Cthelllic Tendrils (#2: Sorcerer, Shaman, Smith)

A becoming-animal is always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have always known that – Deleuze and Guattari

She is the blackening Mother who ruthlessly opens up (epidemic lines, contaminations, contagious machineries, alliances, etc.) … through a strategic epidemic which is nothing but the ungrounding depths of openness, openness as the plague. – Reza Negarestani

Continuing on from last time!

One of the more interesting UFO cults to hang around the underbelly of the weird 1990s was the Industrial Church of the Nine Knocks. Lacking the relatively friendly aesthetic of groups like the Raelians and having not wiped themselves out in a spectacular death rite ala Heaven’s Gate, the Industrial Church gained a reputation for the sheer strangeness of their primary practice: attempting to fuse their body with media technology. As recounted in old BBS messages and green-fonted .txt files, this was a messy affair, involving (with various degrees of ‘professionalism’, if such a word is relevant here) the implanting of radios, microphones, circuit boards, so on and so forth, just underneath the skin, with wires sewn in to connect these instruments with what they described as the body’s “electro-magnetic mesh”.

The goal of this practice was to turn the body into an open channel – a biomechanical “tuning-in” to some cosmic frequency being broadcast from “out beyond the end of the world” , which was connected in some way to a perceived increase in UFO activity and encounters with “sinister Schwa-faced greys” (the “Nine Knocks” in the church’s name seems to be a reference to the nine knocks heard by Whitley Strieber in his infamous abduction episodes, which may or may not be a recurrent phenomenon – exhibited even during the course of Jack Parson’s Babalon Working). Xenocommunication: the forging of contact with outside forces outside the channels of communication deemed safe by social regulatory forces.

Take Kant’s famed prohibition on transgressing the limits. His injunction was for one to remain on the shoreline and never venture past the Pillars of Hercules, which have etched into their ancient stone surfaces a warning that beyond them is the oceanic void of nihil ulterius. Reason remains reason as long as it stays in bounds, fixed to a secure infrastructure. In xenocommunication, by contrast, one is carried off – wittingly or not – in a violent riptide that flows out past these earthen gates. Land, channeling Bataille, calls this as a “tragic” or “pure communication” with a “cosmic madness”.One needs to look no further than Lovecraft, Crowley, Grant, or Templeton for what encounter looms on this line: that with the Dweller on the Threshold, the “unutterable Abomenon of the Outside”.

Sorcerer

Trafficking with this outside, Deleuze and Guattari write, is the craft that belongs to the sorcerer. They take a key example Lovecraft’s character Randolph Carter (a figure he, perhaps tellingly, may have modeled upon himself), who undergoes a radical flight from this reality into a higher, external dimension and encounters other versions of himself, “Carters of forms both human and inhuman, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable”. In the midst of this “cosmic continua” Carter ultimately encounters an Outer God named Yog-Sothoth. As Lovecraft’s own interpretation of the Dweller on the Threshold, Yog-Sothoth is indistinguishable from the cosmic continua itself, and as the Outside that envelopes the Inside, it is a swarming multiplicity – an “All-in-One” and “One-in-All” that is entangled with “ultimate animating essence of existence’s whole unbounded sweep”. Plane of consistency, anorganic continuum, absolute deterritorialization…

In their extended discussion of the sorcerer, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the relationship between this figure and the phenomenon of self-organization variables: the pack, the band, the swarm. It is here than one of the primary conduits between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus is opened up. In the earlier book, the critique of Oedipal configuration leads to an extended critique – one that spans the whole of human existence – of familial filiation, which emphasizes the importance of the hereditary lineage (and which ultimately produces the closed dynamic of the Oedipal triangle). In the latter book, the pack is treated as something that reproduces itself in a wholly different manner: “We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, people by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bandits, human or animal, proliferate by contagions, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophe”. They continue:

Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiate by heredity, even the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire does not filiate – it infects. The difference is that contagion, epidemic involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous, for example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a microorganism, or in the case of a truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are inter-kingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way nature operates – against itself… The Universe does not function by filiation. All that we are saying is that animals are packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion.

The non-filiative mode outlined here is one in which xenocommunication – and, more properly, xenocommunion – is carried out through alliance. The alliance is the entry of forces into the rhizomatic assemblage, where each decodes and recodes the functioning of one another: orchid and wasp, human and tool. This is what makes the sorcerer’s work arrive under the shadow of extreme risk: one never knows what will emerge on the other side of the assemblage once it has been entered into and the process begun. The collision of the inside with the Outside can only ever carry with it the specter of death, as there is no chance for what has come before to escape unscathed. For this reason, the alliance takes place between the pack, whatever seething composition the multiplicitous outside is taking, and the exceptional individual – think Captain Ahab and the White Whale, or the motif of the “Loner and the Demon”.

The alliance is first and foremost a demonic pact, but Deleuze and Guattari are quick to say that we should not understand the ‘exceptional individual’ as an individual in the straightforward sense. The pact is forged between the swarm and a “phenomenon of bordering”, which they dub the Anomalous, the Outsider who moves through the edgelands. As Mark Fisher points out, the Anomalous is distinct from the Abnormal: the latter “correlates to a ‘set of characteristics’ – a set of law-like norms, which it transgresses (and therefore, by dialectical logic, confirms and continues)”. The former is already beyond these norms. Deleuze and Guattari: “Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the field or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages.” (We’re now very much in the same territory as my earlier post on the repressed double and patchwork understood as an eerie politics).

Shaman

The shaman is a sorcerer-like figure in that it haunts the borderlands of society and traffics openly with the Outside – but unlike the sorcerer the role of the shaman is far more ambiguous in terms of how it navigates the relationship between interior and the exterior. The goal of the shaman, particularly in the so-called ‘primitive socius’, is the cure; in Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis, this cure is far more akin to how they understand the goal of schizoanalysis in that it immediately follows the pathology into the social field, and then even deeper flows, instead of focusing only the nuclear family unit (which does not exist in the primitive socius, as family is not defined in terms of filiation). “It is not only a question of discovering the preconscious investments of a social field by interests, but – more profoundly – its unconscious investments by desire…”

At the same time, however, this activity is carried out to ensure the stability of society by ultimately warding-off the Outside. Just as war, like Pierre Clastres argued, was used as a means to prevent the State from forming and seizing the primitive socius (which it would always fail to do), the goal of the shaman was to operate at the borderlands and absorb the deterritorializing flows, to take them into himself, in order to make sure that the social machine would be fall into the “germinal influx… the non-coded flows of desire capable of submerging everything”. In her commentary on the MU Statoanalysis Group’s seminal text Flatlines, Linda Trent points out that this function make the shamanic a precursor to the body the despot, which acts as the stabilizing force for the megamachinic State by ensuring that “all lines of escape are reterritorialized on his own body”. This, of course, will become translated into the Oedipal function when the aeon of the despotic state passes through to the aeon of the civilized capitalist machine – so while there is no Oedipal complex in the primitive socius, the body of the shaman acts as a proto-Oedipus, an earlier regulator of the xenocommunicative function.

And yet, at the same time, the shaman taps into the Gothic Line running down into Cthelllic depths, the machinic phylum’s molten core. Consider, for example, the usage of iron in the shamanic initiation ceremonies of the Yakut people, as recounted by Mircea Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy:

A Yakut shaman, Sofron Zateyev, states that as a rule the future shaman ‘dies’ and lies in the yurt for three days without eating or drinking. Formerly the candidate went through the ceremony three times, during which he was cut to pieces. Another shaman, Pyotr Ivanov, gives further details. The candidate’s limbs are removed and disjointed with an iron hook, the bones are cleaned, flesh scraped, the body fluids thrown away and the eyes torn from their sockets. After the operation all the bones are gathered and fastened together with iron… The Yakut Gavril Alekseyev states that each shaman has a Bird-of-Prey Mother, which is like a great bird with an iron beak, hooked claws and a long tail. This mythical bird shows itself only twice; at the shaman’s spiritual birth, and at his death. It takes his soul, carries it to the underworld and leaves it to ripen on a branch of a pitch pine. When the soul has reached maturity the bird carries it back to earth, cuts the candidate’s body into bits, and distributes them among the evil spirits of disease and death. Each spirit devours the part of the body that is his share; this gives the future shaman power to cure the corresponding diseases. After devouring the whole body the evil spirits depart.

(The Yakut shamanic initiation ceremonies follow a near-universal pattern of shamanic rites that involve the penetration and/or surgical dismantling of the body by metallic instruments, a phenomenon that some have speculated are connected to the probing motif reported by countless UFO abductees. With this in mind, it is certainly curious to recall the curious body modifications carried out by the Industrial Church of the Nine Knocks!)

Smith

This relationship with iron puts the shaman into close constellation with another sorcerous figure – the smith. As the Yakut say, “smiths and shamans come from the same nest” “blood brothers” who share a fundamental – yet sometimes antagonistic – relationship. As Eliade notes in the The Forge and the Crucible, this connectivity is reinforced by the role the smith plays in forging the iron instruments used in the aforementioned initiation rites, which are themselves presided over by K’daii Maqsin – an “evil deity” and “Master-Smith of Hell” who “dwells in a house made of iron, surrounded by splinters of fire”. Finally, the figure of the smith itself is one that shares the power of healing that is characteristic of the shaman, but unlike the shaman this can be carried out directly, without the intermediate of spirits. The smith’s “craft is not looked upon as a commercial one”; it is an occultic practice bound to “the possession of initiatory secrets”.

Deleuze and Guattari summon the smith to serve as the diagonalization that problematizes the binary of the State and the nomad that occupies a major portion of A Thousand Plateaus. The opposition between the State and the nomad ultimately derives form the work of Arnold Toynbee, who posed that in the aftermath of the last Ice Age, there was a shift in global migratory patterns. On one side were populations who settled down and cultivated agricultural civilizations, while on the other were those that were committed to constant movement over a territory. To the sedentary agriculturalists, the State, and to the mobile, the Nomad. For Deleuze and Guattari it was (and still is) the State that produces what might be called History; those who are outside, then, are outside history. None the less, the two forces are in constant interaction: when the nomadic encounters the State, war is produced – and it is the State as an apparatus of capture that constantly tries to seize the nomadic in order to overcode its functions and deploy it for its own ends. Each exhibits their own form of space as well: State societies are defined by the striated space, while the nomadic

(This gives a good insight into the organizational structure and dating schema of the latter part of A Thousand Plateaus: the ‘Geology of Morals’ plateaus sets up many of these frameworks, tracing stratifications up through deep time to the arrival of human civilization under the guise of the alloplastic strata. This is dated to 10,000 BC, alluding to the end of the ice age, while the following two plateaus – the ‘Nomadology’ and the ‘Apparatus of Capture’ – dive into the nomadic and the State societies and the mutual interactions of each, respectively.)

The smith slips between each category. Against sedentary living and the pure movement of nomadism, there is ambulant motion. This is close to the notion of nomadism, and is often treated simultaneously in the text (the nomad sciences, for instance, are also described as an “ambulant science”) – but the distinction is ambulant carries with it an emphasis on engendering connections between wildly heterogeneous forms and the movement between them, in this case the State and nomad societies. This is one of the reasons that the smith is a sorcerer figure: it too haunts the borderlands, trafficking openly with the State and the nomad, upon which both depend for their survival (and vice versa). The smith thus has its own kind of space characteristic to it: the holey space, which burrows between the striated and the smooth.

Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them, excavate the land instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keeping it smooth, turn the earth into swiss cheese. An image from the film Strike [by Eisenstein] presents a holey space where a disturbing group of people people are rising, each emerging from his or her hole as if from a field mined in all directions. The sign of Cain is the corporeal and affective sign of the subsoil, passing through both the striated land of sedentary space and the nomadic ground (sol) of smooth space without stopping at either one… Smiths are not nomadic among the nomads, and sedentaries among the sedentary, nor half-nomadic among the nomads, half-sedentary among the sedentaries. Their relation to others is results from their internal itinerancy, from their vague essence, and not the reverse. It is their specificity, it is by virtue of their itinerancy, by virtues of their inventing a holey space, that they necessarily communicate with sedentaries and with the nomads (and with others besides, with the transhumant forest dwellers). They are in themselves double: a hybrid, an alloy, a twin formation.

INTERIORITY          EDGELANDS          EXTERIORITY

State                          Smith                       Nomad/war machine

Sedentary                Ambulant               Pure movement

Striated space         Holey space           Smooth space

Concrete line           Gothic line             Abstract line

Here things turn again towards the crushing, infernal depths of the earth. The smith acts the Anomalous who straddles the boundary between civilization and the nomads and wolves and forest and sea people that traverse the Outside; it also plunges into the deep Outside strata geological strata – and even deeper still, towards the destratified. Unlike the closed organism, it carries out xenocommunion with the “streaming, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking, feverish line of variation [that] liberates a power of life that human beings rectified and organisms had confined”. In other words, the Gothic line, the machinic phylum. The sorcery of the smith is a Cthelllic demonology, a chattering passage into the domain of matter-flow that is “inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for being inorganic”.

If the smith ambulates, it is not entirely of its own volition: it must follow the tendrils of the phylum:

…the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously: it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences: namely, this matter-flow can only be followed… To follow the flow of matter is to itinerant, to ambulate. It is intuition in action.

The flow of the phylum, as a singularity, thus serves as a sort of attractor that pulls the ambulant figure towards it. The model of the sorcerer, the demonic pact with the swarming multiplicity, and the rhizomatic assemblage: the smith and the singularity, together, as a critical point that triggers the creation of creation anew, the production of production. The phylum’s phylogenetic line is cut and radiates off into an ontogenetic line of technical development that is still part of the primary, singular phylum. Likewise, the smith sets in motion events beyond itself: it becomes shaped by the tool as much as it shapes the tool, and all those who use the tool are shaped by it, and produce the conditions for new tools to be put into play… the cycle launches into a spiral, the tendrils piercing the surface of the earth and climbing ever higher, higher, coating the earth in a megatechnical mesh, like some gigantic, distributed bush robot –

As DeLanda notes in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, the phylum is constantly ahead of those try to wring from the metallic flux instruments to be used. Development moves forward only when cascades of singularities come together. One example he uses is the modern firearm, the dynamics of which can be divided into three distinct stages: a propulsion stage (the propelling of the projectile), a ballistics stage (governing the projectile’s trajectory) and an impact stage (“effects of the projectile on the target”). Focusing on the first – and most important stage – will yield a complex array of developmental paths that had to come together before the weapon could be actualized proper:

…the propulsion stage concerns the evolution of three different mechanisms: fueling, ignition and guidance. Each of these mechanisms, in turn, is related to those critical points in the flow of matter and energy that I have referred to as “singularities”: the onset of a supersonic shock wave which defines “detonation”; the threshold of pressure reached by gunpowder gases inside a closed chamber which defines “explosion”; the minimum number of turns, or threshold of spin , after which a projectile’s aerodynamic properties mutate from incoherent to coherent.

While the full extent of DeLanda’s analysis is beyond the scope here, what is important is that each mechanism – fueling, ignition, and guidance – all have their own histories, tangled messes of events and accidents and discoveries. Seen from this point of view the firearm is the byproduct of a massive convergence, the focal point of waves rolling across geological time-scales into human history, coming together in reversed pond-ripples. On the other side of that convergence: everything that the fire-arm has already and will reformat, and all the other meshes of ontogenetic machinic development that it cuts across. Now take this lesson and multiply it for everything that has been, that is, and that will be.

On the horizon: the Gothic line comes together, following a vast, imperceptible and terrifying convergent wave, into a maddening concrescence beyond thought itself.

[h/t to Cockydooody for alerting me to strange and curious practices of the Industrial Church of the Nine Knocks]

 

Close Encounters (Notes)

The ‘Hynek scale’ is a tool used for assessing the typology an encounter with the UFO. Initially developed by J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer, UFOlogist and adviser to a series of US Air Force UFO studies (Project Sign, which ran from 1947-1949; Project Grudge, 1949-1952, and Project Blue Book, 1952-1969), the scale is divided amongst Distant Encounters (DE-) and Close Encounters (CE-). Although Hynek’s initial developments divided each into three primary categories, four additional CE types have been since added by later researchers.

The breakdown:

DE-1: Appearance of lights (and lights in motion)  in the nighttime sky that cannot be explained easily by ordinary light sources.

DE-2: Daytime sighting of an inexplicable object that may (or may not) move at immense speeds – metallic saucers or cigar-shaped crafts, primarily.

DE-3: Radar confirmation of unidentified flying objects that occur subsequently with eyewitness confirmation.

CE-1: Close witnessing of a UFO with no interaction, either with the witness or the external environment.

CE-2: Encounter with a UFO that entails some sort of interaction with the environment – strange electrical phenomenon (car ignition problems, radio interferences etc), burn marks on the ground, crop circles, etc.

CE-3: Confirmation of (usually humanoid) occupants of the UFO, which may or may not entail contact or communication.

CE-4: The abduction event proper, in which the witness is taken aboard of the UFO (and often experimented upon).

CE-5: Direct communication between the ‘aliens’ and the humans.

CE-6: Direct communication and engagement between the aliens and the humans that results in long-term injury or even death.

CE-7: The production of an alien-human hybrid through experimental breeding techniques.

After CE-4 comes CE-5 to -6. Schwa-mask peels off, and you’re heading into faceless horror, worm-spillage, losing focus. (1)

The transition from Close Encounter 4 – abduction as such – to CE 5-6 is a switch from the thematics of Science Fiction to those of cyberpunk or cybergothic. At CE5-6, the question of what is experienced is inextricably bound up with the question of what experience itself is, since the events undergone seem to constitute what Templeton calls a “Transcendental Occurrence” a change in the nature of time itself, registering as Freudo-Barkerian trauma. (2)

With the Transcendental Occurrence – the encounter with the Dweller on the Threshold, Yog-Sothoth, the Positive Zero – in mind, consider these AQ equivalences that rotate like beacons:

66 = FEAR = LOL = NET

69 = GATE  = KALI = KATA = LSD 25 = UFO = WAR

96 = DEMON = DJINN = FATES = METAL = PEST = WWW

99 = SCHWA = QABBALA = THETA = XXX

Spooky link round-up from the Sarkon zone:

Cybernetics came from UFOs: letter concerning the flying saucer crash recovery team.

Cybernetics came from UFOs, round 2: delirious conspiracy theory from Jack Shulman of the American Computer Company concerning the Roswell Crash, Bell Laboratories, AT&T and the secret history of the semiconductor.

The real Control Society: Jacques Vallee on UFOs and a cybernetic ‘control system’ – grist for the simulation hypothesis mill? (Bonus: Vallee puts on his accelerationist hat, 1, 2 and 3)

The real Control Society, round 2: Vallee hangs out at ARC.

Breakaway

There’s an interesting study of independence referendums that has been published in the British Journal of Political Science, titled “Contested Sovereignty: Mapping Referendums over Time and Space”. The study’s authors – Fernando Mendez and Micha Germann – have found that previous attempts to investigate the phenomenon all-too-frequently muddy the waters something terrible: insufficient definitions on what constitutes a ‘sovereignty referendum’, difficulties in determining when exactly the first referendum of the modern epoch was, etc. To navigate these problems and others, Mendez and Germann take the simplest route: ‘referendum’ becomes defined as “any popular vote on an issue of policy that is organized by the state or at least by a state-like entity, such as the authorities of a de facto state”; while ‘sovereignty’ is rendered as “the right to make authoritative political decisions within a territorial unit”. The sovereignty referendum is “a direct popular vote on a reallocation of sovereignty between at least two territorial centres”. This establishes two (primary) forms of political logic: integrative tendencies, which sees the multiple political actors shift their loyalties into a new system with a higher order principle of jurisdiction (prime example being the unification of Europe under the auspices of the EU); and disintegrative ones that move in the precisely opposite direction. Disintegration entails “the dynamic whereby political actors in one or more subsystems withdraw their loyalties, expectations and political activities from a jurisdictional centre and either focus them on a centre of their own (for example, secession) or on an external centre, such as a cultural motherland.”

What Mendez and Germann end up finding is that the amounts of new sovereignty referendums have steadily increased over time, and have continually broadened their scope. For example, referendums tended to be a primarily Western phenomenon for the two first centuries of their existence, but since World War 2 – that is, time frame encompassing the consolidation of a global economic system and the decolonization process – they have globalized. At the tame time, however (and this is critically important for the ongoing interests of this blog), disintegration has not happened at the expense of integration, which itself has advanced in tandem.

Figure 6 suggests some distinctive patterns. Until the post-war period, sovereignty referendums tended to follow the integrative logic, with notable spikes at the time of France’s post-revolutionary annexations, the unifications of Italy and Switzerland in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the interwar period redrawing of the European map. Much of the baseline integrative activity is due to the drawn-out process of the formation of the American union. However, after 1945 referendums tended to increasingly follow the logic of disintegration. Essentially, this is due to three partly overlapping processes: (1) the wave of referendums related to decolonization after the Second World War, (2) the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and (3) the spike of self-determination referendums referred to in our eighth cluster. Although disintegrative activity has increased, integrative activity has far from ceased and has indeed even increased in recent years. This is mainly due to the referendums triggered by European integration. Finally, Figure 6 points to another recent development: the emergence of multi-option referendums with mixed logic post- 1945, mostly related to decolonization.

We have some of our own predictions here on how this will ultimately shake-out, of course.

Ruin and Freedom (More Thoughts)

On twitter, Uri tweets:

 

it turns out Meltdown and Catabolic Collapse were the same thing: intelligenesis turns Gaia into Medeia, which recombines itself into computronium, to the dismay of its previously children.

— kim kardashian alt (@cyborg_nomade) March 27, 2018

While accelerationist discourse (at least that outside of the explicitly left variety) often seems to skip around the issue of climate change, the overlap of catastrophic ecological transitions with technomic take-off and socio-cultural mutation is enshrined in Plant and Land’s “Cyberpositive”. In this ur-text, global warming, feminization, the growth of drug trade networks, out of control computer systems, and schizo-culture run together as the entangling fall-out of self-organization kicking into overdrive. The end is near and it is hot (both in the sense of temperature and allure):

Replacing the cold war’s phallic stand off is the war on drugs, dissolutio into the jungle, the world’s states united in their terminal self-destructin strategy of prohibition. No more dreams of a nuclear winter. The 1990 begins the China Syndrome of capitalism.

Ice is crystallized speed. It is also Gibson’s name for dataprotection Intruder Countermeasure Electronics. Ice patrols the boundaries, freezes the gates, but the aliens are already amongst us. Convergent input is interpreted by security as intelligent intrusion, as a trap or conspiracy, with everything preprogrammed to connect. Doubting that women belonged to humanity, Burroughs imagined them to be extraterrestrial invaders. Viruses are like this too. Nobody knows where they come from. They always arrive from elsewhere, perhaps even outer space. Humanity is an allergic reaction to vulnerability, but allergy depends upon the health of the immune system: the ice has to work.

Tactics are subtlety, or intelligence. As things become more complex they become more female, but patriarchy prolongs the ice age of mankind. The fatherland is cryogenic, a fantasy of perfect preservation, whose bronze age ancestors are even now thawing out in the Alps, frozen assets under attack. Global warming melts the ice, raises the seas, subverts the glaciers. Computer viruses melt icebergs of data down the screens, burning through the bacterial frost, like Burroughs exploring his junkie cold with LSD.

Trending towards a similar space, through from a totally different beginning position, is Kevin Carson’s Tuckerite market socialism. In a 2013 blog post for the P2P Foundation, Carson took up Greer’s theory of catabolic collapse – which admittedly has more to do with vast resource depletion than just climate change – and twisted it by suggesting that what was being traced was the decay of the old technological superstructures, right as a new technologies and infrastructures burst forth from the ruin (Greer, as one might expect, took issue with the bent of Carson’s argument, which led to a lengthy and productive exchange. Ya’ll can check out the twists and turns here, here, here, and here).

What’s interesting about Carson’s argument is that it exhibits distinct parallels with the apocalyptic vision sketched out by Plant and Land, albeit in a very different register. Just “Cyberpositive” details the escape of self-organizing technomic processes and mutagenic cultural viruses from the restraints imposed by the Human Security System, Carson sees in the emergent economy a “singularity”, the launch of a stigmergic network economy that is much faster and more agile to the top-heavy corporate capitalism that will inevitability fight back against it. As he wrote in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:

Localized, small-scale economies are the rats nest in the dinosaurs’ nests. The informal and household economy operates more efficiently than the capitalist economy, and can function on the waste byproducts of capitalism. It is resilient and replicates virally. In an environment in which resources for technological development have been almost entirely diverted toward corporate capitalism, it takes technologies that were developed to serve corporate capitalism, adapts them to small-scale construction, and uses them to destroy corporate capitalism… there are two economies competing: their old economy of bureaucracy, high overhead, and enormous capital outlays, and cost-plus markup, and our new economy of agility and low overhead. And in the end… we will bury them.

While agreeing with the overall dynamic being traced here, there are a few quibbles with this picture to be had from an [unconditional] accelerationist ground, but we’ll have to defer those to a future post. What’s of interest here is the idea that there is an intersection between a self-organizing, runaway auto-revolution in the development of technomic forces, and the self-organizing, runaway processes that underpin ecological systems and natural resources. The zone of this intersection is plugged into the question of decay and growth as operational cycles in the context of an uneven, combined, and accelerating world system, which is ensemble that serves as the heart of this blog (see Ruin and Freedom, Anarchy, and Wash Out for more on this particular theme). It’s an edge-of-the-edge kind of zone that hopefully we can explore more fully in the coming weeks and months: after all, those who don’t consider the annihilation of the neo-ancien regime in the technomic spiral’s compression chamber as imminent are likely delusional; likewise, those who don’t see this unfolding against a backdrop of socio-ecological ruination – coastal cities swallowed by angry seas, walls of fire devouring midwestern ‘burgs, super-hot asphalt running like water through empty streets, devastating geopolitical conflicts over resources and trade routes, on and on – have their heads buried in the sand.

This looks like a whole lot of ruin and not much freedom. Indeed, the U/ACC argument has already sought to assign the whole question to the trashcan in advance (hence the imperatives of “let go” and “do what thou wilt”), and on a (very shortened) timescale the duration of human existence implodes. But in the timespace between now and then, the swirling drift of development is what interests us: what trendlines already in play will advance into dominance? How will reactions to the great Lemurian insurgency unfold, and how will the fall-out frame necessary organizational infrastructures?

We can expect a greater proliferation of so-called resilient communities – bottom-up, networked forms of community that emerge despite the activities of top-down power systems (regardless of whether or not those activities are slated to encourage or discourage their growth). As Jon Robb describes, the “core process” of the resilient community is based on three elements that conform closely to Carson’s own analysis:

• Resilience to rapidly propagating global shocks (an inevitable outcome of a global system that is too large, fast, and complex to control).
• High productive in their ability to produce everything from food to products to energy (they produce wealth). Networked innovation.
• Extremely efficient and low cost. This stems from: shorter distances, less energy, less space, less time, less mass, and less information (as in, less management overhead required).

The emergent trends that allow these sorts of ‘micro-level’ processes to kick into overdrive include “everything from high intensity small impact farming to personal fabrication to DIY synthetic biology to global tinkering networks to high efficiency local energy production”. The relationship between these things and the primary process should be clear. As more efficient, network-based, technological-bleeding-edge-type forces, they represent the output of the acephalic, market-driven drive towards optimization – modernity in its thrasher mode. Thus while one might hear the words “resilient community” and mutter f o l k p o l i t i c s under their breath, there is no true distinction between this drift and Leigh Phillips’ defense of modernization, growth, and industrialization as a response to the dread of eco-doom in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse Porn Addicts (at least after the universalist left pretenses have been ejected and some sense of abstract doom is reinstalled).

Into the compression chamber we go…

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While the recent past has seen growth in numbers of and memberships in rightist militias, there now is some early rumblings concerning a “Revolutionary Socialism with American Characteristics” (h/t to Nildicit for the link). There are worse things that could happen than mass militia proliferation – at least as long as their activities bend towards exodus.

Flipping the script a little bit: there is no time like the present to reread Alejandro de Acosta’s brilliant encounter between the anonymously-penned green anarcho-nihilist text Desert and Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet:

They should be read together; the thought that is possible in that stereoscopic reading is what my or intends. (I mean to gesture towards the passage from one perspective to the other, and perhaps back.) If Desert sets out from the knowability of the world—as the object of science, principally—it has the rare merit of spelling out its increasing unknowability as an object for our political projects, our predictions and plans. Dust of this Planet allows us to push this thought father in an eminently troubling direction, revealing a wilderness more wild than the wild nature invoked by the critics of capitalism and civilization: the unthinkable Planet behind the inhabitable Earth. As we slip in this direction (which is also past the point of distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary), all our positions, those little compressed bundles of opinion and analysis, practice and experience, crumble—as positions. No doubt many will find this disconcerting. But something of what we tried to do by thinking up, debating, adopting and abandoning, positions, is left—something lives on, survives—maybe just the primal thrust that begins with a question or profound need and collapses in a profession of faith or identity. That would be the path back to the perspective of Desert (now irreparably transformed). What is left, the afterlife of our first outward movements, might be something for each to witness alone, in a solitude far from the gregarious comfort of recognizable positions, of politics. To say nothing of community.

Exodus

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argued that in the wake of so-called new economy’s emergence civic participation and person-to-person interactions had undergone a precipitous decline, contributing to a loss of ‘social capital’ that in turned frayed the fabric of American democracy. This transformation stretched from the heights of political organizing – such as the decline in voter participation, for instance – to various civil society organizations and platforms for civic associations. Declining memberships in various clubs and fraternal organizations, the evaporation of a volunteer-based ethic, the break-up of labor unions, and the fragmenting of the communitarian infrastructure all signaled a transition towards what Putnam deemed a process individualization – or what we would more commonly refer to as atomization (see here and here) – that derives from the increased integration of technology into our everyday lives.

Critics of Putnam’s work have noted that this decline isn’t so much as the elimination of interactive behavior and platforms for it outright; while indeed the phenomenon that is described in Bowling Alone is palpable, it signals a fundamental shift away from a particular social infrastructure that congealed in the wake of industrialization in the United States, reaching its height in the postwar regime of High (or Late) Fordism. Atomization is co-existent with the arrival of new forms of social life and ways of being – the ubiquity of the social network, for example, fills the void left by the closed doors of Elks Club. Yet the primary factor of Putnam’s argument remains: the decline of the community ideal, as something that is at once local and integral, while also being plugged into the gears of mass democracy. The social network can be local, but it is borderless, with tendrils reaching out across time and space. It can (as will be touched on momentarily) connection with political operations, but the manner in which it does so is by no means obvious.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri took up Putnam’s argument in their book Multitude, but discarded the sad nostalgia that suffused his work. “One should do away with this nostalgia…” Instead, we should celebrate the dissolution of the traditional body, and look towards the new synthetic Thing that has emerged: the monstrous New Flesh of the multitude, a strange fabric composed of the “social catastrophes of postmodernity, similar in their minds to the horrible results of genetic engineering gone wrong or the terrifying consequences of industrial, nuclear, or ecological disasters” (yes please!!).

Hardt and Negri’s words here recall the best passages of their previous book, Empire. There they take up Nietzsche’s prophetic vision of future “barbarians” who would arrive “only after tremendous socialist crises”, and re-route to a peculiar sort of cyberpunk transhumanism that emphasizes the already-occurring mutation of the body human and subjective formation through technical apparatuses that compose our fully cyberneticized world. The new barbarian is an emergent body “incapable of submitting to command”; its full instantiation will entail “a body that is incapable adapting to family life, to factory discipline, to the regulations of a traditional sex life, and so forth”. In order to realize this vision, “we must go much further”: the pervasive sense of nostalgia must be expunged, hybridity must be superseded some sort of hyperhybridity, and all previous modes of modes experimentation have to be propelled beyond themselves, to achieve higher heights. The New Flesh is ultimately a synthetic thing, unfolding beyond the boundaries of real and artificial.

While the future-oriented vision here still might be far off (but hopefully not too far!), nearly two decades have passed since Hardt and Negri have penned these words, and the conditions they depicted have accelerated into new, unpredictable formations. The impulse for those on the left is to measure such transformations in terms of their liberatory potential, a deeply problematic practice that leads far too many to miss the forest for the trees – that is, to lose scope of the “anthropological exodus” (Hardt and Negri’s term) that has occurred by subordinating it instantly to value judgments. Junk these value judgments, and the nature of the new barbarian comes into close-up: it is the swirling chaos of our time, hooked together through the information superhighway, strange and often horrifying lines of flight that cut across political, social, cultural and economic strata whilst going beyond them, all diverging from one another as much as connecting.

In A Conceptual Preliminary to Understanding Meme Warfare, Vince Garton approaches this composition of forces by arguing that, at present, the effects of the internet upon politics are woefully misunderstood. For example, take the narrative that the alt-right, a subculture and political force that emerged from the shadowzones of message boards and chans, were the primary culprits behind the election of Donald Trump. This myth became so widespread that even the alt-right themselves believed in it and sought to further their illusionary reach – an act of self-reinforcing myth-making that imploded tragically in the streets of Charlottesville. To believe in such a story is to find traditional political causality at work, where a smooth and linear feedback loop moves from the engaged body politic into the political arena proper. And yet reality has shown itself to be anything but. Linearity such as this can only now be viewed as the desperate act of searching for a recognizable pattern, a cognitive map, in an environment that has become extremely complex, alien, and hostile (this same lesson may, in fact, reflect upon the ongoing “Russiagate” investigation).

What is at work here, Garton suggests, is the emergence proper of something analogous to Hardt and Negri’s cybernetic barbarians: a machinic subjectivity that can only be regarded as foreign to the world that preceded it, and which puts into play an unpredictable and chaotic cyberpolitics (of which the recent news concerning Cambridge Analytica can only constitute a part, albeit a very important one). He continues:

If 2016 was the dawn of cyberpolitics, it is strictly because of Trump, whose victory represented perhaps the first self-conscious loss by the constellated forces of global liberalism to a memetic artefact… Trump himself is by no means conscious, let alone supportive, of this cyberian futurism in his policy objectives. His campaign drew on cyberpolitics only as much as it depended necessarily on numerous other more retrograde forms of political organisation. The quantitative units of his victory were not 4chan and Facebook and Reddit, but Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida… But neither focus of analysis is precisely wrong. The Trump campaign participated in and learned its tactics from the Internet with an attentiveness that allowed it to explode beyond the expectations of its opponents… Trump is both the culmination and a mockery of the politics of the liberal-securocratic world order, both subject and unwitting object, drawing on the ressentiment and revisionist aspirations of the very worldly malcontents of liberal globalisation while also representing the triumphant humiliation of the planetary order by an alien subjectivity far beyond conventional moral-political economy.

“Very worldly malcontents of liberal globalisation” could very easily apply to Hardt and Negri’s own anticipations of a monstrous revolutionary chaosmos: the Thing that occurs when atomization (that is, the dis-integration of the postwar world order) makes an arching collision with higher and higher rates of interconnectivity. Everybody is bowling alone, but the chattering between and beneath it all turns into a cyclonic roar. To step backwards and to attempt to orientate particulars swarm towards traditional political coordinates – rallies, petition, organization, office, etc – is to try and shoehorn it into frameworks that are being rapidly obsoleted.

This is the maneuver that Hardt and Negri ultimately make, confirming Tiqqun’s only slightly hyperbolic insistence that their work composed the ‘idealistic face’ of the Empire that they opposed. The multitude comes together and pushes the logic of neoliberal capitalism, replete with globalized liberal democracy, through itself to the other side where it implodes. What is left is the teeming constituent power of the world’s peoples, united in creativity and unbridled movement alongside a modular bureaucracy that will facilitate this utopic world. In some respects, Hardt and Negri’s vision looks somewhat like the ideal face of the European Union (it’s not surprising, then, to consider how many of the post-Autonomists became fervent Eurozone supporters).

Against Tiqqun’s assessment, however, is another side of their work which seems to veer in another direction, and it is precisely on the question of the barbarian where this finds its most intense expression. It is, after all, difficult to square the rejection of “normalized bodies and normalized lives” with anything approaching business-as-usual politics, or even the anticipated progressive managerialism of those politics. This is the logic of exodus at work. The traditional political world, which encompasses the range from Putnam’s American community-based civic associations to the metastate structures of the EU, unfolds through the collision of forces, each stamped with a unique-yet-unifying higher-order identity, in a way that they achieve power (or not) while being bent in a particular direction overall – or, to put it more simply, they begin as disparate elements that are arranged neatly into a grid-like system. Exodus, however, follows a different path: that of the diagonal that slips off the grid and evades capture by the lines. Hardt and Negri bring exodus together with the similar concepts of desertion and nomadism to express a vision of resistance that based not on the addition of political variables (stretching the liberal system into infinite representation of any and all interest and subject groups), but on subtraction.

While exodus for Hardt and Negri ultimately builds upwards into the liberation of collective labor (think less industrial labor, more the imperceptible labor that is immanent throughout advanced cybernetic capitalism), subtractive logic is also one that moves in the torrents of atomization, insofar as atomization is construed as the ‘dropping out’ from political and civic – or, ultimately, public – life. Contra those who might bemoan this as a regressive, unconstructive maneuver, exodus can be thought of playing a double role: not just subtraction from the dominant system, but elimination of middle men. Hardt and Negri honed-in on labor force mobility, the bodily ‘anthropological exodus’, and the sorts of escape paths forged by groups such as the Italian Autonomists to articulate what a politics of desertion would look like; today, this must be expanded to encompass the realm of cypherpolitics – political tactics and means of conducting business invisibly, without interference. Such an exodus-into-depth can be carried out without ever actually leaving one’s primary territory – all it requires is a bit of easily obtained know-how and access to cryptocurrenices.

Cypherpolitics is already quite close to the anthropological exodus, and while it is beyond the scope here a conceptual genealogy of each would likely plummet quickly backwards to identical source materials. It is also partially operationalized within the emergent machinic subjectivity that is tearing the political asunder: start following conversations about blockchain technology and see where you end up. We are propelled beyond politics, because the core of exodus is anti-political. For this reason, many on the left seem to inherently view the emergent machinic subjectivity with an absolute sense of suspicion, if not outright revile. If this fundamental process is about scaling down, routing-around, and escaping from, mass left movements have characterized themselves as advocating a scaling-up to the order of grand, centralized politics. It, in other words, operates antithetically to the concept of exodus itself. The implication is that in time the left will, along with the mainstream right, become irrelevant.

Consider the following: beginning in 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (ELZN) staged an insurgency in Chiapas, Mexico. Lasting two years, the struggle evolved into what the RAND Corporation described as a “social netwar”, an information age-mode of conflict that tendstowards network organization, spills over national borders, and produces hybridized alliances between elements whose conjunction would have been unlikely or impossible in an earlier era. Both the ELZN and their transnational allies – which ranged from NGOs to hackers and other sorts of cyberspace actors (for an excellent account of  the role of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, see this interview with Ricardo Dominguez; pdf warning) – undoubtedly composed an early iteration of what Garton called “worldly malcontents of liberal globalisation” (the Zapatistas did, after all, help popularize the term ‘neoliberalism’ as a term for the new, abstract enemy of the post-Cold War era of globalization). Like Hardt and Negri’s cyborgian barbarians, the overall movement scrambled strict binaries and produced an idiosyncratic decoding of time: an indigenous movement, opposing neoliberal integration while borrowing freely from the infrastructure of that world, weaving together an exodus with the aid of cutting-edge cyberculture.

The forces that accelerated the ELZN insurgency haunt the world again today, but in many spaces the left seems recalcitrant to engage with it. The hyperskepticism towards cypherpolitical tools, leads to an indifference to them that will, in time, reinforce patterns of obsolescence – and it can also lead to a call for regulatory behavior, which will only amplify the demands for these tools. Likewise, the more ‘traditionally’ political, though marginal, rejection of metastate structures and embrace of secessionist ethos is shunned, be it attempts to escape the dictates of the EU, or the moves by states in the US to extricate themselves from federal government. In each case the left positions itself as the pragmatic actor, the reinforcer of the status quo to which it is ostensibly opposed. Why it should carry that burden is unclear.

Perhaps instead of reading Hardt and Negri as Tiqqun do, in which the age after Empire – their concept for the postwar order of liberal capitalist democracy attached to the project of globalization – is characterized by the culmination of the imperial drive, read it as exodus pursued to its most extreme lengths. This would mark the deeper and deeper penetration of connectivity, but the exact opposite movement in terms of political integration and conditional lock-in. Instead of a higher order entity, the scaling-down of power, in direct alignment with the inescapable drift of techno-economic developing. The collective labor of the multitude: cascading divergence.

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In immediately related extended blogosphere happenings: Axxon Horror gives a rundown on “connective disintegration” – the exit diagonal of high connectivity, low integration; Chris Shaw critiques nationalist populism and looks towards an emergent “networked tribalism” that rejects universalism for a “particularism… beyond spatiality”; and Xenogoth talks about the ELZN in relation to his ongoing exploration of patchwork. Also: Justin Murphy gets stoned and explores capitalist value criteria, relativism & ethics, while J Crane continues to draw out the revolutionary war machine burning in the interstices of Deleuze, Spinoza and George Jackson.

Wash Out

America is nothing but the West, and that’s the land of the dead. No sign here of a new world – let alone a New World Order. – Something Old

Not far from my home is a town called Horse Cave. Once a tourist trap – the main event being a larger cave entrance in the middle of downtown, which lends the town its name – most of the buildings now sit empty, and abandoned. Keep driving past them and you’ll be on an open stretch of highway, dotted by faded industrial sites, trailers, and the county high school. The highway connects Horse Cave to Cave City, and in all reality the towns are one and the same, divided only by the county line. The closer you get to Cave City more and more of the landscape becomes dotted with old, strange roadside attractions – take the Wigwam Village, for instance. Built in the late 1930s as part of a motel chain that spanned the US (of the seven that were built, only three are left), this utterly-impractical dwelling was an expression of the emergent automobile culture, its then-already kitsch-retro contours etched into landscape.

More motels proliferate inside Cave City proper. Most of these were built in the decade following the Wigwam Village, as indicated by undeniable influence of Googie architecture on their design. Like the faux-Americana of the Wigwam Village, Googie in a temporal index: its roots are in the aesthetic of the car culture, buts its gaze is directed towards outer space. The vector for this gaze is the Atomic Age. The automobile, atoms, and flying saucers collide in Googie, along with gentle borrowings from the European avant-garde. The utopian, plastic, left accelerationist offspring of Streamline Modernism.

Now, as the color pop of Googie dulls to weathered oranges and gray, many of these motels now serve as permanent residences for the people of the margins. A small handful are burned out completely, boards covering shattered windows and kicked-in doors. The walls are covered in graffiti left by squatters passing through the area.

In an essay titled Amerikkkan Gothik, Mark Fisher (going under the alias of ‘Mark de’Rozario’) describes how when it comes to America, it was Philip K. Dick who knew best how to disconnect science fiction from the future that Googie presents. While the triumphant, postwar industrial machine and its adjacent PR industry cultivated an image of an impending “jetstreamed, wipe-clean, air conditioned, atomic-powered New World”, “[a]ll the kibble – the crud, the waste, – vacuumed out of SF’s dream home pile[d] up in Dick’s seedy tenements.” On the far side of things, where the industrial process grinds out the human substrata and the PR machine loops into the escalating loop of self-reference, the promise of the car culture, the Atomic Age, and the Space Age collapse into the very kibble it strove to eliminate: luxury motels gone fleabag, the Dimestore Indian decapitated, and nobody knows why they were here in the first place.

Uneven and combined, stagnation and lift-off run together as SF capitalism falls up into cyberpunk. Fisher continues:

In adapting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, [Ridley] Scott re-roots LA in the Northern line, imagining the city of Angels as a neo-medieval City of Quartz… The expressionist style Scott adopts is arty through and through: even the adverts look elegant (whereas in Dick’s world, all the art would be an advert – probably for a hardware store… In the movement from paperback to art movie, there’s also a shift in religious sensibility. Dick’s religion is Weekly World News improbable: revelation is inseparable from mass-mediated sensationalization. It’s all dimestore prophecy and visions of God under the influence of a dentistıs drug. Gnosis is to be found amongst the discarded candy bar wrappers and cheap tunes of an artless huckster culture where everything is for sale: part of the challenge is being able to spot that the way out is hidden somewhere in the trash. Scott replaces Dick’s kooky-quacky loony toons All-American Gnosticism with the sober intensity of Protestant nonconformism. His replicants, especially Roy Batty, speak in the language of Milton or Blake. In a sense, this is no less American. Blade Runner’s infernal city is more Paradise Lost than Dante. Arriving from the dying sky of a choked ecosphere, the replicants come to an Amerikka where the calcified determinism of social stratification finds metonymic expression in the very architecture of the city – opulent Citadels of wealth loom far above new shanty towns, as inaccessible to the subproletarian cybernetic troglodytes below as baronial castles were to the medieval peasantry. Europe, again…

For Fisher, the distinctly American excavated of cyberpunk that is carried out by Blade Runner is one in which the future of the country’s impulse – the immigrant dream of the future – is forced to grapple with the reality that “the future is no longer virgin territory”. Googie was doomed before it was ever conceived.

Deleuze’s essay on Walt Whitman identifies the fundamental American quality as the fragment. Expressed in society – and in literature – as a spontaneity that subsumes advanced planning, the fragment is a reiteration of the country’s immigrant origins. As a patchwork, a “nation swarming with nations”, the ultimate, rapidly deferred goal was the engendering of a “society of comrades”. One must add to this picture that would was to bind together this society of comrades was their escape from one another. The push for the frontier that began immediately in the wake of the consolidation of the revolution into statecraft was less the drive of that state itself than the forging of lines of flight away from it. One exited for the borderlands, and the lands beyond the borderlands, to evade the clutches of an political machine that rebirthed the iteration of the megamachine, the Daddy Ur-staat, that had just been pushed back. It is for this reason, as Deleuze writes in his reprisal of the American question in his essay on Bartelby, the revolution, much like the Bolshevik revolution, was originally against the figure of the Father itself:

The American is the one who is freed from the English paternal function, the son of the crumbled father, the son of all nations… their [the revolutionaries] vocation was not to reconstitute an “old State secret”, a nation, a family, a heritage, or a father. It was above all to constitute a universe, a society of brothers, a federation of men and goods, a community of anarchist individuals, inspired by Jefferson, by Thoreau, by Melville… America sought to create a revolution whose strength would lie in a universal immigration, emigres of the world, just as Bolshevik Russia would seek to make a revolution whose strength would lie in a universal proletariatization, “Proletarian of the world”… the two forms of the class struggle.

Ride the line of flight long enough and you’ll cross into the West’s westernmost limit. “[T]he West… played the role of the line of flight combining travel, hallucination, madness, the Indians, perceptive and mental experimentation, the shifting of frontiers, the rhizome”. Blade Runner deals with the attempt to destroy the Father and the subsequent flight to the West, though the order is scrambled; whereas the American flight waged war against the Father in the Eastern colonies and then proceeded towards the West, the replicants begin in the colonies and take the conflict with them to that city that is west of the West: Los Angeles. Like the American revolutionaries, they too want to be rid of the Father. Here the biological father, perhaps even the Ur-staat Father, has already been killed: the replicants have no parentage except a vast techno-economic structure plugged into a military machine (“daddy is a North American aerospace corporation, mummy is an air-rad shelter” – the genetic line of the Replicants is the same as Googie). Positioned forward in time, we can imagine perhaps that a revolutionary cycle playing out time and time again: kill the Father, crash down in the West. Reset as the cycling development of the relative deterritorialization and reterritorialization… going on and go until, at last, the Wall is transgressed, relative exploding into absolute deterritorialization. By then it will make sense to talk about America, much less the West-

Before hitting the wall, reaching the West must denote not the culmination of the frontier, but the point where it hits the relative limit, before falling back in itself must fall back into itself. The whole thing at this point is a simple game of self-reinforcing recursivity. Here we move from the Deleuzian West of hallucination and madness to Baudrillard’s West, where hallucination and madness persist but have been transformed into the shimmering brilliance hyperreality – neither reality or the unreal, but an instant utopia where everything is “real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams too”. A continental scale hologram “in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements.” Fractal America: one fast food restaurant, one suburban cul-de-sac, one stretch of strip malls, motels, and neon-spattered country bars and the whole is revealed.

This Hyperreal America of the 1980s was suspended is a mishapped triangulization between Space Age dreaming, the manic peak of the dreamers themselves, and a series of looming mutations. It one sense it is now dead, the hologram having ran itself down into the rubble that piled up along its edges and in its blind spots. In another since it is still alive, as an object of nostalgia, as a motor for politics, as something attainable, as a reason for living. Yet even then, the end was palpable, if still unthinkable. “The microwave, the waste disposal, the orgasmic elasticity of the carpets” Baudrillard wrote, “this soft, resort-style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world.” Today it is both palpable and thinkable, as long as one looks at it indirectly. Zombie politics, a ghastly creation shambling through the wasteland of trashed affluence and consumer society’s ruin.

 

Cthelllic Tendrils

Follow the plummeting line downwards, Professor Barker tells us, past the rigid lithosphere where the tectonic plates crush together in howling grind, beyond the asthenosphere’s lurid flux of solid and molten matter, and downwards still through the mesosphere where this flux becomes chaotic, battered by seismic shockwaves and the pressure builds to insanity. Propelled into crushing depths at a screaming velocity we arrive at the outer core: an immense monster of energy, this swirling and churning ocean of liquid iron and nickel. Turbulent flows rocked by seismic shocks producing electrical loops generating the earth’s magnetic fields. Blacker than the frozen cosmic void: Cthelll, the schizophrenic heart of burning matter.

[T]he interior third of terrestial mass, semifluid metallic ocean, megamolecule, and pressure cooker beyond imagination… Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare, nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth, cross-hatched by intensities, traversed by thermic waves and currents, deranged particles, ionic strippings and gluttings, gravitional deep-sensitivities transduced into local electromesh, and feeding vulcanism…

Trauma-core. The Planomenon. When Cthelll hits the the borderlands of the mesosphere its anything but nonlinear. It’s a jagged internal coast that “contains troughs and swells, deeper than the Grand Canyon and higher than Mount Everest, spread across continent-sized areas.” In this zone – referred to as the D” layer – heat flows and matter are channeled together in great plumes that rush upwards, piercing each successive geological strata before rupturing at the surface in volcanic activity. Volcanic behavior, magnetic fields, the drift of continents – all find their motor in the immobile movements of Cthelll.

If there is a fateline that plummets to these depths, it is the Gothic line introduced by Wilhelm Worringer and elaborated upon by Deleuze and Guattari. From the geological veins of metallic mineral pumped up into the crust of the earth to the biological veins carrying iron-dense blood (a remnant of the iron-dense ocean that once covered the planetary surface before sinking into the dark depths) to magnetic field overhead to civilization’s reliance on the tapping into each of these flows, the metal radiance of Cthelll crisscrosses everything that takes place far above it. Speaking of the Gothic line, Deleuze and Guattari write that

metal is the coextensive to the whole of matter… Even the waters, the grasses, and the varieties of wood the animals are populated by salts or mineral elements. Not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere. Metal is the conductor of matter… Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs. The “Northern, or Gothic, line, is above all a mining or metallic line delimiting this body.

For Mark Fisher, the Gothic line is an affair of Gothic materialism, another name for which is hypernaturalism: “In the move from Naturalism to hypernaturalism, the old distinction between vitalism and mechanism – which, [Norbert] Wiener says, had been rendered illegitimate by cybernetics – collapses.” Hence the focus on uncanny technology that has been focused on in this blog. In hypernaturalism, there is nothing idiosyncratic or distinct about human or animal behavior that separates it from that of the machine, or the machine from the so-called ‘natural’ system. Instead of rising all things up to a human level (arrogantly presupposing human superiority) or pushing everything down to a base level (presupposing non-human inferiority), hypernaturalism charts a diagonal line away, into an indeterminate zone where these value judgments no longer hold sway. Here singularities, intensities, haecceities reign supreme.

Two of diagramming tools that Deleuze and Guattari lend to hypernaturalism are abstract machine and the machinic phylum. The first of these, the abstract machine, is the force that engenders the ecumenon – that is, the strata, or plane of organization – atop the planomenon, the plane of consistency. In the latter, the flows of matter are completely unformed and unorganized, yet become organized through being distributed into substances and forms by this abstract machine. Cthelll is an oscillating planomenon; that which organizes from this Entity – and slips back towards it – is an ecumenonical organization.

If this sounds oblique, consider Manuel Delanda’s unpacking, in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, of the abstract machine by way of the study of self-organizing processes. Building on a conversation about turbulent liquid, crystallization, and metal’s transition from non-magnetic to magnetic, he writes that

all these different processes, at the onset of self-organization, have turned out to have similar mathematical structures. The process through which the photons in a laser undergo a spontaneous organization and become coherent (all “cooperating” to emit light of the same phase) has been found to be essentially similar to that of molecules in a liquid ”cooperating” to form eddies and vortices, or in a different case, crystalline structures. Since the actual chain of events that leads to the spontaneous formation of new patterns and structures in different media must be completely different, all these transitions from chaos to order are said to be “mechanism independent.” Only the mathematical structure of these transitions matters, as far as their self-organizing effects are concerned, and not the concrete ways in which the organization of molecules (or photons) is carried out. For this reason these mechanism-independent, structure-building singularities have been conceptualized as ”abstract machines”: that is, single “mathematical mechanisms” capable of being incarnated in many different physical mechanisms.

The singularities referenced here refer to points which trigger self-organization. Something can pass through a series of states – a succession of intensities like stages of temperature, for example – but when it enters into the proximity of the singularity the abstract machine takes over. Water goes from a consistent, unorganized room temperature to boiling to evaporation after passing through different singularities which, in turn, trigger the molecules to enter into self-organization that ultimately culminates in widespread systematic shift.

The second tool Deleuze and Guattari provide is the machinic phylum, which is itself synonymous with the metallic Gothic line. The phylum is nonorganic life: it is not only the unification of the organic and nonorganic under the rubric of the abstract machine’s functions that rupture the boundaries between the two, but the implication – proceeding from this – that nonorganic things and forces can adopt the attributes of biological life.

Vital impulse? Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest toward a technological vitalism taking biological evolution in general as the model for technical evolution: a Universal Tendency, laden with all of the singularities and traits of expression, traverses technical and interior milieus that refract or differentiate it in accordance with the singularities and traits each of them retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge, invents.

The machinic phylum is the Cthelllic tendrils radiating out from the geocosmological compression chamber, rhizomatic burrows making their way through time and space, cutting up and down different scales, acting the bleeding edge of deterritorialization through disrupting the stable ground of a tool, a social configuration, even the human body (Lyotard’s inorganic proletarian bodies warped, broken, and remolded by the machinic arrays they are inserted into, for example). From the perspective of Delanda’s robot historian – one that is writing the historical of its species’ genesis through the nonlinear meanders of matter and process – “the notion of a machinic phylum blurs the distinction between organic and non-organic life, which is just what a robot historian would like to do. From its point of view… humans would have served only as the machine’s surrogate reproductive organs until the robots acquired their own self-replication capabilities. But both human and robot bodies would ultimately be related to a common phylogenetic line: the machinic phylum.”

Deleuze and Guattari divide the great, nocturnal Cthelll line of the machinic phylum into two different lines: a phylogenetic line and a ontogenetic line. “At the limit there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single machinic phylum”, but this line itself becomes cut by the assemblage; that is, but a composition of forces that have entered into mutually transformative process – the orchid and the wasp, the worker and the machine, all the way up to the scales of culture and historical stages. It is this entering into of relations that cuts the phylum: one extracts something from the phylum and the extracted line extracts something in turn (hence why it is deterritorialization’s bleeding edge). The cut of the phylum produces many distinct phyla, both indistinguishable from the machinic phylum itself yet distinguishable by want of its specific attributes. From Cthelll to veins of iron ore to the various Iron Ages to the lineages of tools and weapons internal to them: snaking passages from the phylogenetic line down to the ontogenetic.

[At some future, yet very soon date, I’ll pick up where this leaves off: tracing the operations of the Cthelllic tendrils on human societies through a succession of figures – Shaman, Sorcerer, Smith.]

Germline (#1)

[The below is a (gently remixed) rough draft of something I never completed. Since it connects with some of the dialogue that has been happening on this blog lately, I figured I would put it up. Hopefully I will flesh out thoughts concerning the dangling threads, so until that time apologies for the lack of climax. Or not, climaxes are fashy.]

0.

Identity has always been about keeping you on Level 1, or to be more exact, leaving you with a zero-sum option: Level 1 or Game Over, the organism or death, the phallus or lack. – Mark Fisher, “Hom(m)eostasis”

Can what is playing you make it Level-2? – Nick Land, “Meltdown”

What is it that is playing us? It is clearly not the the illusionary identity that is doing the playing, as if it is some force possessing an otherwise pure entity. If the identity is what is discarded in leap from Level-1 to Level-2, then it is illusionary identity that is being played, a puppet that is mistaking itself for a puppeteer.

What is at Level-2?

Land: A convergent anti-authoritarianism emerges, labelled by tags such as meltdown acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizotechnics, K-tactics, bottom-up bacterial welfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization, rhizomatics, connectionism, Kuang contagion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency, wintermutation, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism, amongst other designations (frequently pornographic, abusive, or terroristic in nature). This massively distributed matrix-networked tendency is oriented to the disabling of ROM command-control programs sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System.

Fisher: “To become the New Flesh you must first kill the old.”Max learns that organism death is not the end. Not that he moves into any kind of spirtualised immortality. Nicki teaches him that ‘Death’ only exists for the individuated organism. “It is understandable that, in a civilization which separates mind from body, we should either try to forget death or make mythologies about the survival transcendent mind. But if mind is immanent not only in those pathways of information which are located inside the body but also in external pathways, the death takes on a different aspect. The individual nexus of the pathways which I call ‘me’ is no longer so precious because that nexus is only part of a larger mind.” Out of the meat. Sex organs sprouting everywhere. First step into the New Flesh.

1.

Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the story of the human puppet, undoubtedly one of the great horror stories of the twentieth century. It is a probing of the primordial trauma core from the point of view of the security apparatus (the work as a piece of psychoanalytic literature) and a murky, contaminated voyage into the depths of the fault-line it can scarcely trace (as indicated by the creeping paranoia that seethes underneath its scholarly pretenses).

The splitting of the subject appears from multiple, yet interrelated directions for Freud – first and foremost the movement indicated by the work’s title itself. Drawing heavily on the work of Gustav Fechner, Freud had elaborated the pleasure principle in early texts (such as The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and the The Two Interpretations of Mental Functioning in 1911) as the instinct to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. Such an instinct was, Freud had argued, the fundamental program for life – but the principle in itself had a cutting edge. Total capitulation to the pleasure principle would entail the collapse of civilization and the rapid expiration of the body. Thus the pleasure principle comes into conflict with another, the reality principle, which dampens the striving for pleasure with reason and the capacity for delayed gratification. Such is the development of the healthy individual, the process through which the ego (correlated to the reality principle) comes to gain control of the id (the pleasure principle).

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is a venture below this conflict, which comes to appear to Freud as a secondary process as he descends through into the substrate. Among the alien artifacts he churns up from this landscapes is the bizarre theory discussed in a previous post on the concept of anorganic continuum – that there is line that demarcates the inside from the outside, the interior self from the exterior world that forms a shield that protects the “little fragment of living substance” deep within; it carries this function by regulating the amount of stimuli that passes from the outside to the inside. If it weren’t for this regulation, Freud reasons, the unmitigated flow of stimuli would overwhelm and destroy the organism. The feeling of pain is but a minor indicator of this, being a localized and limited break of this shield. An event powerful to break through the protective shield in full, however, is registered as trauma.

Freud notes that the person who has suffered a traumatic event tends to dwell on the event in a way that they appear as if haunted by it: the smallest memory-traces, be it in everyday life or the clinical office, are capable of triggering re-enactments of the initial trauma. This reliving reinforces the hold the event has on the subject, widening the force of the fixation and triggering, in turn, additional re-enactments down the line. The trauma situation thus induces a suspension of the pleasure principle that reiterates in time, signaling the damage down to the dynamics of the instincts playing out between the id and ego.

Yet almost as soon as this conclusion is reached, problems arise that destabilize the ground. Why does one repeat? To master something, to overcome initial limitations in order to increase functioning in the world. Referring to the child who throws toys from his crib while happily babbling affirmations, Freud suggests that compulsion to repeat is not simply linked the unpleasurable – as is the case of traumatic repetition – but to the pleasurable as well. It follows, then, that repetition is not induced by the piercing of the protective shield itself. If it cuts across both pleasure and unpleasure, learning and failure to overcome, then the source must be deeper still, bubbling up from some zone deeper still. We begin to get hints here that something is amiss with the human subject, that something else is lurking behind the facade. Indeed, Freud says – the compulsion to repeat carries with it a “hint of possession by some ‘daemonic’ power.” He continues:

At this point we cannot escape the suspicion that we may have come upon the track of a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life in general which has not hitherto been recognized or at least explicitly stressed. It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces; that is, a kind of organic elasticity, or to put it another way, the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life.(emphasis in original)

Here the primary process is approached, the ur-instinct: the death drive, the striving to return to the primordial point of origin, the inorganic itself. Understanding the aim of life as death itself reveals the split subject, divided eternally between the secondary and the primary, between the surface level conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle and the deeper, wider circuitry of self-preservation and drive to abolition. But, at the same time, Freud’s rendering bears a distinctive conservatism. It revels, for example, in the fantasy of the origin point (even if it expands this to a generalized and abstract ‘inorganic’), and, by extension, suggests that the ultimate impulse of the organism is towards homeostasis and a final ‘balancing’.

Freud notes the proximity of his theory to those of the great German evolutionary biologist, August Weismann. The dynamic play between the exoteric will-to-life and the esoteric will-to-death seems to bear some resemblance to the so-called “Weismann barrier” that cleaves apart the germ cell lineages (the germline) and those of the soma cells. This barrier effectively isolates the immortal from the mortal and illustrates a flow of information from the former to the latter: the germline, which gives rise to the gametes of sexually reproducing organisms, imparts hereditary information to each generation of the somatic cells of the generation in question. While each iteration of the somatic line is doomed to death, the germline can live forever as long as propagation of itself in ensured. The sense of a phylogenetic horror begins to rise from the pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: in our individual bodies we are the somatic meat-puppets for the germline, the mortal protective shells developed to ensure its immortality.

Freud had come close to this very understanding nearly a decade prior in a 1912 essay titled “A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis”, having written that:

The individual does carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purpose and another as a link in a chain in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own. The individual regards sexuality as his own ends; while from another point of view he is only an appendage of his germplasm, to which he lends his energies… the mortal vehicle of a (possibly) immortal substance.

Whatever his thoughts on phylogeny, Freud conjured forth Weismann in Beyond the Pleasure Principle only to ward off his ultimate conclusions away. This is done precisely to maintain the stability of his conservative interpretation of the death drive, which threatens to be overwhelmed by Weismann’s theory of ‘programmed death’. For the biologist, death was something that develops later in the evolutionary line, as a form of adaptation to natural circumstances necessary for the continuation of the germline. Simply put: if the single organism is immortal, then the proliferation of organisms threatens the survival of the organism via the depletion of the natural resources it depends upon. Death becomes necessary for the continued evolution of the species, and the prolonging of the germline itself.

Freud’s theory, by contrast, was predicated on a death as a universal condition that beset the biological organism from its very protozoic beginning, and he retained Weismann insofar that this point could be avoided. If death did have the universality that Freud lent to it, then the death drive was precisely that striving for homeostasis realized as a conjoining with the origin in organic totality. But, in the inverse, if organism death developed later through evolutionary process, then the death drive must be expressing something and – perhaps most importantly – it isn’t a manifestation of a strive towards homeostasis. Robbed of the organic totality, the ‘daemonic power’ must become dynamic, an indication of productive disequilibrium.

2.

In his reading of Emile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, Deleuze takes up both the sides of the Weismann barrier in a way that counteracts Freud’s interpretation of the death drive, and helps push it. In The Logic of Sense, as well as in other key works, the germline is recast as the germinal in order to detach it from the genealogical overcoding that attaches it strictly to primordial origin-points. It is not “’before’ the organism”, he writes in A Thousand Plateaus, directly correlating it with the Body without Organs. “[I]t is adjacent to it and continually in the process of constructing itself… The BwO is precisely this intense germen where there are not and cannot be either parents or children (organic representation). This is what Freud failed to understand about Weismann: the child as the germinal contemporary of the parents.” By breaking with organic representation, the germinal breaks from the punctual system to cause thing to slip between the organizing pincers and engage with the productive process itself. Non-familial, anti-oedipal.

This signals an immense transformation in Weismann’s own biological logic, which unfolds by connecting the germinal to, on the one hand, the death drive, and on the other the Eternal Return. Finally, it is the identification of these two together that truly allows the germinal to be separated from the baseline functions of the germline identified by Weismann. In his reading of Zola, these two modes of difference appear as two modes of heredity: the somatic heredity, correlated to the same, and germinal heredity, the elevated heredity of difference. The former is a small, historical heredity, a “heredity of instincts”. It is organic representation pursued through the familial lineage, its vitality ensured through the inter-generational transmission of traits.

The germinal heredity is epic and transhistorical, the “heredity of the crack”. This crack is not simply a split in the world where mutant diagonalizations slip away – it is the great biocosmic background of all things, a “continuous, imperceptible, and silent” crack that “renders this history possible”. It recalls the elusive “oceanic feeling”, described by Romain Rolland in his letter to Freud – the mystical sensation of a vast and uncanny interconnectivity between things, of becoming “without perceptible limits” through submersion in the eternal. Freud, in his response, dismissed the poetic flourishes of Rolland’s descriptions by noting (tellingly) that he had himself never experienced this sensation sensation. Insofar as it existed, it was a narcissistic regression to the state of the infant child before the formation of the ego itself, that is, during the time of breastfeeding (with the removal of the breast being, in Freud’s account, the impetus for the formation of the ego).

Here the oceanic sensation is coded into what Deleuze might call the somatic heredity, with its ultimate implications – the feeling of the self’s dissolution – locked into the individual’s development through the family setting. For Wilhelm Reich, this maneuver marked the beginning of his break with Freud. Foreshadowing Deleuze and Guattari, he lambasted his mentor for being “caught in words”. The oceanic feeling was no mere sensation, but something that, despite the fundamental imperceptibility of it, was palpable and produced effects. Reich: “In the schizophrenic, for example, the streaming they feel, the emotions they feel, that’s all very real.” Echoes: “What the schizophrenic experiences, both as an individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all any one specific aspect of nature, but nature as a process of production… everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions, productions of recording processes, of distributions and co-ordinates that serve as pints of reference; production of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxiety, and of pain. Everything is production…”

 

[Nothing past this point in the initial draft was coherent at all, but here’s two quotes:

Fisher: There’s nothing the reproducers want more than another piece of martyred, dead meat to hang on the white wall as an example: stay on the straight and narrow or end up like this. Leaving Man requires as much care, as much caution, as hacking out of any security system – beware: there are booby-traps everywhere… Think of videogames: it’s all about learning to get to Level-2.

Zola: This time their old, tottering society had received a jolt and they had heard the ground crack beneath their feet, but they felt other jolts on the way, and yet others, and so it would go on until the old edifice was shaken to pieces and collapsed and disappeared into the earth… a black avenging host was slowly germinating in the furrows, thrusting upwards for the harvests of future ages. And very soon their germination would crack the earth asunder.]

 

Anarchy (#3: Katechon and Apocalypse)

An occult war wages between the striving for the grand unification of all things and the insurgency that haunts its every Promethean feat. One side of this conflict takes as its ground universality, stability, linearity, and homeostasis its, while its opponent is an unground of swarming differentiation, unpredictability, non-linearity, and positive feedback. The former is the top-down view and the latter is bottom-up self-organization. The first is the One, the second a multitudinous Zero – the secondary process that thinks itself primary, and the primary process itself. Flat planes and the multi-scaled. The desire for perfect operativity and the forces that induce its downfall.

At the summit of modernity the nature of this occult war becomes profoundly cybernetic (which means that it always already as so). Tiqqun argued in “The Cybernetic Hypothesis” that the systems of domination and exploitation were evolving towards an unending managerialism based upon openness, ecological thinking, globalist progressivism, horizontalist ethos and cybernetic control – a clever camouflage for the Atlanteans. Tiqqun, at length:

Cybernetics is the police-like thinking of the Empire, entirely animated by an offensive concept of politics, both in an historical and metaphysical sense. It is now completing its integration of the techniques of individuation — or separation — and totalization that had been developing separately: normalization, “anatomo-politics,” and regulation, “bio-politics,” as Foucault calls it. I call his “techniques of separation” the police of qualities. And, following Lukács, I call his “techniques of totalization” the social production of society. With cybernetics, the production of singular subjectivities and the production of collective totalities work together like gears to replicate History in the form of a feigned movement of evolution. It acts out the fantasy of a Same that always manages to integrate the Other; as one cybernetician puts it, “all real integration is based on a prior differentiation.” In this regard, doubtless no one could put it better than the “automaton” Abraham Moles, cybernetics’ most zealous French ideologue, who here expresses this unparalleled murder impulse that drives cybernetics: “We envision that one global society, one State, could be managed in such a way that they could be protected against all the accidents of the future: such that eternity changes them into themselves. This is the ideal of a stable society, expressed by objectively controllable social mechanisms.” Cybernetics is war against all that lives and all that is lasting.

While fundamentally correct in the tracing of the contours of particular managerial tendencies (one that aims to culminate in a democratic “social capitalism” which is indistinguishable from an eco-minded “third way socialism”), Tiqqun errs by throwing out the cybernetic baby with the bathwater, and in doing so misses the depths and scope of the war. It remains relegated to level where one on side is the humanist bourgeoisie and their cybernetic ‘toolbox’, and on the other is “Imaginary Party” that swells in the cracks and crevices of this system. Insofar as such a dichotomy can be upheld – which isn’t apparent at all – it is intrinsically problematized by the imperceptible matrix that roars beneath it and even gives rise to it.

No sooner than cybernetics had arrived amidst a fanfare celebrating the optimization of control did a new,frightening conflict break out, as Peter Galison analyzed in his “The Ontology of the Enemy”. The opponent in this deadly game was a “cold-blooded, machinelike opponent. This was the enemy not of bayonet struggles in the trenches, nor of architectural targets fixed through the prism of a Norden gunsight. Rather, it was a mechanized Enemy Other, generated in the laboratory-based science wars of MIT and a myriad of universities around the United States and Britain…” In its genesis the cybernetic sciences were about gaining technological superiority over opponents in the face of faster and faster speeds, which escalating quickly into a mutational program that blurred the distinction between the human and the machine. Genesis turns towards the holy war: “in a final move of totalization, [Norbert] Wiener vaulted cybernetics to a philosophy of nature” in the form of a permanent and boundlessness war between stability and safety and the “Augustinian devil”, the unknowing and unknown “’evil’ of chance and disorder”.

While subsequent developments in the realm of cybernetics, particularly as it moved its second-order phase up through general systems theory into complexity theory (of which much more will be said momentarily) transformed this basic Manichean conflict by recognizing the role of chance, disorder and noise in making systems evolutionary and transformative, the ontological conservatism that whispers through Wiener’s writings is reflected in the widespread resistance to evolutionary transformation. Top-down order is predicated on the ubiquity and prowess of human-led production. An entangling inhuman auto-production that nests this production cannot be be seen as but a threat. That the cybernetic paradigm ruptured the distinction between the human and the machine by articulating the baseline functioning of each in teleological circular causality made the machines uncanny by giving them the attributes of agency and intelligence. Wiener found in the gremlin that haunted aircrafts during the war an earlier preamble to this uncanny collapse:

The semi-humorous superstition of the gremlin among the aviators was probably due, as much as anything else, to the habit of dealing with a machine with a large number of built-in feedbacks which might be interpreted as friendly or hostile. For example the wings of an airplane are deliberately built in such a manner as to stabilize the plane, and this stabilization, which is of the nature of a feedback … may easily be felt as a personality to be antagonized when the plane is forced into unusual maneuvers. (quoted in Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy”)

In the wake of World War 2, Carl Schmitt famously turned his attention to famously turned his attention to the idea of juridical order as the Katechon. With its origins in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the concept of the Katechon became prominent in the Middle Ages to describe a force that restraints the Antichrist, and by so effectively holds the apocalypse itself at bay. In Schmitt’s political theology it carried the same function – but it is not simply a singular apocalypse. It is a history of apocalypses, of grand imperial ambitions that acted as Katechons by forestalling their end until, at last, the empires rots and rays, its thread disentangling and separating as another Katechon rises on the horizon. From Byzantine Empires to the Third Reich to the United States, an oscillating history of imperial ruin and passage.

Much ink and paper have been spilled and spent trying to determine what precisely the Schmittian Antichrist is . Interestingly, the Katechon at times depicted is as a decelerator that slows the pace of world history; it would follow, then, that the Antichrist can be found as an affiliate of the quickening pace – an accelerator, even. This often remains lodged at the political level: he describes the Third Reich, for instance, as an accelerator of world history that is opposed by the decelerator of the United States. But the laws of state decay and means-end reversal prevail, and the US would itself become the new accelerator. There are, however, other ways of articulating the Antichrist. John McCormick argues that, running through Schmitt’s intellectual evolution from the 1910s to the postwar era, an understanding of technology and economics as a malevolent Antichrist that cunningly infiltrates the political arena and bring with it ruin:

Just as the Antichrist seems to deliver salvation and eternal peace, on the contrary, only to actually bring destruction and despair, technology and commercialism promise a heaven on earth but bring only a worse form of impoverishment and devastation, which may not even be readily recognized as such. One of the characteristics of modern technology is that it can mechanically reproduce virtually anything. Schmitt plays on this theme of reproduction with the image of the Antichrist. If one cannot distinguish between God and Satan, then what can be distinguished? Everything becomes the same. Everything is neutralized. The Antichrist/technology is described as “uncanny [unheimlich]” because of the epistemological uncertainty involved in deciphering precisely what it is. It simulates the familiar and authentic, but is it? The very nature of what real is, is called into question in the age of technology. According to Schmitt, “The confusion becomes unspeakable”. (John McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology, 88-89)

As Mark Fisher relentlessly illustrated, the cybernetic revolution, by lending to technological systems a certain intelligence and sense of agency, fulfilled the long-held Gothic dread of the living automaton. Schmitt here taps into this underground current, one that connects the myth of the Golem, Marx’s undead capital, Frankstein’s monster, and the gremlins haunting aircrafts engaged in wartime missions. An echo can be heard, one no doubt unintentional (but no less telling) between Wiener’s Manichean cybernetic conflict of organization and its enemy, the Augustinian devil of disorder, and Schmitt’s own definition of the political as what arises from the friend/enemy distinction. For McCormick, the relationship between the dichotomy of friend/enemy and Christ/Antichrist is clear: traveling above the political as an abstract order and looking down into it, the Antichrist is the absolute Enemy that threatens to undermine the political as a category writ large. Throw this insight into jagged alignment with the cybernetic uncanny and the Antichrist, the schizophrenic god Baphoment, becomes what Deleuze and Guattari described as the Gothic Line, or, in its more common guise, the machinic phylum.

At the limit, there is a single phylogenetic lineage, a single machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits of expression. This operative and expressive flow is as much artificial as natural: it is like the unity of human beings and Nature… Vital impulse? Leroi-Gourhan has gone the farthest toward a technological vitalism taking biological evolution in general as the model for technical evolution: a Universal Tendency, laden with all of the singularities and traits of expression, traverses technical and interior milieus that refract or differentiate it in accordance with the singularities and traits each of them retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge, invents. There is indeed a machinic phylum in variation that creates the technical assemblages, whereas the assemblages invent the various phyla. (A Thousand Plateaus 406-407)

The human and the machine, the orchid in the wasp: unilateral agency dissolves away in the face of the phylum, and as such can only be viewed by the political as the Enemy, even if it to approach the relation in such a manner is extremely vulgar (after all, do Deleuze and Guattari not make it the itinerants who follow the phylum, figures who are outside the reach of the State, but on who the State depends on survival?) To reach the level of phylum we’ll have had to pass from the basic loops of Wiener’s first-order cybernetics to arrive at the imperceptible matrix, the staggering sum of immanent self-organizing processes. In this mesh, the political, the state, Christ, the Atlantean continuum, all can be understood as a elements internal to these processes, no different than Deleuze and Guattari’s self that mistakes itself to be unitary whilst being but something that has congealed to the side of the auto-productive processes: a voided coagulation that thinks itself not. The unwavering stability of this creation, held together by the Judgment of God, is countered by emergent flux of the phylum.

A Lemurian insurgency, even if the things that the flux produces – commerce and technology, namely – sustain the State. The fact of the matter is that the singular instantiation of something from a catalytic process will never be stable, and is part of line that intrinsically escapes. The Katechon is sinking.

End Rush

Virilio unpacks the permanent state of emergency in Speed and Politics (the framing of deterrence and speed no doubt influenced Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the global smooth space in A Thousand Plateaus):

The term “deterrence” points to the ambiguity of this situation, in which the weapon replaces the protection of armor, in which the possibilities of offense and offensive ensure in and of themselves the defense, the entire defensive against the “explosive” dimension of strategic arms, but not at all against the “implosive” dimension of the vectors’ performances, since on the contrary the maintenance of a credible “strike power” requires the constant refining of the engines’ power, in other words of their ability to reduce geographic space to nothing or almost nothing

In fact, without the violence of speed, that of weapons would not be so fearsome. In the current context, to disarm would thus mean first and foremost to decelerate, to defuse the race toward the end. Any treaty that does not limit the speed of this race (the speed of means of communicating destruction) will not limit strategic arms, since from now on the essential object of strategy consists in maintaining the non-place of a general delocalization of means that alone still allows us to gain fractions of seconds, which gain is indispensable”to any freedom of action. As General Fuller wrote, “When the combatants threw javelins at each other, the weapon’s initial speed was such that one could see it on its trajectory and parry its effects with one’s shield. But when the javelin was replaced by the bullet, the speed was so great that parry became impossible.” Impossible to move one’s body out of the way, but possible if one moved out of the weapon’s range; possible as well through the shelter of the trench, greater than that of the shield-possible, in other words, through space and matter.

Today, the reduction of warning time that results from the supersonic speeds of assault leaves so little time for detection, identification and response that in the case of a surprise attack the supreme authority would have to risk abandoning his supremacy of decision by authorizing the lowest echelon of the defense system to immediately launch anti-missile missiles. The two political superpowers have thus far preferred to avoid this situation through negotiations, renouncing anti-missile defense at the same time. Given the lack of space, an active defense requires at least the material time to intervene. But these are the “war materials” that disappear in the acceleration of the means of communicating destruction. There remains only a passive defense that consists less in reinforcing itself against the megaton powers of nuclear weapons than in a series of constant, unpredictable, aberrant movements, movements which are thus strategically effective for at least a little while longer, we hope. In fact, war now rests entirely on the deregulation of time and space. This is why the technical maneuver that consists in complexifying the vector by constantly improving its performances has now totally supplanted tactical maneuvers on the terrain, as we have seen.

General Ailleret points this out in his history of weapons by stating that the definition of arms programs has become one of the essential elements of strategy. If in ancient conventional warfare we could still talk about army maneuvers in the fields, in the current state of affairs, if this maneuver still exists, it no longer needs a “field. ” The invasion of the instant succeeds the invasion of the territory. The countdown becomes the scene of battle, the final frontier. (152-153

countdown = convergence = 210 [counting down…]