It could be said that a devil stands at one (arguably both) end(s) of any deal being made, whether lawful or not. As on the physical, so in the virtual plane, the myriad forms of the Black Market Mephistopheles transact with clientele under shadow; manifestations of Faust embody those particular consumers who offer nothing short of anything in exchange for libelous services and otherwise unobtainable wares.
No matter how carefully science insists in tracing the limits of its own understanding, barricading itself behind walls of axioms and boundary conditions, it inevitably becomes an oracle, a spiritual medium, opening a laceration onto a radical Outside and summoning an invasion of voices of long lost demons into our world, not unlike a cursed Cassandra who refuses to surrender to her own prophetic utterances. In this sense, conspiracy theorists and cybernetic oracles of the coming apocalypse draw from scientific knowledge not as a source of reliable predictions of reality, but rather “as a poetics of the sacred”, and transform astronomy into an astrology of Armageddon.
July 1, 1963. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA. America is in the midst of the Cold War. The masculine fire and fury of World War II has given way to a period of cooling and the new digital war of information. Two Titans prepare to enter into battle for the dominion of Gaia, to claim their perfect sky from the Moon and reign down missiles onto the Earth. The Cold War’s primary theater is the Space Race, and the Soviets become the first to master the skies with Sputnik in 1957 and Luna 2 in 1959. America is getting nervous.
For Jünger, souls are judged according to their readiness to see an invisible war. Invisible war conjoins the immediacy of the front experience (Fronterlebnis) to a higher order of determination. Immolating fire is a communiqué that travels from an absolute remoteness to an essentialised closeness: causality is vertical, hierarchical and unilateral. An act on the front is the mirror of a determination within the invisible war. The station of a higher soul can be achieved through the intensification of this perception, which separates a reflective surface from a secret face.
There is a famous scene in the movie Alien where engineer Brett is chasing a cat in the space ship’s engine room and unexpectedly runs into an alien. So do the spectators, who see an adult alien for the first time—even a bit sooner than the character since the creature descends from the ceiling behind Brett’s back while he is staring into the camera and courting Jones, the cat. I believe our attitude towards capital to be quite similar—we are Brett the moment before he turns around, we sense something unbearably, monstrously alien behind our back, yet we still behave as if we were only chasing a cat. The alien capital in the title stands for alienness, for the eighth passenger aboard a spaceship with seven humans. The capitalist economy we are more familiar with also encompasses classes, entrepreneurs and employees, banks and finances etc. and something else, something alien.
There is a blurry edge in all detective work that, as Borges too competently demonstrates, skirts a zig-zag threshold between apophenia and the truly canny connection of events that only appear, superficially, to be disconnected. In the name of a method that is closer to invocation than criticism, a reckless detective might refrain from determining exactly where an act of decryption lies on the ugly terrain of legitimacy and, proffering sanity as the stake, live up to the problem as it stands.
War has arrived into the streets of Paris once more, the revolution’s darkened version colliding with the fractal expansion of difference, filling the eerily symbolically named streets of Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad. LIBERTY LEADING THE %%%+REG Fatal System Error ++!!!!!!+/+/“PEOPLE.”
English translation of Jean-François Lyotard, “Petite mise en perspective de la décadence et de quelques combats minoritaires à y mener”, 1976.
Let’s begin with a sort of warning to say that we will seek to avoid the traditional “critical point of view”. Critique is an essential dimension of representation: in the order of the theatrical, it is what stands “outside”, with the exterior incessantly situated in relation to interiority, i.e. the periphery relative to the center. A so-called dialectical relation is established between the two; this relation does not safeguard the autonomy of critique, not by a long shot.
Towards the end of his book on Henri Bergson, Deleuze mined from the philosopher’s work a spectral prefiguration of the people-to-come: the faint traces of an emergent and enigmatic open society, a “society of creators” and ‘privileged’ souls connected together by an imperceptible circuitry. Standing atop a grand, abstract summit, the open society derives its name not only from its differentiation to the closed society, but through that which it opens onto. The open society moves in the direction of what Bergson had called the élan vital, the impulse or force that compels self-organization in matter and morphogenesis through time. Such a movement is an affair of life itself, the sifting apart of the organic from the inorganic, organization from base matter. By ascending up a cosmological hierarchy in order to enter into unending engagement with this force, the mark of the open society is life at its most creative.
All enfoldings, invaginations and internalisations attendant upon abiogenesis are only so many precursors and ancestors to the later development of intelligence’s full-blown transcendental functioning. However: this is not to say they are therefore the same. It is not to speciously state their dubious ‘continuity’ — whether explanatory or descriptive, genetic or categorial. They resonate only in mutual dissonance.
Let us embark upon a phylogenetic fantasy.
