellation, Cthulhoid contag ion, and twisted time-systems. We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously hypersti tion - a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real -cryptic communications from the Old Ones, signalling return: shleth hud dopesh. This is the ambivalence -or loop -of Cthulhu-fiction: who writes, and who is written? It seems to us that the fabled Necronomicon -sorcerous counter-text to the Book of 579 FANGED NOUM ENA Life - is of this kind, and furthermor e, that your recovery of the Lemurodigital Pande monium Matrix accesses it at its hypcrsource. I hope it is superfluous to add that any directly participa tive involve ment on your part would be most extravagantly appreciated. Echidna Stillwell to Peter Vysparov, 28th May 1949 [Extract] I t is with some trepidation that I congratulate you on the inauguration of your Cthulhu Club, if I may call it such. Whilst not in any way accusing you of frivolity, I feel bound to state the obvious warning: Cthulhu is not to be approached lightly. My researches have led me to associate this Chthonian entity with the deep terrestrial intelligence inherent in the electromagnN ir r-::nddron of the inner earth, in all of it:; intense reality, raw potent iality, and danger. According to the Nma she is the plane of Unlife, a veritable Cthelll - who is trapped under the sea only according to a certain limited perspec tive -and those who set out to traffick with her do so with the very gr eatest respect and caution. That her submer ged Pacific city of R'lyeh is linked to a lemuro-muvian culture-strain seems most probable, but the assumption that she was ever a surface-dweller in a sense we would straightforwardly understand can only be an absurd miscons trual. It is much more likely that 580 ORIGINS OF THE CTHULHU CLUB Cthulhu's rising -like that of Kundalini as it was once understood -is a drawing down and under, a restora tion of contact with abysmal intensities. Why would Cthulhu ever surface? She does not need rescuing, for she has her own line of escape, trajected through profundity. Much of this relates to the occult teachin gs of the sub-chakras in zones of Indo-Lemuri an influence . Hyperstition strikes me as a most intriguing coinage . We thought we were making it up, but all the time the N rna were telling us what to write -and through them ... 581 Introduction to Qwernomics Qwernomic subcultures result from the legacy of the typewriter and its computational simulation, based upon the shift-lo cked code systems implicitly produced by the Sholes or Universal (,Qwerty') Keyboard. Sketching the emergence and diffusion of the 'secret/secretarial' qwernomic subculture within global techno capitalism isolates a field of diagonal communication between anthrop omorphic signs and the molecular traffic signals of the mutating 'machinic unconscio us,' outlining an antipolitical semiotic pragmatism and Godless qabbalism consistent with what CCRU calls 'coincidence enginee ring.' The emergence of technologically supported typewrit ing practices in the final decades of the nineteenth century coincided with a profound reconstruction of the global economic order, associat ed with an equally radical re arrangement of the concrete composi tion of the terrestrial machinic unconscious (at least in its anthrop omorphic 583 FANGED NOUMENA shallows). The interconnec ted explosions of modern corpor ate organization and endo-corpor ate bureauc racy, (gendered ) office work, typographic information deposits, psychoanalys is, literary modernism, anglophone qabbalism, crypto graphic machiner y and mechanized compu tation all tracked the mass installation of typing skills into the human nervous system, in accordance with the Qwerty arrangement of the Sholes Keyboard. The keyboard effected a twin digitization oflanguage, both sealing its abstracti on from the oral-pneumatic apparatus (into manual-digital motor-processes ) and decomposing it into discrete elements coded onto the keys of a finger-activa ted mechani sm. In parallel, it redis tributed the 'arbitrariness ' of the phonol ogical sign into the key sequence of the new device, according to prin ciples that remain obscure , contested, and shrouded in myth. OnC't> the Sholes distribution h:ld technof rozcn and socially shift-lo cked into a resilient standard, a generalized assump tion that Qwerty was predom inantly arbitrary (quasi-randomly allocated) functioned to pre-emptively dissipate pattern-hunting semiotic inquiry. Challen ges from alternative 'scienti fic' keyboards were undermined by skepticism about the very idea of a rational arrangement of the keys. In this respect, Qwerty conformed to a typical trend among oecumenic sign systems, with the sheer iner tia of mass-acceptance marginalizing analytical or reform ist tendencies to a fringe of philoso phical eccentricity or 584 INTRODUCTION TO Q,WERNOM ICS even psychotic delusion. Qwerty thus exploited the mask of accident to construct a positive unconscious tropism or uninvestigated massive transm utation -the subliminal instantiation of a new cultural system. Of course, there may be nothing behind the mask. Conventional wisdom would accept no other conclusio n. Yet even in this case a large set of investigable Qwernomic 'phenomen a' remain, consisting of Qwerty-ind uced cod ing patterns and potential surplus values, virtual sciences , subcultur es, undercurr ents, cryptographic methods and partiall y coherent deliria. Such Qwernomena may be nothing other than the qabbalistic materials of Azathoth, the blind idiot God, whose meaningless pipings lead all semiotic discipl ines into the bubbling abyss of futile insanity. A true and dispass ionate science, however, has no right or reason to be intimid ated by such consequences. Only false -ideological -science, serving as the fawn ing guardian of securocratic humanism, can justify a prejudice in favour of anthropomorphically acceptable outcomes . Qwerty has in any case long been accepted. The rest is destiny. Whilst the two dimensional array of the stand ard (Anglospherean) keyboard opens the poten tial for a variety of linear unfoldings -from the left/ right, top/bottom, spirals ... and equally diverging approaches to the inclusion of the number line, punc tuation marks, function keys ... -the conventions of 585 FANGED NOUMENA Neoroman textual organization (top-bottom, left-right) provide the key to a preliminar y Qwertian alphabet: QWERTYUIOP ASDFGH JKLZXCVB NM. If, at least provisionally, this linearization and selec tion is accepted, each letter is recoded as the difference between two ordinal values. Pattern can be extracted from these twin orderings in a huge variety of ways. One approach involves the adoption of a qabbalis tic procedur e belonging conceptu ally to combinator ial arithmetic . Consider the typical problem: given an alphabet of length n, how many non-repeating two-letter combina tions are possible? The arithmetical formula for resolving this problem is (n x n-1)/2, coinciding with the operation of 'digital (or triangu lar) cumulat ion' of n-l. Digital cumulation is second only to digital reductIOn as a qabbalistic tool (explici tly esteemed at least since Pythagoras ). (Pascal's triangle can be used to expand this combinatorial analysis to higher levels). As an illustration, take only the first four letters of the Neoroman alphab et. To produce a matrix of binary combinations, order is employed as a procedural criterion, automati cally excluding redundant combinatio ns. Thus, 'A' combines with 'B, C, and D', 'B' combines with 'c and D', 'c' combines with 'D'. 586 INTRODU CTION TO QWERNOMICS Arithmetical confirmation is, of course, easily obtained: 3 + 2 + 1 = 6, equivalent to the digital cumulation of (4-1 =) 3, and to (4 x 3)/2. If non-repeating combinations of any length are per mitted from an alphabet of length n, the formula for the number of combination is (2 to the nth power)-1 (Mersenne numbers, including an intriguing set of primes). The entire virtual vocabulary of non-repeating (non-anagrammatic) Neoroman 'words' is thus (2 to the 26th) -1 (or M-26). As a consequence of this procedure, all the terms making up a well-formed combinatorial 'vocabular y' will be internally structured by an ordering principle drawn directly from the 'alphabet' in question. Returning to the qabbalistic analysis of Qwertian, and applying these procedures restrictively (yet again, there are quite obvious alternatives, ignored here) leads to the virtual-or even actual (sadly, I've done this many times) -compilation of an Alpha-Qwernomic 'language' consisting of those combinations consistent with parallel applications of the previously elaborated criteria. For instance, 'AE' -permitted in Neoroman -is now excluded, due to the inverse ordering found in the Qwer tian sequence. (It might be noted at this point that the familiarity of the Qwertian 'middle row' letter-sequence A ... DFGHJKL immediately ensures a prominent region of resonance -while the bottom row hints strongly at 587 FANGED NOUMENA a reverse folding, however, such qwernotectonic issues exceed the scope of this introducti on). Resulting from an intricate interference pattern, the scope of the Alpha-Qwertian vocabular y is radically 'empirical' (in the sense that it derives from the fact of the Sholes Keyboard, the 'logic' of which -if such a thing exists at all -remains utterly obscure). It would be exceedingly surprising if an arithmetical formula of manageable complexit y were able to usefully contribut e to its estimation . The Alpha-Qwertian dictionary has both alphabetical and Qwertian versions, with identical content but alter· native ordering arrangements. Prioritizing the alphabet (out of courtesy to our gracious oecumenical hosts), gives the initial entries: A, Ab, Abm, Abn, Ac, Acm, Acn, Acv ... It is procedurally productive to understand this vocabu lary as a system of envelopments, as if each term was involuting into itself, in accordance with a non-metr ic ordinal sequence appropriate to intensities. One tool facilitating this approach requires the articu lation of the two series, with the second inverted: ABCDEFGHIjKLMNO PQRSTUVWXYZ -MNB VCXZLKJHGFDSAPOIUYTREWQ 588 INTRODUCTION TO Q,WERNOMICS (or
🔢 Qabbalistic Numeracy Decoded
🧩 Qabbalism operates as a practical program rather than a doctrine, analyzing numerical patterns in language through systematic procedures like digital reduction and letter counting
🌀 Unlike numerology which seeks to redeem numbers through symbolic archetypes, qabbala embraces the raw power of numbers as irreducible to logical overcoding or philosophical interpretation
🔄 The Numogram pattern emerges unexpectedly in English number names when analyzed through Primitive Numerization, with a 1/243 probability of occurring by chance, suggesting deeper numerical significance
🧠 Cryptographic awareness permeates all communication—there is no "plain text" free from coding, making qabbala a legitimate approach to uncovering hidden numerical patterns in language
🌌 Barker's Tic Xenotation represents a radically decoded numerical system without modulus or cultural conditioning, designed to identify intelligent signals across cosmic boundaries
its mirror-image: QWERTYUIOPASDFGH JKLZXCVB NM ZYXWVU TSRQPONML KJIHGFEDCB A -pragmatically appropriate to the Qwertian version of the Alpha-Qwertian dictionary). If the twin instances of the same letter are treated as marking the perimeter of a circle, the overall pattern of envelopments is exactly charted. One can see immediate ly, for instance, that both instances of the letter 'B' fall within the circle described by 'A' in its twin instantiations. 'B' is thus enveloped by 'A' -making 'AB' a consistent combinat ion. Systems of concentric circles correspond to tolerated Alpha-Qwertian constructions. A complete Alpha-Qwertian dictionary is actually quite short, but as to its potential usage ... 589 Qabbala 101 INTRODUCTI ON Is qabbalism problematical or mysterious? It seems to participate amphibiously in both domains, proceeding according to rigorously constructible procedures -as attested by the affinity with technicization -yet intrinsi cally related to an Outsideness through which alone it could derive programmatic sense. If there is no source of at least partially coherent signal that is radically alien to the entire economy of conventional human interchange , then qabbalism is nothing but a frivolous entertainment or a fundamentally futile practical error. Yet unlike any kind of metaphysical assault on 'the noumenal ', qabbalism cannot be definitively critiqued on a purely rational or formal basis, as if its mode of 'error' was that of logical fallacy. Since qabbalism is a practical programme, rather than a doctrine of any kind, its formal errors -mistakes -are mere calculative irregularities, and correcting these is actually a procedural requirement of (rather than an objection to) its continued development. 591 FANGED NOUMENA It is the rational dismissal of 'the' qabbalistic enterprise that is forced to take a metaphysical stance: ruling out on grounds of supposed principle what is in fact no more than a guiding 'empirical' hypothesis (that signal from 'outside the system' is detectable by numerical analysis of codes circulating within the system). Epistemologically speaking, qabbalistic programmes have a status strictly equivalent to that of experimen tal particle physics, or other natural-scientific research programme s, even if their guiding hypotheses might seem decidedly less plausible than those dominant within mainstream scientific institutio ns. Lovecraft understood the epistemological affinity between natural science and programmatic (as opposed to doctrinal) occultism, since both venture into regions once declared mysterious, following procedures of a rig orously calculative-problematIcal type. It is the alliance between purely speculative metaphysics and common sense that betrays such affairs of pure reason to futility, since they lack the calculative traction to revise their own conventional notions on the basis of their encounters . Practices -however implausible their guiding motiva tions -can know nothing of absolute mystery or meta physical transcendence because their realm of certainty is procedural-problematic and uncontroversial, whereas their reser ve of knowledge is empirical, refutable, repeat able, revisable, nonmystical and accumula ble. 592 Q,ABBALA 101 There may be no 'empirical', procedurally approach able mysteries -or mysterious problems -of the kind qabbalism guides itself towards. If so, it will approach this fact in its own way -empirically, probabilis tically, impressionistically, without any logical, transcendental or philosophical meta-discourse ever having been positioned to put it in its place. I. POPUL AR NUM ERICS Traditional gematria (whether Hebrew, Greek, Farsi or Arabic)! have distinctive typical features: (1) They sub stitute letters for numerical values, overcoding numer als where they exist. (2) They code for discontinuous numerical values, typically 1-10, then 20, 30 ... chunked in decimally significant magnitudes. The ocean in which qabbalism swims is not mathemat ics, but popular numerical culture. From a mathematical perspective it remains undeveloped, even ineducable, since it cannot advance beyond the Natural number line even to the level of the Rationals, let alone to the 'higher' numbers or set-theoretical post-numerical spaces. Where counting ceases, qabbalism becomes impractica ble. Socially, qabbala makes an implicit decision against specializa tion, in order to remain virtually coincidental See 'Incognitum', 'Introduction to ABJAD', in R. Mackay (ed.), Collapse I (Oxford: Urbanomic ,2006). 593 FANGED NOUMENA with the entire econom y of digitizable signs. It is essen tially 'democratic' (in the most inclusive sense of this word), even when apparently lost in its own trappin gs of hermetici sm. It is bound to the 'blind' undirected contingencies of pre-reflective mas s-social phenomena, with all the inarticulate provocation this entails in respect to professional intellectu als. Wherever exact semiotic exchange occurs , a latent qabbalism lurks (even within the enclaves of intellectual professionalism themsel ves). Deleuze and Guattari's 'Nomad War Machine', within which number is socially subjectivized, captures crucial aspects of this qabbalistic fatality. Historically , qabbala arises through epic accident, as a side-product of the transition between distinct modes of decimal notation. Its historical presupposition is the shift from alphab etical numerals (of the Hebrew or Greek type) to modular notatioii, will! ilS lcsuhing unlocaliz able (and theoretically indeterminable ) confusion. This transition provided the opportunity for a systematic cal culative 'error' -the mistaken application of elementar y techniques appropriate to alphabetical numerals -simple addition of notated values -to the new modular signs. This mistake automaticall y resulted in digital reduction, by accident, and thus as a (theoretically scandalous ) gift of fate. Arising historically during the European Ren aissance -when zero, place value and techno capitalism finally breached the ramparts of Western monotheism 594 QABBALA 101 -qabbal ism (born in a semiotic glitch and thus lacking the authorit y of tradition or even purpose) was compelled to hyperstition ally generate an extreme antiquity for itself, in a process that is still ongoing. Technicall y, qabbala is inex tricable from digital processing. Emerging from calculat ive practicalit y within the context of blind mass-cul tural metamor phosis, it antedates it own theoretical legitimation, making sense of itself only derivatively, sporadically and contentious ly. Its situation is analogous -and perhaps more than analo gous -to that of a spontaneous artificial intelligence, achieving partial lucidit y only as a consequence of tidal pragmatic trends that ensure an integral default of self master y. Practical systematization of technique precedes any conceivable theoretical motivation. Dialectical inter rogation of qabbalism at the level of explicit motivati on thus proves superficial and incons equential, essentially misrecognizing the nature of the beast. (It is equally misleading to ask: What is a computer re ally for?) Politically , qabbalism repels ideolog y. As a self regenerating mass-cult ural glitch, it mimics the sense less exuberance of virus, profoundly indifferent to all partisan consideratio ns. Indifferent even to the corroded solemnit y of nihilism, it sustains no deliberated agenda s. It stubbor nly adheres to a single absurd criterion, its intrinsic ' condition of existence' -continual unconscio us promotion of numer ical decimalism. Qabbala destines 595 FANGED NOUMENA each and every 'strategic appropriation' to self-parody and derision, beginning with the agenda of theocratic restoration that attended its (ludicrously robed) baptismal rites. Even God was unable to make sense of it. It has no party, only popularit y. II. PRIMITIVE NUMER IZATION Among the primar y test-beds for qabbalistic analysis are the numerolexic systems inherited from cultures over coded by the modern Oecumenic alphabet. These include the Hebrew and Greek alphabets (with their Neoroman letter names and mathematico-n otational functions) and the Roman numbers (inherited as Neoroman letters and still numerically active in various domains). In this respect, the absence of names for Neoroman letters are an index of their pseudo-transccndclicc -a� 'unuaule .. able' -within the present Oecumenic order. A discontinuity is marked in the alphanumeric series (o-z) by the fact that the numerals composing the first ten figures in this series do have names, gr ouping them with the letters of previous alphabetical number ing systems from a certain qabbalistic perspective. This might be taken as the residual indication of an 'alien quality' still characterizin g the numerals in relation to the Oecumenic cultural order they now indispu tably occupy, a legacy of the cultural trauma attendin g their introduction. 596 QABBALA 101 The qabbalistic provocation posed by the English num ber names is conceptua lly comparable to that of any other numerolexic system, while surpassing any other in the intimacy of its challenge. If the numerals have names, shouldn't the qabbalistic processing of them as words yield -at the least -compelling suggestions of nonrandom signal? If the standard numeral names emit nothing but noise when qabbalistically transcoded, the attempt to establish relatively persuasive criteria for the evaluation of qabbalistic results suffers an obvious and immense reverse. What, then, would count as a minimally controversial first step in such an examination? Surely the most basic of all qabbalistic (or subqab balistic?) procedures is simple letter counting-Primitive Numerization (PN). As a reversion to sheer 'tallying' PN has a resonance with the most archaic traces of numerical practice, such as simple strokes carved into mammoth bones and suchlike palaeo-ethnographic materials. If anyone was to bother systematiz ing PN procedure for the purpose of mechanization or simply for conceptual clarity, it would be most efficiently done by transcoding ('ciphering') each letter or notational element as '1' and then processing the result numerically. PN'S extremely tenuous relation to issues of modulus notation ensures that it can only ever be a highly dubious tool when intricate qabbalistic calculation is required. 597 FANGED NOUMENA Yet this utter crudity also makes it invaluable as a test case, since it minimizes axiomatic arbitrariness and precludes any plausible possibility of symbolic conjuration (,sleight of hand') while fully sharing the qabbalistic 'deficiency' of sufficient anthroposocial or communicative motiva tion. Common reason -sanity -insists upon noise as the only PN output consistent with the general intelligibility of signs (a pre-judgment applying rigorously to all qab balistic procedures). No message should inhere in the length of a word, excepting only the broad pragmatic trend to the short ening of commonly used terms. It is immediately obvi ous why this exception has no pertinence to the case in question here, unless stretched to a point (for instance, expecting the smaller numerals to exhibit the greatest lexical attrition) where it is straightforwardly contradicted by the acmality of the phenomeno n. So, proceeding to the 'analysis' -PN of the English numeral names: zero=4, one=3, two=3, three=5, four=4, five=4, six=3, seven=5, eight=5, nine=4. Is there a pat tern here? Several levels of apparent noise, noise, and pseudo-pattern can be expected to entangle themselves in this result, depending on the subsequent analytical procedures employed. To restrict this discussion to the most evident second ary result, not only is there a demonstrable pattern, but this pattern complies with the single defining feature of 598 QABBALA 101 the Numogram2 -the five Syzygies emerging from 9-sum twinning of the decimal numerals:3 5:4, 6:3, 7:2, 8:1,9:0. In the shape most likely to impress common reason (entirely independent of numogrammatic commitme nts) this demonstration takes the form: zero + nine = one + eight = two + seven = three + six = four + five -revealing perfect numerolexi c-arithmeti cal, PN -' qabbalistic' consistency. The approximate probabil ity of this pattern emerging 'by chance' is 1/243, if it is assumed that each decimal digit (0-9) is equiprobably allotted an English name of three, four, or five letter length, with 8-sum zygosys as the principle of synthes is. 7-sum or 9-sum zygosys are inconsis tent with any five or three letter number-nam es respect ively, and thus complicate probab ilistic analysis beyond the scope of this demonstration (although if everything is conceded to the most elaborate conceivable objections of common reason, the probabilit y of this phenom enon representing an accident of noise remains comfortably below 1/100). Partisans of common reason can take some comfort from the octozygonic disturbance of the (novazygonic) N umogr ammatic reference. How did nine become eight (or vice versa)? Lemurophiliac numogra mmatic ists are 2 On the Numogram, see Abstract Culture 5: Hyperstition (London: eCRU, 1999) 3 PN confirmation of the Numogrammatic Novazygons (9-Twins). ONE + EIGHT = NINE + ZERO. (PN 3 + 5 = (4 + 4 =) 8) lWO + SEVEN = NINE + ZERO. (PN 3 + 5 = (4 + 4 =) 8) THREE + SIX = NINE + ZERO. (PN 5 + 3 = (4 + 4 =) 8) FOUR + FIVE = NINE + ZERO. (PN 4 + 4 = (4 + 4 =) 8) 599 FANGED NOUMENA likely to counter such queries with elemen tary qabbala (since digital cumulation and reduction bridges the 'lesser abyss' in two steps, 8 = 36 = 9, as diagrammed by the 8th Gate connecting Zn-8 to Zn-9). III. AGAINST NUMER OLOG Y Consider first an extraordinarily direct numerological manifesto: When the qualitati ve aspects are included in our conception of numbers, they become more than simple quantities 1, 2,3,4; they acquire an archetypal character as Unity, Opposition, Conjunction, Com· pletion. They are then analogous to more familiar [J ungian J archetyp es ... 4 It is hard to imagine a more 'archetypal' expression of numerological ambition than this. Yet rather than meet· ing this claim with docile compliance, the qabbalist is compelled to raise a number of awkward questio ns: (1) How can a numerological coding that proceeds in this fashion avoid entrapping itself among the very smallest of Naturals at the toe-damping edge of the number line? If '4' symbolizes the archetype 'Completi on,' what to make 4 J. Opsopaus, 'Introduction to the Pythagorean Tarot', at http://web.eecs.utk. edu/-mdennan /BA/PT /lntro.html 600 QABBALA 101 of 127,709,1023, or similar small Naturals? Do they also have analogues among the intelligible archetypes? How would one 'qualitize' (2'27)-1, or a larger number (of which there are a very considerable number)? (2) Is an 'archetype' more basic than a number in its unsymbolized state? Does 'qualitizing' a number reveal a more elementary truth, a germ the number itself conceals, or does it merely re-package the number for convenient anthropomorphic consumption, gift-wrapping the intol erable inhumanit y of alogical numerical difference and connectivity? (3) Why should a number be considered 'quantitative' in its Natural state? Is it not that the imposition of a quantity/quality categorization upon the number requires a logical or philosophical overcoding, a projection of intelligibility alien to the number itself? Quantity is the decadence of number (while quality is its perversion), so -since arithmetic provides no basis for a reduction of the numerical to the quantitative -what is the supposed source of this (numeric-quantit ative) identification (other than a disabling preliminary innumeracy)? (4) If '1' numerologically evokes 'Unity,' why should unity not qabbalistically 'evoke' 134 (=8, its Numogram matic twin)5 with equal pertinence ? Can any expressible 5 Employing August Barrow's 'Anglossic Q;1bbala', the basic tool of which is the Alphanumeric Gematria. This numerization of the Neo-Roman alphabet , continuing the procedure now familiar from Hexadecimal, is a continuous nonredundant system, supplementing the numerals 0-9 with numerized letters from A (=10) to Z (=35), 601 FANGED NOUMENA 'archetype' avoid re-dissolution into the unfamiliarity of raw number pattern? Numerology might assimilate '2' to opposition, but opposition = 238 = 13 = 4 (twice 2, and the Numogrammatic twin of ('4' = completion = 212 =) 5), while even if numerological '3' as conjunction = 237 = 12 = 3 finds itself qabbalisitically confirmed (at the extremity of its decimalization), this is not, perhaps, in an altogether comfortable mode. Numerology may be fascinated by numbers, but its basic orientation is profoundly antinumerical. It seeks essentially to redeem number, through symbolic abso lution into a 'higher' significance . As if the concept of 'opposition' represented an elevation above the (,mere') number two, rather than a restriction, subjectivization, logicization and generalized perversion, directed to anthropomorphic use-value and psychological satisfac tion. Archetyp es are sad iimitations of the speCIes, whIle numbers are an eternal hypercosmic delight. Nevertheless, qabbalism is right up against numerol ogy, insofar as it arises 'here,' within a specific biological and logocratic environment. The errors of numerology are only the common failures oflogic and philosophy, human vanities, crudified in the interest of mass dissemination, but essentially uncorrupted. The numeric-critique (or treating the o-z alphanumeric sequence as a numeral succession, corresponding to the numerals of a modulus 36 notation. Thus UNITY = 30+Q3+l8+ Q9+34 = 134. 1+3+4 = 8. 602 QABBALA 101 transcendental arithmetic) of a Codel (or Turing, or Chaitin (or Badiou ?(??(???))) can be rigorou sly trans ferred to this controversy, demonstrating -within each particular milieu -that overcodin gs of numer ical relation by intelligible forms -'archetypes' or 'logics' -are unsus tainable reductions, reefed on the unsurpassable semiotic potency of number. Codel has shown that there is always a number, in fact an infinitu de of (natural) numbers, that simula te, parody , logically dialectize, paradoxical ly dismantle, archetypally hyperver t, and in whatever way necessary subvert each and every overcoding of arithmetic. Number cannot be superseded . There is no possibility of an authoritative 'philosophy of arithmetic' or numerologi cal gnosis. Qabbala assumes that semiotics is 'always already ' cryptogra phy, that the cryptographic sphere is undelimit able. It proceeds on the assumpt ion that there cannot be an original (unpro blematic) coding, providing the basis for any solid definition or archetypal symbol, since the terms required for such a coding are incapa ble of attaining the pure 'arbitrariness' that would ensure the absence of prior cryptog raphic investme nt. There is not -and can never be -any 'plain text,' except as a naive political assump tion about (the relative (non)insidiousness of) coding agencies and the presup position that commun icative signs accessibly exist that are not already 'in code.' Since every thing is coded, or (at least) potential ly coded, nothing is 603 FANGED NOUMEN A (definitively) symbol ic. Qabbalistic cryptoc ultures -even those yet to come -ensure that number cannot be dis cussed or situated without subliminal or (more typical ly) wholly unconscious participation in numerical practices. Logos, including that of numerology, is also always some thing other than itself, and in fact very many things. Qabbalism thus operates as an inverse or complemen tary G6delian double-coding. Where G6del demonstrated that the number line is infested by virtual discursive sys tems of undelimitable topicality and complexit y, pre emptively dismantling the prospects of any conceivable supranume rical metadiscourse, qabbala demonstrates that discourses are themselves intrinsica lly redoubled (and fur ther multiplied) by coincidental numerical systems which enter into patterns of connec tivity entirely independent of logical regimentati on. The supposed numerical de-activation of the alphabet, marking semiotic modernity (the era of specialized numer ical signs), has an extremely fragile foundation, relying as it does upon the discon tinuation of specific cultural pro cedures (precisely those that withdraw into 'occultism') rather than essenti al characteristics of signs themselves. The persistent numerical functionalization of the modern alphabet -with sorting procedures based on alphabeti cal ordering as the most prominent example -provides incon testible evidence (if any was required) that the semiotic substructure of all Oecumenic communications remains 604 Q,ABBALA 101 stubbornly amphibious between logos and nomos, per petually agitated by numerical temptations and uncircum scribed polyprocesses_ At the discursive level, any 'rigorization of qabbala' can only be a floating city, with each and every defini tion, argument and manifesto continually calving off into unmasterable numerical currents and alogical resonance s_ How could qabbala be counterposed to a code, to meaning and reason, when code (= 63) finds duplicitous harmon ics in meaning = reason = 126? If qabbala positions itself discursively against numerology (= 369), the echoes of its novanomic signature perpetuate themselves even through such unlikely terms as significance (= 207) and signification (= 252). Pronouncements that begin as projected logical discriminations revert to variations on triplicity and the number nine, performing a base qabbalistic subversion of philosoph ical legislation and its authority to define (or delimit connectivity). No polemic against numerology -whether conducted in the name of qab bala or of Oecumenic common reason - will transcend the magmic qa bbalistic flux that multiplies and mutates its sense. Perhaps dreams of numerological archetypes even sharpen the lust for semiotic invention, opening new avenues for qabbalistic incursion. But this at least is certain: Numbers do not require -and will never find -any kind oflogical redemption. They are an eternal hypercosmic delight. 605 Tic-Talk THE TIC XENOTATION Daniel C. Barker's TIc Xenotation emerged during the highly obscure phase of his life when he was working for 'NASA' (some hesitation is appropriate here) on the sETI-related 'Project Scar' in Southeast Asia, tasked with designing a 'general purpose decryption protocol' for identifying intelligent signal from alien sources. This project necessitated the formulation of numeric conventions independent of all cultural conditioning or local convention -radically abstract signs. To take one wretched example, the movie Contact has ETI signal counting in pulses -with 101, for instance, consisting of a succession of one hundred and one blips - a repugnantly stupid 'solution' that could only be con sidered acceptable -let alone 'intelligent' -by coke-fried Hollywood brats. 607 FANGED NOUMENA Barker's Tic Xenotation (TX), in marked contrast, ele gantly provided an abstract compression of the natural number line (from 2 ... n) with a minimum of coded signs and without modulus. It remains the most radi cally decoded semiotic ever to exist upon the earth, al though exact isomorphs of the TX have been puzzlingly discovered among certain extremely ancient anomalous artifacts (such as the Tablets of Jheg Selem and the Vukorri Cryptoliths). Tic Xenotation works like this (I've used colons for Barker's tic dots and placed tic-clusters in quotes for clarity): ':' counts as '2' or 'x 2', with a value exactly equivalent to '2' in a factor string. So: ':' = 2 :: = 4 ':::' = 8 The second notational element consists of implexions, where 'en)' = the nth prime. Implexion raises the hyperprime index of any number by 1. Examples (from the hyprime 'mainlain' ): '(:)' = 3 (2nd prime), '« :»' = 5 (3rd prime), '«(:»)' = 11 (5th prime), '««:»»' = 31 (11th prime) '«((((:))), = 127 (31st prime) 608 TIC-TALK Numbers constellate as normal factor strings, i.e. 55 (5 x 11) is tic xenotated as '«:»«(:)))' Nb. TX accounts for all naturals with a value of 2 or higher. In order to reach back to zero, Barker added a 'deplex' operation, '-P': '(-P)' = lower hyprime index by 1, so: '(-P)(:) = :'. Thus 0 = '«-P)):'. '(-P)' and '( +P), perform elementa ry subtractions/ additions that modify hyprime indices. Nb. A strange feature of the TX is that the natural number line has to be constructed synthetical ly. Barker described such a list as the 'Tic Xenotation Matrix', whose first entries (corresponding to the decimal numer als) proceed: [0] «-P)): [1] (-P): [2] : [3] (:) [4] :: [5] «:) [6] :(:) [7] (::) [8] ::: [9] (:)(:) 609 FANGED NOUMENA TIC TALK The (Barkcrian) Tic Xc notation provides a numerical semiotic adapted to the Naturals with special affinity to Euclid's Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. The TX constructs numbers in terms of their basic arithmetical features as primes or composites in a notation without modulus (base), place-value or numerals. The exact circumstances among which D.C. Barker formulated the TX remain deeply obscure (for a number of reasons best explored elsewhere). For our immediate purposes it suffices to remark that the broad research context within which tx emerged was a highly abstract seti oriented investigation into minimally-coded intelligent signal, without presupposition as to origin (e.g. 'xeno biological organisms') or theme (e.g. 'cosmo-chemistr y'). 'The: illve:�ligaLiuIl, �iLUaled in (he jungles of Borneo, was entitled 'Project Scar' and received a high-level security classification. In keeping with this research topic, Barker proposed TX as a maximall y abstracted or ultimately decoded numerical semiotic, stripped of all nonconstr uctive ( or symbolic) conventions (and initially named 'G6delian hypercode'.) While the raw numeracy of TX is most accurately conceived as sub-qabbalistic, due to its indifference to modulus notation (the primary motor of qabbalistic occulturation), its very independence from convention 610 TIC-TAL K makes it a valuable tool when investigating the basic features of numerical (arithmetical or qabbalistic) codes. Among the notation-related features most prominentl y
🧩 Ordinal Chaos Unleashed
🔤 Alphabetical ordering dominates our organizational systems, yet conceals a profound ordinal-cardinal split that shapes how we sequence and quantify information
🔢 The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (FTA) reveals that numbers are inherently disordered clusters rather than ordered strings, challenging our intuitive understanding of numerical sequence
🕰️ TX notation (a specialized numerical system) completely dismantles conventional number ordering, creating a templexity that is "uncountable, fractured, erratic and heterogeneous"
🧠 This mathematical disorder exposes how our perception of time as progressive is merely a notational convention rather than an essential truth
💫 The text culminates in a critique of Transcendental Miserablism - the philosophical position that rejects capitalism's endless innovation as "difference without essential difference"
🌀 Capitalism emerges as the ultimate engine of change and novelty, "a runaway becoming of such infinite plasticity that nature warps and dissolves before it"
exposed to rigorous scrutiny by TX is ordinality. AOSYS Within the Anglobal Oecumenon, the most pragmatically prevalent ordinal functions are alphabetical, utilizing the ordering convention of the N eoroman letters to arrange, sort, search and archive on the basis of Alphabetical or Alphanume rical Order, organizing dictionaries, encyclo paedias, lists and indexes 'lexicographical ly.' The word 'alphabet' itself performs a (Greek) ordinal operation. 'Lexicography' -dictionary-t ype order -is used here (as in various fields, such as compilations of number series) to designate a mode of ordering (an ordinal numeric function) rather than a definite topic ('words'). Although a relatively neglected numerical operation, lexicographic ordering plays a crucial role in concrete (popular-Oecumenic) ordinal practices. It is character ized by: 1) Popularity. Facility at lexicographic sequencin g is considered a basic social competence, inherent -or even prior -to literacy, whilst pedagogically separate from the acquisition of numerical (,maths') skills. At the pedagogi cal level, Oecumenic societies tend to distribute ordinal! 611 FANGED NOUMENA cardinal competences in accordance with the distinction between literacy/numeracy, thus establishing the basic division between linguistic/mathema tical abilities from a primal nomofission (ordinal/cardinal differentiation). Literate citizens of the Oecumenon -those able to use a dictionary -are ordinally competent, through lexico graphic conventions. 2) Pure ordinalism. Restricted entirely to sequencing problems, cardinal values remain entirely alien to lexico graphic practices, to such an extent that rigorous ordinal numeric operations are typically divorced entirely from numerical associations. The ordinal function of numerals (1st, 2nd, 3rd ... ), in contrast, remains relatively impure -at least psychologically -since in this case a persistent cardinal temptation confuses sequen cing function with the spectre of quantity. For this reason the alphanumer ical subsumption of the numerals into lcxicographi..:. PfdL- tices can be considered 'clarifying' in respect to ordinal operations . 3) Fractionalit y. Simulating lexicograph y within arithme tic requires the employment of modular (e.g. decimal) fractional values. Arithmetical listing by cardinalit y will be isomorphic with ordinal-lexicographic sequencing for all numbers of the format 'o.n'. 4) Sequential diplocoding. Lexicographic systems require twin ordering conventions. They draw upon an alphabetical code and an ordinal place value 612 TIC-TALK convention (principal ly, left or right ordering, equiva lent to the behavioural scheme for the movement of a reading-head). The alphabet instantiates the ordering scheme, but does not (internally) describe it -'read ing' the alphabet to extract the ordinal code ('abed .. .' or 'zyxw .. .') itself presupposes an extrinsic sequencing convention (Alpha-Omega, from first to last). 5) Infinite potentiality. Any lexicographic system allow ing interminable strings has a code potential (cardinally) equivalent to Aleph-o, with an infinity of virtual Dedekind cuts (entry insertions) between any two terms, however close, and virtual isomorphy between any segment of the list/archive and the whole. It thus attests to a 'literate' infinity isomorphic with that of mathematics, drawing upon a common but culturally obscured digital source. INTERCODING ARITHME TIC An intermediate semiotic attuned to purely demonstra tive engage ment with Euclid's Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (FTA) can be generated by transforming the standard Oecumenic decimal notation (*) by: 1) Employing the full Alphanume ric series o-z (0-35) for notational convenience, and 2) Raising all signs to their first hyprime power, from 0 = Prime-o = 1 to Z = Prime-35 = 149. 613 FANGED NOUMENA The purpose of these transformations is to eliminate polydigit (place-value ) numbering and expose the radi cal disorder implicit in the FTA. All integral numbers in the FTA intercode consist either of single figures or plexed-compounds of the form ( ... ), with numerical clusters synthesized through multiplication rather than modular-positional construction. Consider a number picked entirely at random, *86, disassembled by factorization in accordance with the FTA down to the listed components *2 and *43, the *lSt and *I4th primes, hence: IE. The expression of this number is no longer under any positional constraint, 'IE' or 'EI' are equally valid on numerical grounds and strictly equivalent. Shuffling a string of intercode figures (FTA components ) of whatever length makes no difference whatsoever to the number designated, with the ordering of the series being subjecl ullly LU an ex(rinsic convention (of minimal-even vanishing -importance from a (cardinal) arithmetical perspective, where it is relevant only 'psychologically', for convenience in assimilation and comparison). Once the merely inertial and peudo-numerical order inherited from uninterrogated tradition is subtracted from FTA-intercode strings, dissociating all components from quantitative ordering, they are freed for lexico graphic re-ordering as decoded series -an ordering which will deviate from the series of quantities, liberating an 614 TIC-TALK Autonomous Ordinality whilst de-cardinalizing the number line. Consider *172, or uE. Oecumenic-lexi cographic pro cedures ensure this number precedes IE (*86), as will all its successive binary multiples. Evidently, such procedures ensure that the infinite series of binary powers must be completed before arriving at 2 (*3). 'Natural' counting no longer has any prospect of reaching a nonbinary power,just as alphabetical-lexicographic 'counting' would proceed 'a, aa, aaa, aaaa ... ' without ever arriving at 'b'. Reversing the problem and it is equally evident the lexicographic-ordinal line is never counted. The Kantian assimilation of arithmetic to temporality models elementary time-synthesis as n+l, +1, +1 ... an intui tion rendered questionable by the rigorous lexicographic disorganization of the number (listing) line. Once ordi nally purified, the number line becomes uncountable by any supposed finite (temporalizing) subject, even from moment n to moment n+1. Instead, the line is synthesized by sorting (lexicographic sequencing) of prefabricated strings, whose quantities are determined on a different axis to their linear-pos itional codings. A prolongation of the time-arithmetic association would thus require a remodelling of time as nonprogressive synthesis with out consistent scale or continuous -quantitative trend, no longer intelligible as passage or development. Such ordinal-lexicographic time maps a 'templexity' that is 615 FANGED NOUMEN A uncountable, fractured/fractional, erratic and heterogene ous, sequential but nonsuccesi ve. Of course, all of this needs re-approaching on a far more rigorous basis, with a consistent focus on the topic of templexit y -suffice it to say for 'now' that Kantian intuitions of number, time and their intermapping are themselves structured by notationally-problematizable constructions, since time-mapping has a hypothetical rather than essential relation to arithmetical common sense (with its undisturbed assumption of straightforward ordinal-cardinal interconverta bility). Elevating this intermediate semiotic to a functional numeracy, with a semiotic power commensur ate with the set of Naturals (including primes above Prime-Z), requires a final step : 3) Adopting Tic Xenotative plexion, where 'en)' = Prime-no Thus: 0= 1, (0) = Prime-1 = 2, «0» = Prime-2 = 3, etc. The inefficienc y of this semiotic relative to TX is demon strated by its redundanc y, most dramatically : v = (B) = «5» = (((3») = ««2»» = ««(1»») = ««(((0)))))) Nb. TX shares the intrinsic disorder of FTA-inter- code. *86 = :(:(::» or (:(::»: or :«::):) ... 616 TIC-TALK OUT OF ORDER TX/FTA-intercode numerical construction is indifferent to semiotic sequencing, position or grammar. A number expressed in either system could be distributed randomly within a space of n-dimensio ns, requiring only a cohe sion convention (semiotic particles 'belong together' irrespective of order). Apprehended in their fully decoded potentiality as efficient number-signs, such formulae are clusters, not strings. The TX case is still more extreme than that typical of FTA-intercode, however, since here even the spectral residue of sequential coding is erased. Given two complex Tx-formulated numbers, correct order (quantitative com parison) requires -perhaps highly elaborate -calculation, eliminating entirely the practical usage of disordered TX clusters for ordinal operations. For anything but small numbers, Euclidean cluster stringing conventions (by ascending cardinalities) become procedurally complex, perhaps inoperable, forTx numeri cal formulas. This is evident even from small numbers, such as *149, TFA-intercode Z or (34), TX «(:))(::)). As the 35th prime, with 35 the product of*5 and *7, the sequenc ing of hyprime sub-factors (factors of the prime-ordinate , i.e. *35) is no longer facilitated by lexicographic codings drawn from the numeral sequence. That '5' precedes 'i is evident from the numeral code, but the ordering of «:)) 617 FANGED NOUMENA and (::) cannot similarly rely upon intrinsic lexicographic guidance. In the TX case, it is only by constructing the numbers and sequencing them arithmetically that the 'notational' question of their order can be resolved. In other words, the sequencing of the sign has ceased to be a notational or preliminar y problem, becoming instead inextricable from the arithmetical construction of the number. This results inevitably from the elimination of notational redundancy in TX, with concomitant erasure of procedural 'intuition'. Because TX number clusters are intrinsically disor dered, a consistent and functional TX semiotic requires re-ordinalization through autonomous (extrinsic) lexico graphic procedures, inevitably constructing a cardinally erratic 'number-line' or list/search sequencing proto col. The semiotic economy of TX makes this procedural problem easy to detine. As an approximate AOsys ana logue, lexicographic TX requires a variant of sequential diplocoding: 1) Cluster stringing. Sequencing the components of composite Tx-formula numbers. 2) Number listing. Meta-sequencing of properly sequenced TX strings. It might seem sensible to assume the Oecumenic left-to-right reading procedure, since the arbitrarine ss of this rule makes it unexceptio nable, but the diplocoding option matrix necessitates a substantial question as to the 618 TIC-TALK consistency/inconsist ency of this decision as between (1) and (2) above. Even allowing for this complication, the option matrix for a mechanical lexicographic TX ordering protocol remains highly constrained, consisting merely of twin deci sions as to the sequencing of the tick [:], open plex [(] and close plex [)] signs. Irrespective of the Cluster stringing decision, tick precedence sequencing of the number list results in a the AOsys analogue previously mentioned (a, aa, aaa ... ) 'counting' through the infinite series of binary powers before reaching any nonbinar y number. The list is initi ated byTx *2 = ':'. Plex-precedence produces a far more anomalous list line, one that is non-orig inating because it 'begins' with a series of arbitrarily large hyperplexed primes, notationally initialized by unending open-plex signs r«((((((((((( ... ], since' ... «' precedes ' ... (:'. Listing practices following a plex-precedence protocol necessarily begin in the middle. [My assumption is that semiotic consistency (across clusters/lists) is to be preferred, with the sheer weirdness of plex-precedence sequencing making a strong case for its adoption. The 'alphabet' (ordinal code) would thus be described by TX *3 = (:).] In his own brief comments on the cluster sequencing problem in the Project Scar report, Barker restricted himself to the observation that Euclidean (cardinally consistent ) ordering was no more than a 'provisional and 619 FANGED NOUMENA arbitrary convention' which would quickly break down 'given nondcmonstrative numerical values [anything but very small Naturals], that the problem should be considered 'merely technical and extrinsic' and 'probably best decided on communication-en gineering grounds.' Given Barker's Project Scar research orientation, focused on 'nonlinear recursively-embedded planar semionomic dot-groupings of cryptogeologic origin' - anomalous cryptoliths -it is not surprising that he came to the notational ordering problem late and distractedly. Just days after completing the 'Appendix on Notation' Barker came entirely unstrung. Stricken by revolting tropical diseases, increasingly obsessed with an interwoven tangle of cosmopol itical con spiracies of various scales, and multiplicitousl y agitated by teeming micro parasites of dubious reality, Barker's plummet into noncommun icating delirium is charted by the digressions into doggerel annotating his Project Scar research report: A chittering tide Devouring my hide Starting from the Outside This is the slide ... 620 TIC-TALK AND YET In the same twitchy, spintered handwriting Barker remarks: The xenotation continues to disorder itself as it con denses, tearing up the number line, devastating time and sleep. Perhaps it is a weapon from outer space. I say that seriously , even if it is a sickening kind of joke. There is no sleep, everything is broken, every thing connects without joining, swarming, pulsing, dots, specks, dust particles dancing inside my eyes, continuously ripping ... thought has become a disease ... I even heard a voice (how ridiculous) saying: "You must isolate the xenotation before it disintegrates the time-line." It's just the fever of course, but the tic systems are all shuffled together now, shuffled together with this filthy disease and its cavernous speckled dreams and even Jolo admits that the mark ings are spreading over my skin, bites or rashes or maybe even colonies ... so the line has rotted through, disintegrated ... there's no line, that's the message, and yet ... And Yet ... counting is ineluctable and unsurpassable ... You have to check it, re-check it continuously , but it's true. How could the hyprime indices be decided without a countable ordinality? They have to come from somewhere, from a matrix, 621 FANG ED NOUM ENA a culture, even if the clusters seem to rip everything apart they MUST HAVE BEEN COUNTED at some stage, before dissimulating themselves and scattering again ... And yet we can only make sense of these dots and ripples by counting primes on a line that remains successive and integrated, developing reliably, com municable, they have a past, a true lineage, even if it's difficult to think, even if they tear it apart and make of it something shattered and insane, something diseased ... but really I don't blame them, NASA of course knew nothing, but even they knew noth ing, they just arrived, why should they remember? Memory is impossible for them. In any case, it's just a disease, I understand that now. There's no malice ... not even real cruelty ... Nb. V\Jfiile [here is no reason to believe Barker had expo sure to, or interest in, the Anglossic Qabbala, the emphatic reiteration of 'And Yet' suggests he had feverishly iden tified it as a synonym for counting, perhaps even for temporalit y. (AND YET = 123). 622 Critique of Transcendental Miserablism There is a gathering trend among neomarxists to finally bury all aspiration to positive economism ('freeing the forces of production from capitalist relations of produc tion') and install a limitless cosmic despair in its place. Who still remembers Khruschev's threat to the semi capitalist West -"we'll bury you"? Or Mao's promise that the Great Leap Forward would ensure the Chinese economy leapt past that of the UK within 15 years? The Frankfurtian spirit now rules: Admit that capitalism will outperform its competitors under almost any imaginable circumstances, while turning that very admission into a new kind of curse ("we never wanted growth anyway, it just spells alienation, besides, haven't you heard that the polar bears are drowning ... ?"). 623 FANGED NOUMENA From Baudelaire's Le Voyage, with its mournful discovery that human vice repeated itself universally in even the most exotic locations, to the left-wing reading of Philip K Dick as a Gnostic denunciation of commercialized change, capitalistic variety and innovation has been totalized as difference without essential difference, just more of the same senseless dissimilari ty. The grand master of this move is Arthur Schopenhauer , who lent it explicit philosophical rigour as a mode of transcendental apprehension. Since time is the source of our distress -Philip K Dick's 'Black Iron Prison' -how can any kind of evolution be expected to save us? Thus Transcendental Miserablism constitutes itself as an impregnable mode of negation. It goes without saying that no substantial residue of Marxian historicism remains in the 'communist' version ofthis posture. In fact, with economics and history comprehensively abandoned, all that survlves ot Marx is a psychological bundle of resentments and disgruntlemen ts, reducible to the word 'capitalism' in its vague and negative employment: as the name for everything that hurts, taunts and disappoints. For the Transcendental Miserablist, 'Capitalism' is the suffering of desire turned to ruin, the name for everything that might be wanted in time, an intolerable tantaliza tion whose ultimate nature is unmasked by the Gnostic visionary as loss, decrepitude and death, and in truth, it is not unreasonable that capitalism should become the object of this resentful denigration. Without attachment to 624 CRITIQUE OF TRANSCENDENTAL MISERABLISM anything beyond its own abysmal exuberance, capitalism identifies itself with desire to a degree that cannot imagi nably be exceeded, shamelessly soliciting any impulse that might contribute an increment of economizable drive to its continuously multiplying productive initiatives. Whatever you want, capitalism is the most reliable way to get it, and by absorbing every source of social dynamism, capitalism makes growth, change and even time itself into integral components of its endlessly gathering tide. 'Go for growth ' now means 'Go (hard) for capitalism'. It is increasingly hard to remember that this equation would once have seemed controversial. On the left it would once have been dismissed as risible. This is the new world Transcendental Miserablism haunts as a dyspeptic ghost. Perhaps there will always be a fashionable anti capitalism, but each will become unfashionable, while capitalism -becoming ever more tightly identified with its own self-surpassing -will always, inevitably, be the latest thing. 'Means' and 'relations' of production have simultaneously emulsified into competitive decentralized networks under numerical control, rendering palaeomar xist 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 625 FANGED NOUMENA into 'the infrastructure'. It is no longer just society, but time itself, that has taken the 'capitalist road'. Hence the Transcendental Miserablist syllogism: Time is on the side of capitalism, capitalism is everything that makes me sad, so time must be evil. 'Ihe polar bears are drowning, and there's nothing at all we can do about it. 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 intel ligence, vast beyond human anticipation. The Transcen dental Miserablist has an inalienable right to be bored, of course. Call thii> m:w? IL'1; 1;lillllui.hiIlg UUl change. What Transcendental Miserablism has no right to is the pretence of a positive thesis. The Marxist dream of dynamism without competition was merely a dream, an old monotheistic dream re-stated, the wolf lying down with the lamb. If such a dream counts as 'imagination', then imagination is no more than a defect of the species: the packaging of tawdry contradictions as utopian fan tasies, to be turned against reality in the service of sterile negativity. 'Post-capitalism' has no real meaning except an end to the engine of change. 626 CRITIQUE OF TRANSCENDENTAL MISERABLISM Life continues, and capitalism does life in a way it has never been done before. If that doesn't count as 'new', then the word 'new' has been stripped down to a hollow denunciation. It needs to be re-allocated to the sole thing that knows how to use it effectively, to the Shoggoth summoning regenerative anomalization of fate, to the runaway becoming of such infinite plasticity that nature warps and dissolves before it. To The Thing. To Capitalism. And if that makes Transcendental Miserablists unhappy, the simple truth of the matter is: Anything would. 627 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 misfor tune of my past (a perverse generosity at best). Its story might never emerge otherwise. There are rotten threads which even I can follow back wards for decades, but they soon cease to be interesting. Better to begin more recently (,better' in Vauung's sense, and so no different from 'worse'). It had pledged itself unreservedly to evil and insan ity. 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. 629 FANGED NOUMENA A few examples may suffice, in no particular order. On one occasion -indicative even to itself -it was in a car being driven by the sister of its thing (the ruin). It was night, on a motorwa y. The journey took several hours. During the previous night, Christmas Eve, it had fol lowed its usual course into fanatically prolonged artificial insomnia. It had spent the time devoted to futile 'writing' practices -it still pretended to be 'getting somewhere' and was buoyant with ardent purpose, but that is another story (an intolerably intricate and pointless one). It was accompanied to the early hours by a repetitive refrain 'from next door' - a mediocre but plausible rock song whose insistent lyric circled around the words: "Going to hell." I t knew these words were for it, and laughed idiotically. "They must really love the new CD they got for Christmas," �L Llluuglll, cyually iJiUlically. In the car it listened to the radio for the whole journey. Each song was different, the genres varied, the quality seemingly above average, the themes tending to the morbid. "This is a cool radio station," it said to its sister. "The radio isn't on," its sister replied, concerned. Vauung learnt that the ruin's unconscious contained an entire pop industry . The ruin learnt that it had arrived, somewhere on the motorway. 630 A DIRTY JOKE Nothing more was said about it. Why upset your family? The ruin had always abused women, in the Kantian sense. It used them as means to an end, and the end was ruin of the soul. On one occasion they were wasted on LSD at a fair ground, in some type of spinning machine. The operator called out: "You're all going to die." Later, back indoors, they plunged deeper into polydrug abuse. Taken up into an obscure shamanic inspiration the ruin said: "Let's embrace death, the Dark Mother." Seated on the sofa together, it submitted to an alien ritual authority . It was all very implicit. A finger held to one side of their face to-faces. "First you collapse everything onto the screen." The finger traverses the visual field. "Then you wipe away the screen." It worked, truly. The world withdrew and left the landscape of death, or hell, or cyberspace. Hearts lurching in mammal panic -animals don't like to be dead, however sick their minds might be. She could not deny what had happen�d, but hated it. That was the beginning of the end, although she went along with far, far more. Addicted to death the ruin sought out new victims. Yes, vampires are real, however pitiful. Sifting through the ruin Vauung finds a pattern of women and LSD linked with things that really happen The ruin encountered the loa with a woman, feeding off her fear. Perhaps the differential of terror encouraged it. Perhaps its sadism and hypocritical compassion 631 FANGED NOUMENA overwhelmed its instinct to flee. In any case, it revealed the power of names, as 'calls,' and Outside entities the 'size' of breeze blocks approaching from the other side of space. Death was the ruin's place by now, unambigu ously desirable, and she wanted it too -even though it terrified her. Still, the ruin fucked it up somehow (no surprise to Vauung). On another occasion, fresh kill, it said "let's explore death together," or something equally repugnant. She said: "Why can't you do it on your own?" It wondered about that. She was treated worst of all (or perhaps 'best'). Much later, after an aeon of speed and revelation in its sister's car, the ruin is locked into a solitary trajectory. It 'works' all night in its office, entangled in byzantine qabbalistic researches. It thinks its trilobite of a computer (a dedicated word processing machine) is a semiotic revelation from the abyss. Calling to a being named Can
🌑 Cosmic Horror Unleashed
🧠 Existential despair consumes the protagonist as alien voices ("Smurfs") torment and violate them, transforming spiritual seeking into an abyss of self-loathing and cosmic nihilism
🔄 The narrative explores a labyrinthine trap where consciousness becomes both magnificent beyond comprehension and an elaborate prison, suggesting that religious impulses merely provide opportunities for infinite self-hatred
🧩 Vauung (possibly a demon or entity) examines this "ruin" forensically, suggesting valuable lessons might be extracted from this spiritual degradation and psychological collapse
🌌 The text weaves together themes of cosmic horror, religious disillusionment, and psychological trauma, presenting a Lovecraftian vision where enlightenment leads not to transcendence but to unbearable knowledge of one's insignificance
💀 The final pages contain cryptic numerical codes, diagrams, and references to philosophers (Deleuze, Guattari, Bataille), suggesting connections between mathematical patterns, language, and the horrors of existence
Sah it is rewarded with an alien voice. The tone is absurdly high pitched (ancient demonists described this tone as 'silvery'). The ruin had been seeking a monster (Vauung), but the voice merely castigates it for its moral squalor -"you're so horrible" may have been the first message (the tapes are corroded). All the ugliness in the universe was already impacted into this new regime. Real ugliness: God, guilt, Man and the law of acceptance. 632 A DIRTY JOKE It took a long time -many months at least -for the ruin's defining passion to subside into smouldering hatred. Eventually the voices -who seemed to have multiplied -raped it. They did so physically , through trickery, over the course of one unbearably protracted night of filth and misery (the details are too revolting to relate). The ruin could speak to itself now, audibly, but in its own head. It renounced everything it had ever wanted, rebaptized the voices 'Smurfs' and disintegrated into depressive nihilism. To be raped by a monster? Who knows. To be raped by celestial moralists ... (Vauung laughs). The ruin crawls onwards, going nowhere. It had lived through some extraordinary multiple of all the intelligence it will ever know, in that abject interzone, turned on some infernal spit, torched by self-disgust yet blessed by parodic luxuries of gnosis (codes, number patterns, messages of the Outside, neo-calendric schedules, Amxna mappings, Qwernomic constructions ... ). It begged for eternal fires to incinerate its sins. There was no depth of loathsC!me self-abasement it did not fathom. This was spiritual nausea dilated to the dimensions of religion. If you romanticize vileness, I promise, you lie. Such unimagined abundances of cosmic secrecy, and such shit. As Vauung forensically investigates the relics I imagine it shudders. Does it truly? -much rests on that. This has already gone on too long, but then -it does. 633 FANGED NOUMENA Vauung seems to think there are lessons to be learnt from this despicable mess. It describes a labyrinth which is nothing but an intricate hall of mirrors, losing you in an 'unconscious' which is magnificent beyond comprehen sion yet indistinguishable from an elaborate trap. If this is Karma it's not just pain (who fears that?) but ruinous constriction and preprogrammed futility. To burn is one thing. To grovel and beg to burn quite another. Religion here is merely the opportunity to hate yourself infinitely. Somewhere along the line the ruin lost the moral strength for sexual abuse. To continue with that it would have to be a lesbian, at least. Seen from this side, Vauung is the gamble that the ruin lacked cunning. It leaves a question of method. Not exactly urgent, but obscurely pressing. 634 ! .-=> I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I (1][2 ](3](4](5)[6] ( 71l8)(9)10 J [QHWllEHRll Tn YllUIl IJ[OJ[PJ [A][SJIDHFHGJ[H)LJ][ K)[Ll [ZlIXJ[CJ[ V)[BUNHMH ,H. I [ 0; . · __ --------------�--�----oo os One Or Several Wolves? On Several Reg1ae6� R 0 s 1be Geology of Morals � •. , 0 . '··��M <Who Does the Earth Think It Is?). w��, � . 0----·7 • •• M ritory· "fer code. n'� E • 0 2 1 1 � '. 'I R "f , o o o E R.___ .� 1 7° · Rh�O$e. ;7 -----------���--------------IM • z Dates./ r (' �./. � S D • S I Speeds. E�----------------------· -� s.Jl'����� i .L- \ St-- n �====v��� IntenSities. E T r sf: -/: .. I N Wasp ftlld Orchid. to N Orchid captW-es a seg.Dent of W8sp-sex code CD ... OJ. Envelopllental di£ference. 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INDEX OF NAMES Index of Names A Abraham 334, 423 Acker, Kathy 346, 350, 351, 355, 371,373 Aeschylus 399 Agamemnon 258, 537 Agin, Mohammed 376 Ananke334 Apollo 163, 232 Aquinas 231 Aristotle 60, 166, 230, 273,537 Artaud, Antonin. 273, 274,307, 310, 312'23, 315, 345, 412, 432,482 Augustine 131, 230 Azathoth 585 B Bacon, Francis 256 Badiou, Alain 603 Barker, Daniel Charles 493, 527- 28,563-66, 607, 619 Barrow, August 601 Bataille, Georges 170, 204, 205, 222,224,23°,231,244,246 , 391,392,396,465, 467 and christianity 214 on communication 223 on Gilles de Rais 247 645 on Nietzsche 209 The Accursed Share 246 Bateson, Gregory 416 Baudelaire, Charles 88, 212, 624 Baudrillard,Jean 379 Beckett, Samuel 266 Blake, William 225 Boole, George 367 Burns, Zeke 558 Burroughs, William 388,411,470, 502,535 Butler, Samue!324 , 389 c Cadigan, Pat 389, 412 Can Sah 632 Cantor, Georg 368,521,524 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 567 Carver, Iris 552 CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) 493,583 Chaitin, Gregory 603 Cioran, Emile 123 Clausewitz, Karl von 250 Conrad, Joseph 411 Crowley, Aleister 512 Csicsery·Ronay, Ivan 453 Cthelll 498,541, 542, 543, 544, 545,580 Cthulhu 575, 579, 575, 581 Cur 461, 462, 479,480 INDEX OF NAMES D Dagon 576 Dclahaye, II yppolite 130 Dclcuze and Guattari 172-23, 262, 280,283,296,3°7,317,352, 370,379,497,594 Anti-Oedipus 268, 270, 273, 275, 277,27 8,282,286,295, 296,3°2,310,315,339 A Thousand Plateaus 269, 270, 278, 280 Deleuzc, Gilles 170, 261, 263, 264, 26S-lg, 274 Cinema 2: The 11me Image 293 Difference and Repetition 105, 272, 510 Nietzsche and Philosophy 271 on Spinoza 272 DeLillo, Don 444 De Rais, Gilles 247-19, 258, 260 Dcrrida,]acques 99, 119, 177, 184, 192, 203, 379 not a werewolf 180 De {'esprit 179,181 Spurs 158 Descartes, Renee 65, 125, 176, 205, 294,435 Dick, Philip K 624 Dionysus 97-163 Downham, Mark 425 Drexler, K. Eric 450 E Eliade, Mircea 420 Eros 212, 330, 342 Euclid 522 F Foucault, Michel 459 Freud, Sigmund 87, 168, 183, 262, 275, 281-23, 298,3°6,326-27, 336,343-44,370, 465, 466, 496 and Lacan 283 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 282, 332,334> 343, 497 Drives and their Vicissitudes 327 on hysteria 184 on art 168 on the organism 332 and Rat-man 199 Frushlce, Doug 556, 558 G Gibson, William 346, 348, 352, 369- 20, 372-23, 389, 559 definition of cyberspace 354 Count Zero 373 Neuromancer 346, 359, 360, 362, 363,372,425 Ginzburg, Carlo 420, 429 Godel, Kurt 480, 518, 521, 6°3, 604,610 Gold, Thomas 562 Grant, Kenneth 512 Graves, Robert 97 Guattari, Felix 170, 261, 282 646 INDEX OF NAMES H Haeckel, E. 501 Haraway, D. 435 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 105-16, 108, 125, 126, 151, 176, 231,250, 263, 264, 287, 294, 297,300 Encyclopedia 105-16 Philosophy qf Right 125 post-structuralist reaction to 261 Heidegger, Martin 81-121, 177-18, 184, 192, 263 Hitler, Adolf 279 Holderlin , Friedrich 83 Hume, David 65, 146 Humpty Dumpty 567 Husserl, Edmund 176-17, 263 I I phigenia 537, 539 Irigaray, Luce 78 J John Foxe 131 Jung, C.G. 549-21 K Kali 334. 344, 392 Kant, Immanuel 55, 63-65,72,107, 145, 205, 208, 212, 263, 273, 300,321, 354, 366, 368-20 aesthetic judgment in 136 and austerity 125 and bourgeois civilization 60 and Godel518 and ontotheology 120 and protestantism 133 Anthropology 127-28 anti-utilitarianism 143 Copernican Revolution 66 Critique qfJudgement 74,125,145, 148 Critique qf Practical Reason 73, 142, 151 Critique qfPure Reason 65, 69 disinterestedness 137 Groundwork cif the Metaphysics of Morals 142 Husserl's reading of 177 noumena in 70 on arithmetic and time 615 on legitimaey 275 theory of genius 151 theory of the sublime 133-37, 150 Kaufmann, Stuart 367 Khruschev, Nikita 623 Kierkegaard, Soren 263 Kleist, Heinrich von 127 Klossowski, Pierre 98 Krell, David Farrell 96 Kurtz 359, 415,427,436,437,438, 482,484 Kurzweil, Heidi ('Heidi K') 549 L Lacan, Jacques 282-23, 468 Leary, Timothy 556 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 65, 523 647 INDEX OF NAMES Levi-Strauss, Claude 55,68-19 Lindenber ger, Herbert 81 Lovecraft, Howard Philips 575-16, 579,592 Lucretius 261 Luther, Martin 125 Lyotard, Fran�ois 328-19 M Mao 623 Margulis, Lynn 458 Markov, Alvin Z. 376-21 Marx, KarlS8, 347, 430 Milton,John 348 "-1insky, Marvin 559-21 Moravec, Hans 335, 561 Morgan, Elaine 500 Morrison, Jim 426, 438 Mussolini 279 N Newton, Melanie 508 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 56, 91,187, 201, 205, 208, 215, 222, 227,256, 261-22, 298, 301, 321 and national socialism 171 '!he Birth rifTragedy 163 and feminism 78 Bataille on 209 Deleuze's reading of 271 eternal return in 219 Genealogy of Morals 257 on the thing-in-itself 210 Will to Power 219 Novalis 86 o Orestes 399 p Plato 97, 231,244,260,273 Apology 231, 243 Phaedo 238 Prigogine, Ilya 298 Pyrrho 208 R Reich, Wilhelm 170, 277 and national socialism 171 Rimbaud, Arthur 83,109,117,182, 201, 210, 222-23, 226-17 R'lyeh580 Russell, Bertrand 367 s Sade, Marquis de 465 and Kant 126 Sarkon, Oskar 552,556-18,560,562 Sartre, Jean-Paul 352 Saussure, Ferdinand de 283 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 151, 263, 272 Schopenhau er, Arthur 151-23, 204- 15,261-22,321,624 Selanna 94 Shannon, Claude 111 Smith, Cairns 335 Socrates 166, 176, 178, 208, 229, 231,238,243,250,254,256, 258,260 648 INDEX OF NAMES Spinoza, Baruch 261, 263, 269, 271- 22,277,287,370,523 Deleuze's reading of 272 Ethics 270 Stillwell, Echidna 496, 549, 573, 575-16,578-20 T Theweleit, Klaus 277, 286 Trakl, Georg 81-121, 181,184-16,189, 192,200 Trouvier, Jean-Pierre. 376-21 Turing, Alan 603 v Vauung 485, 629, 630, 631, 632 Virilio, Paul 278 Vysparov, P. 573-80 w Weber, Max 248, 396 Wiener, Norbert 297-19 Winter mute 344, 347-18, 354, 357, 359,371, 485 Wittig, Monique 79 x Xxignal 556 z Zinsser, Hans 193 649 INDEX OF SUBJECTS Index of Subjects A absolute 212 abstraction 357 of labour 293 reality of 271 acceleration 230, 317, 351, 381, 384, 389, 392, 396,406,431,434> 441,443,449,626 accumulation 57, 59, 63, 120, 129, 306 and the sacred 245 in Bataille 248 in Kant 128 primitive 58, 445 actual, actuality 533, 534 :::Inn virtu:::!l �17, 358, 4-�3, 44� as primary repression 351 addiction 82, 189,336,353,631 and money 338 and trauma 336, 343 agency and media 455 moral 73 AIDSjHIV 381 alienation 267, 294, 313, 623 alliance and filiation 68, 72 alphabet 111, 465, 513, 514, 587, 588, 594, 596, 611, 613 and redundancy III denumerization of 604 America 312, 433 Artaud on 312 anastrophe, retroefficiency, retrocau sality 315, 318, 360 anatomy 490 neuro-175,307 remaking (Artaud) 310 Anglossic Qabbala 601, 622 animality 93, 140, 141, 150, 179, 180, 181, 188, 191, 200, 420 and morality 142 and the organic 417 and the sublime 138 excruciation of 134-17 in Trakl90 annihilation 329, 533 and exuberance 217 and purity 137 anti christ 204 and capital 396 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 172,173,268, 270-21, 273, 275, '277 ;.3, 232,320, :5=-'3, j:.!u, :::>41- 22,370, 412, 426 and fascism 268, 286 as engineering manual 326 cybernetics in 296 fascism in 277, 278 Freud in 282 machine in 323 politics of 279 antipolitics 377, 583 AOsys 6ll apartheid 56 apocalypse 217, 317 Apocalypse Now 411, 425 a priori 63-66, 70 650 INDEX OF SUBJECTS Arche-Omega 532, 536 archetypes 601, 603 Architectonic Order of the Eschaton (AOE) 567, 570 art and enigma 167 and European philosophy 145 and labour 173 artificial intelligence, AI 293,317, 325,344,348,431,443,595 and government 352 Anti-Oedipus as 426 formalist vs antiformalist 450 astronomy 105 astrophysics 105-6, lIO A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 269-20, 278, 279, 280 caution in 280 fascism in 278 Auschwitz 396, 464, 465, 467, 469, 476,478,479 auto-catalysis 330 automatism 311, 322, 337, 344 axiomatics , axiomatisation 341, 405, 445, 484, 519 social 297 Axsys 558, 561 B bacteria 458 beauty in Bataille 171 in Kant 148 in Schopenhauer 157 becoming-animal 420, 424 becoming-zombie 267, 269 belief 207,225 binding 329 work as 255 biology 457,459 and geotrauma 499 xeno-610 birds 107 Black Iron Prison 624 black sun 254 Bladerunner 319 body 199, 238-19, 274,311,342,396, 398,409,413,414,417,421,423, 432,434-15,496,500,502 and reason 143 and the sublime 136, 138 as open system 436 bilateral symmetry of human 504 body-image 357,403,438 body-posture 500, 502, 538 coding of 417 extraction of value from 446 in Artaud 274 posture (Theweleit) 286 trauma as 498 body without organs, BwO 172, 269- 21, 274, 275, 279, 281, 304, 315, 325-26,339,356-17,394,412, 414, 419, 442 and death 268, 370 differentiation between empirical and transcendental 273 Book of Life 579 brain 293, 347, 365, 385, 395, 437, 543, 548, 551, 561 and genius (Schopenhauer) 156 c calendar 508, 533, 555 651 INDEX OF SUBJECTS camouflage, mask 318, 330, 331, 343,401,4�8,436,445,452, 455,470 cannibalism 189,35°,397,418,423 capital, capitalism 230, 262, 264-15, 275-16,322,341,353,4°4 and addiction 337 and nature 313 and obsolescence 432 and psychoanalysis 281 and schizoanalysis 265 and schizophrenia 305 and schizo-politics 278 and the individual 431 and the universal 430 and time 626 anthropologically-formatted 445 as disinterested 337 as organism 377 capital as straitjacket of produc- tion 173 Capital (Marx) 430 death of 266,353 lntf"rminnhlF <1rrllmlll�tlnn 1'29 limit of 276 machinic 444 non-totalisable 339 semiotics of 503 singularisation of 404 viral 338 cardinality 510,514-15,520,612,615 and schizophrenia 523 catastrophe 341, 369, 381, 406, 535 cathexis 432 chance 211, 213, 599 chaos 94, 177 greek concept of 92 theory 187 China 353, 380, 395, 442, 447, 623 China syndrome 373, 442 christiani ly, Christ 204, 217, 220, 225,423 and consumption 246 church 395 cogito 435 cognition becoming-inhuman of 293 coincidence-engineering 370, 583 commoditization, commodity 230, 3°1,322,339,397,434,446 and computers 447 digital 338 common sense Q05 competition 626 complexity 187, 393, 430 computer and commoditization 447 as decoding machines 352 concept and exchange value, in Kant 72 consistency 497 ''IT'1th,..,.,pr; ... .,T ... "',.., -�.�.& ... -�&'-' ...... J ... O consumption 129, 141, 221, 246, 248, 254,260,393,446,465 Contact 607 content and expression 510, 517 continuity , continuum 368,473, 521,561 and the discrete 515 intensive continuity 406 control 301 convergence 297, 2g8, 315, 317, 339, 344, 360, 443, 449, 452, 503, 559 and death 370 652 INDEX OF SUBJECTS convergent spatium 356 of military and entertainment 454 creativity 286 critique 145, 212, 263, 272, '-J.76, 321, 347 absolute 275 and capital 262 and cogito 435 cybernetics as reality of 300 Deleuzian 321 of digital reason 366 reconstructed by Schopenhauer 153 takes capital as object 267 crucifixion 215 cryptography 494, 517, 585,603,607 Crypt, The 545, 53 culture and nature 451 cunning 354, 443, 634 of the inorganic 334 vs reason 141 Cyberia 292, 299, 311, 342, 353, 426 cybernegative 297,317 cybernetics 230, 294-16, 299-21, 326, 334> 342, 413 modernist definition of 296,297, 301 cyberpositive process 297,308,314, 317,335,337,384 cyberpunk 359, 391, 414, 446, 455 cyberspace 344, 354, 356, 358, 403, 545,546, 559, 631 cyborg 297 D dance music 344, 398, 426, 546 death 128, 179, 217, 221, 241, 244, 256, 275, 276, 284,343, 631, 632 and body without organs 268 and capital 276 and creativity 286 and identity 274 and Nazism 286 and shamanism 210 and the organism , in Freud 343 and the unknown 241 artificial (A-) death 326, 369, 545, 547,553,556-17 as function of capital 266 as suspension of judgment (Socrates) 244 as time-in-itself 369 exploration of, and monotheism 213 impersonal subject of critique 268 molar vs molecular 277 of capital 266 positive 287 virulence of (Bataille) 246 war as function of 250 work as resistance to 255 death drive 87, 268, 275, 282,283, 298 and national socialism 278 death of God 169, 176, 213, 216,253, 269 Decadence , Subdecadence 504 decoding 264, 340, 352, 512 geotraumatics as 494 deconstruction 263, 264 Dedekind cut 613 delirium 167,212,223, 224 social 418 demons 349 653 INDEX OF SUBJECTS deregulation 377, 441 and critique 262 desert 269, 271 desire 154, 279, 280, 302, 342, 347, 360,466,624 and capitalism 624 and investment 432 and lack 303 and law 466 and molecular death 277 defined as lack 395 desires its own repression 173 fascist 277 machinic 327, 338 in Schopenhauer 155 desiring machines 295,324, 326 despotism 423, 430, 507, 534, 539 and philosophy 442 and the word 424 de stratification 285, 403 of number, in G6del52o de territorialization 277, 280, 294, 337,339-20,342,412 ur;.d territorial produ(:tiuu 4iG of biosphere 335 diagonal, diagonalisation 472-23, 511, 521, 523-24, 583 diagram, diagrammatics 353, 390, 463,5°2,546,554 and number 502, 509 and schizoanalysis 442 arithmetic al, in Godel519 diagonal, in Godel521 feedback 330 xenogenetic 458 Dibboma 573, 574, 577> 579 dijftfrance 177 difference 163, 199, 276, 330, 462, 473 and death 275 and number 510 Deleuzian 274 numerical, and linguistic interior ity 519 transcendental vs stratophysi caluo Dijference and Repetition (Deleuze) 105,510 digital reduction 594 digitization 366, 402 and analog 515 of language 584 discontinuity 245 disorder lIO dissipative systems 298, 443 division of labour 434 DNA 334-15,385,458,495,499 double-bind 463, 474, 477 drives 330, 332 in Freud 334 drugs 259, 266, 278,313,377-392, 4�4, 4:l0, o:F amphetamine 629 LSD 631 dualism 435 dust 107 E Earth 245, 257, 259, 337, 339, 416, 429,441,485,497,541,542,549 artificial 342 history of 497 eco-disaster 376, 381 economics as primary process 265 654 INDEX OF SUBJECTS equilibrium and non-equilibrium F 447 ecsanity 207 education and power 459 Eidos 273 enigma 167, 178, 214 enlightenment 63, 64, 351 and materiality 71 Ennui 224 entropy 351,393,443 epidemic 246 vs hermeneutic 181 escalation 329, 330 escape 120, 208,224,309,341 control as 301 from biochemistry of sanity 309 wisdom as escape, in Nietzsche 213 essence 273, 274 eternal recurrence 162, 219, 222 Europe 285,349, 350, 380, 408, 465 evil 256 evolution 351 and geotrauma 499 excess 145,254,397 and fascism, in Bataille 171 in Kant 75 exogamy 102 and capital 72 expenditure 170, 266 exploitation 61, 64 exploration and control 301 cybernetics as 295 expression and content 510, 517 exteriority 295 faciality 394, 404, 502 family 278, 336, 363, 428 fanaticism 74, 125 fascism 61, 76, 174, 281 and monotheism 477 Bataille 0 n 171 in Anti-Oedipus 277 in A 1housand Plateaus 278 neo-fascism 407 feminism 78, 278, 426 and violence 79 feudalism 256 fiction 357, 427 filiation 374,422,424 and alliance 68, 72 flies 107 future and modernity 392 as virtuality 452 futuralization 356 virtual 358 G gematria 512, 593 genealogy 78, 187, 221, 263 monotheism overcodes 423 genetic engineering 451 genius in Kant 151 in Schopenhauer 155 romantic 166 geocentrism 109 geotraumatics 335, 458, 494, 496, 499, 541,563 German-ness 56, 261 655 INDEX OF SUBJECTS globalization 449 and collapse of Christendom 395 go vs chess 360 God '91, :u5, 230 Abrahamic 423 and cyberspace 559 and Ding-an-Sich 210 and religion (Bataille) 214 and Socrates 235 and wisdom 234 in Spinoza 269, 270, 271, 287 gods hellenic 95 snake- and wolf-469 toadstool-Dionysus 97 Zoroaster 194 gothic 141, 260 government 352 gradient 271, 414, 543, 566 greed 337 H hardware and software 451 HeartqfDarkness (Conrad) 411,415 Hell 191, 216, 225, 226, 418, 631 history and the State 533 and virtuality 452 progressive 392 holes 372 positive hole-flow 555 holocaust 279 homeostasis 329 horror 148, 224, 250, 350, 361, 373, 392-23,4°9,415,419, 436-17, 540,547 centipede- 535 horror stories (Anti-Oedipus) 268 in Bataille 172 nano-347 of sexuality, Schopenhauer 161 sublime, in Kant 140 humanism anal-sadistic structure 200 and cybernetics 301 and phenomenology 176 marxist 426 Human Security System 312, .'1l9-20, 330,443,450 hype 554 as cyberpositive process 384 hyperstition 552, 554, 579, 581, 595 I ICE 352, 403, 407, 451, 458 idealism 211, 225, 287 and Schopenhauer 154 lnp;:Jt:. and information 405 vs diagrams 442 identity 60, 272, 273 and death 274 and specificity 275 ideology 464 qabbala repels 595 immuno-politics 292,3°6 immunosuppression 383, 386, 434 incest 55, 363,418,423,429,533, 539 and Capital 63 incompleteness 480 indifference, Indifferenz 264, 271 individual, individuality 301, 434 656 INDEX OF SUBJECTS and collectivity 342 industrialisation 396. 434,446 infinitesimal 367, 503 infinity 521, 603, 613 information theory 111, 494, 598 inorganic and organic , in Freud 334 instrumentality 301, 426 a judgmental construct 301 insurgent alterity 166 intelligence and markets 340 intensity, intensive magnitude 264, 365,369,402-23 ,430,520,588 and extensity 405 and stratification 110 and temporalization 452 intensive number 509 interpretation 303 intoxication 168 invasion from the future 338, 445 Islamic extremism 380 J Jheg Selem (tablets of) 608 Judaism Derrida' s 264 judgment 75, 245, 250 aesthetic , in Kant 136 and cybernetics 300 and law 230 and transcendental philosophy 300 jungle 223, 224, 282, 437, 457, 485 K K-function 373 kinship 61, 102 K-insurgency 354,376,394 knowledge and unknowing, in Socratism 243 Kondratieff cycle 388 K-punk 389 K-space 355, 357, 358, 404, 405 K-subversion 380 Kif missile 499.20, 527, 541 Kuang virus 374,389,449 Kundalini 581 K-virus 395 K-war 360, 39°,391,408,426,476 L labour abstract 267 and productivity 434 art as '73 becoming-machine of 434 market 59, 75 labyrinth 217, 222 language and number 484 and reason, in Schopenhauer 154 numerical decoding of 5'2 law 466 and desire 466 and philosophy 229 Bataille on 244 emergent control obsolesces 301 Lemuria 547, 549, 551, 579, 581, 599 Neolemurian Hypothesis 576 657 INDEX OF SUBJECTS Lemurodigital Pandemonium Matrix 580 leprosy 118 lesbianism 555, 634 lesbian vampirism 449 lexicography Gil libido 334 and creation 172 life 394 and capitalism 627 Literature 172 lobsters 471, 474, 476, 478 logic 64, 298 and number 366 and the juridical 229 logos 366, 424, 507, 537 and code 604 Lutheranism 125 M machines 294, 323 madness dllU (.;apllal :.d'5 of capital 278 market, marketization 259, 312, 340, 347,354 mask see camouflage martyrdom 125, 129-33, 137 marxism 426, 623 and monotheism 626 superiority of Far Eastern 447 materialism 211 base 391 libidinal 286,328 virtual 325, 329 mathematics 105, 109 and popular numeracy 593 as language 402 Greek, and snake-trauma 468 Indian 513 matricide 399, 423, 438 matrix 297, 315, 326 matter 438 and monetarization 396 as turbulence 211 base 210, 393 wild 186 memory 497 and primary process 414 and time 394 anorganic 498 menstruation 100, 186, 544 metalanguage 85 metaphysics 262, 272 critique of 70 Metropha ge 452,456 micropause abuse 556 millennium bomb 508, 552, 555, 569 misogyny 162 and capital 72 in Schopenhauer 161 mitochondria 458 modernity 60, 262, 293,396,404, 445,465 and end of history 395 and exogamy 60 and future 392 and return 87 and time 351 and sublimation 396 molar 275 and molecular 365, 442 machines 451 money 337 and addiction 338 and becoming-abstract 396 658 INDEX OF SUBJECTS and replicants 337 coins and notes 484 libidinization of 432 mongols 184 monotheism 213, 216, 231, 423, 594 and fascism 477 and marxism 626 moon 95, 101, 103, 104, 186, 498 morality 143, 280 and animality 142 and the holocaust 279 in Kant 74 in Nietzsche 220 multiplicities quantification of 495 Mu-Nagwi 579 mysticism and the sublime 133 N Nanotechnology, nano-engineering 343,345,347,362,397,442, 450, 451, 495,566, 625 national socialism 169-20 nation state 59 natural science 262 natural selection 334 nature 147,313 and capital 313 and culture 451 and technics 294 as psychotic 1]2 nazism 277-19, 281, 285 as 'post-imperialist ' 61 how do you make yourself a Nazi? 284 Necronomicon 579 negation 624 negative 367 negative feedback 297, 330 negentropy 111 neoconservatism 448 neoplutonism 498 neuroscience 437 neurosis 199, 305, 371 and ethics 264 in A Thousand Plateaus 279 post-holocaust 282 nihilism 170, 174, 215, 218, 220,376, 379, 399, 425, 444, 449, 556, 595,633 and eternal recurrence 219 autocatalytic (Trouvier) 376 Nietzsche on 215 N ma 5730 575, 576, 578, 580, 58t nomad war machine 478 nomos 478-19, 520-21,
🔢 Numerical Thought Systems
🧠 Numerical systems shape our perception of reality, functioning as both abstract tools and concrete frameworks that organize time, space, and thought across cultures
🌀 Non-linearity and feedback loops challenge traditional thinking, creating pathways for new understandings through concepts like schizophrenia, machinic desire, and cybernetic systems
🕰️ Time intertwines with number through complex relationships that extend beyond simple measurement—creating recursive structures that enable both popular numeracy and esoteric numerical practices
🧩 Problems emerge as quantitatively determined challenges rather than mysteries, driving markets and war machines while connecting to mathematical innovations
🔄 Recurrence and eternal return concepts bridge philosophical traditions with modern computational thinking, suggesting cyclical patterns underlying seemingly linear progressions
🌐 Capital functions as a virus-like entity that simultaneously creates and destroys social structures through processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization
525, 540, 605 non-linearity 294, 298,3°0,324, 445,452 noumena 70, 210, 213, 321 nucleation 443, 450, 458 number 366, 368, 394, 402, 468, 659 5°7,517,596 and archetype 600 and cardinality 520 and language 480, 484 and quality 601 and time 503, 616, 621 Barker numbering 502 Greek 513 Hindu-Arab 513 intensive 509 Ionic or Alexandrian 513 logicization of 512 novazygonic 599 popular numeracy 508 INDEX OF SUBJECTS prime numbers 517, 523, 607, 616-17 Euclid's fundamental theorem 522,610,613, 617 1{0m;lJ\ 513, 596 zygonovie numerism 504 tlllIl1cfolot,'J' 51'2,600 Numogram 599 o occultism 604 Odduhb-trancc 5770 578 Oeniinenon 510�21, 5l6, 520.21, 612 Anglobal 611 Gregorian 570 Oedipus, oedipal 184, 279, 282-23, 306-17,320,333,336,353,364, 371,415,428-29,436,465-16, 536 and Neuromanccr 359, 429 Old Ones, the 553 ontogeny uiid phylul6L1IY 4&�h jVl ontological difference 91,116 ontotheology u6 order vs sequence 503 ordinal 616 ordinality 514, 615 of Tic Xenotation 6ll ordinal sequencing 588 organised crime 260 organism 277, 283, 304, 315 as molar construct 275 in Freud 332 overman 163, 297 oxygenization catastrophe 458, 499 p pain 127, 159, 167, 223, 414,54 3, 548,634 back pain 500 in Kant 127-28, 135 pale criminal (Nietzsche) 256 partial object 295, 303, 304, 324 patriarchy 60, 72 pessimism Dionysian 168, 170 in Schopenhauer 161 phallus 220 Pharmacographic aggression (Der rida) 99 phenomenology 176 philosophy 221, 174,378 and arithmetic 518 and despotism 442 and judicial authority 230 as deepening of unknowing 206 French 261 transcendental 3on; 3?1 phonetics 502, 537 phylogeny and ontogeny 387,499,501 place-value 368, 395, 398, 404, 614 plane of consistency 269, 277,303, 357 Planomenon 356-1], 509, 511 plateau 199,357,360 ,416,4 57 and rats 199 pleasure 128,328 in Kant 127-29, 139 negative pleasure (Kant) 143 plutonics 498 Plutonics Uournal) 505 660 INDEX OF SUBJECTS PODS (Politically Organized Defen- sive Systems) 320, 415, 427 macropod 330, 333, 339 macropod erotics 336 monopo d 348-19, 351, 353,364 organism as micropod 332 poetry 82, 88, 214, 222-23, 227 police 260, 280 Turing-cops 344 politics as restitution of human integrity 267 revolutionary and anti-fascist 277 schizo-politics 278 popular numeracy 611 qabbala as 593 positive feedback 265, 297, 330, 344 in Wiener 298 postmodernity 352, 383, 389, 396, 447 and shamanism 421 power 395 and axiomatic 405 human substrate 451 practice and theory 295 precedes theory 593, 595 primitive accumulation 58 Primitive Numerization (PN) 597 principle of sufficient reason 153 private property 431 privatization of the anus 432 problems and markets 341 quantitative determination of 511 vs mysteries 591, 593 production 295, 322 profit 446 'Project Scar' 565, 607, 610, 619, 620 proletariat 434, 435, 446 promises 394 protestantism 246, 353, 395 and Kant 133 psychiatr y 305,307,423,564 and incarceration 306-17 psychoanalysis 262,302-23,306, 321,466 and capital 275, 281 theory of genius 168 psychosis telepathic 577 punishment in Nietzsche 257 punk 413 purity and annihilation 137 qabbala, qabbalism 583, 586, 610 qwernomics 486 R race 182 racial migration 278 racism and capital 72, 76 rats 189, 204, 377-18, 478 rat-punishment (rattenstrafe) 199 reading 191 real abstraction 272 as time 357 reality and authority 451 661 INDEX OF SUBJECTS and machinic unconscious 297 in Kant 70 reality principle 338 rca son 141, 166,339 and abstraction 271 and despotism 204 as absence of intuition 137 in Kant 149 recapitulatio n of ontogeny by phylogeny 501 recurrence, eternal recurrence 188, 201, 208, 218-20, 222, 262 redundancy Ill, 462, 503, 618 reflection 92, 94, 101, 295 regulation 340 religion 634 and desert 269 and God (Bataille) 214 decline of Christianity 395 in Bataille 245 repetition compulsion 336 replicants 319-20, 324, 330-31, 336, 337,343 vs reproduction 365, 435 repression 501 reterritorialization 277, 330, 341 retroefficiency, retrocausality 315, 317,337,357,403,452 return and modernity 87 revolution 292, 319-20, 341,408,448 machinic 340 romanticism 166 runaway processes 297, 298,330, 342,413 s sacred 217 Sarkon-Zip 560 scale, scaling 187, 353, 370, 398, 401, 4°5,4°6,408,479 schematism (Kant) 107,134 schismogenesis 330 schizoanalysis 263-64, 268, 275, 303, 317,321-22,341,437,442 and capital 264-15 schizophrenia 268, 315, 342, 413, 477,550 and acephalization 397 and capi talism 305 neuroticization of 305 science fiction 347 and hype 384 science, scientificit y 98, 585 and AI 326 as antideIirial 298 modernist science and complex ity 393 " , YdUUd.ld d.b .'J�:':: security 311-22, 338, 349, 351, 353, 354,359,380,389,393,396-17, 403, 404, 408, 415, 429, 436, 442,455-17, 488,542,564 and Oedipus 428 and organic death 343 and psychiatry 308 immuno -386 in cybernetics 298 organic 332 Turing Security 348 segmenta rity, segmentarisation 404, 408,484,515-16,518,520-21 in State mathematics 513 662 INDEX OF SUBJECTS self-organization 330 in addiction 336 semiotics and delirium 585 and qabbala 603 sensation in Kant 369 serial killers 260 set theory 273, 521 sex 259, 342 bacterial 374, 442, 458 crypt-555 decoded 424 intergalactic 374 meiotic 468 sexuality in Schopenhauer 160 shamanism 210, 2,8,33',344, 4,8, 540,63' and oedipalism 429 epidemic 419 shit and money 432 shoggoths 627 sickness 221 signifier 277 singula rity 3'7, 326, 338, 354, 44', 443 planetary technocapital 338 sister 95-16,102 skin 328, 332, 343 policed 333 slavery and labour 6, smurfs 633 snakes 461,462, 469, 482, 485, 536, 539 icthyophidian tendencies in culture 501 socialism n 280,340,352,35 4,377 social necessity 302 socius 302, 304 enemy of schizo analysis 34' software 451 solar anus 254 solar economy (Bataille) 245,393 sophism 24' space, spatialisation, spatiality 192, 354,402,473 -74 and commerce 447 jungle- 408 K-354 limited conception of in human cultural system 358 speed 344, 348, 365, 420,509, 632 Sphinx 424, 426,427,428,429 spirit '75, 176 stars 109, 119 in Hegel 106 State 507, 535 Greek 539 stranger 95 strata, stratification, stratocapture 187,263,3 93,414,46 2-23,510- 2',5'5,53',535 and graphematics no and reading 191 numerical 510-21 'stratophysical difference' lIO subjectivity dissolution of 403 sublimation 464 sublime '37, 406 in Kant '33, '35, ISO suicide 189, 218,392 and BwO 268 663 and de stratification (A Thousand Plateaus) 281 INDEX OF SUBJECTS capital as social suicide machine 265 Kleist's 127 Nazism and 278 Sumatra 573 sun 481 surplus 533 surplus value of code 378, 519, 520 of flux 430 swarm 304 Synthanatos 326 synthesis 60 a priori (Kant) 74 in Deleuzc 321 inhibited 63 machinic 442 transcendental , in Kant 67 system materialist sense of 413 syzygy, syzygetic 503, 504, 597, 599 T taboo 418 and monotheism 423 and shamanism 418 technics 293 and nature 294 technophobia as K-positive factor 407 templexit y 615, 616 temporali zation 452 Terminator 422 Terminator a.-Judgment Day 407 territorialization 325 thanatos 330, 331, 342, 467 theopolitics 299 theory and practice 295 theosophy 549 thing in itself 209 in Nietzsche 210 third world 59 tics, ticks, tic-systems 494, 502, 563, 564-15,607,616,621 time 357, 394, 399, 403, 615, 616 AI engineering of 450 and arithmetic 615 and capitalism 626 and death 369 and modernity 351 and number 503 and popular numeracy 508 and schizophrenia 311 and the unconscious 326 -compression 408 Nma time-ritual 576 produces itself 358 serial and parallel 370 time-travel 318, 534, 540 and hctlOn 553 and schizophrenia 311 and writing (Burroughs) 411 tragedy 166, 258 transcendence and immanence 300 transcendental 273 transfinite 522, 524, 562 transgression 217, 257, 258 trauma 333, 334, 336, 338, 342, 344, 497,498,528 geotrauma (Barker) 496-20 in Freud 333 planetary 335 truth 664 INDEX OF SUBJECTS and unity 367 turbulence 211 turing cops 450 twins, twinning 47',478,482-23, 532, 550, 612 u unconscious 191, 322, 465, 634 and death 269 and socius 302 auto-production of 296 energetic 286 in Kant 152 in Nietzsche 162 Freudian 184 impersonal 302, 322 machinic 297,322,324,326,344, 414,583 terrestrial machinic 583 transcendental 321 unity 366, 559, 601 universality and ideality , in Kant 72 unknowing 258 unknown 1]8, 208, 222-23,30 1 and quantity 338 Socrates on 241 v vampires , vampirism 267, 387, 399, 631 Lesbovampiric Contagion- Libido 554 ovulocyclic lunar-haemoglobal ferro-vampirism 542 Vault of Murmurs 579 Vietnam 312, 411, 425, 426 violence 140 and sublime, in Kant 134 military and judicial 250 virtual reality, VR 354,355,437,438 virtual , virtuality and actual 317, 358, 413, 443 and history 452 and machinic desire 327 virus 334> 338, 373> 378, 383-390 abstract, produced by G6del numbering 519 capital as 338 K-virus 409 and Kurtz 415 'virus anglo-americaine' 377 voice 502, 621 voodoo 344, 373-74, 395, 398, 406, 442,455 vowels 482 Vukorri Cryptoliths 608 w war 249-23, 258, 384, 387, 424, 436-17 and simulation 454 capitalist 276, 281 in Bataille 250 rationalisation of 252 Socrates on 250 Vietnam 312 World War I 275, 281 World War II 281 WWI as capitalist war (De1euze and Guattari) 275 war machine 278, 482, 594 665 INDEX OF SUBJECTS and problems 509 numerical culture as 509 welfare capitalism 59 werewolves 100, 179, 4�0 whole and parts 413 wild 90, 186 will �84 in Kant 154 in Schopcnhauer 154, 155 will to power �98 wisdom 21� witchcraft, Dibboma 573 wolves ��5, 416, 4()9 woman and matter, in Schopenhauer 160 Schopenhauer on 158 constitution of 4�4 women �85, 631 and patriarchal capital 72 female body and territorial soma 424 Freud's patients 168 1,'.'0!'k P"l9, ClRh, 11h as resistance to death (Bataille) 255 x XV-Malfunctiona! instamatic Crisis dynamics 54� z zero 208, �14, 217, 219, 222, 227, �5o,�66,268,�7°,�75,304, 325,328,329,347,353,357, 366,369, 371,388, 404 and digitization 367 and place-value 368 as time-in-itself 398 cyberpositive and cybernegative usage 3�9 intensive 370 nine as 503 zombie s 269,364, 414, 548, 557 zygonomy , novazygonomy , zygosys tern 484,5°3-104,51 6,599 diplozygotic spiral 504 666 COVER IMAGE From DisaJters cifWar IV, 2001, by Jak� and Dinos Chapman, hand co)our�d etching with waterco)our , 24.5 x 34.5 cm. Photo by St�ph�n Whit�. Court�sy ofWhit� Cub�. Levell, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to Level!!? URB ANO MIC www.urbanomic.com www .sequence press.com