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.

 

Anarchy (#2: Twitter Talk)

On Twitter, John Doe’s Carnival of Error writes that it has “become clear any Gnon-centered approach to power must be accompanied by an anarchist ontology in some way.” I certainly agree, though with a slight modification of terminology: any anarchic approach to power must be accompanied by a Gnon-ontology in some way. Gnon, as the Great Propeller, already holds great affinity with the anarchic outside, to point even in which the difference between the two seems nil. The question of power intersects here in two different ways, the nuances and internal connections of which are need of greater elucidation and interrogation. The first intersection is in the context of political power: as an immense struggle unfolding in the great void, the anarchic is the political’s a priori, to which it is permanently wed. The second is in the manifestation(s) of non-political power, which (on the surface, at least) cuts sharply towards the Outside by want of its own logic. It is, then, another mask of the anarchic. Upon each of these the final determination unfolds as the asovereign exception.

Another thread that crossed into similar territory began with on the topic of whether or not civil war is imminent (a topic for a future post!) and ended on the question of whether or not a unipolar global order is an open possibility for the future. From the U/Accist perspective here (or is something like a gamble more proper?), the position that is staked out in this debate is on the supreme unlikelihood technocratic unipolarity. To summarize as briefly as possible: highly centralized, vertical power systems are doomed and their capacities will into squeezed into tinier and tinier blocs – or patches – as the involutionary curve of spiral temporality auto-tightens. This isn’t to say that the existing sovereign units won’t be undergo intensive development and become zones of runaway growth and innovation – quite the opposite! The kicker is that the happenings in such spaces will, along with despatialized counterparts, be conduits for the tightening gyre itself feeding into itself.

Regardless, it’s an excellent thought experiment, and one that demands to be thought-through. The implications for anarchy are clear: if unipolarity was achieved it would be a sovereign operating above all other sovereigns, and the void of anarchy would be squeezed into nonexistence. To pull off this defeat would entail nothing short of the Promethean overcoming of Gnon, ushering in Scott Alexander’s Age of Elua.

A cosmic reign of Elua would be nice; it is, after all, the imaginal zone where the most utopian of socialist currents and libertarian transhumanism bend and connect. At the conceptual summit it comes down to the classic friendly artificial intelligence vs. malevolent artificial intelligence debate. Anything short of that and it is a matter of a planned and perfectly-executed upon convergence upon the smooth, perfect functioning of a system designed to achieve these goals.

Baudrillard’s death knell: “Every system that approaches perfect operativity simultaneously approaches its downfall.” (Symbolic Exchange and Death, 4)

 

Demons and Disjunction (Patchwork and Capitalist Realism)

A great new post series is in the works by Xenogoth, pushing out from the reflections on state decay to The Gothic Secession of Yorkshire. Reprising the fallout of early posts on the topic, they write:

Following my previous post on patchwork, ‘State Decay’, which tentatively introduced the idea and explored why it is something that the Left should take more seriously, I was repeatedly challenged over the legitimacy of patchwork being anything more than “science fiction”.

The difficulty in addressing this is, of course, that theories of patchwork are inherently speculative, but if we are to jettison the use of our imaginations when addressing the future, what point is there to thinking (about it) at all?

To me, this line of criticism felt like a blatant instantiation of the Left’s consistent inability to dig itself out of the “capitalist realist” fallacy that Mark Fisher so famously described in his book of (roughly) the same name.

This is a really cool way of thinking about it, and raises interesting questions with regard to certain retroprogressive elements in leftism, i.e. because there appears to be no alternative, and in response the Left only looks backwards. There’s always tools and forgotten histories and whatnot in the past to be found that can be resurrected, but if this comes at the expense of thinking-through future-oriented trendlines then the backwards face only serves to reinforce the initial condition of capitalist realism.

Either way, this made me think about the brief appearance of capitalist realism in Flatline Constructs, which is still occupying a major spot of my headspace. It occurs in a lengthy conversation about Freud on the double and Baudrillard’s response in Symbolic Exchange and Death (maybe the connection is further enforced in my mind by the fact that this conversation takes place to unpack the Uncanny, and which Xenogoth sees as something active in the concept of patchwork itself – “Patchwork is, in this way, for me, an eerie politic.”):

The destruction of the double goes hand in hand with the production of the (Christian) soul (the ultimate achievement of the “spiritualist” project), the rise of “psychological and psychoanalytic interpretation” as the authorized forms of capitalist realism bring an end to “the primitive double”. “Shadow, specter, reflection, image”, the primitive double haunts post-monotheistic, psychoanalytic culture, which appropriates it as a “crude prefiguration of the soul”. Yet “soul and consciousness have everything to do with a principle of the subject’s unification, and nothing to do with the primitive double. On the contrary, the historical advent of the ‘soul’ puts an end to the proliferating exchange with spirits and doubles which, as a direct consequence, gives rise to another figure of the double, wending its way beneath the surfaces of western reason.” This – modern, western – double is inextricably connected with alienation; it is the double as lost part of the self, “a fantastic ectoplasm, an archaic resurgence issuing from guilt and the depths of the unconscious.”

These reflections, addressing psychoanalytic consolidation of the unitary self and matters of spirit and soul, might seem to be at an immense distance from the conversations concerning patchwork – which is, ostensibly, a theory of metapolitics, belonging to a different set of scales. But is Fisher not right in saying that, as fantastical as it seems, this line of inquiry plunges us into the depths of capitalist realism’s functions? In the destruction of the primitive double, the wild chains of proliferating difference are cut off; one no longer enters into transit and trade with figures on the outside, but turns inwards to operate under the sway of predetermined sets of options that are each flush with a particular unifying logic. The double begins in multiplicity and ends unified and coded.

Baudrillard, like Deleuze, was a shrewd reader of Klossowski, and the influence radiates through the conversation about the double. Klossowski approached the concept through the simulacrum, which for Klossowski appears in European culture under the figure of the demon so feared by those of the Church. Baudrillard, by way of Fisher: Freud’s psychological flattening of the double “is what kills off the proliferation of doubles and spirits, consigning them once to the spectral, embryonic corridors of unconscious folklore, like the ancient gods that Christianity vertefeult, that is, transformed into demons.” For Klossowski, the Church had killed the ancient gods, but only to resurrect them as the demonic pantheon that their own holy order was tasked with holding at bay – a swarming apocalypse warded off by the Katechon. This, however, had unintended consequences: the demons did not annihilate the tracings of paganistic delirium, of mad communion with spirits, contagion and possession – the very presence of the demon was a portal between the unitary, sanctified world and the repressed Outside.

If Baudrillard finds Freud and the Church carrying out the same function, it’s because what is being repressed in this cycle (destruction of the old gods → their resurrection as demons → warding off the demonic) are impulses, which correspond precisely to what Nietzsche called the “vast confusion of contradictory drives” that are contained within ourselves. For Klossowski, they are primordial and noncommunicable intensities, just as in Deleuze’s own philosophy. The impulses ‘flicker’ through differential sequences, giving rise to to the phantasm – the self produced through synthesis and that is blind to the impulses that uphold it. Insofar as we can describe capitalist realism through these terms, it is a mode of suppressing the interplay of impulses in order to stabilize a particular phantasm in place – what Klossowski would describe as the production of series of stereotypes.

(A brief detour: it is perhaps here, in secular institutions repeating repression and molding of impulses, that we reach a perhaps more constructive vision of what neoreaction has designated the Cathedral. With CCRU’s writings in mind, we can think of the demonic impulses in relation to the Lemurian insurgency that the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton, the Human Security System, wages war with across time – and as Land writes in Dark Techno-Commercialism, “the Cathedral culminates in the Human Security System, outmatched and defeated from the Outside”. To put the concepts of the Cathedral and capitalist realism together might produce some interesting offspring.)

Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense:

The order of God includes the following elements: the identity of God as the ultimate foundation; the identity of the world as the ambient environment; the identity of the person as a well-founded agency; the identity of bodies as the base; and finally, the identity of language as the power of denoting everything else. But this order of God is constructed against another order, and this order subsists in God and weakens him little by little.

This weakening of God reaches critical mass in Klossowski’s novel The Baphoment, which depicts the Templar Order tending to, under the guidance of God, the spirits of the dead. Released from their bodies in death, these spirits must be prevented from slipping into obscene mixtures in preparation for the eventual Resurrection – but a rebellion against the divine order takes place, heralded by Saint Theresa. The eventuality of divine Resurrection is shattered as spirits escape more and more, entering into strange arrangements, multiple spirits in one body, free to engage in acts deemed profane and perverse by the holy order.

This marks, Deleuze writes, “the death of God, the destruction of the world, the dissolution of the person, the disintegration of bodies, and the shifting function of language now only expressed in intensities.” A point-by-point opposition to the order of God: the order of the Anti-Christ, analogous exactly to the warded-off demonic world and the zone of the repressed primitive double. Or, to bring it back up to the top, something beyond capitalist realism.

What does this have to do with patchwork?

In The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus, Klossowski’s counterposing of the order of God and the order of the Anti-Christ informs a transformation of Kant’s arguments on the disjunctive syllogism. Kant takes the syllogism to its limit: at the ceiling of the ideal, this is the function of God, as the very ground of the ability to reason. The judgment of God that Artaud wished to have done with: the logic of either/or, this not that, not A therefore B, etc. “God is here, at least provisionally”, says Deleuze in the Logic of Sense, “deprived of his traditional claims.” He now “has a humble task, namely, to enact disjunctions”. God is thus weaker in the Kantian schema, but in the end becomes the determining factor by serving as the master of the disjunctive syllogism.

Deleuze sounds the trumpets for Klossowski and his demonic army of impulses, spirits and intensities: “it is not God but rather the Antichrist who is the master of the disjunctive syllogism. This is because the anti-God determines the passage of each thing through all of its possible predicates. God, as the Being of beings, is replaced by the Baphomet, the ‘prince of all modifications,’ and himself modification of all modifications.” Or, to put it in the more understandable (!!) language of Anti-Oedipus: the disjunctive is a synthesis of which there are two uses, a positive use and a negative use. The negative use of the disjunctive synthesis is the order of God, based on a limitation and exclusion. You are either this or that, lest catastrophe befall you. Oedipal coding, to which is opposed the positive use, reigned over by the Antichrist, a “schizophrenic God [who] has so little to do with the god of religion, even though they are related to the same syllogism”. There is no longer simply “either/or”; it has passed to “either… or… or… or…”, potentially ad infinitum.

If we situate ourselves on a transcendent sofa in the anarchic outside and peek in it becomes apparent that this follows the perverse logic of patchwork: capitalist realism, the Human Security System, what have you, manifests the negative use of the disjunctive synthesis, while patchwork – stripped down to its most basic core, which is a meta-systemic multiplication of systems through fragmentation and division, exhibits the attributes of the positive use. This system, or this system, or… or… or… or… The commonalities are reinforced by the identification of the disjunctive synthesis operating upon the socius, that is, the body without organs relative to macroscale historico-political systems. The negative use of the disjunctive organizes a unitary body atop the socius, enforcing a judgment of God – but the positive use would entail a break-up of this unitary body, the slippage of the organs into different arrangements and mutant hybrids.

Things get even more uncanny when we consider the Marxist core to Anti-Oedipus: that capital is the force that goes to work on the socius, breaking apart the negative use of the disjunctive imposed by the despotic state and pushing things towards cosmic schizophrenia – the instantiation of the positive use in the form of an immense, frightening singularity.

Cue Metcalf:

Short of theology and fascism, brain core capitalism is already virtually extinct. Crippled Archangel of Meat Cull Europa withers into grey dust on Terra Nova. Insect swarms arrive like fate – nth dimension intrusion across the spinal thresholds of the socius – passing memeplexed revolution sequences through the germ plasm of evolutionary vehicles. Becoming metallic. Becoming swarm. Unnatural participation as elan vital bootstrapping imperceptible colonization of Nu-Earth into virtual operativity.