Catastrophic Astrology

Gruppo di Nun

2004 MN4

I shall disappear from heaven when I shall have consumed myself, and my doom will have been glorious enough! Know that various fires burn in the temple of God, and do all give Him glory: ye are the light of golden candelabra; I am the flame of sacrifice.[note]Eliphas Levi, The Ritual of Transcendental Magic, Rider & Company, London, 1896, 3.[/note]

A countdown clock still runs on one of the countless forgotten pages in the wastelands of the early 2000s web. The website, www.99942-apophis.com, hosts a timer that marks the time left before Earth’s annihilation by a near-Earth object, asteroid 2004 MN4, later renamed (99942) Apophis, after the Greek name for the Egyptian abyssal snake-god, Apep, the Destroyer. Below a picture representing the catastrophic impact of a gigantic space rock with the Earth, an eerie epitaph is written in red characters, like the testimony of a vaporwave Ozymandias in the dust of his abandoned cyber-kingdom:

This page is in some way still under construction.
I have some time left before 2036.
Some trouble could this timeline be. I am 80 years in 2036.
So the question is; if Apophis or a heart attack will strike me first.
Yes I know my English could be better.[note]99942 Apophis 2004 MN4, http://www.99942-apophis.com/[/note]

2004 MN4 was first discovered in the summer of 2004 by a group of astronomers at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Several months after the discovery, NASA’s Sentry and ESA’s NEODyS automated monitoring systems predicted a possible impact of the asteroid with the Earth on April 13, 2029. On December 23, 2004, the computed probability of the 2029 collision increased dramatically, being first estimated at 1 in 300 and, later that day, being raised to 1 in 62. In the days that followed, the probability kept increasing until it reached 2.7%, the highest value ever recorded, with an unprecedented Torino hazard scale rating of 4. As the astronomers had widely anticipated, after further observations and calculations, the impact probability plummeted and the possibility of the 2029 event was excluded; nonetheless, a second coming of Apophis — exactly seven years after the first one, on April 13, 2036 — was still raising concerns, due to the possibility, although unlikely, that the asteroid’s trajectory could be deviated by its passage through a gravitational keyhole, determining a new risk of collision. By 2013, even this small possibility of impact had been ruled out. Friday, the 13th of April, 2029 will still be a night to remember, as a 300 metre wide asteroid crosses the night sky closer than ever recorded, visible even to the naked eye.

Apophis
Apophis: Asteroid (99942) Apophis captured by the Sormano observatory in December 2004. Source: Sormano Astronomical Observatory.

There is a strange affinity between the internet and doomsday. Civilisation’s morbid fascination with its own annihilation has often been relegated to the deepest and most anonymous corners of the web, where, next to scam advertisements menacing horrendous bodily deformities, dark omens of death and destruction steal more clicks than the most depraved pornography. Somehow, secretly, we want to know — in the darkness of our incognito windows — how many seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years separate us from our doom; if we are sick of an incurable and disgusting disease; when will the Earth be engorged by the fiery abyss of our dying sun. A mirror to our most terrifying nightmares is always one google search away, or even closer, haunting social media with our antisocial urges, as if the Algorithm already knew — and it does — what scares us and excites us the most. Are we afraid? Are we looking for salvation? Or are we just waiting, aroused by the panic ecstasy of disintegration? When it comes to the impact with Apophis, or any other real or imagined threat of apocalypse, the many rational and scientific arguments that solicit the public to remain calm, debunking the ‘fake news’ that spreads unjustified alarm, can never eliminate our fear and our desire for destruction completely. On the contrary, science itself seems to fuel the same conspiracy theories that it tries to suppress, being distorted and transformed from cautious information into prophecy. (99942) Apophis is not merely a celestial body, or an astronomical object, because its influence expands far further than its gravitational field, becoming entangled with our cosmological destiny and speaking to the depths of our being; it is the flaming messenger of a catastrophic revelation. Apophis is, without doubt, the offspring of the limited gaze of scientific inquiry, since the veil of apocalyptic horror that surrounds it is rooted in the cold mechanical equations that dominate its orbit and in the ghost of its spectral signal disturbing our sensors from the depth of space. Nonetheless, 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.[note]Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, Routledge, London, 1992, 37.[/note]

One of the first and most illustrious examples of the prophetic power of science is reported by Galileo Galilei in his Sidereus Nuncius:

I feel sure that the surface of the Moon is not perfectly smooth, free from inequalities and exactly spherical, as a large school of philosophers considers with regard to the Moon and the other heavenly bodies, but that, on the contrary, it is full of inequalities, uneven, full of hollows and protuberances, just like the surface of the Earth itself, which is varied everywhere by lofty mountains and deep valleys.[note]Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, Byzantinum Press, Oklahoma City, 2004, 7.[/note]

At the time of his writing, the dominant Aristotelian doctrine preached that the cosmos, and all the elements composing it, was perfectly spherical, and that no imperfection was allowed to exist outside of the Earth. Gazing in his telescope, Galileo was struck by a blasphemous revelation: that the moon, and by extension, the entire universe, was irremediably dirty and subjected to the same processes of degradation and dissolution that we experience in our world. The apparently innocuous words of his statement, supported by the reasonable argument of scientific observation, hide an actual, gruesome deicide; if the universe is not perfect and eternal, how could God be? As we now know, the moon’s surface was forever disfigured by asteroids just like Apophis — celestial omens of death whose distorted, eccentric trajectories escape the understanding of spherical cosmology. Interestingly, Galilei somehow expiated his blasphemy by opening the way to the formulation of the principle of conservation of energy — the first principle of thermodynamics — through his experiments on motion. The spherical nature of the universe was somehow preserved in the symmetry of the laws of mechanical motion, which imply the total reversibility of all dynamic processes and thus the nonexistence of time as a material drive towards degradation. From this consideration it obviously follows that the ultimate prophecy of doom channeled by science is the second principle of thermodynamics in its statistical-mechanical interpretation, as understood by Ludwig Boltzmann:

After this confession you will take it with more tolerance if I am so bold as to claim your attention for a quite trifling and narrowly circumscribed question. […] The second law proclaims a steady degradation of energy until all tensions that might still perform work and all visible motions in the universe would have to cease. All attempts at saving the universe from this thermal death have been unsuccessful, and to avoid raising hopes I cannot fulfil, let me say at once that I too shall here refrain from making such attempts.[note]Ludwig.Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, D. Reidel, Boston, 1974, 15-19.[/note]

The “narrowly circumscribed question” of condemning the entire cosmos to irremediable heat death breaks any surviving hope that the universe may be, in any capacity, spherical, reversible or eternal.[note]Ibid., 15.[/note] Boltzmann was a meticulous scientist and a convinced upholder of the inherent boundaries of science and human knowledge; but despite his understandable caution in approaching the subject of his own groundbreaking discoveries, the proof of his H-theorem, containing a probabilistic argument in support of the second principle of thermodynamics, is not merely a speculation on the behaviour of an ideal gas of non-interacting particles, but rather the elaborate conjuration of an eldritch aberration. As we diligently follow through the intricate steps of this twisted ritual, summoning functions and variables and transmuting them through the arcane operations of calculus, we finally reach the Quod Erat Demonstrandum, manifesting the apocalyptic truth of the death of the universe and unleashing it into reality. There is minimal need of scientific understanding to operate the conjuring machine of thermodynamics; it just works — until it works no more.

When I first met Apophis I was 11 years old. A classmate had told me that an asteroid was going to hit the Earth in 25 years’ time. As a child, my mind was always haunted by an unusual obsession with death, but I had never, before that moment, contemplated the idea of the end of humanity and confronted the possibility of extinction. In my nightly terrors, I had often considered my own disintegration, dissecting in every possible way the paradoxical insanity of being an individual, and then of being no more. But there was something strangely reassuring about the idea of dying as a part of the universal cycle of Nature, just like in an eternal wildlife documentary, where death is perfectly compensated by new life and equilibrium is forever preserved. I was never truly Catholic. I was raised not to believe in any god. But there was something religious about the way I was taught to approach Nature as a redeeming force of heterosexual preservation: the sun sets only to rise again; we die, only to leave room for our offspring to thrive and carry on our legacy. As a cisgender girl approaching puberty, I could finally access salvation by consecrating myself to the natural cycle of heterosexual reproduction; but if an alien force could shatter this harmony to pieces, putting an end to our species, our planet, our universe, then there was truly no hope. Apophis was my lesbian love for Extinction.

Desire could thus be said to be nothing but becoming a woman, at different levels of intensity, although of course, it is always possible to become a pious woman, to begin a history, love masculinity and accumulate […] But reality drifts upon zero, and can be abandoned over and over again. In the lesbian depths of the unconscious, desires for/as feminizing spasms of remigration are without limit. Everything populating the desolate wastes of the unconscious is lesbian.[note]Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 26.[/note]

Little did I know that Apophis would visit me again, some ten years later, appearing in a vivid dream as an immense celestial serpent encircling and devouring the Earth, and hissing to me the secrets of time-sorcery and the mysteries of the Great Arcanum. All I can recall from those days are a few lectures on statistical quantum mechanics, the persistent image of my body collapsing on concrete and a deep, devouring feeling of cold. “Think to yourself: ‘This is.’ If this knowledge leads you back to yourself, and, as you experience a sense of deadly cold, you feel an abyss yawning beneath you: ‘I exist in this’ — then you have achieved the knowledge of the ‘waters'”.[note]Julius Evola and the UR Group, Introduction to Magic, Inner Traditions, Rochester, 2001, 17.[/note]

Apophisor the Uncreator

In that day, the LORD will punish with his sword — his fierce, great and powerful sword — Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea.[note]Isaiah 27:1[/note]

The inhabitants of the earth […] will be astonished when they see the beast, because it once was, now is not, and yet will come.[note]Revelation 17:8[/note]

Apophis, the Egyptian serpent-god of the Netherworld, belongs to a lineage of Mesopotamian chthonic deities incarnating primeval chaos and darkness. References to Apophis recur in the spells reported in the Pyramid Texts, in the Coffin Texts and in the Book of The Dead, where it is described as a great snake dwelling in the dark waters of the night, waiting to swallow the solar boat of Ra after it had set beyond the horizon. The recurrence of Apophis in these texts — whose main function was to protect the souls of the dead in their crossing to the afterlife — sheds some light on the deep and intimate connection between the astrological dimension of the Sun-Ra mythos, the political construction of human society and the journey of individual consciousness in Egyptian cosmology. Somewhat similar mythological creatures in the Mesopotamic tradition are the biblical Leviathan and the Babylonian Tiamat, both sharing with Apophis their serpentine/reptilian appearance, their fundamental affinity with the sea, and their defeat of some male solar deity syncretised with the figure of the King, resulting in their slaughter and in the profanation of their body. Of particular interest is the figure of the goddess Tiamat, who, after rebelling against the god Marduk, is killed, and her body is split in two parts, forming the Earth and the sky of our world. This creation myth reveals the beast Tiamat as an Original Mother of mankind, whose flesh is the substance that sustains our existence, but who is inevitably dismembered and annihilated as a result of her giving birth to the world; the literal penetration of her flesh by the Babylonian God is the insemination of dark matter with light, and her massacred body is the clay out of which all existence is shaped. The feminine subjecting itself to this cosmic process of rape is considered unripe, as expressed by the green color of the hermetic dragon representing untamed matter at the beginning of the alchemical Opus, and, unsurprisingly, the same unripeness appears in jungian psychoanalisis as a pathologisation of non-heterosexual or non-conforming womanhood, that subjects itself to the reproductive patriarchal order, refusing to take on her role as Great Mother and dialectical counterpart to male consciousness. Femininity, in the equation “woman = body = vessel =  world”, is only determined in motherhood, that is, only in relation to the other, and through bleeding, that is, only as a function of her wounding.[note]Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1963, 39.[/note] Even her devouring, monstrous aspect is to be interpreted from the masculine perspective of the child seeking liberation from the chains of the unconscious, as a necessary adversary in a process of growth. Femininity is constricted in the circularity of the reproductive process of civilisation, but, as Amy Ireland points out in her article “Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come”, the true revolutionary potential of femininity lies in the possibility of uncoupling it from its association with the masculine:

Woman plus man produces homeostasis (the equilibrium of inequality), but woman plus woman, or woman plus machine, recalibrates the productive drive, slotting it into a vector of incestuous, explosive recursion that will ultimately tear the system it emerges from to shreds, pushing it over the “brink” into something else.[note]Amy Ireland, “Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come”, e-flux, 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100016/black-circuit-code-for-the-numbers-to-come/.[/note]

Unlike Tiamat, Apophis cannot be killed: no matter how many times the Creator God penetrates its flesh, it is never destroyed; it is an uncreating force that overcomes creation. Apophis is not reborn like a dialectical One; it is recursion, not reproduction; it is the autogynophilic, sterile, lesbian Zero forever excavating itself, onto which everything collapses.

As the solar disk plunges into the darkness of Duat, so do the souls of the dead, facing the ancient monster that lies beyond the light of existence: unconstructed matter, eternal recombination, necessary dissolution. The True Zero, the Unborn, the Uncreator, hungry for human and superhuman blood alike, swallowing souls and worlds and digesting them into the Prima Materia of the ocean of Nun. The daily struggle of Ra against Apophis ensures the cyclical re-affirmation of the glory of the Sun God and his life-giving light, the preservation of civilisation and the rebirth of the souls of the dead into the afterlife, so that a new dawn can rise on the world of men; but the kingdom of Ra is constantly leaning over the abyss of the exponential recurrence of the serpent’s regeneration. The possibility of the murder of the Sun by the fangs of Apophis is mirrored by the astrological aberration of the solar eclipse, that ultimately breaks the cycle of rebirth, violating the sacred harmony of the cosmos. In the Book of Overthrowing Apep, a ritual text reported in its most complete version in the Bremner-Rhind papyrus, Apophis is referred to as “the rebel”, hinting at the political dimension of the struggle between the God and the Beast: the preservation of the cosmos depends on the possibility of the King holding his power against the centrifugal forces of disaggregation, placing Apophis in the position of the supreme adversary — Satan — to his dominion. The insistence of the text on the disintegration and dismemberment of the body of the beast, especially its decapitation, can be intended as an alchemical recipe for the birth of humanity, produced by the slaughter of the primeval Ouroboros:

O APEP THOU FOE OF RE, THOU SHALT DIE, DIE! MAYEST THOU PERISH, MAY THY NAME PERISH, THY TEETH BE SOFT, THY POISON SPILT; MAYEST THOU BE BLIND AND UNABLE TO SEE. FALL UPON THY FACE; BE FELLED, FELLED! Be crushed, crushed! Be annihilated, annihilated! Be slain, slain! Be cut to pieces, to pieces! Be cut up, cut up! Be severed, severed! Be slaughtered, slaughtered! Thy head shall be cut off with this knife in the presence of Re every day, for he allots thee to Aker, and he crushes thy bones.[note]R. O. Faulkner, The Bremner-Rhind Papyrus, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 1938, Vol. 24, No. 1, 45.[/note]

Egyptian magick identifies Apophis with a primordial principle of Uncreation: unformed matter that needs to be continuously violated, through a separatio of its original non-duality into the qabbalistic Duad, so that the world can come into being.[note]On the thermodynamic relation between work and separation: “Energy may take three forms, the visible motion of bodies, thermal motion, that is the motion of the smallest particles, and finally work, that is the separation of mutually attracting bodies or the approach of repelling ones”. Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, 18.[/note]. This is the essence of the alchemical Opus, and the expression of the highest aspiration of the Right-Hand Path, as clearly stated by Abraxas in the Ur group’s Introduction to Magic:

In our Tradition, these “waters”, or Humidum Radicale (“radical Humidity”), have been symbolised as ▼ (downward direction, precipitation). They have also been referred to as the “earthly Venus”, as female and cosmic matrix (▼ in Hinduism is the symbol of Shakti and of the yoni), or as “Original Snake” (because of the serpentine path ≈, which is the astrological equivalent of ▼). […] And now, since you wished to learn about it, realise that the “Science of the Magi” wills this and disdains anything that is not this. To create something stable, impassive, immortal, something rescued from the “Waters” that is now living and breathing outside of them, finally free; and then, like a strong man who grasps a raging bull by the horns, slowly but relentlessly subjugating it, to dominate this cosmic nature in oneself — this is the secret of our Art, the Art of the Sun and of Power, of the “Mighty Strength of all Strengths”.[note]Evola and the UR Group, Introduction to Magic, 18.[/note]

The ritual decapitation of the snake that brings forth duality, taming the flood of uncreated matter, is rendered possible by a principle of symmetry, that is, equilibrium. The serpent bites its own tail because it is a self-sufficient machine in perpetual motion, fueled by the same body that it sustains; a cannibalistic universe that eats itself without ever consuming. As the circle is broken, as the man-God sets himself in the center, generating an alchemical Sun, the infinite free energy of this impossible engine can be harvested indefinitely, producing a hermetic battery whose polarities — Chokmah and Binah, the Subject and his Object — are forever preserved.[note]”The path of heterodoxy and disintegration into infinitely many individuated particles begins with woman, Binah. This paradoxically makes it not merely that the weak Eve was tempted by the evil Serpent, but rather that the origins of Evil lie in Eve. Or rather, in woman.” n1x, Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper, Vast Abrupt, 2018, https://vastabrupt.com/2018/10/31/gender-acceleration/[/note] The myth of Apophis confronts us with a much more terrible serpent, one whose hunger cannot be satiated by feasting on its own flesh; it is the non-ideal, dissipating machine of a universe that precipitates towards Extinction. Apophis, the ultimate thermodynamic horror, does not bite its own tail, because it is biting us; and, as it swallows the world into darkness, reveals itself as the blazing fire of the Black Sun, illuminating the putrefaction of the God of man.

Nemesis or the Black Sun

Because You love cremation grounds
I have made my heart one
so that You
Black Goddess of the Burning Grounds
can always dance there.
No desires are left, Mā, on the pyre
for the fire burns in my heart,
and I have covered everything with its ash
to prepare for Your coming.[note]R. F. McDermott, Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kālī and Umā from Bengal, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, 75.[/note]

A model in which the 26-Myr mass extinction cycle of Raup and Sepkoski (1984) is associated with the orbital period of a solar companion star is investigated. The required semi-major axis is about 88,000 A.U., or 1.4 light years. Its highly eccentric orbit (e greater than about 0.9) periodically brings the companion into the dense inner region of the comet cloud where it perturbs the orbits of large numbers of comets, initiating an intense comet shower in the solar system which results in several terrestrial impacts of a period of 100,000 to a million years. The companion probably has a mass in the black dwarf range of 0.0002 to 0.07 solar masses, depending on its eccentricity and the density distribution of comets in the inner cloud, and is potentially observable in the infrared.[note]D. P. Whitmire, A. A. Jackson, “Are periodic mass extinctions driven by a distant solar companion?”, Nature, 1984, Vol. 308, 713–5[/note]

In the article “Are periodic mass extinctions driven by a distant solar companion?”, published in the journal Nature in 1987, authors D. P. Whitmire and A. A. Jackson speculate on the existence of an undetected star in our solar system, constituting, together with our sun, a binary star system. In a paper published in the same issue of Nature, M. Davis, P. Hut and A. Muller baptise the unseen star: “If and when the companion is found, we suggest it be named Nemesis, after the Greek goddess who relentlessly persecutes the excessively rich, proud and powerful. We worry that if the companion is not found, this paper will be our nemesis.”[note]M. Davis, P. Hut, R. A. Muller, “Extinction of species by periodic comet showers”, Nature, 1984, Vol. 308, 717.[/note] Interestingly, the theory of the existence of Nemesis emerged as a possible explanation for the cyclical repetition of mass extinction events on Earth registered in the fossil record. The recurring passage of the hypothetical dark star across the Oort cloud, a region located at the deep boundary of our solar system and populated by billions of comets, was deemed responsible for the distortion of the orbits of the icy worlds inhabiting the cloud, that would then be cast across our solar system and impact with the Earth, causing planetary devastation and bringing life to the brink of annihilation.[note]Quoting Land on cyclic mass-extinction events: “In order to actually up the game, nothing quite substitutes for a super-compressed catastrophe (or mass extinction) which cranks evolution to the meta-level of superior ‘evolvability’. By gnawing-off and burning entire branches of life, crises plowing deep into the X-risk zone stimulate plasticity in the biosphere’s phyletic foundations. […] Gnon isn’t Malthus. It’s the thing toasting Malthus’ liver — in the fat-fed smoldering ashes of the biological kingdom it just burnt down» Nick Land, “The Harshness”, Outside Inhttp://www.xenosystems.net/the-harshness/.[/note] If Nemesis was indeed out there, then, according to the calculations proposed by Davis et al., it would now be at its maximum distance from the sun, and the next wave of catastrophic collisions should arrive about 15 million years from now.

Nibiru
Series of photographs capturing the evolution of V838 Monocerotis, an unusual stellar outburst observed in 2002 whose expanding light echo was associated with the approach of the planet Nibiru. Source: NASA Image and Video Library.

Despite the fact that no firm trace of Nemesis has been found, and possibly will ever be, and despite the theory of the 26-Myr mass extinction cycle being strongly contested, the legacy of Nemesis carries on in the imagination of countless conspiracy theorists and in the sensational titles of tabloids on the web. The idea of a dark, deadly twin to our life-giving sun, proposed by astronomers for an exquisitely scientific reason and without the pretension of suggesting any kind of cosmological truth, offers us a glimpse into the abyss of a universal horror: that the sun, in its burning, offers us a vital energy that is not without retribution, and that the same burning that we experience as nurturing and vibrant is, in itself, the sacrificial pyre to its own deranged greatness: “a certain madness is implied, […] because it is no longer production that appears in light, but refuse or combustion”.[note]Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985, 57.[/note] Nemesis was never found because, as several speculations of paranoid theorists point out, it is hiding behind the sun, that engulfs it in its brilliance, making us all blind to the truth of our coming extinction; the dark companion of the sun is indeed the sun itself. From this perspective, the name of the goddess Nemesis, daughter of the night goddess Nyx, appears particularly fitting in its association with the greek word νέμειν, meaning to give what is due. Extinction is the price we pay for our existence, the fuel consumed and forever lost, the surplus of energy we cannot grasp; it is the necessity of expenditure, that is, the spontaneity of our existence, since “the verbal root of spontaneity, PIE *spend- (to make an offering, perform a rite, to engage oneself by a ritual act), contains this sense of sacrifice and self-offering, just as we speak of the spontaneous as something ‘surrendered to’, as to a whim. The spontaneity of authentic transformation is also thus a species of death, of surrendering to the expiration of what is untenable”.[note]Nicola Masciandaro, On the Darkness of the Will, Mimesis International, Milano, 2018, 34.[/note]

Civilisation, as the bright twin of our binary Sun, “has the form of an unsustainable law”, and appears as the desperate negation of spontaneity, as it aggregates itself in architectures of horrendous symmetry.[note]Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, xix.[/note] Nonetheless, if we stare long enough into its feverish light, it reveals itself in its nigredo, as a cancerous proliferation, no less revolting than a corpse being nibbled by countless contorting worms. The shimmering temple of God, the perfect balance of his Qabbalah, the great “humanising project” is but a sub-product of the godless precipitation of matter into darkness, “a precarious stabilisation and complication of solar decay”.[note]Ibid., xix; xviii.[/note] The history of civilisation is always told backwards, as seen through the lens of an impossible time-machine; there is no true thermodynamic paradox in the existence of life, because it is not a process of aggregation, but rather an acceleration of disaggregation, a mindless engine consuming itself to death. The martyrdom of Christ on the cross is the necessary sacrifice for the preservation of the patriarchal order of the One God Universe, revealing the inevitably dissipating nature of the Kingdom of God and expiating the thermodynamic sin of organic existence, so that, as the flesh of the creator is slaughtered, the darkened sun «hiddenly gives witness to a zone of occult identity between the immanent summit of perfection and the kenotic abyss of God’s self-dereliction».[note]Cf. Ccru, Writings 1997-2003, Urbanomic, Falmouth, 2017; Masciandaro, On the Darkness of the Will, 98.[/note] Cast out at the edge of our known universe, like a ritual scapegoat venturing into the desert, the Black Sun responds with an invasion of fiery comets from the sky, because there is no real outside to store its excess — it is life itself that is being sacrificed.

Nibiru or the Great City of Babylon

The great planet:
At his appearance: Dark red.
The heaven he divides in half
as it stands as Nibiru.[note]Zecharia Sitchin, The Twelfth Planet, Harper, New York, 1976, 242.[/note]

What is the terrible ruby star
that burns down the crimson night?
What is the beauty that flames so bright
athwart the awful dawn?
She has taken flesh, she is come to judge
the thrones ye rule upon.
Quail ye kings for an end is come
in the birth of BABALON.[note]Jack Parsons, The Book of Babalon, 1946, https://hermetic.com/parsons/the-book-of-babalon.[/note]

In his infamous 1976 book The Twelfth Planet, conspiracy theorist Zecharia Sitchin proposed an argument in favor of the existence of an unseen planet in our solar system, based on his interpretation of ancient Babylonian cosmology and astrology. This planet, the astronomical incarnation of the god Marduk, patron deity of the City of Babylon, was responsible for the creation of the Earth when, smashing against the lost planet Tiamat, it tore her apart; one part of her would constitute our planet, and the other the asteroid belt and the comets of our solar system. In this very literal and simplistic transposition of the Babylonian creation myth as told in the ancient Babylonian text Enûma Eliš, the impact of Marduk with the planet Tiamat was the moment of the insemination of our dead, uncreated world with alien life:

There was no premeditated “seeding”; instead, there was a celestial collision. A life-bearing planet, the Twelfth Planet and its satellites, collided with Tiamat and split it in two, “creating” Earth out of its half. During that collision the life-bearing soil and air of the Twelfth Planet “seeded” Earth, giving it the biological and complex early forms of life for whose early appearance there is no other explanation.[note]Sitchin, The Twelfth Planet, 256.[/note]

Marduk, our original metropolis, is, according to Sitchin, inhabited by the race of the Annunaki, whose name was historically used to refer to the Gods and Goddesses of the pantheons of ancient Mesopotamian religions, but who, instead of spiritual beings, are a species of super-intelligent and all-powerful aliens. Seeing that life on Earth was but a defective and debased version of the one evolved on Marduk, the Annunaki intervened on the under-developed primates populating the Earth with biological engineering, creating Homo Sapiens in their own image, and dominating the ancient Babylonian civilisation as gods. Ignoring his clear religious connotation as a solar deity, Sitchin insists that Marduk is some kind of rogue, sunless planet that reached our solar system from outer space, not creating, but rather colonising our Earth; it is an invading force, acting from the outside in, rather than an expanding force, extending from its center. Rather than creators, the Annunaki, also referred to as Nefilim, the ancient biblical race of giants, are described as settlers, saying that “the story of the first settlement of Earth by intelligent beings is a breathtaking saga no less inspiring than the discovery of America”.[note]Ibid., 283.[/note] The city of Babylon — the “Gateway of the Gods” — was the first outpost to this planetary expansion, a hyper-technological space-port connecting Earth to her alien invaders. Due to the cyclic encounters of Marduk’s orbit with the Earth, he was named Nibiru, “planet of crossing”.[note]Ibid., 150; 240.[/note]

Nemesis
Artist’s concept of a failed star, or brown dwarf, like the sun’s hidden companion Nemesis. Source: NASA Image and Video Library.

Sitchin’s pseudo-historical narrative was a brilliantly fascinating work of science fiction, destined to influence our image of extraterrestrial intelligent life and ancient human civilisations for decades to follow, but his impact extended far beyond the limits of mere fiction, entering the domain of astrology and prophecy. First, it is significant to point out that, as for Apophis and Nemesis, the supposed existence of an undetected faraway planet in our solar system is rooted in an ongoing scientific debate about unexplained aberrations in the orbits of other celestial bodies in the Kuiper Belt, which, according to recent mathematical modelling[32], could be justified by the presence of a large unobserved planet hiding beyond Pluto, nicknamed Planet X or Planet Nine.[note]Cf. K. Batygin, M. E. Brown, “Evidence for a distant giant planet in the solar system”, The Astronomical Journal, 2016, Vol. 151, 22.[/note] Secondly, while Sitchin’s prophecy remains somewhat incomplete, hinting at a vaguely defined End Of Days associated with the return of Nibiru, his work was completed in the 90s by Nancy Lieder, who was supposedly contacted by aliens warning her about an incoming cataclysm due to the passage of Nibiru in the inner solar system that would cause the Earth to be destroyed; the inevitable catastrophe was, and still is, being covered up by governments and institutions, in order to avoid a global wave of panic and nihilism that would crush the social, political and economic order of the world. Quoting from the archive of Nancy Lieder’s website Zeta Talk:

Article: <6ftpfq$sd5@dfw-ixnews5.ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Planet X/12th Planet Cover-Up Mechanism
Date: 1 Apr 1998 16:20:10 GMT

[…]

The panic that would ensue from a general announcement of the forthcoming cataclysms would in and of itself be deemed a disaster to avoid.  Beyond the concerns of the banking industry, which would collapse due to lack of confidence in the continuing worth of many assets, and beyond the concerns of industry which requires the faithful attendance of its employees in order to function, there is concern about possible looting, suicides, mass migration of peoples, and never-ending demands that the government do something.[note]Zeta Talk, Re: Planet X/12th Planet Cover-Up Mechanism, 1998, http://www.zetatalk.com/usenet/use00561.htm.[/note]

A lot more could be said about the theory of the Nibiru cataclysm and its impact on contemporary culture.[note]“The Earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it.”
“What?”
“Nobody will miss it.”
“But where would Leo grow up?”
“All I know is, life on Earth is evil.”
“There may be life somewhere else.”
“But there isn’t.”
Melancholia, Dir. Lars von Trier, 2011[/note] Two aspects of this visionary epic of extinction are particularly relevant to us for the elaboration of a catastrophic astrology: the reversal of the original timeline of the Mesopotamian creation myth and the mysteriously recurring association between the City of Babylon and the Apocalypse. The final impact with Nibiru that will put an end to humanity as we know it mirrors exactly the creation of the Earth from the remains of planet Tiamat. In Sitchin’s own words, somehow “the roles of, and references to, Tiamat and Earth appear to be interchangeable. Earth is Tiamat reincarnated”.[note]Sitchin, The Twelfth Planet, 231[/note] In other words, the Nibiru cataclysm is not simply the death of our world, but rather a birth in reverse: instead of being shaped out of the flesh of some sacrificed Original Mother, arising from formless darkness into light, life is sucked into a disintegrated future, reversing the patriarchal narrative of progress. From the perspective of human civilisation, Nibiru is thus a time-travelling monstrosity that comes from the future, for the future, realising the self-fulfilling prophecy of annihilation summoned by the same humanity that it created. Nibiru is not merely a planet, but the spaceship of an invading alien civilisation, whose technological advancement allows it to understand that the only possible, energetically efficient outlook for the advancement of their species is disintegration.[note]”The only way to get more tight-feedback under current conditions is by splitting, in every sense. That is the overwhelming practical imperative: Flee, break up, withdraw, and evade. Pursue every path of autonomization, fissional federalism, political disintegration, secession, exodus, and concealment. Route around the Cathedral’s educational, media, and financial apparatus in each and every way possible. Prep, go Galt, go crypto-digital, expatriate, retreat into the hills, go underground, seastead, build black markets, whatever works, but get the hell out.” Nick Land, “Quit”, Outside Inhttp://www.xenosystems.net/quit/.[/note] Quoting Nick Land on the energetic economy of gravity:

Lift-off, then, is merely a precursor to the first serious plateau of anti-gravity technology, which is oriented towards the more profoundly productive task of pulling things apart, in order to convert comparatively inert mass-spheres into volatile clouds of cultural substance. Assuming a fusion-phase energy infrastructure, this initial stage of off-world development culminates in the dismantling of the sun, terminating the absurdly wasteful main-sequence nuclear process, salvaging its fuel reserves, and thus making the awakened solar-system’s contribution to the techno-industrial darkening of the galaxy.[note]Nick Land, Lure of the Voidhttps://themigrationperiod.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/nicklandlureofvoid.pdf.[/note]

A sufficiently advanced civilisation will have to surrender to the inescapable law of thermodynamic nemesis — that no more can be put together than what is being torn apart; from the inertial reference system of an accumulating economy, whose timeline runs from dismemberment to aggregation, any disaggregating force is an invader collapsing backwards from the future. It is thus unsurprising that, as stated by Sitchin, “Marduk was coming into the solar system not in the system’s orbital direction (counter-clockwise) but from the opposite direction”.[note]Sitchin, The Twelfth Planet, 219[/note]. Nibiru, entering our world from the deep outside, is a planet forever in retrograde, because our sun-propelled gravitational time-loop prevents us from grasping the universe’s entropic drive towards destruction. Tiamat is no longer a primitive beast slaughtered on the altar of human civilisation, an original virgin to conquer and destroy. She is “the Vast Abrupt, and the crossing”.[note]Nick Land, “The Cult of Gnon”, Outside Inhttp://www.xenosystems.net/the-cult-of-gnon/.[/note] She is “the Great Propeller”, silently permeating our universe, undetected until She crashes into our reality.[note]Ibid.[/note] She is the future, and the future is female.

The idea that futurity is inherently feminine, and that femininity is the grave that Mesopotamian solar patriarchy excavated for itself unknowingly, is contained in the Book of Revelation in the figure of the whore of Babylon. Babylon shares with Nibiru a blurred definition of her identity: she is altogether a woman, a Goddess, a city and a civilisation; both of their names, meaning respectively the gateway and the crossing, do not indicate a particular place or time, but rather a relation between places and times. Both are associated with redness, as they are red in the blood of childbirth and the blood of slaughter; both are standing and both are falling at the End of Days. On a more superficial level of interpretation, Babylon incarnates a morally dissolute civilisation that thrives on wasteful consumption and celebrates the pleasures of the flesh; as city of the Tower, she is associated with unconstrained technological advancement beyond the boundaries of anything natural or human. Impure and artificial, decadent and oriental, implanted with shimmering prosthetic jewels, she is the western dream of the city of the Future.[note]”The Western civilisation in which Modernity ignited was ultimately combusted by it. From an Occidental Traditionalist perspective, Modernity is a complex and prolonged suicide. An Ultra-Modernist, who affirms the creative destruction of anything in modernisation’s path, assumes an alternative criterion, inherent to Modernity itself. It asks: What had to happen to the West for it to become modern? What was the essential event? The answer (and our basic postulate): Zero arrived. […] In Europe, zero was an alien, and from the perspective of parochial tradition, an infection. Cultural resistance was explicit, on theological grounds, among others. Implicit in the Ontological Argument for the existence of God was the definition of non-being as an ultimate imperfection, and ‘cipher’ — whose name was Legion — evoked it. The cryptic Eastern ‘algorism’ was an unwelcome stranger.” Nick Land, “Zero-Centric History”, Outside Inhttp://www.xenosystems.net/zero-centric-history/.[/note] Babylon is described in contrast with an opposing version of femininity, expressed by the figure of the Celestial Mother bearing the child of God; but somewhere in the desert they fuse together, becoming one and the same. The feminine Prima Materia, dismembered to give birth to the kingdom of God, is the apocalyptic Beast that “once was, now is not, and will come up out of the Abyss”, undead, crawling backwards from the future through the gates of Babylon to extinguish herself in a glorious fire together with everything that She created.[note]Revelation 17:8[/note]

Gaze into the sky, for the Future has come.
Mark our words: She is the Mother, the Devourer and the Fires that Consume the Universe.
Burn, love, and understand.
Today is the twilight of the God of Man.


Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land

This is the full-text transcript of an audio podcast, recorded over two sessions, with Nick Land. Several people contributed to the transcription effort, including Uriel Fiori, Luana Salles, Akira, Gullfire, and Nishiki.

Part 1: Acceleration, Ideology, Intelligence, Religion

Justin Murphy: You’re basically one of the leading thinkers, I would say arguably the leading thinker, of what we might call the school of thought that’s known as accelerationism. Accelerationism is something like the view that contemporary history is changing at an exponential rate, technologically and economically, and that this rate of change confounds nearly all of our traditional concepts for thinking about society and economics and politics. That’s just for people who have no idea what we’re going to be talking about, that’s broadly the school of thought you are known for and associated with, so maybe just before we even move forward (that’s my short, “elevator pitch” as it were), would you add anything to that? If someone on the street walked up to you and asked you “What is this whole accelerationism thing?” Is there a kind of essence or key upshot that you would add to what I just said?

Nick Land: We’re going to have this conversation so, you know, it’s probably … to try and anticipate might be a mistake, and I think as we start talking about it, we will find ourselves in various dimensions of accelerationism. In terms of my own involvement in it, I would say the guiding term, for certainly a long time, was cybernetics. The basic accelerationist thesis is that modernity is dominated by positive feedback processes rather than negative feedback processes, and the first wave of cybernetic theory — which consistently normalized negative homeostatic feedback and pathologized positive feedback — was therefore self-obsolescent. It was something that was not going to be a sustainable stance, given the — as you say — basic accelerating trend of the modern process, most extremely in its technological and economic dimensions. So that’s the “off the shelf” conceptual vocabulary that I think, at least initially, it comes in with, but it is itself extremely dynamic. And we’ve seen, an astounding range of different systems and terms of reference get sucked into this accelerationism conversation.

Justin Murphy: I’ve always been extremely curious about the relationship between your earlier work and your current thinking on these matters. A lot of your early work from the 1990s, it tends to embrace a fairly radical and even emancipatory political tone, I think it’s fair to say … it’s very kind of insurrectionary anarchist. There are a lot of feminist connotations. It’s very cyberpunk, obviously. It’s all about theorizing rebellion in the new digital context. Things like “hacking the macropod” and exploiting glitches in what you call the “human security system”, these sorts of notions … You talk about “k-war,” which I interpret as like revolutionary guerrilla warfare but on the level of the social codes. You’re even interested in more fantastic ideas such as stuff like “neolemurian time-war” in which one gets the sense that your position then seems to have been that these sorts of accelerationist insights might allow rebellious individuals and groups to fundamentally alter or hack the nature of social reality in ways that the status quo institutions are not able to defend against … There’s this very heady, emancipatory kind of tone to all of it, and so a lot of people who are interested in your work and your ideas, got into it through these early texts, and I think we know it’s very clear that since then, your thinking has evolved drastically, but what’s unclear I think is how and why exactly your thinking has changed or just how to understand the trajectory between those early heady, emancipatory connotations and your current viewpoints. So before even going into your current views and picking your brain about how you see these things today, I’m just curious if you could kind of mentally go back to the 1990s, when you’re theorizing all these kinds of radical ideas at the beginning. What was the first crack in that tendency for you? Like what gave, exactly? Was there a particular realization or insight or problem or anomaly in your viewpoint in the 90s that kind of cracked and made you see that all of these radical emancipatory ideas are not going to work, or how would you explain that?

Nick Land: These things come in waves. Wave motion is crucial to this. There was an extremely exciting wave that was ridden by the Ccru in the early to mid-1990s. You know, the internet basically arrived in those years, there were all kinds of things going on culturally and technologically and economically that were extremely exciting and that just carried this accelerationist current and made it extremely, immediately plausible and convincing to people. Outrageous perhaps, but definitely convincing. It was followed — and I wouldn’t want to put specific dates on this, really — but I think there was an epoch of deep disillusionment. I’d call it the Facebook era, and obviously, for anyone who’s coming in any way out of Deleuze and Guattari, for something called “Facebook” to be the dominant representative of cyberspace is just almost, you know, a comically horrible thing to happen! [Laughs.]

I just really responded to this with such utter, prolonged disgust that a certain deep, sedimentary layer of profound grumpiness — from a personal point of view — was added to this. But I don’t think it’s just a personal thing. I think that accelerationism just went into massive eclipse …

Justin Murphy: To me, what’s really at stake in this question is the nature of ideology — that’s one of the things I’m really interested in today — just what, exactly, is ideology? What is the most empirically sophisticated way to understand social communities’ tendencies to divide along ideological dimensions, the number of those dimensions, the relationship between those dimensions … I find it very fascinating and important because I think those are the tracks along which so much of the contemporary mass insanity and confusion go down … It almost seems to me like you — listening to you describe your own trajectory — it almost sounds like you’re endorsing a horseshoe theory of ideology, this idea that the radical left at a certain margin almost has to become right-wing to some degree? That seems to be kind of baked into what you’ve said about Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective on accelerationism, that the real way to rebel against capitalism is, in some sense, to be so capitalist that capitalism can’t handle it? Is that how you see it?

Nick Land: Actually, that’s not really how I see it, but I think it is an interesting suggestion and I think you’re touching upon this really fascinating and intricate zone in making that suggestion, for sure.

Justin Murphy: So what’s wrong with that, to you?

Nick Land: Before trying to respond precisely to that, let me just say that there is a fabric of discussion, obviously very connected to your point, which comes from the fact that (precisely because of this surreptitious, insidious strategy that Deleuze and Guattari use, I’m going to use them as the epitome of this thing that we’re involved in), the fact that that strategy has resulted in a question that has haunted accelerationism from its birth, which is precisely this “Is it a left-wing or right-wing process?” thing — that we’ve seen people exploring in stages later. The original leftist formulation of it was very different from anything that we get in what then becomes called left-accelerationism later. It’s almost like Lenin’s “the worse, the better”. The understanding of it is that, you know, what Deleuze and Guattari are doing, what the accelerationist current coming out of them is doing, is saying the way to destroy capitalism is to accelerate it to its limit. There’s no other strategy that has any chance of being successful.

Now, then, there’s a question, can we model what is being said there as a horseshoe? There is a certain kind of possible meeting point of hyper-rightists, proponents of capitalism, and hyper-leftists, defined as ferocious antagonists of capital. Yes, I will grant you, in that construction, that’s not implausible, that’s not impossible. And I think we do see these interesting crossovers. Obviously, one figure that is on the edge of this and of great interest to lots of people working in accelerationism-related areas is this guy who goes by the nick of Damn Jehu (if I’m pronouncing that right, I don’t know). He’s as absolute, fundamentalist Marxist as anyone I’ve ever come across. Absolutely fundamental anti-capitalist, proletarian-revolution economistic Marxist, and yet there’s a huge zone of resonance between his analysis and accelerationist currents, that could be seen as absolutely, offensively and unambiguously rightist in orientation. There’s something serious behind what you’re saying, it’s not like there’s nothing there, but I have to put my fourth point on the table, which will bounce back onto this question, which is the right-accelerationist commitment (that feeds into all kinds of later things but definitely is something already going on in the 1990s), that the actual, practical, social force of conservatism — all of what would be called “reaction” — is the political left. The political left is the thing that is set essentially against the imperative to accelerate the process.

By that definition of leftism, it’s really that — I can say this as soon as I’m not within a certain strategic context set by the the academy, but I think it’s not just the academy, it’s a structure of political and ideological hegemony — that it’s just misleading to really present this as a leftist project at all, you’re so against the basic grain, the basic impulsive imperatives of the left to say that, that it’s just … sure, you’ll do it for strategic reasons but then, when you’re no longer under that pressure, why would you? Why would accelerationism maintain some kind of affinity or affection for the left as a position, when it is in a position to come clean on the situation and just say, “Look, what the left is, is the counter-movement, it’s the opposition to the accelerationist process” … and that’s where I say it’s not really a horseshoe. It’s only a horseshoe if you continue to define the left in terms that don’t actually make any sociological sense.

[15:50] Justin Murphy: So if you think about the left and the right as both superficial, strategic, social, molar formations, then they’re really kind of mutually reinforcing paranoiac simplifications, trying to deal with the unbearable anxieties of economic acceleration. If you try to do either one of them too seriously, you might find yourself popping out into the other one, but that’s not for any deep meaningful reason but simply because they’re both delusional or strategically simplified, ultimately disingenuous tracks along which contemporary society sends people down, or something like that?

Nick Land: I think the terminology of left and right, for anyone like you who is fascinated by the question of ideology, it’s completely indispensable. I totally see why people get dissatisfied with that language and say “We have to move beyond this” or “This terminology ceases to be useful” but I have a sense of its kind of extreme resilience. I don’t see us ever stopping talking about the left and the right. It’s always going to come back in, I call it the prime political dimension, there is a basic dimension with left and right polarities that everyone returns to, after their wanderings and complications. And all kinds of ideological currents themselves have a strategic interest in either muddying the water or trying to get people to rethink what they mean.

But in the end, people come back to this basic dimension of ideological possibility and I think it is the one that captures the accelerationist tendency most clearly. On the right end of that is the extreme laissez faire, Manchester liberal, anarcho-capitalism kind of commitment to the maximum deregulation of the technological and economic process. And on the opposite extreme is a set of constituencies that seek in various ways to — polemically, I would say words like “impede” and “obstruct” and “constrain” and whatever, but I realize that’s just my rightism on display. And there are other ways of saying that, to regulate it or control it or to humanize it, I wouldn’t try and do a sufficiently sophisticated ideological Turing test on myself to try and get that right you know?

But I don’t think there’s any real … It’s not really questionable, which of those impulses is in play and I think that it’s on that dimension that so-called left-accelerationism is left, I mean, it’s left because it is basically in a position of deep skepticism about the capitalist process. It’s accelerationist only insofar as it thinks there is some other — I would say magical — source of acceleration that is going to be located somewhere outside that basic motor of modernity. They gesture towards the fact that things will somehow still be accelerating when you just chuck the actual motor of acceleration in the scrap. And I think that is the left.

Left-accelerationism is left in a way that is robust, that everyone will recognize, they definitely are in fact genuine leftists, they’re not playing games like that, and they catalyze, obviously, a right opposition as soon as they do that because they’re already [inaudible] the prime political dimension. They’re on the left pole of it, they’re in antagonism to, then, what is defining the right pole of that same spectrum.

Justin Murphy: So it sounds like you would basically say that Deleuze and Guattari are not really leftists. They might be writing from a kind of leftist milieu, and they might have some, sort of, leftist connotations, but the core of their project is not leftist because … you think leftism is basically the position of trying to slow down the accelerator?

Nick Land: Yes, I think that project is anti-leftist but smuggled-in — this insidious thing of subverting the Marxist tradition from inside. I think the Marxist tradition is easy to subvert from inside because the Marxist tradition is based upon an analysis of capitalism that has many very valuable aspects. And as soon as you’re doing that, then you are describing the motor of acceleration, and once you then make the further move that Deleuze and Guattari do — and Marx obviously at times does, too — of actually embracing the kind of propulsion that that motor is is generating, then you’re there. I mean, you’ve already crossed the line.

Justin Murphy: OK. I think that clarifies things. That’s interesting because you also said you think there are cyclical tendencies in ideological manifestations, you seemed to be referring to the possibility that in some times and places, to pursue a radically critical philosophy, you’ll tend to find yourself on the left, but at other times and places that might be more of a right-wing manifestation. Is that what you meant?

Nick Land: Yes. Well, nothing so articulate. But I think the question is extremely interesting. I’m not going to put a dogmatic response to that down. Sure. But I think the conversation could go down a huge, extremely interesting track, guided entirely by that question that you’ve just raised really, which would be, “Does the history of critique pass through these strange processes of ideological oscillation?” And I think there definitely does seem to be some indication of that.

There’s a lot of work that has to be done to really bring out the pattern really rigorously and clearly, but I’m absolutely convinced that Marxism in its core of maximum theoretical potency is definitely a working of critique in its strict Kantian, technical philosophical sense. And obviously, at a certain point, that seemed to have obvious anti-capitalist implications and I think that, in Deleuze and Guattari’s work that does flip, but it’s also complicated because in a sense Deleuze and Guattari are only excavating something that is already happening in Marx. They’re not really distancing themselves in any way from what Marx is doing, or even from his configuration of critique, they’re simply elevating it to an unprecedented point of lucidity. So maybe what you’re saying is that there is a kind of a subterranean rightist implication even in what seems to be, at a certain point in history, its absolute antithesis.

Justin Murphy: Well, how about this? What if we step out of the the ideological question and … let me ask you a question embedded in some of this, but without the ideological fetters on. Specifically, I want to go back a little bit to all of these notions and ideas that you spent a lot of time theorizing — which I mentioned before, in the 90s. There’s a lot of pretty concrete mechanisms or tactics, if you will, that you theorize in those early writings, ways that people can basically re-engineer our social reality — I referred to some of them before, I won’t go over them again.

But what I want to ask you is, has your empirical model of society changed in such a way that those kind of tactical ideas of reengineering social reality — do you believe that they no longer work? Or that you were wrong to think that they worked? Or is it just that those tactical abilities that humans have to alter social reality, maybe you would maintain that those ideas still empirically describe real possibilities available to people but they’re just not being pursued for idiosyncratic reasons, or what?

Nick Land: I think there are two dimension to this question, both are very interesting. On one level, there is a question of tactical — I’ll just repeat your language — various types of tactical potential. But I want to just abstract them from any attribution of a subject, because that’s what we’re going to then get onto on the flip side of this, which complicates things. Now, if we can do that, on one side we’re talking about the question of humanism, in its wider sense … Who is it who’s doing this stuff?

In the way you formulated the question, it’s very much like individuals or groups, conceived as agents, in a relatively conventional way, using or exploiting these tactical opportunities which therefore serve them as tools. You’ve got a clear teleological structure there. Coming along with that, therefore, you have a notion of political guidance at the level of these agents, where their individual collective is in some position of mastery over their tools or equipment or resources.

This second aspect is obviously much more complicated, though the first aspect [of tactical opportunities] … I would straightforwardly say: there’s absolutely no need to withdraw from this. This is partly back to this whole Facebook … this Facebook slump is the negative of this, but I think we’ve come out into an absolutely incandescent, new phase of technological and economic possibility driven by this fundamental dynamic vector of the internet. The basic socio-historical conditions right now are every bit as exciting as anything that was around in the 1990s. Totally.

And I would obviously say these blockchain technologies, I mean, they were envisaged in some sort of extremely abstract philosophical sense in the 1990s, everyone thought (who was looking at these issues at all), everyone could see that what the internet was going to do was produce these distributed structures that escaped the kind of established structures of governance that would be, in some insurrectionary sense, apolitical. You look back at some of these early cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist writings — Tim May, people like that — and they catch a hell of a lot of this stuff and what it’s going to do, and what it’s going to mean, and people were seeing that in the late 1990s and then they lost it …  the internet just looked like an extremely sad opportunity for this narcissistic implosion back into the most pathetic forms of subjectivity.

And then we’ve had an absolutely incredible resurgence of massively exciting processes in the last few years, the last decade, I don’t know how you would date it exactly.

So that’s all easily said. I haven’t at all become skeptical about those kinds of processes. But where I’ve always been skeptical is with the structures of agency that are supposedly employing these things. The big … I’m sorry if I’m relapsing back into ideological terminology you’re hoping to escape … my sense of just absolute distancing from the left is that I think it has a massive myth, a huge, massive, humanist myth about the fact that there are these human agents, they can be trusted in the final analysis to have sound political orientation, we should listen to them, we should trust their political judgments and instincts, and that all of these technological and economic resources properly belong in a state of teleological subordination beneath their political projects.

So you have this whole thing about “praxis is on top,” and capitalism [chuckles] … To summarize it, the technological and economic materials are subordinated in principle; even before you have your revolutionary suppression of capitalism, you have a theoretical suppression because you’re thinking of it as just a toolkit to be put in the hands of various kinds of human agents to pursue their projects. And as you’ve already said, that’s not, for me, a new problem. I mean, all of this — that’s the human security system! [Laughs.] I don’t trust the human security system, it’s not my friend … I’m not trying to empower it. I’m not … cheering it on. I don’t want it to improve its position of mastery in any way. I don’t see capitalism as its toy or tool, you know. My relation to that is just utterly antagonistic.

[33:30] Justin Murphy: So basically, all of the stuff you were thinking about in the 90s, which had a very left-wing flavor or a very emancipatory kind of motivation or drive or connotation — or I don’t know what exactly you want to call it — but these very emancipatory-seeming ideas that you’re theorizing in the 90s… You actually have not disavowed them at all. And interestingly, you’re kind of saying — if I hear you correctly — that you actually think they might be more salient now than ever, as we come out of this Web 1.0 or 2.0 slump. So that’s very interesting that …

Nick Land: Sorry, Justin, if I can just interrupt you for one minute, because again, this is two-sided … Yes, I nod along to everything you were just saying, but … the language of emancipation, it’s fine with me, you know, but — what is being emancipated?

Already in the 1990s, my interest is in the emancipation of the means of production. I have zero commitment to emancipation in any way defined by our dominant political discourses. I’m not into emancipated human groups, an emancipated human species, who reaches species-being to emancipate human individuals … None of that to me is of the slightest interest, so in using this word of emancipation, sure, I will totally nod along to it if what is meant by that is capital autonomization. I don’t think that’s something that it isn’t already there in the 1990s, but I’m no longer interested in playing weird academic games about this and pretending this is the same thing as what the left really means when they’re talking about emancipation. I don’t think it is. I think what the left means by emancipation is freedom from capital autonomization.

Justin Murphy: I definitely see the conceptual landmines here … The way that certain words here seem to have certain ideological affiliations you’re very keen to be on guard against, so I think I understand you clearly. I guess where I’m coming from, though — and I think this is a really important point — is that for people who read your work, and read accelerationism, who are aware of this school of thought, there is a very popular kind of interpretation in which it’s seen as, “Oh, accelerationism is that school of thought that says, basically, you should just accept the reality of capitalism and not only should you just accept the reality of capitalism, but you should more or less accept and even push forward its increasingly brutal tendencies”. So that’s obviously, for a lot of people, that’s a non-starter, but the reason that I’m interested in the questions I’m asking right now is because I think that common way of seeing accelerationism is really, really misguided, because on the one level, there’s everything you’re saying about how, yes, accelerationism does mean the foreclosure of human agency and the subject, and the increasing autonomization of capital, and a lot of these things that in the popular imagination are associated with oppressive dynamics, but … What I remain very interested in trying to understand, and also trying to explain and model, is that what a lot of people see as this kind of oppressive pessimistic horror show — and it sounds like you kind of play that up a little bit when you talk about things like horrorism (that’s sort of a separate sideline) — but what I’m interested in is, actually, there is a different way of reading the same empirical phenomena.

Yes it’s dehumanizing, its capital autonomization, and yes, there will be really brutal consequences. But at the same time, if what you’re really interested in is … if you see the world through categories such as freedom and liberation and emancipation, and kind of escape from oppression, if that is how you see the world, well actually, the accelerationist perspective still has a lot for you to be interested in. There’s still, in some sense, a lot for you to do. And you’re right that I’m kind of lapsing into a humanistic language which is, you know, just an unfortunate convenience, and you’re right you have to be careful to not kind of reproduce unnecessarily naive notions of the human subject.

But correctly understood, these processes of we might call “k-war” or “neolemurian time war” or hacking the human security system, all of these sorts of tactics that you very richly help people to see in your early texts, those are still there … And those are things that human beings who feel oppressed today can do. And maybe it’s not the naive human subject that’s going to be doing that, maybe it’s actually going to be a kind of tearing asunder of the human subject in the very act of doing it. But my point is simply, and this is what I wonder if you agree with, that whatever that is, it’s as close as we can get as human beings to what some of us have been calling “freedom” or “emancipation” or “liberation”, that there are still things we can do in this accelerationist paradigm, that are a lot like what people had in mind whenever they they’ve talked about liberation and freedom.

That’s kind of the really important upshot from the accelerationist worldview that I am extremely interested in and am actively pursuing, and I find it very … I do find it liberating! I find it actually energizing and propelling in a way that I consider to be emancipatory, and I think there’s a lot of research to be done on how to do those things and how to work those things out. But a lot of people can’t see that because they think this whole accelerationism thing is just a kind of reactionary capitulation to everything that they see as being terrible and oppressive. Does that make sense, I wonder?

Nick Land: Yes, that whole thing … I think it’s an extremely rich field, as you know because of your deep involvement in it. The accelerationist landscape right now is absolutely extraordinary, in terms of the incredible stuff people are doing. There’s a whole flourishing of just fantastic accelerationist resources and blogs and discussions and … it’s never remotely been in this state of flourishing and the kind of questions that you’re raising just there are very much integral to that, and being thrashed out very much by all kinds of people within these different interlocking, interacting strains of accelerationist theories. So for sure, that conversation, it’s not only that it’s interesting and to be encouraged, but I think it’s probably absolutely inevitable and something that we can just confidently predict is going to be one of these explosive dynamics.

I would tend to put myself, predictably [laughs], on the dark side of that whole ecology of discussion, because it just comes back to this question about humanism, the human animal, its ideological self-aggrandizement, and what is going on in that. I guess I’m sort of drifting somewhere very close to agreement with you, in saying something like, true emancipation, as something that is intensely and really produced, corresponds strictly to a process of dehumanization. Yeah, that would be the way I would put it, in trying to be in maximum resonance with what I took you to be saying.

Justin Murphy: OK well, I think that’s actually a really nice and relatively neat way to wrap up that segment of the conversation then. Maybe we should not beat a dead horse as it were, and move on a little bit.

Nick Land: Without wanting to seize the steering wheel, it seems to me like this is a really good place to go into the artificial intelligence discussion. The kind of problems and questions you were just raising are obviously extremely pertinent, in that, again, that huge field that I think intersects with accelerationism in a huge way, and is precisely haunted by the same kind of terrors of oppression … of whatever is mapped under this umbrella term of unfriendly AI, which is an update on a lot of the old terrors of what capitalism is delivering for us, and obviously again cuts across all these questions about agency in human identity, the definition of intelligence and subjectivity … So right there, already at this stage in the discussion …

[45:10] Justin Murphy: Sure. Is there a particular point about AI that you think feeds in directly to what we were just talking about?

Nick Land: Well, if I can just backtrack a tiny bit. I think there’s one point about the AI landscape that we reached right at the beginning of this whole discussion, which is that the model of intelligence explosion as it comes out of the more rigorous but still speculative side of the artificial intelligence world — I’m thinking particularly of this amazing essay by I.J. Good, I’m gonna forget the name now, I won’t try and recall it [Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine], but he launches the term intelligence explosion in that essay. It’s an extremely good fit for the kind of core commitment of accelerationism, and intelligence explosion is the name for the thing that accelerationism is looking at. This notion is obviously controversial within the whole AI discussion. I don’t think anyone would doubt its importance, but there are definitely people who have questioned its possibility. I think accelerationism finds itself committed automatically on one side of those internal debates around intelligence explosion.

Justin Murphy: There’s a popular image of the intelligence explosion, in particular the possibility of catastrophic failure modes in which, basically, superintelligence … one fine day in the near future … something clicks into place and suddenly there’s a kind of rapid take off. That’s, I think, a picture that has been put into a lot of people’s minds, in large part through Nick Bostrom’s influential book. He outlines a bunch of possible pathways, but now when people think of really catastrophic possibilities, this is something that commonly comes to mind, and something that I think about a lot is the connection to your work. You know, I’m very skeptical to be honest, of that picture of the situation, because I think if you look at capitalism in the kind of light that you do, if you see capitalism as this kind of pan-historical, almost substrate of reality itself, as kind of cybernetic, capitalism is almost in the nature of things, in your model. Correct me if you see it differently, but that’s kind of how I read you.

If you think of intelligence as this — how should I put this? — it’s almost like you see all of human history as a kind of intelligence explosion and that capitalism as we know it is already this long-term, explosive historical process. And so it’s always seemed to me that the very catastrophic, malignant failure modes of superintelligence — I take them very seriously — it seems to me like it’s already happening in the form of capitalism. There’s a lot of reason to read your work as saying that, but I’m not sure if you agree with that or not. What do you think?

Nick Land: I think it comes down, again, just to these very, very basic cybernetic diagrams to do with positive feedback. And one sort of image — it’s an entirely satisfactory image once it’s accepted that it is figurative — is a critical nuclear reaction. You have a pile of radioactive rods that are damped down by graphite containment rods, and you start pulling out those graphite rods, and at a certain point it goes critical and you get an explosion. It’s just absolutely — it’s not a metaphor — it’s a positive feedback process [laughs]. It just is a positive feedback process that passes through some threshold and goes critical. And so I would say that’s the sense [in which] capitalism has always been there. It’s always been there as a pile with the potential to go critical, but it didn’t go critical until the Renaissance, until the dawn of modernity, when, for reasons that are interesting, enough graphite rods get pulled out and the thing becomes this self-sustaining, explosive process.

So in a certain sense, a lot of the actual fabric, the social historical fabric, is actually a containment system. And I think that containment system had a failure mode in the Renaissance. Just to dip back into the hyper-ideological space for a minute, what the extreme kind of what I call “paleo-reactionaries” get right is that they they totally see that. I share nothing of their mournful affection for the medieval period, but I think they’re totally right to say that there was a catastrophic failure that unleashed this explosive process, and that is what modernity is from the perspective of the Ancien Régime. What any social system is for is to stop this nuclear pile going off. You look at Chinese civilization and you say, well, what is it really doing? What’s it for? From a certain perspective, it’s a capitalism containment structure that obviously worked better in this traditionalist sense than the European one. The European one was too fractured, it was subject to a whole bunch of wild, uncontrollable influences, and unprecedented feedback structures kicked off that no one was in a position to master in Europe.

And so we get capitalism and modernity in Europe, and capitalism and modernity is brought to China by Western gunboats. It’s not like they’re bringing a gift, what they’re bringing is … they’re coming to pull the [laughs] graphite containment roads out, you know, from outside. That’s what that process of Chinese modernization is. It’s a process of the indigenous Chinese process of containment being dismantled from outside until it then — obviously in a way that is no less spectacular than the one we’ve seen in the West — goes into this self-sustaining modernist eruption basically in the early 1980s.

Justin Murphy: I really like your vivid metaphor of the radioactive rods and the containment system. I think that really helps someone picture what’s at stake. Is this all to say that, do you think all of the people today who are talking about “AI alignment” — the people that are trying to ensure that, if and when there’s a superintelligence take-off, that it won’t be catastrophic — do you view those efforts as doomed?

Nick Land: Yes. Catastrophic, obviously, is a word that’s going to wander all over the place. And I’m a massive critic of the most popular catastrophist models epitomized by, I think, honestly, this pitifully idiotic paperclip model that was popularized by Yudkowsky, that Bostrom is still attached to, that you know, is very, very widespread in the literature, and I think, for reasons that maybe we can go into at some point, is just fundamentally mistaken. So that notion of catastrophe — as something very stupid happening as a result of an intelligence explosion — I find deeply implausible. But catastrophic in a technical sense, as it’s used in catastrophe theory — there being some trigger point we enter into as a self-feeding positive dynamic — is absolutely right.

This is all about the history of capitalism. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not talking about catastrophic failure modes; on the contrary, it’s precisely why we’re talking about catastrophic failure modes, because we’ve seen, in the case of modernity, that that is what happens. That’s what liberation looks like: pulling out enough of the containment structure that this new, self-feeding dynamic process erupts.

There are these reactionary voices that say that when liberals talk about liberalism, they’re really talking about some kind of disaster. I don’t think that’s a trivial or stupid thing to say. There’s obviously room for very different sets of evaluative responses around that, but there’s a thought there that is actually profoundly realistic — and one I definitely think is more realistic than the kind of facile liberalism that says “everything just gets better and better and better”. That perspective from which things are getting better is just deeply artificial and constructed. It doesn’t correspond to any real agents. The real, significant agents are the guys who are running the containment structure. The weak spin on that is deeply disingenuous.

Justin Murphy: One thing I’m thinking about is how you read this problem of intelligence explosion — say, the difference between Nick Bostrom’s book and the larger historical narrative that you get from your writings. The difference is really significant in terms of cosmology. It’s a fundamentally different picture of what human society and human history is — and in some sense, the history of the universe. Everything people like Bostrom are highlighting right now has been a possibility baked into the nature of reality. It’s basically the cybernetic substrate of the evolution of everything that we’ve ever known. So long as there have been intelligent processes, there has been the spectre of positive feedback of intelligent processes that take off and leave behind all carbon-based deadweights. All of this gets strangely close to traditional religious worldviews. Have you ever noticed that, or have you ever thought about that?

Nick Land: The fact that people now are seeing more and more of what is happening in terms of religious lineages is hugely important in its cold realistic development. So yes, absolutely. This has been a huge thing I’ve seen really in the last decade; this massive, massive explosion of saying, “Hey, look at this, isn’t this just actually intelligible within a particular religious lineage?”

[59:25] Justin Murphy: The very frontiers of science, the very frontiers of philosophy, even the very frontiers of the radical, critical, anti-institutional sorts of projects, and traditional religious worldviews, they’re all converging in a shared underlying model of reality. We are rapidly — and more rapidly than ever — approaching a limit, and we don’t know what’s behind that wall, but whatever it is was something there from the beginning. You talk a lot about how, on some level, you can’t really justify talking about the past causing the future, and that on some level of abstraction you can just as well say that the future causes the past. All of this stuff about intelligence is making us take these ideas increasingly seriously — people like Bostrom and lots of others who take very seriously the simulation argument, the possibility that perhaps everything we know has some sort of creator. In other words, they’re all of these very, very strange loops in which the most hardcore rationalist line of thought seems to converge with very traditional models of the world. In some sense, I think early pre-modern human beings always had a sense that our ability to intelligently exploit the environment was going to end really badly.

Nick Land: To regress a little bit in our discussion, one of the things that is coming into crisis is our sense of the relationship between humanity and intelligence. There is a certain way that that couple became very thoroughly soldered together, even in places where it seemed unlikely. For instance, for certainly popular modes of theology, the notion of a supreme cosmic intelligence as a deity is accompanied by this massive anthropomorphization of what that being will be like. There are all these resonances between god and man that cement this notion that there is some profound relationship between the anthropomorphic and the intelligent. This structure has been really badly pulled apart by modernity and has been coming to shreds, and people have obviously seen that happening long ago.

The discussions that are happening around artificial intelligence are deeply connected with that. The notion of friendly AI, for instance: I’m not saying it’s reducible to a kind of new, synthetic anthropomorphic model of intelligence, but it’s not completely separate either. It’s anthropomorphic pretty much to the same degree as theologies have been.

A sophisticated theologian will say it’s only the vulgar, low-grade versions of religious tradition that actually anthropomorphize superhuman intelligences — in the same way that someone in AI will say it’s only a vulgarization to think that they’re anthropomorphizing this notion of a friendly AI. But in both cases, the anthropomorphization is actually the predominant cultural phenomenon. There’s a fringe of sophistication that can, with some credibility, say it’s not fallen into that culture.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the utterly brilliant remark by Elon Musk where he says that it would be unfortunate if the human species was to turn out to be the biological bootloader for artificial intelligence. There’s a huge amount going on in there. All of our terrors are going on in there, that notion of what a catastrophic failure in this domain is going to be like. But also, what you see happening here is this rending of the fusion of humanity and intelligence where suddenly you begin to think — and a lot of people are — that actually, we’re not abstract intelligence. Our intelligence is supposed to be instrumental in relation to our humanity. We are a specific biological species with a set of interests that are determined in terms of species preservation, not in terms of intelligence optimisation. Maybe intelligence optimisation collides in an extremely vicious way with our biological species’ interest in terms of human self-preservation, whether as something recognisably human — whatever that means — or even as a carbon-based life form, or as something whose basic mode of reproduction passes through the DNA molecule. All of these things are open to a whole variety of extreme scenarios.

But it makes perfect sense for someone to say, “What science is telling me is that I am a transmission device for a hereditary piece of DNA code. And that’s where my interests lie. I don’t have any interest at all in the optimisation of intelligence insofar as it’s going to move the whole reproduction of complex chemistry on this planet onto a new reproductive substrate.” That’s extinction; that’s a disaster. But it’s a disaster that could still be intelligence-optimizing — a disaster that could still be,  in cold, neutral terms, the most glorious thing that has yet happened in planetary history. It’s entirely compatible that this could be totally consistent with the worst nightmare in our biological history as a species.

Justin Murphy: Again, it’s all extremely religious because it could very well be that the greatest catastrophe of the species is also the saving grace and the greatest glory of the species. These are all notions that are embedded in the world’s religions — at a low resolution, for sure. But we’re constantly falling back onto this vocabulary that it seems like there’s something else doing the work that’s not human agency.

When you think about how unfashionable religion is in the West, I find a symptom there. There’s something symptomatic going on there that might be a bit of a clue as to the mass ideological insanity that is wreaking havoc on the public sphere today. Rationalism is obviously the order of the day; it’s the order of modernity. On the one hand, it seems like if we have any chance of navigating what is coming down the pike and what is already underway with the explosion that is modernity, it seems undeniable that intelligence is a valuable and necessary asset in figuring out how to survive, how to live. And yet, it also seems to be that this headlong collapse into unbridled rationalism is also the cause of so much of what horrifies us.

When you take these things together — the fact that religious or traditional worldviews are being very strangely vindicated by the frontiers of science and critical philosophy — but you also take note that people are rabidly afraid of taking religion seriously, I think that is a symptomatic knot of what is driving people so insane.

Nick Land: This is at a slight diagonal to what you’re saying — it’s definitely not just a translation of it — but we’re back on these strange loops and the fact that the most archaic forms of religiosity are found at the end. Time is not simply taking us away from those things. So I agree with that. But I think the diagonal is also a set of revisions to a lot of niche public conversations that have come, as far as I’m concerned, from Mencius Moldbug’s work. He’s mostly talking about religion, and he’s mostly talking about the fact that secularism is cladistically religious. It’s not that it has simply put religion behind it; it’s a particular type of development within a religious tradition. I see so many people say this that it’s become difficult to attribute it to anyone in particular, but the claim that atheism, as it is generally understood in Western societies, is a particular variant of extreme Protestantism. It is not at all outside of it. It has not escaped our religious tradition, it’s just the dominant phase of our religious tradition. I’m seeing lots of people beginning to move into this mode of analysis.

What is collapsing is a certain kind of extremely smug notion of transcendent secular rationalism, as if it’s really looking at the world’s cultures from outside and above, in some position of perfect neutrality — whereas instead, it’s massively historically and culturally embedded, and it’s looking out of its own very specific cladistic branch of cultural development at other parts of the planet’s cultural shrubbery. It’s not that that doesn’t have roots; you could see the whole crisis that was visited upon the West by the introduction of comparative religion, where for the first time people couldn’t help but see their own religious tradition as something that was relativised by these other religious cultures that were being discovered around the world. It obviously had a very corrosive cultural impact. But what’s different about this is that it really is about losing the sense of transcendence completely.

There just simply are no perspectives that are not immanent to cultural history. Once that’s taken seriously, then the notion that people have put certain religious problems behind them just begins to look very smug. It’s a kind of smugness that is becoming increasingly fragile.

To loop this right back to what you were saying, that fragility is making people very bad-tempered. There’s a wide sense in a lot of people that these very basic structures of sensibility are disintegrating. They’re becoming unsustainable, and that makes people furious. They want to lash out at what they worry is a big challenge to it, or to things they think are somehow exhibiting less fragility, or as a way of demonstrating the fact that they still have remained in the same place, or for all kinds of reasons. When these basic belief structures enter into a crisis, it does produce this extreme atmosphere of vituperation and resentment that we’re seeing on a huge scale.

Part 2: Blockchain, Critique, Time, Patchwork

[1:15:44] Nick Land: [The term] “Bitcoin” can be used safely as being the carrier of the blockchain. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first one is just network effects, or first-mover advantage; it has installed itself. Part of its fascination is that it’s an open-source protocol. Anybody can just take that code today and launch a Bitcoin 2, or whatever, that is absolutely indistinguishable from Bitcoin 1, except for the history. The history is everything: all our Bitcoin has is the fact that it’s the first one. It has this first-mover advantage, this network effect. Why would you move from Bitcoin 1 to Bitcoin 2? The clone could be perfect, so there would be absolutely no reason not to, except for this mass accumulation of network effects that is already there with the first version of the thing.

Justin Murphy: I just wanted to clarify whether or not you were remarking about specific features of Bitcoin relative to other cryptocurrencies, or if you’re more generally talking about the properties of blockchain itself. It sounds like the latter.

Nick Land: Both are really interesting. If you get into the discussion, then you would very quickly start talking about other instantiations of the blockchain, other altcoins and all of this, which definitely can’t be just ignored or put aside. But if people are doing that in order to somehow dismiss the predominance or pre-eminence of Bitcoin, then I think that’s a mistake. Insofar as this is a blockchain revolution, it is because Bitcoin is going to continue to feature very, very significantly in that.

Justin Murphy: Maybe we could just dive in right away to the relationship between Bitcoin and philosophy, because I think that that very idea will confuse or surprise a lot of people. When people think about blockchain or Bitcoin, they think it’s a very interesting and potentially very important financial technological innovation, but how on Earth could this have implications for philosophy? Maybe you could help us understand how you see the philosophical implications of Bitcoin. In some sense, that’s what we’ll be unpacking for the better part of this conversation, but just as a first jump into that question … How did you first make that connection in seeing philosophical implications here?

Nick Land: There are two sides to this, from my point of view, that lock in the importance of the topic. One of them is already a sort of philosophically-freighted issue, but to a second order, and that is the fact that something like Bitcoin is baked into the modernist cake extremely deeply. The actual possibility of technically instantiating it relies on a set of incredible technical achievements having been made, but those achievements — that would be made one way or another — have been extremely predictable.

The whole tradition of spontaneous order, in the old sense, the liberal tradition of modernity — notably passing through the Scottish Enlightenment and then through the Austrian School of Economics — had broad schemas for the technical and economic developments that it considers to be compelled by modern development, that really draw a profile of something very much like Bitcoin. If you look more recently into the computer and internet age, you see a lot of old texts about crypto-anarchy, about the way that anonymous internet transactions are going to impact on society, that obviously were formulated before anyone had actually worked out how to make a blockchain.

But at the same time, when you get the blockchain, you have this “aha moment” of saying, “This is what people were seeing. This is the actual realisation of something that people were only seeing in much more abstracted terms before that”. That is, in the broad framework of political economy and political philosophy, Bitcoin is something that you recognise, when you see it, as having already been in play in a much longer tradition.

For the real, more crunchy, philosophical side, the argument I would strongly want to make is that there is a really powerful isomorphism between Bitcoin and critique in its Kantian sense. I’ll run through that really quickly and then we can pick over it like vultures later. The main way this works is that the most abstract formulation of critique is something like, “objectivity should not be confused with an object”. If you make that confusion, then you’re doing metaphysics, and recognising the error of that move — of confusing objectivity with an object — is basically the whole of the critical enterprise.

There are probably several ways that that translates across into the technosphere, but I’ll just reduce it to two. First of all, the internet itself. People know, in a broad socio-cultural and technological sense, the story of the internet and the fact that it begins from this series of strategic military imperatives for a robust communication system that would survive a nuclear exchange. The reason it would survive a nuclear exchange is because there are no indispensable nodes in the system. You can, to an arbitrary degree, take out important nodes in the internet — and of course, if you carry on doing that enough, you will finally eliminate the system — but the robustness of the internet is the fact that you have to work a long way down, taking out these hubs successively until you finally get to a point where the thing becomes dysfunctionally shredded. The further down you have to go to do that, the more powerful the internet is as a distributed system. And you get all the internet effects from that: the fact that it’s relatively censorship-resistant, that it offers a lot of autonomy to low-level nodes, the fact that it can route around obstacles. On the internet, when you route around an obstacle, you emulate a hostile nuclear strike. You say, “I don’t want to go past this or that gatekeeper, and I will just assume that they have been vaporised by a foreign nuclear device and go around them some other way”. There are always more of these other ways being brought on stream all the time.

So, with the internet, formulated in terms of critique, you make a metaphysical error if you misidentify the system with any node or group of nodes in the system. That’s the isomorphism, the relation between objectivity and the object, or the media system and the nodes in that system. The internet is already a materialisation, a technological instantiation, of critique, and Bitcoin then builds on that and takes it to the next stage.

Satoshi Nakamoto is completely explicit in his kind of repeated mantra about Bitcoin that it’s about bypassing trusted third parties. The trusted third party is in the role — in Bitcoin’s realized-materialized thought space — that a central commanding hub would be in terms of the internet, or the supreme metaphysical error that these metaphysical objects are for pre-critical philosophy. Bitcoin is a critique of trusted third parties, that is deeply isomorphic with critique in its rigorous Kantian sense, and then with the historical-technological instantiation of critique. And that’s why I think it’s a philosophically rich topic.

Justin Murphy: That was an excellent opening summary of how you see the philosophical implications. Maybe we could try to unpack it a little bit, because I think there’s a lot of stuff there that’s really fascinating but won’t at all be obvious to a lot of listeners. One thing that I’m thinking about, listening to you give that summary, is whether or not the story that you tell which begins with modernity — and with a sort of modern tradition of philosophical critique — whether or not the process you’re delineating really actually goes back to the beginning of time, as it were, in the sense that Bitcoin is a more perfect and formal realization of technological and economic dynamics of which the internet was an original kind of best shot, given the technological frontier at the time the internet appeared. But the internet was also really just the frontier manifestation of the same phenomenon that the printing press essentially was as well. And then further on down the line of historical time.

In other words, especially relating what you’re saying now to some of your other work, and some of the other ideas I think we both might be equally interested in about the nature of capital itself, and the nature of the long run of human history, or even life on this planet, seeing it as this kind of more or less continuous cybernetic evolutionary process, I wonder if there’s a reason why you begin your discussion with modernity. Why could you not tell one continuous story within the framework that you’re presenting? Or could you?

[1:30:32] Nick Land: You’re right that I would be reluctant to do that. I definitely think that modernity is a singularity, that there’s a huge historical discontinuity involved in it. I can totally see that that is a controversial argument, and historians obviously treat it, I think, quite explicitly, as a controversial point. People will argue both ways on that. But at the crudest level of responses, it just seems to me, empirically, there is a sort of stark historical discontinuity that happens roughly in the Renaissance, where it really seems that something new has begun to happen.

Justin Murphy: So basically, the thing that’s new with modernity — it’s very hard to pin down the primary variables, because it’s a cluster of variables, as you’ve kind of indicated — the very idea of applying human rationality to traditional institutions and thinking about them critically, early capitalism, early technological innovations such as joint stock corporations and double entry bookkeeping … all of these are candidates for the key cause that sends modernity off into exponential takeoff, or singularity as you put it. But I think it’s exceedingly difficult to try and pin down the primary variable among all of those variables, which was most importantly responsible for the takeoff that we call modernity. They seem to happen more or less in a self-reinforcing kind of cluster phenomenon.

Nick Land: I’m tempted to make two quite disconnected remarks about it. One is the fact that the arrival of zero in Europe does strike me as overwhelmingly synchronized with the catalysis of modernity. Now, people obviously say, “Well, zero was around a long time. So what’s so special about the arrival of zero in Europe?” I think that’s a good and important question to ask, and it maybe then bounces us onto the other side of this …

Which is to say, this notion — which is still entirely contemporary and probably intensified right now in a way it’s never been before — this notion of the route-around. I think it’s utterly crucial to this. Once you really have robust route-arounds, you have this process in motion. So what you’re trying to understand is “What is it that happened in Europe in the Renaissance with the arrival of zero that was different to what had happened in India?” I think it’s quite clear that China had a functional notion of zero, it was obviously so prevalent in the Muslim world that people often call the numeracy “the Arabic numerals” — that was certainly how they were received by the West at the time — in none of those cultures do you get that same dynamic of escape. Modernity just isn’t able to escape from the prevailing systems of social organization. There’s something about the European situation — I would say it surely has to have, as one crucial component, the massive amount of regime fragmentation that you find in Europe relative to these other cultures — that it was able to get out of the box in a way that was prevented in its other social contexts.

Justin Murphy: So the way you see it is that, perhaps, for contingent, historical, institutional reasons, it’s in Europe that something which human civilization, up until then had tried to contain — was able to, to some degree, contain — was able to get out of the box, as you put it, and you think that that is especially, uniquely, related to the arrival of zero in human mathematical capacities within Europe. You think that that was a profound qualitative rupture that allowed something to escape and something that we’ve really never been able to put back in the box since then?

Nick Land: Yes, I would say that’s exactly what I think.

Justin Murphy: So maybe we could think a little bit about what exactly is that thing that escaped, because, I mean, I guess one plausible candidate would be, perhaps we just call this intelligence itself?

Nick Land: The crucial notion is intelligence production. There’s always been intelligence kicking around, but what is specifically modern is the fact that you’re actually able to lock in a positive feedback circuit on intelligence production, and therefore, to have a runaway intelligenic process. This is something that is uniquely modern. Often when you’re looking at the highest examples of intelligence in a culture, you’re looking precisely at the way that it has been fixed and crystallized and immunized against that kind of runaway dynamic — the kind of loops involving technological and economic processes that allow intelligence to go into a self-amplifying circuit are quite deliberately constrained, often by the fact that the figure of the intellectual is, in a highly-coded way, separated from the kind of techno-social tinkering that could make those kind of circuits activate. And so what we’re talking about with modernity, or capitalism, is the fact that the inhibitor system on that kind of circuitry becomes dysfunctional and ceases to obtain.

Justin Murphy: What is unique about zero, you think, that kind of unlocks something? Why would the arrival of zero specifically be a candidate for the profound shift that occurs?

Nick Land: The most striking thing about the explosion of modernity, in all of its dimensions, is it has this immensely mathematical character. When you’re saying, “Has modernity erupted yet?”, you’re looking at the natural sciences, you’re looking at the mathematicization of theories of nature, you’re looking at business, you’re looking at, obviously, the absolutely fabulous explosion of the systems of accountancy that were completely unprecedented in scale and complexity and sophistication.

Before technology, similarly, it’s to do with applied mathematics. And so, on one level, the arrival of zero in the culture is the arrival of a truly functional mathematics, just out of that arithmetical semiotic. And if you go back the other way, you can say, “Well, in the mirror, when we’re talking about modernity as the singularity, we’re actually engaged in a study of social control systems, dampening devices, inhibitors, a whole exotic flora and fauna of systems for the constraining of explosive dynamics. And it seems to me, clearly, in the Western case — what we can see retrospectively — one crucial inhibitor-mechanism was the radically defective nature of the arithmetical semiotic that was then dominant in the West. And so, again, we’re really talking about a sort of negative phenomenon that zero just liquidates — a certain system of semiotic shielding, that is dampening down certain potential processes.

Justin Murphy: The pre-modern worldview can be thought about as an artificially constrained scale of the relative values and magnitudes of things. This is perhaps most famously encoded in the notion of the Great Chain of Being. So if we just very crudely simplify the pre-modern worldview as this worldview in which everything has a place, everything has some sort of positive value, in other words, starting at zero, and going up to god, or something like that. So everything in the world, everything that’s real, everything that exists, has some value greater than zero, in some sense. And those values are known, they’re enforced by traditional authorities. And they even make a good deal of sense relative to human heuristics about what is valuable, and attractive, and what’s not. And so, that can actually work fairly well in a limited way for some time.

But what’s interesting about that is you can see it as a kind of suppression of zero in some sense; what it’s not quite able to intuit is that, in fact, the number line goes from negative infinity to positive infinity, and there is, smack dab in the middle of that, a unique quantitative value of zero that actually has no value whatsoever.

And the reason why I think that this way of thinking about it might be relevant or just useful heuristically is because it seems to me that part of the catastrophe of modernity, as it unfolds, especially for human experience, and our ability to process what’s happening and to interact with each other in at all healthy and sustainable ways — there’s this very peculiar symmetry or really chaotic, chaotically cycling nature to intelligence, where it really is kind of the basis of all good and the basis of much that people call evil. And I wonder if your idea about zero has something to do with this because, in some sense, you can think of the pre-modern worldview enforced by traditional authorities as keeping a kind of forced lid on precisely that chaotic cycling around the zero point.

The liberation of mathematics is kind of the unmooring of rationality’s ability to anchor itself ethically. It seems to me that the pre-modern traditions and especially the world religions, and perhaps I have in mind Catholicism in particular is, almost, you can really read it as precisely one dedicated solution to that very problem. Perhaps that’s why zero is unique, if, in fact, your hypothesis is right, because it sort of makes possible this chaotically perverse symmetry around the number line, or something like that.

[1:45:10] Nick Land: Where you started off seems to me worth isolating in itself, because it’s super convincing: this question just about the scale of available magnitude. It’s obviously hugely characteristic of this transition of arithmetical semiotics. If you’re using Roman numerals, every new magnitude has a letter. I mean, you’d run out of letters! They don’t even use them all! Exactly as you say, the range of conceivable magnitudes would therefore be hugely constrained by that semiotic.

It clearly is a characteristically modern phenomenon to have this massive explosion in the range of conceivable magnitudes. And something that the semiotic obviously just pushes hard. It’s a really reliable index of acceleration. The fact that we now talk about billions and trillions, quadrillions, that’s very recent. You don’t have to go back very far before “a billion” seemed like an almost preposterous number. The notion that you would just be throwing it into casual conversation, that it’s something that’s just marked on your memory chip, was totally inconceivable. I think that there’s an imagined, to use your language, Great Chain of Being, that involves a relatively limited number of conceptually manageable magnitudes, marked fairly adequately by the letters of the Roman alphabet — and that is just blown to pieces into this screaming cosmic immensity that the new numbers open for us.

Justin Murphy: I guess zero is also uniquely abstract, if you think about it, so it might have something to do with a certain opening onto abstraction.

Nick Land: You can’t say that strongly enough. It’s the absolute definition of the absolutely abstract.

Justin Murphy: At a certain point, our technologies for abstraction reach a breaking point where intelligence itself becomes auto productive, if I understood you correctly.

Nick Land: That actually is closer to something like a Kurzweil-type historical model. And it’s not that I don’t think there’s much to that, but at the risk of being repetitive here, the thing I really want to emphasise when talking about what we mean by the pre-modern, is that we’re talking about an entirely positive inhibitory apparatus. In the early stages of control engineering, of cybernetics, all the emphasis is on the inhibitory apparatus. The inhibitory apparatus is considered, into the mid-20th century, to be obviously what control engineering is about. The explosive element is systematically themed as pathological, dysfunctional, as disturbance, as some kind of social threat. That’s why I’m slightly reluctant to see it translated as if there’s this long-term trend struggling towards getting to takeoff point, as if the historical impetus is basically straining towards this explosive outcome, as if it finally arrives at the capacity for modernity. This is not a realistic model. I think it’s rather that there is a regime failure that allows modernity to break out.

Justin Murphy: That’s an interesting distinction, definitely worth making. So you actually don’t see the explosive dynamics of intelligence accumulation over time as a process that begins in the beginning of time.

Nick Land: Yes, it has to be said that of course you only have a sophisticated, complicated inhibitory structure if there’s something that you’re inhibiting. In any complex information system — unquestionably throughout the history of life — there have been processes of positive cybernetic escape, and within those fields, appropriate systems of the production of an inhibitory apparatus. It’s not that I’m wanting to say that that positive potential is something that only miraculously arrived in modernity. I think I’m quoting Deleuze and Guattari — where they say, it’s the terror that has haunted the whole of history. When you’re doing this concrete analysis of the actual machinery of a pre-modern regime, you’re implicitly looking at the way that it prevents autocatalytic catastrophe happening under the conditions of that society.

Justin Murphy: One of the things I think is really interesting about your work is the way that you really emphasize that critique, as we know it, is more or less the same thing, if I understand correctly, as capitalism itself.

Nick Land: Yes, I think so. And absolutely as modern thought, modern philosophy.

Justin Murphy: A lot of people today I think walk around with a kind of model in their heads in which rational critique and leftism are more or less synonymous. People think of, you know, Marx and the whole the entire tradition of criticizing capitalism as kind of the epitome of applying the human mind to social institutions. So a lot of people carry around this kind of natural presumption that rationality, and intelligent critique, is a kind of natural partner of creating social organizations and projects and institutions to make the irrationality of capitalism more rational, in some sense. Holding this line that you’ve held, and working on it, and tilling this ground, quite against the grain of what a lot of people’s conventional wisdom is … is, I think, super useful now, because it seems to me that everyone’s ideological codes are being scrambled, and if you kind of have this natural presumption in which we use our intelligence and rationality to criticize the stupidity and insanity of capitalism, that gets short circuited pretty badly when you look around. So I wonder if you could maybe try to back-out this idea a little bit more.

Nick Land: There’s a lot of architecture in the history of philosophy that is basically putting this stuff into place. The largest recent shift is, again, the joint work of Deleuze and Guattari, where I think this fusion of the functioning of critique and the capitalist mechanism is brought together with huge intensity already very clearly. When you’re reading their account of history, and their reading of Kant, they’re exactly the same things. For them, the state is basically the ultimate metaphysical object. So everything we started with, in terms of this whole question of eliminating indispensable nodes, route-arounds — all of this kind of thing — plugs straight into that. The state is that historical element that presents itself as the Indispensable Node, the Great Hub, the Supreme Object — and in that way, it is actually the material and historical incarnation of metaphysics as a kind of materialized social problem, from the Deleuze-Guattari point of view.

Before that, in my graduate education, I was lucky to have some very smart Marxist teachers — I probably shouldn’t name them because it probably wouldn’t do them any favors if I did [laughs] — but the notion of a Kant-Capital complex was something that was totally in play for these people, already in the late 1980s, and far before that. That’s just where I came across it. If that’s the reference, then the dominant question about the overcoming of Kantianism is exactly the same, as a philosophical task, as the overcoming of capitalism, as a socio-political task. And I just want to say this was very explicit for them. It’s not that that requires some kind of later interpretive overlay to make that kind of move.

As an appendix to that point, when you’re talking about critique, and rationality, and these various notions that can obviously be quite nebulous — or they can be very philosophically rigorized — but I think if they’re philosophically rigorized from a leftist perspective, then they’re probably being rigorized in relation to this notion of what it would be to overcome Kant, and I don’t think that Kantianism itself, except by the most extreme set of intellectual confusions, can be understood as an inherently counter-capitalist mode of intellectual or cultural process.

Justin Murphy: Is it fair to say then, that in some sense, one of the reasons that blockchain is so fascinating is because it is this overcoming of Kantianism that is also an overcoming of capitalism — philosophy in practice? Is that how you see it?

Nick Land: Well, that is how I would expect an articulate leftist to see it. I would not go that way at all. My position is that the stubborn vindication of Kantianism as the horizon of modern intelligence is the dominant phenomenon. I see blockchain as being Kantian. There’s obviously some kind of updating that happens through the process of technical implementation, but there’s nothing like the kind of overcoming that is seen in the history of German idealism leading into Marxism. I just don’t see that kind of thing at all. I think that you’ve got a much more stubborn isomorphism between the actual mechanism of critique and the process of the blockchain.

Who knows what’s down the road. But it certainly seems to me that it’s an intensive transition in the autonomy of capital, which I think can be translated into the robustness of these route-around processes. So, while there is a deep leftist objection to the blockchain, which seems to be very rational and coherent and on point, there’s the fact that it obviously is an escape route for capital, and that it makes a whole series of social projects based upon the domestication of capital become increasingly implausible.

[2:01:24] Justin Murphy: While blockchain is clearly giving route-arounds for capital to escape, it’s also undeniably on the side of liberation from control, right? So if you’re against blockchain, if you want to suppress it and control it, and you generally see it as a bad thing, you can’t also pretend you’re interested in liberation from control structures. And I think that’s a very valuable and quite attractive by-product of the way that these theoretical notions are getting manifested in the technology.

Nick Land: I don’t think I would disagree with that. But it just seems to me that what is seen as the libertarian potential of these technologies, and its capitalist potential, are more or less synonymous notions, and that the dominant sentiment on the left is that these things are bad, and a language of liberation is the way that capital masks its actual process — in a language of emancipation that, taken from a leftist his point of view, is profoundly inadequate. It’s not sufficiently collective in its orientation and it’s extremely cold in terms of any questions of amelioration of problems of social disadvantage and underdevelopment. So I don’t see how anyone could disagree that there is a challenge to systems of control. I would have thought that the question is rather whether certain systems of control are actually required for the collectivization of emancipation, rather than it’s more Darwinian variants.

Justin Murphy: Some things might surprise me that don’t surprise you [laughs]. I guess perhaps the kernel of insight that was more promising in what I said is that it seems leftism — as that kind of sociological phenomenon that does still characterize the attitudes and behaviors of a fairly large number of human beings today — it still traffics in the connotations of liberation, and it seems to me that, a prediction that may emerge from this conversation about blockchain is that this will become increasingly less and less tenable as the technology becomes more widely distributed and it will become increasingly hard to deny that leftism is simply the break upon liberation in some sense.

Nick Land: Yeah, that language, it’s not that I’ve got any problem with it really, except it just sounds a little bit too triumphalist from the right. I do think, insofar as the language of liberation is about the ability to escape and route-around structures of control, then that is almost tautologically inevitable. I’m not really seeing a coherent objection. I’m not, as you know, the world’s greatest sympathizer of the leftist political orientation, and so I tend to see the language of liberation in leftist rhetoric as often quite sophistical. I don’t expect a lot of conceptual integrity from it. And I think the thing that blockchain is doing on this level, is that it just bypasses philosophical and political argument  people just simply do a route-around, it doesn’t require some sort of collective affirmation at the barricades or any such thing. So it seems to me the rhetoric around that is very obviously secondary in a way that isn’t true of a whole number of other socio-political projects, where the rhetoric and the political phenomenon are much more integrated.

Justin Murphy: Could you say a little bit about how you think blockchain or Bitcoin affects our understanding of time, because I think you have some particular ideas about that?

Nick Land: The whole of critique, and the whole of capitalism, can be translated into a discourse on time. Most famously the Heideggerian formulation of critique, that seems to me conservative in its essentials  that’s to say I don’t think it is a candidate for a post-Kantianism, but I think it’s definitely enriching in the fact that it’s quite clear about adding certain insightful formulations, and they tend to be time-oriented. The Heideggerian translation of the basic critical argument is that the metaphysical error is to understand time as something in time. So you translate this language, objectivity and objects, into the language of temporality and intra-temporality, and have equally plausible ability to construe the previous history of metaphysical philosophy in terms of what it is to to make an error. The basic error then, at this point, is to think of time as something in time.

So that’s just to say that if it wasn’t possible to make some point about Bitcoin and time it would be strange, having already said that Bitcoin is the highest level of technological instantiation of critique. There’s also an obligation that comes with that: what is it saying about time?

And I guess my argument is that it’s the first serious candidate that we have seen for artificial time. The context for that, that I think has drawn the most interest from people that I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this with, is really to do with Einsteinian relativistic physics, where the basic gesture that I want to make is a reactionary one, of saying there’s a revival of this Kantian structure that had seemed to be destroyed. There’s an extremely impressive, powerful, scientific case for the destruction of the autonomy of time from space  which seems to have been destroyed by the notion of general relativity. Minkowski space-time is where you get the clearest mathematical formulation of this new, modern take on that. The background to it is very tied up with the eclipse of Kantianism in the late 19th century/early 20th century, where it had seemed that Kant was incapable, due to his naive Euclideanism, of dealing with the new geometries introduced in the 19th century and their applications in physics that we see in 20th century.

There is an absolutely fascinating little exchange on a crypto mail board around the time that Bitcoin is actually being launched, and Satoshi Nakamoto, in that exchange says that the system of consensus that the blockchain is based upon  distributed consensus that then becomes known as the “Nakamoto consensus”  resolves a set of problems that include the priority of messages, global coordination, various problems that are exactly the problems that relativistic physics say are insoluble. In relativistic physics, between two sufficiently distant points in space, it’s simply impossible to say which of two events comes first, the notion of simultaneity is lost, time order is lost. Instead, you have space-time coordinates  from a certain reference frame there’s a certain ordering of events, but from another reference frame that ordering of events might be completely inverted. So, absolute Newtonian time is lost, Newtonian space is lost as well. But the blockchain simply cannot function …

Insofar as the blockchain functions at all, it’s because that kind of relativistic structure does not obtain upon it. Were it the case that the space and time of the blockchain were modeled by relativistic physics, then what Nakamoto calls the double-spending problem would be insoluble. So what I’m wanting to argue is that the double-spending problem is exactly translatable into the kind of problems of classical physics that relativistic physics describes as insoluble. The equivalent of relativistic physics within the world of blockchain would be to say, “You cannot solve the double-spending problem”. If we believe Einstein, and we believe it’s translatable into the blockchain, then the double-spending problem is insoluble, and since resolving the double-spending problem is the main thing that the blockchain does, there cannot be a blockchain. So the very existence of blockchains, in some fascinating way, shows that we cannot use Einsteinian physics when we’re thinking about this world.

[2:16:17] Justin Murphy: Okay, that’s fascinating. So you think that blockchain basically surpasses the relativistic theory of physics?

Nick Land: Well, I think you could easily end up saying really ridiculous things. So I would really like to be cautious about it. The minimal claim is to say that within the Einsteinian paradigm, the double-spending problem is insoluble. So how do we square this stuff? Obviously you don’t want to say Einstein is wrong, and that Satoshi Nakamoto proves that. There are a whole bunch of inflated weird claims — that Bitcoin has overthrown modern physics  that could flow from this, and I think clearly have to be avoided.

So, what is the acceptably sober conclusion that is drawn from this? And I think I can say, with some confidence, that the blockchain preserves a distinction in type between space and time that is not Einsteinian. That therefore, if we say, “Well, what do we mean by time when physicists say that we’ve lost that notion?”, I have to make a rejoinder in saying that we really still have time, that the blockchain tells us that we have time, and that we have time that is something totally different from space. And, in the structure of the blockchain, the difference between space and time is carried by the difference between the chain and blocks  every block is spatial when defined in terms of time, it’s a unit of simultaneity. Everything which happens within a block in the blockchain has no differential duration, whereas blocks, when they’re put together into the blockchain  the articulation of the blocks in the chain  is a time articulation, and it’s time articulation in a Kantian sense. Irreducible temporality in the sense that it’s not a spatial dimension.

So we still have space and time left. Well, how is it possible that we have space and time left? The answer to that is a technical theorization of this, that would be rigorously physical — it totally exceeds my competence in every way, but I’m able to see what it would look like. Bitcoin has a pulse, it has a tick, it has a set goal of the average time it takes to process a new block. (Well, I shouldn’t say it’s a tick, because it’s not like a clock, it’s not that it’s set so you’ll get a block every 10 minutes, it’s that the parameters of the system are designed to hunt that, like a thermostat, and that’s the equilibrium). So it has a model of the kind of regularity of these “ticks” and the difficulty of mining the block is adjustable and is fixed in order to keep it going at this rate that is considered ideal, and that rate is a function of the spatial scope of the system, so it can establish a model of time.

It still is subject to cosmo-physics. So if I’m mining Bitcoin on Earth, and someone else is mining Bitcoin, even somewhere close, like Mars, then we still have a relativistic problem, potentially. And if you’re going to have a blockchain, it must be that the metabolism of the blockchain considered, it’s “tick”, is sufficiently expansive for it to be able to absorb any relativistic distortion that happens due to the time lag of signals passing around in the system. Because, on Earth, the relativistic effects of large distances are pretty tiny  you’re just talking about a fraction of a second probably  then even regular turnover of blocks is completely satisfactory, given the way the blockchain works  it chunks time into units of simultaneity called blocks, and then stacks the blocks in this absolutely fixed chronological order, and the magnitude of the blocks, measured in time, is quite adequate to maintain this artificial temporality under terrestrial conditions.

But were the blockchain to be fanned out deeper into the cosmos, then the block time would become larger and larger and larger and larger, and ultimately, would become impractical. So you’d be mining a block every six hours or something if you’re just extending a blockchain into the inner solar system, or, if you go out into the outer solar system, then you need to have spent days for the system to tick forward and another block be added to the blockchain. So, I’m not saying that Einsteinian physics is wrong.

I’m saying that the blockchain is, in a substantial way, autonomous of the most extreme relativistic conclusions of that, because we do still have absolute time and the blockchain instantiates it. But Einsteinian physics put constraints on the blockchain, in that there has to be this relation between the regularity of block production and the spatial magnitude of the system. If you do then fan out beyond the Earth, they could become constraining, and this has the further implication that at astronomical scales you probably just have to have a plurality of blockchains. I don’t think the notion of the blockchain scales up astronomically for Einsteinian reasons.

Justin Murphy: I think that’s incredibly fascinating. And I would probably need to listen to what you just said a few times before I fully grok it. I think I do basically understand you and I don’t think that you’re making overly inflated claims about physics. It sounds like what you’re really just trying to say is that blockchain is able to technically instantiate something that one would think is not possible if one were thinking according to the relativistic physical model.

Nick Land: Yes, I think so. The relativistic model itself has certain constraints in the fact that it doesn’t apply on small spatial scales, it does apply in theory, there are minute relativistic effects, but they’re so minute that there’s an absolutely rigorous, reliable technical fix to relativistic problems on small scales, and the blockchain does that fix, and therefore restores a notion of time that means we simply don’t have to treat the foundations of critique, the Kantian foundations of critique, as having been obsolesced in this respect, we’re under no intellectual obligation to do that.

Justin Murphy: Without making any comments about Einstein or anything like that, it seems to me that we can say that blockchain is a system that supplies its own objectivity. Because the blockchain is this self-validating, trustless … it’s like a technical prohibition on the possibility of lying. Once you have rational critique, and rational critique is out of the bag, and everyone’s able to critique everything, you actually have some serious problems for the very possibility of rational critique, because everything becomes relative to everything else. And that’s a quick and dirty way to summarize the cognitive unmooring that modernity represents. You could kind of understand that in a spatial metaphor, in the sense that in modernity, up until this point, we can create rational systems that are internally rational, but their relationship to other people, or figures, or spaces, is totally relative and arbitrary. And people can just tell lies, right?

In the most quotidian sense, people can lie and get away with it in some part, because when they’re caught out locally, they can just sort of move spatially, they can leave the area in which they’re outed as liars, move spatially, and be liars somewhere else. And that spatial relativity — I only mean that in a metaphorical sense — seems to be a kind of basis upon which the cognitive chaos of modernity is possible, but if you’re arguing that blockchain is artificial time, that in some non-trivial, meaningful sense is able to instantiate itself in a way that is not subject to the relativism that we might expect, then, does it not solve the spatial problem of lying and the cognitive disorientation that the current state of modernity could perhaps be described as?

Within blockchains you’re going to have a perfect technical realization of objective truth and there’s no routing around that within the blockchain. Now, you can have multiple blockchains, and this might result in something like a patchwork of blockchains, which is actually another avenue of conversation we could very well go down, but you’re going to have perfectly objective internal systems and I just wonder is this not the perfection of critique into a state in which lying or spatial displacement becomes finally non-relative or impossible?

[2:30:53] Nick Land: I think that what you say about spatial displacement in relation to this question of lying  it’s quite strongly analogous to what you then, quite rightly, end up with in terms of this proliferation of distinct blockchains. Okay, I think this is something that has kind of haunted our discussion right from the start. And maybe we haven’t brought it out very explicitly in terms of these questions about rationality and critique, in it’s colloquial sense. There’s no question that you’ve obviously been very interested in this thing about the ideological valence of this notion of critique, and how this applies to left and right.

In this context — let me test you to see to what degree you think that this is right — the difference at stake is between a model predominant on the left, which has to do with [the fact] that what is meant by reason is really the formation of an intellectual community or, you know, you start off with people who have a disparate series of assumptions or are drawing disparate conclusions or inferences, and the process of rationality is one that in a certain sense harmonizes that intellectual community. Whereas the model on the right is much more open to fragmentation and enduring disagreement and the operation of various kinds of selective processes to resolve the issue. And so obviously, the business corporation is the model of this, in the sense that you don’t try and work out, in advance, as a society, what’s the best way to run a business. You allow people to basically try almost anything that they want, and the businesses that work, work. And the ones that don’t work, end up being liquidated. That selective process is the one that substitutes for the process and for the necessity of an intellectual community.

I don’t know whether you think that way of articulating these differences is something that is convincing from your point of view. Maybe I should pause and see.

Justin Murphy: Sure, yeah! I mean, I think it is a recurring theme perhaps, or recurring implication that I’ve had a sense of throughout my conversation with you, that it’s almost as if technological acceleration is simply going to obviate almost all of the conceptual baggage that we use to try and figure out our political situation as human beings. In other words, we have these legacy categories such as left and right that are largely just by-products of certain technological inefficiencies. We need to aggregate decision making over time. We need to aggregate attitudes over time across large spaces. So certain concepts emerge to deal with the fact that we have faulty cognitive baggage, we have tendencies to all kinds of biases, we have this basic and faulty cognitive hardware that we operate on. And for most of modern political history and modern political theory, a lot of the categories that we use really are just quite inadequate, simplifying devices to deal with all of our faulty pieces of hardware, or something like that.

But as the rationalization of that technology and the actual construction of technical hardware, or technical systems (combination of hardware and software) — as the proficiency of that accelerates, we’re just finding that almost all of our concepts are becoming no longer necessary, they just dissolve. There is just an immanent technical process that is occurring, and it becomes harder and harder to even make sense out of traditional modern political categories. That’s a kind of thesis that, as I’m listening to you, I’m becoming perhaps a little bit more convinced of.

Nick Land: But then how do you make sense of the modern — when I say modern … let me say contemporary — political atmosphere, which seems to be becoming if anything more radicalized, more polarized, more heated in terms of the weight of these various kinds of markers of ideological affiliation? I mean, I’m assuming you don’t see any hint of those things ceasing to obtain in that sort of terrain?

Justin Murphy: Well no, not necessarily. In the short run, anyway. But isn’t it sort of an implication of blockchain that capitalism, or the auto-development of systemic processes that generate value over time, that these are less and less in need of human beings at all in some sense? So once you can combine the idea of artificial intelligence with blockchain, it’s just becoming increasingly easy to simply imagine a purely machinic capitalism in which surely non-carbon-based, intelligent machines basically have their own kind of global capitalism and increase value on their own over time, without any human beings even [being] on the planet. It’s increasingly almost trivial to imagine capitalism carrying on through artificial intelligence and blockchain, as basically [with] every passing generation, human beings find it increasingly impossible to even survive, to the point that humans are completely bypassed. Is that how you see it, or not?

Nick Land: Well, I think if we say bypassed, then definitely! I think there’s a gradient of capital autonomization, and that what it is to be advanced in modernity is to be moving up that gradient. So, autonomous machines are the index that is used to say “how modern is this?” So, yes, I do agree.

But in terms of how that will play out ideologically … I don’t know whether you saw it, it was passed around Twitter quite a lot, that article in The New Statesman by an English politician, I think he’s called [Jon Cruddas] or something like that, about accelerationism. What he was basically doing — I mean, I only read it once, and fast, but it seems to me his basic thing was to say, “Look, accelerationism is inherently anti-humanist, even in its left-wing variants it simply can’t shake that, that’s just essential to it in a way that’s irreducible” and — even though maybe this was more implicit in his argument — it seemed to me he was saying, “For this reason the left cannot use this stuff, really, the left has to align itself with a kind of new humanist resistance to these dehumanizing, autonomizing technological processes.” Now, that seems to me very plausible.

If I was asking what is going to happen to the left, I think it’s going to become increasingly and explicitly and fiercely humanist in orientation. So nonchalance about the dehumanizing tendency of these processes, I think, will be seen as a marker of right-wing ideological affinity.

Justin Murphy: Right. I think that that’s a very reasonable prediction, and in large part that basically characterizes what seems to be happening right now. So I think you’re on point. I would only add to that at least one alternative possibility. And I should say very clearly, I’m not necessarily predicting [anything]. I’m really just kind of riffing and speculating about possibilities, and also indicating what I think is perhaps the most attractive line of thought for people today who are interested in radical philosophy and thinking as critically as possible about the human predicament at this point in time.

Especially for people from a left-wing perspective — and that the traditional modern coordinates of which are being rapidly destroyed. But if you do still have an interest in the left-wing tradition, personally, I think the most exciting lines of thought have to do with leveraging blockchain, to be honest. And I’m especially interested in potentially connecting blockchain to these ideas of patchwork because [those are], in my view, the most honest and intelligent positions for serious intellectual projects with a left-wing flavor. In other words, people who are still interested in the idea of building radical liberatory communities that are in some part insulated or that transcend the drudgery and aggressiveness that’s associated with market discipline.

It seems to me that if you’re really into that, and you think that there’s a way to organize life like that, that it is superior — and also, in engineering terms — possible and empirically serious, then we should be able to build a patch. Leveraging the most state-of-the-art technical possibilities to make something like communism a superior form of living that would actually function better than current forms of economic and political organization … And I’m actually fairly confident … I wouldn’t put the probability of achieving that very high, but I would probably put it much higher than most people who are thinking about this sort of stuff in any kind of mature or serious way. I actually think that it’s quite imaginable that a kind of communist patch, if organized correctly, would actually outperform and outcompete more reactionary-flavored patches.

But I’m also aware that we’ve been talking for quite a while. And I didn’t mean to just put a huge provocation on the table an hour and 40 minutes in …

[2:45:13] Nick Land: No, no, that’s all good! My position on what you’ve just said is, I totally welcome this tendency. Obviously, from outside. I mean, I’m profoundly skeptical about the prospects of these, as you say — I think in the most extreme way of describing it — a communist patch. You know, I’m not going to be investing in them, but I entirely support the project. And it seems to me that there’s a left lineage that should be tightly unobjectionable to the “liberal” (in the old sense) tradition of capitalistic modernity, which is the tradition of experimental communes, of experimental cooperative organized businesses, and now, as you say, of experimental left-flavored blockchain innovation. I just, I don’t think there is any legitimate basis for a right-wing critique of such things being undertaken. There is of course much, much room for right-wing skepticism about their chances of success, but that seems to be a isolable and irrelevant issue. Because I’m assuming you don’t need right-wing endorsement of these things. At that level you simply need social permission, and I would of course hope that social permission will be there, and be ever easier to find for this kind of thing.

Justin Murphy: It’s ironic but if there’s a social permission problem, it’s coming from the left. And that’s just so bizarre, and that can explain for you why I’m so obsessed with trying to unwind these strange ideological loops.

I know it’s late for you. And I know we’ve been talking for some time now. But it’s actually quite a natural segue since you invoked social permission …

Maybe you could reflect a little bit or maybe share some of your insights from your experience becoming, in a lot of people’s eyes, quite a pariah figure. Something I’ve always been very curious about is, when you first started getting a lot of condemnation, especially from the left, in England and in the West … I’m very curious. Were you even surprised how much condemnation was generated? Or had you already factored that into your model of the world? In other words, you were quite conscious of the provocations you were making and the effects that it would have, or you were stunned at how offended people were by some of your ideas?

Nick Land: The model was precisely predicting the level of condemnation that arose. The phase of my activity that has generated the most thermonuclear hostility is obviously based on my encounter with Mencius Moldbug, and particularly, with his basic model of what we’re dealing with — what he calls the Cathedral. The state church of the supposedly secular West. And that state church engages in entirely traditional modes of cultural policing, based upon zealous extirpation of heresy. All you need to know is what the significant heresies of the state church that you’re concerned with are, and then those responses are as predictable as the results from a particle accelerator given a good standard model of the nature of subatomic interactions.

I mean, it is completely unsurprising and, in fact, if surprising, surprising only in that they are so completely and unironically falling into the pattern predicted by their enemies. The tragedy of the left — as I’ve seen it, really, in the last five years — is the fact that it lacks any sense of what it looks like outside its own framework, and the fact that it does seem to be so entirely predictable in its set of responses.

Justin Murphy: Your model of the world had already been updated, such that you knew saying the things you wanted to say was going to trigger quite a lot of outrage. But in some sense, you were willing to do that precisely because your model of the world was such that you had really nothing to lose?

Nick Land: No … That condemnation was extremely valuable scientific confirmation, as far as I was concerned, of the validity of the Moldbug thesis, and it played a large role in consolidating it. Now, if nothing like that had happened, I would have probably had to just dump Moldbug in the trash and say, you know, “nice theory” but clearly the world doesn’t work like that.

Justin Murphy: It’s as though, if you actually want to try and figure out the left-wing project, your number one immediate enemy is all the people on the left today. Or at least, let’s say, the people who occupy the word and the associated vocabulary of leftism as a kind of recognized manifestation. These legacy concepts are just so overheated that they really don’t make that much sense anymore …

Nick Land: I think you can overdo historical analogy to some extent, but because modernity is a coherent — it’s cross-cut by all kinds of randomness and complexity and discontinuities, but ultimately — it’s a coherent process, and I think it supports to a considerable extent criss-cross historical analogies within the history of modernity (we’ve made lots [of this], and probably this is more my voice, more my vice than yours,  over the course of this conversation), and the one I think is just hugely, hugely relevant (and maybe we even talked about it last time we were talking, because it is so attractive to me) is the earliest stages of modernity and the processes of Reformation; and the interaction of this revolutionary new media system based on the printing press, and the traditions of church authority. And I think we’re seeing exactly the same thing. I think it fits extremely well with what you’ve just said.

I think that there is a church. It’s quite coherent, it has a very definite sense of orthodoxy and heresy. We know it does, we can argue about how fragmented or pluralistic or whatever society is, but you will get this language from the left (which is what I will continue to call it here). And that is based upon the fact that any “decent”, “acceptable” person will subscribe to this belief, and this [other] belief is completely unacceptable — it should be no-platformed, suppressed, maybe you even should be imprisoned for the voicing of certain extremely heretical opinions. So, of course, it is a coherent cultural entity. We can see! If it was not a coherent cultural entity, it could not possibly have any belief in its capacity for doctrinal policing. And we see that it has this confidence of doctrinal policing all the time. It’s just … we’re being bombarded with it.

The dominant ideological phenomenon of our age is the crisis of  — I would use Moldbug’s language — Cathedral doctrinal policing. And, of course, that crisis is being driven by new media technologies that I think are completely unstoppable. And I think that the Cathedral in its modern form has roughly the same prospects that the notion of a universal authoritative Catholic Church had in early modern Europe: none. There’s going to be wars of religion, heretical thinking is not going to be suppressible. There are questions about how much and what intensity of violence and conflict and failed policing operations will be required, but at the end of the day the media system — the technological and media system — dictates that there has to be a retrenchment on the part of the established church into a more realistic, defensible position: enclaves, partitions of various kinds, zones of sovereignties that are based upon an acceptance of fragmentation and diversity, and differential regime structures that as yet are not accepted. But I have absolute confidence that that’s the trend that were involved in.

Justin Murphy: Well, Nick, I think I’m gonna let you have the last word on that one. Because, I mean, I could talk with you much longer about many more things, but I’m conscious that it’s late there, and I really don’t want to overtax you, so you gotta draw the line somewhere, and I think I should let you off here.

Nick Land: Okay, that’s great. That’s really… This has been great fun, Justin. Best of luck. I would even go as far as “best of luck” with your communist blockchain, as long as you’re not looking for an investment.  va-tombstone1-03

The Revolving Door and the Straight Labyrinth: An Initiation in Occult Time (Part 1)

by Amy Ireland

A script from the absolute unknown, how do you even begin to think about that? “Meaning” is a diversion. It evokes too much empathy. You have to ask, instead, what is a message? In the abstract? What’s the content, at the deepest, most reliable level, when you strip away all the presuppositions that you can? The basics are this. You’ve been reached by a transmission. That’s the irreducible thing. Something has been received. [And] to get in, it had to be there, already inside, waiting. Don’t you see? The process of trying to work it out — what I had thought was the way, eventually, to grasp it — to unlock the secret, it wasn’t like that. That was all wrong. It was unlocking me.[note]Nick Land, Chasm (Shanghai: Time Spiral Press, 2015), §25.[/note]

We never find those who understand philosophers among philosophers.[note]Gilles Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, trans. Melissa McMahon, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.[/note]

So we are confronted by a triad of mysteries: the death or otherwise of Lönnrot, the disappearance of Carter into the coffin-shaped clock, and the deliquescence of Professor Challenger as he absconds both slowly and hurriedly towards an invisible point below the strata. 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. The greatest puzzles are always a delicate balance of intrication and simplicity. What if a single answer were capable of resolving all three of these strange cases — blinding in its solvent consistency?

In Kant’s Critical Philosophy, Difference and Repetition, his nineteen-seventies lectures at Paris-VIII, and in a late, expanded reformulation of the preface to the first of these works (appearing in Essays Clinical and Critical), Deleuze pairs and contrasts two schemata of time: the time of the ‘revolving door’, and the time of the ‘straight labyrinth’.[note]The ‘revolving door’ motif persists throughout Deleuze’s work from 1963 to 1993, preceding Difference and Repetition and succeeding A Thousand Plateaus, the two works that will be most consistently drawn upon here, despite differences in the accounts of transcendental production given in both. The historical evolution of temporal modelling condensed into these two images appears in the Logic of Sense, The Fold, and it also frames the Cinema books, although the revolving door as a specific motif disappears in these texts. Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2008), vii-viii; Difference and Repetition, see “Repetition for Itself” and “The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible” specifically; “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, and “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, trans. Melissa McMahon, https://www.webdeleuze.com/groupes/4; “On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, in Essays Clinical and Critical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 27-29; The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 2001), 3, 6, 18-19, 70; The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), 176; Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xi.[/note] Quoting Hamlet, who furnishes the first of the four poetic formulas he will relate to the innovations of Kant’s philosophy, Deleuze writes

Time is out of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis on which the door turns. The hinge, Cardo, indicates the subordination of time to precise cardinal points, through which the periodic movements it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinated to extensive movement; it is the measure of movement, its interval or number. This characteristic of ancient philosophy has often been emphasised: the subordination of time to the circular movement of the world as the turning Door, a revolving door, a labyrinth opening onto its eternal origin. [C’est la porte-tambour, le labyrinthe ouverte sur l’origine éternelle.]

Time out of joint, the door off its hinges, signifies the first great Kantian reversal: movement is now subordinated to time. Time is no longer related to the movement it measures, but rather movement to the time that conditions it. Moreover, movement is no longer the determination of objects, but the description of a space, a space we must set aside in order to discover time as the condition of action. Time thus becomes unilinear and rectilinear, no longer in the sense that it would measure a derived movement, but in and through itself, insofar as it imposes the succession of its determination on every possible movement. This is a rectification of time. Time ceases to be curved by a God who makes it depend on movement. It ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, the order of an empty time. […] The labyrinth takes on a new look — neither a circle nor a spiral, but a thread, a pure straight line, all the more mysterious in that it is simple, inexorable, terrible — “the labyrinth made of a single straight line which is indivisible, incessant”.[note]Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas that might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, Essays Clinical and Critical, 27-35. The final quotation is from Borges’ “Death and the Compass”, examined in Part 0 of this series. Here Deleuze shifts from “invisible, incessant” (Différence et répetition, 147) to “indivisible, incessant”. “Sur quatre formules poétiques qui pourrait résumer la philosophie kantienne”, Critique et Clinique. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1993), 40.[/note]

The contrast between these two figures is due, first and foremost, to the relationship between time and movement they express. In the schema of the revolving door, time is twice subordinated: first, to a transcendent eternity which provides the rational model for the ordering of movement, and second, to the rationally-ordered movement from which time’s number is derived (the aperture ‘onto the eternal origin’ constituted by the resonance of copy with model). In the schema of the straight labyrinth, movement is subordinated to time, which conditions movement, inaugurating a reversal of priority between the two and a shift from a spatialised classification of the difference to a temporal one.[note]This is a framing contention of Anna Greenspan’s unpublished doctoral dissertation Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine, from which this essay draws some of its key ideas. Anna Greenspan, Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine (University of Warwick, 2000).[/note] The pairing of the two figures is more enigmatic. Since the former reappears as a functional attribute of the particle-clock (“the assemblage serving as a revolving door” [l’agencement qui servait comme d’une porte-tam­bour]), that strange vehicle which facilitates the disappearances of Carter and Challenger in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” and “The Geology of Morals”, and the latter clearly invokes the straight labyrinth (“the labyrinth made of a single straight line which is indivisible, incessant”) used by Lönnrot to riddle Sharlach in the confrontation at the Villa Triste-le-Roy, both seem to conceal passageways by which escape from specific geometrical tyrannies — indexed here by extensity, cardinality, and ‘a space we must set aside’ — may be effectuated.[note]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 82; Mille plateaux, 94. Translation altered to reflect original. (See Part 0.) Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas that might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, Essays Clinical and Critical, 28.[/note] However, given the fact that the revolving door seems to implement the geometrical conditions it somehow also affords an exit from, and the obvious preference Deleuze (as a transcendental philosopher) exhibits for the straight labyrinth as a ‘rectification’ of time, the counterintuitive nature of this proposition is not easily brushed aside. Deeper exploration is required.

Revolving Door I: The Time of Philosophers and Theologians

In the history of Western philosophy, the revolving door is the archetypal image of pre-critical temporality. It takes its coordinates first from astronomical movements, and then from terrestrial ones: the rotation of planets and seasons.[note]The constitutive role of planetary motion is even more overt in the first of Deleuze’s 1978 lectures on Kant: “What is the joint? The joint is, literally, the hinge. The hinge is what the door pivots around. But the door? We have to imagine a revolving door, and the revolving door is the universal door. The door of the world is a revolving door. The door of the world swings and passes through privileged moments which are well known: they’re what we call cardinal points. North, South, East, West. The joint is what makes the door swing in such a way that it passes and re-passes through the privileged co-ordinates named cardinal points. Cardinal comes from cardo; cardo is precisely the hinge, the hinge around which the sphere of celestial bodies turns, and which makes them pass time and again through the so-called cardinal points, and we note their return: ah, there’s the star again, it’s time to move my sheep!” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66. I have occasionally made small modifications to the translation of these lectures, and have indicated where this occurs in the following citations.[/note] These revolutions, confining time to motion and phenomenality, are held in contrast to what is outside them and what has been said to have engendered them — an ever-present but non-manifest, spatiotemporally unconditioned, unified mind or essence. In his lectures, Deleuze links this figure of time, curved by the hand of a god, to “the arc of the demiurge which makes circles” in the account given by Plato’s Timaeus.[note]Gilles Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.[/note]

Since the model was an ever-living being, [the demiurge] undertook to make this universe of ours the same as well, or as similar as it could be. But the being that served as the model was eternal, and it was impossible for him to make this altogether an attribute of any created object. Nevertheless, he determined to make it a kind of moving likeness of eternity, and so in the very act of ordering the universe he created a likeness of eternity, a likeness that progresses eternally through the sequence of numbers, while eternity abides in oneness.[note]Plato, “Timeaus”, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25/37d.[/note]

Timaeus, an expert astronomer who has “specialised in natural science” refers several times to his cosmogony as an ἐικός λόγος (a ‘likely account’), a play on words drawing on the relation between εἰκόνες and ἐικός meant to reinforce the notion of the cosmos as a likeness — the imperfect copy of a perfect original.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 15/27a; 18-19/29d-30b.[/note] Here, worldly imperfection is due to the changeability of the contents of the copy, which unlike their eternal origin, are subject to time:

This image of eternity is what we have come to call ‘time’, since along with the creation of the universe [the demiurge] devised and created days, nights, months, and years, which did not exist before the creation of the universe. They are all parts of time, and ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are created aspects of time which we thoughtlessly and mistakenly apply to that which is eternal. For we say that it was, is, and will be, when in fact only ‘is’ truly belongs to it, while ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are properties of things that are created and that change over time, since ‘was’ and ‘will be’ are both changes. What is for ever consistent and unchanging, however, does not have the property of becoming older or younger with the passage of time; it was not created at some point, it has not come into existence just now, and it will not be created in the future. As a rule, in fact, none of the modifications that belong to the things that move about in the sensible world, as a result of having been created, should be attributed to it; they are aspects of time as it imitates eternity and cycles through the numbers.[note]Plato, “Timeaus”, 25-26/37d-36a.[/note]

There is no measurable time prior to the demiurge’s imposition of order on a previously disordered cosmos, composed only of confused matter and erratic motion. Because time arises from movement, only a perfectly regular and harmonious totality of cosmic motion will install temporality in the rational manner required to produce a sufficiently faithful copy of the model. This imposition of formal regularity is not, however, without complication. Deleuze’s emphasis on the motif of circularity arises from the description, first, of the demiurge ensuring that the matter of the universe is “perfectly spherical, equidistant in all directions from its centre to the extremes”, “freeing” its primary motion from imbalance by giving it a “circular movement … setting it spinning at a constant pace in the same place and within itself”, and then, with the totality of the matter of the universe thus arranged, of the inauguration of a complex process of division and mixing for the purpose of imbuing the assemblage with a soul, which the demiurge creates via the combination of two media: the “indivisible and never changing”, and the “divided and created substance of the physical world” (the former indexing identity, the latter, difference) obtaining a third medium with aspects of both, thus allowing for a flow of information between the formal and the phenomenal.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 21/33b; 22/34a.[/note]

He then blends the indivisible with the divisible and the alloy of the indivisible and divisible, fashioning from the tripartite mixture a homogenous whole, but not without effort, for “getting difference to be compatible with identity [takes] force, since difference does not readily form mixtures”.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 23/35a.[/note] Despite the complexity, might and skill brought to the work of ordering by the demiurge (who is a craftsman, after all), a material remainder — what Deleuze will call “the unequal in itself” — still persists, and further blending is required.[note]’δημιουργός’ (demiurge), from δήμιος (belonging to the people) and -εργος (a suffix indicating a worker), literally denotes ‘a skilled workman, a handicraftsman’ in Ancient Greek; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 233.[/note] This involves a tortured series of intervallic material distributions from which the demiurge finally extracts an obedient harmony.[note]Here is the sequence — which will play an important role in Difference and Repetition — in full: “[H]e divided up the whole mixture again, this time into as many portions as he needed, with each portion being a blend of identity, difference, and substance. He began the division by first taking a single portion from the mixture; next he took a portion which was double the quantity of the first, and then a third portion, which was one-and-a-half times the quantity of the second and three times the quantity of the first; then he took a fourth portion which was double the quantity of the second, and a fifth which was three times the quantity of the third, and a sixth which was eight times the quantity of the first, and then a seventh portion which was twenty-seven times the quantity of the first. After this, he filled up the double and triple intervals by cutting off further portions from the mixture and inserting them into the gaps, so that in each interval there were two means, a mean that exceeded one of its extremes by the same fraction of the extremes as it was exceeded by the other extreme, and another mean that exceeded one of its extremes by the same number as it was exceeded by the other extreme. These links created, within the first set of intervals, further intervals of 3:2, 4:3, and 9:8, and then he filled up all the 4:3 intervals with the 9:8 interval, leaving in each case a portion, and the portion that remained was an interval whose terms, expressed numerically, were 256 : 243. And so at this point the mixture, from which he was cutting these portions, was all used up.” Plato, “Timaeus”, 23-24/35a-36b.[/note] The mixture is then split into strips, laid out like an X and folded together into two revolving circles, the outer circle — containing “the equal in the form of the movement of the Same” — revolves with the primary movement of the cosmos and is justly named “the revolution of identity” while the inner circle — revolving at an angle to the circle of identity — contains the eight then-known “planets” (including the sun and the moon) along with “what subsists of inequality in the divisible” by distributing it among the planetary orbits, and bears the denomination “the revolution of difference”.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Reptition, 233; Plato, “Timaeus”, 24/36c-d.[/note] This latter grounds the derivation of time.

The Great Symmetrical Cycle

Because it is “the shared task” of the heavenly bodies “to produce time”, a considerable portion of the “Timaeus” is dedicated to a geometrical description of planetary ambulation, offering precise calculations of each planet’s orbit which, when taken together, add up to an internally and externally harmonious totality (each orbit internally relative to the others, and the whole externally relative to the revolution of the circle of identity): the world’s year.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 27/38e.[/note] This single, great revolution yields “the perfect number of time” and is marked by the “moment when all the eight revolutions, with their relative speeds, attain completion and regain their starting points”, resetting the cycle of the circle of difference in relation to the circle of identity.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 28/39d.[/note] Pre-critical time is thus simply the organisation and rationalisation of a prior, chaotic, spatiality in response to the exigencies of a divine model which exists both outside space and time. A great compass, dividing a cosmic sphere into equal and predictable portions, priming its matter for technological and cultural capture: the seasonal arithmetic that will come to ground agriculture; the compartmentalisation of the day, the week and the year into periods devoted alternatively to the sacred or the profane; the striations of latitude facilitating oceanic navigation, cartography, imperialism, and the proportional fastidiousness of classical architecture and art.

An exclusive disjunction (the abiding feature of monotheistic religion) administrates the distinction between eternity and the cosmos as the ordered structure of secondary appearances. Held apart from the eternal and locked down by matter and movement, this turning according to number is only an auxiliary, fallen ‘image’. A simulation generated and managed by a fully exteriorised and transcendent non-time, which functions as the ultimate measure against which every determinate object falls into a static and immutable hierarchical series whose order can never be shifted, interrogated, or affected by feedback from within. Because it continues to be tethered to a transcendent realm which imposes teleological order, the most generous aberration allowed to time — one “marked by material, meteorological and terrestrial contingencies” — still remains derivative of movement.[note]Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas that might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, Essays Clinical and Critical, 27.[/note] ‘Time’ beyond revolution is transcendent, tenseless, authoritative and persistent. The revolving door is therefore a dualistic image of temporality, inserting a gap between the hierarchically organised, oppositional qualities of idea and appearance; unity and variation; identity and difference; indivisibility and divisibility; being and becoming, good and evil, inside and outside — its borders stalked by the constabulary of the laws of thought, and god. It is, as Luce Irigaray tirelessly anatomises in “Plato’s Hystera”, the time — as space — of the Platonic cave, a “theatrical trick” designed to inaugurate the great “circus” of representation via the circular repetition of the same. The cave’s anterior tunnel leads upward into the light.

Upward — this notation indicates from the very start that the Platonic cave functions as an attempt to give an orientation to the reproduction and representation of something that is always already there. […] The orientation functions by turning everything over, by reversing, and by pivoting around axes of symmetry.[note]Luce Irigaray, “Plato’s Hystera” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 244-5. The thing, “always already there in the den” is the matrix or womb, which again, following the injunction of cosmic horror — muted and covered over by the schema of the revolving door — can never quite be shown, seen, or described. Within the realm of representation (or the specular economy) the anteriority of the hystera is displaced and oppositionalised as a posteriority in the image before the men in the cave, generative of a telos which appears linear but is, in fact, cyclical. Linearity hides an exoteric return, which in turn hides an esoteric involution. Mark Fisher and Suzanne Livingston marshall a similar argument to counter Baudrillard’s defeatist reading of seduction in his book of the same name: “Yet what of seduction itself? For as a Process it is far in excess of its writings. For Irigaray, these circles which constantly return to the point at which they first began are not what they appear. For the female zero, vulva, circle never finally closes up in the shape of a ring.” Livingston and Fisher, “Desiring Seduction”, Ccru.net, https://web.archive.org/web/20011211011651/http://www.ccru.demon.co.uk:80/archive/seduction.htm.[/note]

The cardinal points of the compass, or four wings of the door’s turning hinge, exhibit the spatialisation of time inherent to the image. The law of its number is cardinality — quantitative measurement of internally homogenous content — and a representational form of numeracy. Being a sphere, it is intrinsically symmetrical. In this way, space and time are confined to the double homogeneity of extension and simultaneity — to the circus of representational reproduction and its clowns, whose comedy is always enacted in the mode of farce, a repetition that always “falls short” of its model.[note]“According to Marx, repetition is comic when it falls short — that is, when instead of leading to metamorphosis and the production of something new, it forms a kind of involution, the opposite of an authentic creation. Comic travesty replaces tragic metamorphosis. However, it appears that for Marx this comic or grotesque repetition necessarily comes after the tragic, evolutive and creative repetition (‘all great events and historical personages occur, as it were, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’). This temporal order does not, however, seem to be absolutely justified.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 91-2.[/note] There are, therefore, only “proportions, functions, [and] relations” available inside the simulation that can be referred “back to sameness”.[note]Irigaray, “Plato’s Hystera”, 247; “[The demiurge] endowed each of the gods [the planetary bodies] with two kinds of motion: even rotation in the same place, to enable them always to think the same thoughts about the same things; and forward motion, under the sovereignty of the revolution of identity and sameness.’ Within the teleological account tendered by the Timaeus, to act for the best is to always act in the same manner. Plato, “Timeaus”, 29/40a-b.[/note] And this sameness is at once the model for the beautiful, the truthful, and the good — astronomical rationality providing the exemplar for human aesthetic, epistemological and moral order.

Truth

Man, as a rational animal equipped with the ability to observe and understand these relations, is ontologically at home in the universe of the revolving door. Human cognition and sensibility, when exercised correctly, are perfectly resonant with the structure of phenomena. Thought thus naturally inclines towards the law that the demiurge embodies and by extension, to the model from which the universe has been copied. Psychology, cosmology and rationality are bound in cosmic rhyme. This is precisely what the latter part of the Timaeus then turns to, linking the account it has just given of human perception, especially that of sight, to our ability to infer the universal law of the good, the beautiful, and the true, and to reproduce it on a microcosmic level, specifically through the practice of philosophy.[note]“[T]he visibility of day and night, of months and the circling years, of equinoxes and solstices, resulted in the invention of number, gave us the concept of time, and made it possible for us to enquire into the nature of the universe. These in their turn have enabled us to equip ourselves with philosophy in general, and humankind never has, nor ever will be granted by the gods a greater good than philosophy.” Plato, “Timaeus”, 38/47a-47b.[/note] Plato’s cosmos is teleologically assured by the perfection of the demiurge, and opposes both accounts of cosmogenesis more sympathetic to contingency, chance and natural selection (such as those of Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus, which offer explanations exhibiting an awkward but prescient Darwinism) and the immanent teleology of Aristotle. Revolution thus has a moral content, and Timaeus concludes his account of cosmogenesis by stating that,

since the movements that are naturally akin to our divine part are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe, these are what each of us should be guided by as we attempt to reverse the corruption of the circuits in our heads, that happened around the time of our birth, by studying the harmonies and revolutions of the universe.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 96/90c-90d.[/note]

In this way, “we will restore our nature to its original condition” achieving “our goal” of living “now and in the future, the best life that the gods have placed within human reach”.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 96/90c-90d.[/note] The importance of sight to the practice of philosophy is insisted upon here because it alone of all the senses provides us with access to the law of number (and by extension, a model of perfect morality) embedded in the rotations of the planets.[note]“[T]he gods invented and supplied us with vision to enable us to observe the rational revolutions of the heavens and to let them affect the revolutions of thought within ourselves (which are naturally akin to those in the heavens, though ours are turbulent while they are calm).” Plato, “Timaeus”, 38/47b.[/note] Vision is thus the most morally-attuned sense, the conduit of goodness and beauty, and the base upon which one can realise the latent harmoniousness of one’s own relation to the universe. These ‘corrupt circuits’ in need of correction reprise the wandering of the planets prior to the ordering of their movements by the demiurge, and not insignificantly, ‘wanderer’ (πλάνης), ‘illusion’, ‘deceit’ or ‘discursivity’ (πλάνη) and ‘planet’ (πλάνητας ἀστήρ — wandering star) all share a similar root in ancient Greek, with Plato using the term ‘planomenon’ (πλανόμενον) elsewhere to mean ‘errant’.[note]αἴτιον πλανόμενον (errant cause). Thanks to Jake Hamilton for this insight and for help with translations from the Greek.[/note] Truth emerges in inverse proportion to the itinerant dithyramb of material insubordination. Timaeus completes the moral lesson of cardinality, vision and aspirational goodness with a warning. Men who live “unmanly or immoral lives” are destined to fall farther down the series of good and perfect beings in harmony with the order of the universe, being “reborn in their next incarnation as women”.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 96/91a. Incidentally, the formulation of truth, which lists a short taxonomy of external madnesses as afflictions to thought (“shamelessness, stupidity, mental illness, willingness to lie, or an indifference to truth”) which is otherwise naturally oriented towards its object in @parallaxoptics’ piece, “Exit Accelerationism” exactly reprises the premises of the universe generated through this figure of time — with the “Outside” mapped by a theologically conditioned exclusive disjunction separating a fallen, temporalised interority from a transcendent, perfect exteriority — and the accompanying, dogmatic, image of thought. Thus explicitly anchoring the fundamental axioms of what has come to be known as R/Acc (along with some of its R/Dec variants) in an ancient, theological conception of reality self-consciously at odds with the process of modernisation and capitalistic temporality the term originally (and perhaps more correctly) invoked. It will be seen that R/Acc, in want of a better articulation, disbars itself from any real purchase on the demonic, Lovecraftian imagery it so frequently delights in calling forth, insofar as Lovecraft relates the insurgency of the Old Ones to time. The question the above post dearly wants to answer: “[H]ow to access, or conceive of this [non-human] intelligence? What is its relationship to human spacetime?” is not discoverable by venturing outside the Platonic cave (as it advises), but rather, by boring deeper into the cave and its illusions, unearthing an altogether different model of truth and an alien conception of time. The only way out is in. The inward trajectory of this limit defining outside from in occurs in several steps, which the following parts of this essay will attempt to bring — darkly — to light.[/note]

The return to sameness, finally, ensures that the universe will not degrade or dissolve of its own accord. While “the model exists for all eternity”, “the universe was and is and always will be for all time”, unless the demiurge explicitly wishes it to be so (“anything created by me is imperishable unless I will it”); so long as the world remains in harmony, this dissolution will not occur — a threat monotheism will make much of in the epochs to come.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 26/38c, 30/41a, 18/29e. Italics added.[/note] Hence the biblical prophecies of apocalypse such as that which suggests that when the day arrives, the heavens will depart “as a scroll when it is rolled together”, inflected back into the curved palm of its god.[note]The Bible, King James Version, Revelation 6:13-15.[/note] Broadened beyond its exemplary delineation in the “Timaeus”, the revolving door thus becomes a cipher for temporal dualisms in general. Truth is located in a lost transcendence (the indivisible, god, eternity), obtainable only at a delay via religion or via the work of philosophical contemplation shepherded by vision — the decanting of a priori knowledge from empirical experience, which prior to Kant, denoted a separate and transcendent ideality. If there is knowledge of this fallenness and of the perfection of that other realm inside that of the world of motion and change, this can only be so because ‘man’ is made in the image of a god, or has forgotten something he once knew.[note]Plato, “Meno” in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), especially 363-374.[/note] Thought is inherently linked with its ground via an internal isomorphism — a rhyme — acting as the guarantor of its intuitions of damnation and error, whose causes are always external. Its correlative subject is moral or epistemological: the theologian or the philosopher, compelled to discover the realm of essences behind the veil of appearances.

There is, as there always is, a sexual difference attached to the dualism. Historically, the material, fallen aspect of time-as-variation is feminised, secondary, and passive. Timaeus calls it the “receptacle”, “the mother”, “the nurse and the nurturer of the universe” and characterises it via all the emblems of lack: it is “altogether characterless”, a bare medium for the production of formed elements; passive (“it only ever acts as the receptacle for everything”); it operates through mimicry (“[i]ts nature is to … be modified and altered by the things that enter it, with the result that it appears different at different times”) having no nature of its own, and is “difficult” and “obscure”, while the creative force untouched by temporality — that which energises representation as a condition of the feminised matter it circumscribes — is primary, active, de-substantialised, and masculine.[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 40/49a, 43/51a, 90/88d, 43/50e, 42/50b, 50c/42, 49a/40. Philosophically, the receptacle is graspable only by “a bastard kind of reasoning” and is something like what one apprehends in a dream (25b/45). The sexualised nature of the dualism is both the target and the weapon that annihilates it in Irigaray’s “Plato’s Hystera”.[/note] “It would not be out of place to compare the receptacle to a mother, the source to a father, and what they create between them to a child.”[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 50d/40.[/note] Is there a neater epithet to describe the age-old pact between reproduction and representation?

Sensible, material, and bound in harmonious relation to a transcendent non-time, pre-critical temporality is irrevocably secondary and modal. The time of the revolving door is a mode of eternity, the essential structure of which appears to us as a succession of moments — extensive, cardinal, homogenous — arranged in a cyclical repetition of the same, with a spatial line delimiting outside from inside.[note]Space, too — as coexistence or simultaneity — is just another mode, coexistence and simultaneity graspable only as arrangements, erratic or ordered, relative to the positing of eternity. As well as the specific schema of the “Timaeus and a figure denoting fundamental aspects of monotheism, the revolving door also extends to index a prevalent trend in pre-Kantian philosophy applicable to rationalist thinkers such as Leibniz, who deems space and time to be modal expressions of an infinite, conceptual intellect, confusedly perceived by finite minds (monads). “I have said more than once that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time is — that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order of things that exist at the same time, considered as existing together, without entering into their particular manners of existing. And when many things are seen together, one consciously perceives this order of things among themselves.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew (Cambridge: Hackett, 2000), 15.[/note] As Deleuze puts it, “all the time of antiquity is marked by a modal character … time is a mode and not a being, no more than number is a being. Number is a mode in relation to what it quantifies, in the same way that time is a mode in relation to what it measures”.[note]Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.[/note] In a world for which time is a mere, cardinalised image of the eternal, held apart from it in a relation of exclusive disjunction, administered by a god, all experience is that of a subject condemned to reckon, neurotically, with its originary imperfection. The great line demarcating outside from inside assigns interiority to time and exteriority to the non-time of eternity via a spatial horizon. A definitionally beautiful misconception of the topology of time, but a misconception nonetheless.[note]“We have misconceived the topology of time, and in doing so closed the gates connecting time with eternity. The recovery from this greatest of errors will sift the strong from the weak, setting the capstone of the ‘Great Politics’ that open at the end of nihilism. Eventually, the philosophy of time will decide.” Nick Land, “Nietzschean Shards”, Outside In, http://www.xenosystems.net/nietzschean-shards/.[/note]

Straight Labyrinth I: The Time of Economists and Poets

The circle must be abandoned as a faulty principle of return; we must abandon our tendency to organize everything into a sphere. All things return on the straight and narrow by way of a straight and labyrinthine line.[note]Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum”, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 166.[/note]

‘Rectifying’ the celestial or meteorological temporality of the revolving door, the figure of time expressed in the straight labyrinth emerges in Deleuze’s various accounts as “the time of the city” and also that of the “desert”.[note]“Time is no longer the cosmic time of an original celestial movement, nor is it the rural time of derived meteorological movements. It has become the time of the city and nothing other, the pure order of time.” Deleuze, “On four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, 28; “And time will be this sort of form which is also pure, and this kind of act by which the world empties itself, becomes a desert.” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.[/note] The subordination of time to space and motion dissolves into the contentless, temporal determination of the empirical by an immanent yet abstract process. Deleuze notes that Kant was able to apprehend this due to his historical and geographical situation — virtually immobilised in his Königsberg study, yet sensitive to subterranean tremors — deep in the heart of Europe during the ignition of modern industrialisation. There is an embedded double reference to capitalist temporality, brought to light by Marx’s statement in the Grundrisse, that

Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange — of the means of communication and transport — the annihilation of space by time — becomes an extraordinary necessity for it …

and to Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Notes on the Oedipus”, leading Deleuze to state that “it is correct to claim that neither Fichte nor Hegel is the descendent of Kant — rather it is Hölderlin, who discovers the emptiness of pure time”.[note]Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook V, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htm. Italics added.; Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus” in Essays and Letters, trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), e-book; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 87.[/note] If the industrial city is also a desert, it is the Athenian desert of the Sophoclean tragedies, for, as Hölderlin writes, Oedipus is remarkable in its uniquely modern conception of the genre, in which “God and man communicate in the all-forgetting form of unfaithfulness”.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3.[/note] Oedipus, like the subject of the First Critique,

forgets both himself and the God and, in a sacred manner, of course, turns himself round like a traitor. For at the most extreme edge of suffering, nothing exists beside the conditions of time or space. Man forgets himself there because he is wholly in the moment; and God, because he is nothing else than time. And both are unfaithful: time, because at such a moment it reverses categorically — beginning and end simply cannot be connected; and man, because at this moment he must follow the categorical reversal, and therefore simply cannot be in the following what he was in the beginning.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3. The reversal is that of the ‘caesura’ (see the following), which marks an inversion of “the striving out of this world into a striving out of another world into this one”. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone” in Essays and Letters, trans. and ed. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), e-book, §2. Thanks to Thomas Murphy for his insight regarding this problem of temporality in Difference and Repetition and for catalysing the magmic inclusion of Hölderlin in this essay.[/note]

Hölderlin’s identification of a ‘categorical reversal’ in the dual turning-away of god and man is taken up by Deleuze as the mark that indicates a historical transition in the schemata of time, and in turn, the relation this reversal installs between the two sides of the disjunctive couple. With the figure of Oedipus, the initial shift from the temporality of the revolving door to that of the straight labyrinth is consecrated, and — following Hölderlin’s interpretation — coincides with a truly modern sense of time, a time that is inherently tragic, but in an unprecedented way. While Plato’s arc of integrated planetary motion is always returning — like the great cyclical tragedies of Aeschylus — to a state of equilibrium, ending where it began, Hölderlin’s Oedipus is “traversed by a straight line which tears him along” with “murderous slowness” towards an enigmatic dissolution at an unknown coordinate in the shifting desert sands: and “Towards what? Nothing”.[note]Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67, translation modified; “[L]a tragédie d’Œdipe est dans sa lenteur meurtrissante presqu’une tragédie moderne.” Jean Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle” in Friedrich Hölderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe, Remarques sur Antigone (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1965), 50. The above, and all following translations of Beaufret’s untranslated text are my own; Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.

Oedipus’ demise holds significant parallels to Empedocles’ dissolution in the volcano that forms the crux of Hölderlin’s unfinished tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, which he had abandoned just prior to writing “Notes on the Oedipus“, and these latter are generally understood to be the completion of the inchoate theory of tragedy advanced in the Empedocles texts. Empedocles’ volcanic dissolution haunts the whole of modern tragedy, and Hölderlin’s own struggle with the infinity it called up in his writing will become more than just the personal struggle of an alienated and ambitious poet in the history of dramatic thought. See Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning-Play, trans. David Farrell Krell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).[/note] The distinction between ancient and modern tragic forms — and elsewhere, between farce and tragedy — is determined by the placement of the limit with which the hero interacts. In the ancient conception of the genre, tragedy conforms to the exclusive disjunction operating under the aegis of the gods. The limit with which the hero comes into conflict is external, manifested in a law that is then transgressed by some excessive act for which the hero must atone, triggering a return to order.[note]“Sophoclean tragedy, for Hölderlin, is not the tragedy of Aeschylus or Euripides. It is the singular tragedy of divine withdrawal. Everything that is tragic in Sophocles enciphers the fact that the frontier between man and God has become enigmatic. Thus it is different from the tragedy of Aeschylus, for whom the limit is hardly an enigma. Here [in Aeschylus], man surpasses the limit, and often does so despite the counsel of the gods. […] Tragic action is thus the history of a return to order which demands the violation of a limit.” Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 15-16. In farce, it is the clown’s inability to reach the limit (which is clearly defined by what has gone before) — and thus to perform his or her acts adequately — that subtends the relation between agent and limit as both Marx and Deleuze will define it. Farce begets only an inferior representation, rather than a real alteration. See note 21 above.[/note] Deleuze sees in this cycle of limit, transgression and return, a perfect isomorphism with the schema of the revolving door.

[T]his tragic time is modelled on astronomical time since in astronomical time you have the sphere of fixed points which is precisely the sphere of perfect limitation, you have the planets and the movements of the planets which, in a certain way, break through the limit, then you have the atonement, which is to say the re-establishment of justice since the planets find themselves in the same position again.[note]Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67; See note 43.[/note]

The cycle is reinforced by the act of transgression, harmony is reinstated between the realm of the gods and the realm of men, and we know in advance the lesson that will be learned.[note]In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, for example, “Agamemnon has hardly entered his palace before Cassandra sees, as if through the walls, the exact course the crime will take, and predicts the return of Orestes. But here, the clamour of the prophetic voice does not carry the significance of the ‘caesura’. Rather, it confirms only what was already expected. […] In the triumphant king who descends from his chariot to tread the blood-red carpet Clytemnestra unfurls beneath his feet, we have already recognised the figure of one who is sentenced to death. There is nothing more Aeschylean than a tragic act prefaced by the words ‘It is done’ — before having even begun. Everything unfolds from one end to the other, right up to the exoneration of Orestes by the tribunal of the Eumenides, without a ‘lacuna’, certainly, but also without a ‘caesura’. Such is the march of a destiny that does not cease to subsume everything into its most precise image from the point of an initial transgression.” Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 31-2.[/note] But something different happens for Oedipus. The limit he encounters is no longer external, having shifted simultaneously closer and further away — the threshold dividing gods from men, and time from space, is both interior to Oedipus and beyond him — it has become “enigmatic”.[note]“Oedipus, the most economical formula of interiorisation (Case). It’s all in your head.” Ccru, “Flatlines” in Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2017), (:)(:)(:)::/108. Aeschylus and Euripides may “understand better how to objectify suffering and anger”, but it is Sophocles who truly grasps “the sense [sens] of man, in his voyage towards the unthinkable.”; Hölderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe, Remarques sur Antigone, quoted by Beaufret in “Hölderlin et Sophocle’, 16.[/note] It cleaves him in two and drives him towards an infinity that rises up to meet him in an “all-forgetting form of unfaithfulness”, annihilating him at Colonus whilst looping him back upon himself.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3.[/note] Following Hölderlin’s idiosyncratic, Kantian reading of the text, the Sophoclean tragedy is condensed into an infernal play of diversion and re-orientation as Oedipus is forced to confront himself in the form of an infinite self-displacing horizon which draws him across the deflated denouement of King Oedipus and into the relentless modern desert of Oedipus at Colonus.[note] The bulk of French and German commentary on Hölderlin’s interpretations of Sophocles read Hölderlin’s work as a subversion of Hegelian self-consciousness, despite the former’s alleged youthful participation in “The Oldest Program toward a System in German Idealism” alongside Hegel himself. See Kathrin H. Rosenfield, “Le conflit tragique chez Sophocle et son interprétation chez Hölderlin et Hegel”, Les Études philosophiques, 77:2 (2006), 141-161, for a survey of this difference.

This essay follows the former tendency, which is consonant with Deleuze’s own approach. See, for an example beyond those given in Difference and Repetition and “On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, Nietzsche and Philosophy, where Deleuze writes, “Dialectics in general are not a tragic vision of the world but, on the contrary, the death of tragedy, the replacement of the tragic vision by a theoretical conception (with Socrates) or a Christian conception (with Hegel). What has been discovered in Hegel’s early writings is in fact the final truth of the dialectic: modern dialectic is the truly Christian ideology”. This bears heavily on his readings of tragedy and farce in Marx. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1983), 18. This is also Beaufret’s approach (see Beaufret, ‘Hölderlin et Sophocle’, 38) and is supported by more recent commentaries in English, including (but not limited to) that of Véronique M. Fóti, who writes “whereas Hegel situates tragedy, or tragic conflict and its resolution, within ethicality (Sittlichkeit, as a surpassed self-actualization of spirit), Hölderlin decisively withdraws it from the ethical domain. … The twisting free of tragedy from the grip of Hegelian ethicality does not mean that the concerns normally classed as ethical are cast to the winds … but rather that they are resituated against a vaster horizon — the horizon, perhaps, of what lies ‘beyond good and evil’, of the dispropriative trait in the propriative event (Ereignis), or of the tragic structure in the instauration and despoilment of hegemonic principles. […] [F]or Hegel, reconciliation remains the guiding aim of tragedy and defines its cathartic work, the late Hölderlin sees ultimate reconciliation — the reconciliation of man with divinity — not as the ideal of a differential interrelation, but as a hybristic union, destructive of the singular, and motivated by ‘eccentric enthusiasm’, which is fundamentally a passion for death. The cathartic work of tragedy therefore becomes for him a work of dispersive separation”. Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Tragedy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006) 2-3; Henry Somers-Hall, for whom Hegel’s privileging of ethical action cleaves too closely to ancient conceptions of drama and fails to see the novelty in Hölderlin’s reading, “Time Out of Joint: Hamlet and the Pure Form of Time”, Deleuze Studies, Volume 5 (2011), 64-7; and David Farrell Krell, who wrests Hölderlin from the grip of German Idealism via the notion of intensity in Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning-Play, especially 304-6.[/note]

Oedipus’ time is no longer the cyclical time of return to a founding order, but a simple, straight line which complicates everything. The limit manifests both as a temporal fracture interior to Oedipus’ vexed subjectivity and a point to which he tends — “the gap of an in-between, which occasions, finally, a loss of self”.[note]Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 16.[/note] There is no atonement for Oedipus, although there is a tribunal — and a crime. He is not subject to a hero’s death, only a long and desolate exile (a little too long to be comfortable) to which he voluntarily submits in the absence of divine directive.[note]“OEDIPUS: Cast me away this instant
Out of this land, out of the sight of man.
CREON: Be sure it would have been done without delay,
But that I await instruction from the god. […]
OEDIPUS: I have your promise, then?
CREON: What promise?
OEDIPUS: To send me away.
CREON: God will decide, not I.
OEDIPUS: No god will speak for me.
CREON: Then you will have your wish.
OEDIPUS: And your consent?
CREON: I do not speak beyond my knowledge.”
Sophocles, King Oedipus in The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin, 1974), 65; 67-8.[/note] Thus Oedipus “turns himself round like a traitor”, but in a sacred manner — the trial becoming what Jean Beaufret (the Hölderlin commentator Deleuze draws most visibly on besides a few cursory gestures towards Heidegger, who he cites laconically in Difference and Repetition and the lectures on Kant), names both a “heresy” and an “initiation” — and is “returned to himself” in two ways.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3. Italics added. Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 50; 53. Beaufret’s untranslated commentary is drawn upon repeatedly by Deleuze in his evocations of Hölderlin in Difference and Repetition, and its influence is heavily apparent in Deleuze’s 1978 lectures on Kant (if not also elsewhere, “On Several Regimes of Signs” in A Thousand Plateaus being one site that bears the mark of its impact). Deleuze’s circumlocutionary references to Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin can be found in Difference and Repetition, 32 (note 4), and Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67 and in A Thousand Plateaus, 138.

“A trial for heresy” is taken from “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3. Beaufret explains that a heretic, for Hölderlin, is one “who aorgically and without mediation attempts to seize the very essence of the divine”. “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 50. The ‘aorgic’ is a term of Hölderlin’s own making, and it is deployed to encipher the effusive, infinite, disordered and discordant power of Nature in opposition to the structured, finite and organising principles of Art — or the ‘organic’ — in the context of his theory of tragedy. The aorgic is closely linked to the dissociative experience of panic by Beaufret and related to the “passion for death” by Fóti who writes that, “ever hostile to man”, the aorgic “manifests [an] ambiguous aspect: although it may appear welcoming and life-sustaining, it is an alien and unfathomable power that — for all the effort to conceal it behind the screens of cultural and intellectual constructs — fatally attracts sensitive individuals. Somewhat like the Freudian death drive, it impels the individual toward dissolution or a return to the unformed. Hölderlin relates the aorgic element to the unconscious (or, perhaps, nonconscious) dynamics of the psyche, which means that it now infiltrates the supposed organicism of subjectivity, eroding its boundaries and affecting it with alterity”. Fóti, Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Theory of Tragedy, 21; 61; 47. The organic and the aorgic “inter-penetrate most profoundly and touch one another in their uttermost extremes” in a manner not dissimilar to Nietzsche’s formulation of tragedy with its opposition of Dionysian and Apollonian impulses — their unification bringing about an epochal transition that gestures towards a “still inchoate world to come”. Hölderlin, ‘The Basis of Empedocles” in The Death of Empedocles, 147; Krell, The Death of Empedocles, 170.

In his notes to the Empedocles manuscript, Hölderlin drew a number of diagrams meant to evoke this unification. Krell reproduces them in his translation of the play, accompanied by the following caption:

Holderlin Aorgic-Organic Union/Dispersion Diagram

“The one on the left refers to the dispersion from the midpoint undergone by both art (the organizational) and nature (the more aorgic), a dispersion that occurs in the most radical enmity … while the one on the right tries to demonstrate some sort of higher unification or reconciliation of the two”. (Krell, The Death of Empedocles, 257-8.)

Hölderlin thus saw aorgic infinity as the necessary corrective to contemporary Germanic tendencies, which overemphasised the organic, organisational power of Art and culture, whilst, for the Greeks who naturally overstated the aorgic at the expense of the organic, the attraction of dissolution and excess was “especially danger-fraught because it destroys the protective lucidity and measure that Greece had cultivated, unleashing the full wildness of the fiery, aorgic element. Since the Hesperian formative drive tends toward this very fire and sense of destiny, the Greek dys-limitation constitutes for Hesperia a warning example which holds it back from following the sheer onrush of its own formative drive”. Fóti concludes this part of her analysis with a comment which presages and (according to Hölderlin’s identification of the orgic as the primary Germanic drive) inverts certain passages of A Thousand Plateaus with its warnings against the “fourth danger” of the line of flight — the pure line of abolition and destruction: “One can reflect here on what it may have meant — beyond Hölderlin’s historical horizon — for twentieth-century Germany to maximise the tendency of its cultural formative drive in a quest for grandeur and a sense of destiny, while neglecting the free and creative (rather than obsessive or servile) cultivation of its natal tendency to lucid ordering. It remains, of course, a consummate historical irony that Hölderlin’s thought and art were themselves (without benefit of attentive explication) annexed and exploited by the Third Reich”. Foti, Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Theory of Tragedy, 82. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 252-5.

Finally, the aorgic seems to appear as the ‘orgiastic’ in Difference and Repetition, (Holderlin’s ‘aorgique’, from Beaufret’s French translation, becoming ‘orgique’ in Deleuze’s original French) and is similarly opposed to the ‘organic’. To wit: “When representation discovers the infinite within itself, it no longer appears as organic representation but as orgiastic representation: it discovers within itself the limits of the organised; tumult, restlessness and passion underneath apparent calm. It rediscovers monstrosity.” And, significantly, from the conclusion, “The greatest effort of philosophy was perhaps directed at rendering representation infinite (orgiastic). It is a question of extending representation as far as the too large and the too small of difference; of adding a hitherto unsuspected perspective to representation — in other words, inventing theological, scientific and aesthetic techniques which allow it to integrate the depth of difference in itself; of allowing representation to conquer the obscure; of allowing it to include the vanishing of difference which is too small and the dismemberment of difference which is too large; of allowing it to capture the power of giddiness, intoxication and cruelty, and even of death. In short, it is a question of causing a little of Dionysus’s blood to flow in the organic veins of Apollo”. Difference and Repetition, 42; 262.[/note] First, in terms of the mythic narrative, as the cause of himself (Oedipus is the cause of the plague that causes Oedipus) and more enigmatically at the terminus of his abstractly interminable wanderings, where he ‘returns’ in such a way that he can no longer be what he was in the beginning.

When the god who “is nothing more than time”, finally, and not without an irony that is unique to Hölderlin’s translation (“Why are we delaying? Let’s go! You are too slow!”), enables his demise, we are denied the catharsis that typically accompanies the spectacle of the hero’s death.[note]Quoted by Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 50.[/note] “What happened?” implores the chorus of the small party that has accompanied Oedipus to the threshold beyond which only he and Theseus are allowed to pass.[note]Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in The Theban Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin, 1974), 121.[/note] The response is a brief and integrally obscure report.[note]“MESSANGER: When we had gone a little distance, we turned and looked back. Oedipus was nowhere to be seen; but [Theseus] was standing alone holding his hand before his eyes as if he had seen some terrible sight that no one could bear to look upon; and soon we saw him salute heaven and the earth with one short prayer. In what manner Oedipus passed from this earth, no one can tell.” Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 121.[/note] It is speculated that Oedipus has vanished into “the earth’s foundations” which “gently opened up and received him with no pain” or was “lifted away to the far dark shore” by “a swift invisible hand”, the prolonged arrival of his death heralded by thunder and strange surges of lightning, illuminating, briefly, the hidden diagonal that haunts the in-between of sky and ground, the realm of the gods and the realm of men.[note]Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 121.[/note] In the cracks of the Kantian machinery a different disjunction momentarily rears its faceless mien, whilst at the end of the line, “death loses itself in itself” and Oedipus, “having nothing left to hide” becomes “the guardian of a secret”.[note]Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 174; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 320; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 90.[/note] Between these two returns, the modern tragic figure is split across time both intensively and extensively as its own internal and external limit and source. The Sophoclean line does not restore a temporality of lost equilibrium, as is the rule in classical tragedy, but ends unresolved, internally perturbed, and terminally out of balance.

Shamanic Oedipus

Oedipus plays an ambivalent role in Deleuze’s writing. Like the shaman and the despot he is always double.[note]“Oedipus is almost unique in the Greek world. The whole first part is imperial, despotic, paranoid, interpretive, divinatory. But the whole second part is Oedipus’s wandering, his line of flight, the double turning away of his own face and that of God. Rather than very precise limits to be crossed in order, or which one does not have the right to cross (hybris), there is a concealed limit toward which Oedipus is swept. Rather than interpretive signifying irradiation, there is a subjective linear proceeding permitting Oedipus to keep a secret, but only as a residue capable of starting a new linear proceeding. Oedipus, his name is atheos: he invents something worse than death or exile, he wanders and survives on a strangely positive line of separation or deterritorialization.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 138.

For the ambiguity inherent in the role of the despot, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Penguin, 2009). Thanks are due to Edmund Berger for the many conversations we shared concerning this point, particularly on the relationship between Oedipus and Cain as scapegoat figures in the fifth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. This is a reading supported by Ronald Bogue in “The Betrayal of God”, Deleuze and Religion, ed. Mary Bryden (London: Routledge, 2000). Ed is also responsible for providing the references making the link between schizophrenia and shamanism in Anti-Oedipus and R.D. Laing’s work explicit below.[/note] Carlo Ginzberg makes the connection between shamanic practices and the Oedipus myth explicit in Ecstasies — his trans-temporal, trans-spatial study of the witches’ sabbath — where he finds in the motif of the swollen foot (which gives Oedipus his name) the mytho-cultural stamp of the shamanic initiate whose journey leads inexorably to the realm of the dead.[note]“We may suppose that in the most ancient version of the myth of Oedipus (identified as we have indicated, with a fable about magic) the wound to the feet, the exposure, the period spent on the margins of the world of the polis on the wild heights of Mount Cithaeron, the struggle with the Sphinx — later mitigated by the solution of the riddle — marked the stages of an initiatory journey to the beyond.” Carlo Ginzberg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 228.[/note] Oedipus incarnates, as such, the mythical archetype of the dying god, which links him enigmatically with Christ and Dionysus.[note]Ginzberg, Ecstasies, 237-8. See also James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 396-404.[/note] Moreover, the persistence of lameness, monosandalism, bodily maiming, or an unbalanced gait among the vast swathe of myths and cultural practices included in Ginzberg’s study reveals a fundamental trait attributable to all beings who, like Oedipus, are “suspended between the realm of the dead and the realm of the living”: “Anyone who goes to or returns from the nether world — man, animal, or a mixture of the two — is marked by an asymmetry.”[note]Ginzberg, Ecstasies, 232; 247.[/note] This asymmetry, at once abstract and empirical, is measured against a perceived natural symmetry that keeps the social realm in harmony with the circular world of revolving seasons and astronomical cycles — coordinates that return the cycle to its beginning. “The trans-cultural diffusion of myths and rituals revolving around physiological asymmetry”, writes Ginzberg, “most probably sinks its psychological roots in this minimal, elementary perception that the human species has of itself”, namely the “recognition of symmetry as a characteristic of human beings”. Thus, “[a]nything that modifies this image on a literary or metaphorical plane therefore seems particularly suited to express an experience that exceeds the limits of what is human”.[note]Ginzberg, Ecstasies, 241-2. See also Tom Moynihan’s excellent comments on the connection between bilateral symmetry and faciality in evolution, “The Gastrulation of Geist: or an Extended Meditation upon the World-Historical Connection Between Digestion and Simulation”, Vast Abrupt (2018), https://vastabrupt.com/2018/02/08/gastrulation-of-geist/.[/note] Mythical lameness symbolises an otherworldly incursion, a problematic asymmetry that intrudes upon a so-called natural humanity and opens a passage between worlds.

Ginzberg also notes in passing (although only to point out what he considers a superficial reading indebted to an overly synchronic methodology) Levi-Strauss’ connection of symbolic lameness to the passage of the seasons, where it features as part of a dance-based ritual performed to truncate a particular season and accelerate the passage to the next, offering a “perfect diagram” of the hoped-for imbalance.[note]Ginzberg, Ecstasies, 226; 239.[/note] If Ginzberg is warranted in discounting Levi-Strauss’ hypothesis, perhaps this is not because it is wholly incorrect so much as an interpretation that is limited insofar as it remains indebted to a particular conception of time among its proponents. Ritual or symbolic lameness grasped as a spell for accelerating the seasonal series acts as a superficial interpretation covering over a deeper one, operating within an altogether different understanding of time. One glimpsed beneath the esotericism of Deleuze’s statement that the “ego is a mask for other masks, a disguise under other disguises. Indistinguishable from its own clowns, it walks with a limp on one green leg and one red leg”.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 110. The source of the strange attribution of green and red to the “legs” in the image can most likely be exhumed from Salomon Maimon’s critique of Kant in the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, where the origin of the difference between perceptions of the colours green and red resurfaces consistently as problem troubling Kant’s attempts to extract de jure principles for experience, and is ultimately marshalled in support of an argument that a philosophy concerned only with the conditions of possible experience does not go far enough when it comes to questions of transcendental production. Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, trans. Nick Midgely, Henry Somers-Hall, Alistair Welchman and Merten Reglitz (London: Continuum, 2010), see for example, 22; 27-8; 74; 97-8.[/note] Read through these subterranean lines which knit it into a complex cultural history of shamanic tropes and practices, Oedipus’ swollen foot condenses time compression, an initiation preceding a journey to the realm of the dead and a fundamental disequilibrium, and thereby acts as a cipher for the key aspects of the Sophoclean tragedy in Hölderlin’s interpretation and the schematic shift from the revolving door to the straight labyrinth.

In “Notes on the Oedipus” and “Notes on the Antigone”, Hölderlin proposes a reading that can be extrapolated from a “calculable law” opposing a discursive logic embedded in history, judgement and the mundane affairs of the human world, with an obscure notion of rhythm.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, Essays and Letters, §1.[/note] The idiosyncrasy of his reading arises from an attempt to affirm the realist paradigm (grounded in scientific and historical validity) that dominated early German Romanticism alongside an unnameable and unrepresentable “efficacity”, located in “another dimension […] beyond and below” conceptual thought, which he believed characterised the tragic in its essence.[note]Arkady Plotinsky, “The Calculable Law of Tragic Representation and the Unthinkable” in At the Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-Kantian Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinbugh University Press, 2015), 130; Kathrin H. Rosenfield, “Hölderlin et Sophocle: Rythme et temps tragique dans les Remarques sur Œdipe et Antigone”, Philosophique, 11: 2008, 20. This and all following translations from the text are my own.[/note] The aim of the law was to make this obscure element momentarily graspable — not as something represented, but as the form of representation itself — a momentary “inspiration” that “comprehends itself infinitely … in a consciousness which cancels out consciousness”.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone”, Essays and Letters, §2.[/note] As Beaufret frequently reminds his readers, the influence of Kant on the young poet is difficult to miss, and is particularly apparent when Hölderlin writes, for example, “[a]mong men, one must above all bear in mind that every thing is something, i.e. that it is cognisable in the medium of its appearance, and that the manner in which it is defined can be determined and taught”.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, Essays and Letters, §1.[/note] Applied to the two Oedipus plays, taken together as a single drama, this yields an analysis in which a rhythmic distribution of the dialogue becomes diagrammable as a speed differential broken by a caesura corresponding to the prophecy of Tiresias. In contrast to Antigone where the structure is inverted (Tiresias’ prophecy being withheld until the end), the caesura in the Oedipus plays occurs early in the drama, countering a momentum which “inclines … from the end towards the beginning”.[note]“[I]f this rhythm of ideas is so constituted that in the rapidity of enthusiasm the former are more torn along by the later ones, the caesura (a), or the counter-rhythmical interruption, must lie from the front, so that the first half is, as it were, shielded from the second; and then, precisely because the second half is initially more rapid and seems to weigh more heavily, as a result of the caesura’s counter-action the balance will tend to incline from the end (b) towards the beginning (c). If, however, the rhythm of ideas is so constituted that the following are, rather, compressed by the initial ones, the caesura (a) will come to lie more towards the end, because it is the end which must, as it were, be shielded from the beginning; and then the balance will incline more towards the end (b), since the first half (c) extends further, but the balance sets in later.” Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone”, Essays and Letters, §1. Hölderlin’s diagrams are reproduced above.[/note]

Caesura Diagram Black
Hölderlin’s rhythmic diagrams of Oedipus and Antigone. Note that the notational progression from a (caesura), to b (end), and c (beginning) implies that the caesura is logically prior to the two points given in successive time.

By the time Tiresias speaks the “pure word” that reveals to Oedipus the truth of his identity everything of significance has already taken place, and the drama is supplied by Oedipus’ apprehension and acceptance of his fate, dragged along by the line of time, in which he learns to become who he is by becoming something else (as the cause of himself he is also the cause of a difference from himself).[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §1. In contrast, Antigone, singled out by Hegel as the crucial specimen in the Athenian trilogy and from which he draws a dialectical, ethical lesson, has a more straightforward narrative structure, inclining from “the beginning towards the end”, its caesura arising intelligibly at the end of the play (when Tiresias advises Creon to allow the interment of Polynices).

Hölderlin, in an earlier essay, relates the tragic heroism of Antigone to the lyric mood in its privileging of the subjective, cultural and “organic” side of the division between the gods and man, while that of Oedipus is more thoroughly tragic, privileging the objective, natural and “aorgic” side of the divide — its law proceeding from the “necessary arbitrariness of Zeus”, “father of time” divine avatar of the rift in the unity of being. Hölderlin, “Notes on the Antigone”, §1; Friedrich Hölderlin, “The lyric, in appearance idealic poem …” in Letters and Essays, trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), e-book. Antigone is also classed as the “more Greek” of the two because of the swift incarnation of time as death, whilst the death of Oedipus is maximally prolonged, and in this, “modern”. “For this is the tragic thing about us [moderns], that we should quietly leave the world of the living, packaged in a simple box. Such a destiny is not so imposing, but it is deeper.” Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 49; 22. See note 48 on the rejection of Hegelianism in Hölderlin’s readings.[/note] The narrative is, incidentally, structured like a modern detective story, in which one begins by asking ‘What happened?’.[note]And Deleuze will write in “The Philosophy of Crime Novels” that “[w]hile Oedipus is the only Greek tragedy that already has this detective structure, we should marvel that Sophocles’s Oedipus is a detective, and not that the detective novel has remained Oedipal”. In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 82.[/note] The caesura breaks the consistency of Oedipus’ conception of himself, rewrites his memories (“the killer you are seeking is yourself”), and throws him into a time that suddenly becomes animate with a ‘before’ that was not previously available, and ‘after’ that sutures him to zero: “This day brings your birth; and brings your death”.[note]Tiresias to Oedipus, in Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 36; 38.[/note] The terrible implication of his fate — the prophecy of patricide and incest that lead his parents to desert him as an infant, supposedly left to die among the elements, and the discovery that everything he had done to avoid it has in fact functioned to bring it about — rises up before him. The ground falls away and, as Hölderlin writes, the rhythmic structure of the text propels Oedipus backwards towards his beginning with an incredible momentum, simultaneously interminable, due to the indifference of the gods, whilst slowly hurrying him towards his death. It is not for nothing that Hölderlin would pronounce in a letter to a friend that “[t]he true meaning of tragedy is most easily grasped from the position of paradox”.[note]Friedrich Hölderlin, Samtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994) vol.2, 561. Quoted by Rosenfield in “Hölderlin et Sophocle: Rythme et temps tragique dans les Remarques sur Œdipe et Antigone”, fn8.[/note] The caesura shields the first portion of the two Oedipus plays from their accelerated second portion, interfacing the differential speeds of dramatic action, and in this, wordlessly renders Hölderlin’s idea of an otherworldly efficacity rhythmically apprehensible without representing it.[note]The caesura “thus abolishes the distinctions and the understanding ensured by succession (in human or physical time), insofar as the rhythm makes appear a more all-embracing connection — and a timelessness, not subject to the segmentation of the successive alternations. The rhythm makes one see-feel-guess the unfathomable dimension that ensures the connection of everything. Thus, paradoxically, the tragedy presents, as equivalent and concomitant, the movements of two forms of language: that of the arguments situated in the temporal succession and the pure language of the seer (the counter-rhythmic movement). What is accessible to knowledge and what is removed from human mastery are presented simultaneously”. Rosenfield, “Hölderlin et Sophocle: Rythme et temps tragique dans les Remarques sur Œdipe et Antigone”, 82.[/note] The operational rule of this manifestation is disequilibrium or asymmetry, and asymmetry linearly breaks the foundational rhyme that animates the Timaean cosmos, and inaugurates a new rule, the shamanic limp of schizophrenic auto-production. Oedipus’s initiation is a countdown that re-initiates his fatal loop.

The caesura thus produces two ‘times’ — an asymmetrical, looped, auto-productive time (one slice of which is rhythmically compressed, generating an empirical acceleration), and the asymmetrical form of time productive of asymmetrical time (Hölderlin’s modern god) — and two deaths: the horizontal death at the end of straight line, which takes Oedipus into the ground, and the secret, vertical death of the caesura, which rearranges everything in a single instant, producing and grounding the physical death of Oedipus and the time it takes place in. Hölderlin will denote both with the mathematical expression “= 0”.[note]Hölderlin, Samtliche Werke und Briefe, vol.2, 561; Quoted in Rosenfield, “Hölderlin et Sophocle: Rythme et temps tragique dans les Remarques sur Œdipe et Antigone“, 92, and Krell, The Death of Empedocles, 299-300.[/note] In contrast to the progressive time of the heretic’s trial, “the ever-oppositional dialogue”, the history and affairs of Thebes, and Oedipus’ voyage of metamorphosis “in which the beginning and end no longer rhyme”, the caesura is the irruption of time as a void which produces succession and abides within Oedipus in the function of an initiation as he travels the line that will remove him “from his orbit of life … to another world, [to] the eccentric orbit of the dead”.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3; Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67; Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §1. My italics.[/note] It is, to borrow a term from MVU’s resident Hyper-Kantian, R. E. Templeton, a “transcendental occurrence”.[note]Ccru, “Glossary”, Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Falmouth, Urbanomic, 2017), (((:):))(:)(:)/369. See also, “The Templeton Episode” which contains an extended meditation on auto-productive Kantianism and cyclical time control, (::::)-(:)(:)(:):/53-4. The occulted relationship of Professor Randolph Edmund Templeton (“the model for H.P. Lovecraft’s Randolph Carter”) to the dissolution mystery outlined here provides vital clues that will be returned to. Ccru, Abstract Culture: Digital Hyperstition, 55.[/note]

Split across an asymmetrical empirical succession and a far more obscure asymmetry that both grounds and ungrounds it, time indeed becomes a straight line with a subterranean labyrinth as its premise. A strange kind of homogeneity forged in war. With the shifting of the limit — the great rift that draws a threshold between two worlds, defining inside and outside — into the modern Oedipal subject, everything changes. When Hölderlin claims that in the double betrayal of man and god, “infinite unification purifies itself through infinite separation”, purification is no longer just a euphemism for catharsis but the precise characterisation of this pure and empty form of time.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, §3.[/note] Anglossic qabbala distils this insight with economic clarity: Kant is a break and a link.

“Rather than being concerned with what happens before and after Kant (which amounts to the same thing)”, writes Deleuze,

we should be concerned with a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant, much less by post-Kantianism — except, perhaps, by Hölderlin in the experience and the idea of a ‘categorical reversal’. For when Kant puts rational theology into question, in the same stroke he introduces a kind of disequilibrium, a fissure or crack in the pure Self of the ‘I think’, an alienation in principle, insurmountable in principle: the subject can henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as that of an Other, and in so doing invoke a mysterious coherence in the last instance which excludes its own — namely, that of the world and God. A Cogito for a dissolved Self: the Self of ‘I think’ includes in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other. It matters little that synthetic identity — and, following that, the morality of practical reason — restore the integrity of the self, of the world and of God, thereby preparing the way for post-Kantian syntheses: for a brief moment we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterises the highest power of thought, and opens Being directly on to difference, despite all the mediations, all the reconciliations, of the concept.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 58. Patton’s ‘categorical abduction’ for ‘détournement catégorique’ has been changed to ‘categorical reversal’ for the sake of maintaining consistency across English translations of Deleuze.[/note]

There are three elements to this ‘furtive and explosive’ moment in Kant: the death of God, the fractured I, and the passive nature of the empirical self, all of which correspond to the introduction of transcendental time into the subject and usher in an immense complication of what we take to be human agency.

The death of god is the effacement of the demiurge, along with the essences from which he constructs the phenomenal world of appearance. Without this god, what guarantees the faithful reproduction within the image-simulation of reality of its eternal model? How can we know our experience rhymes with its ground? This leads to an ontological problem whereby ‘man’, the plaything of empirical time, can no longer assume ‘he’ is at home in the world of experience. If there is to be a disjunction between law and its material manifestation, who, if not god, administers it? Nothing is there to underwrite the Platonic values of truth, goodness and beauty, and the modern, empirical subject finds itself at sea in a murderous asymmetry that promises nothing but the cosmic fatigue of ultimate extinquishment under the second law of thermodynamics. The fractured I is even more insidious. The subject, no longer infirm and fallen, as it is for Plato, is constitutive, but “constantly hollow[ed] out”, spilt “in two” and “double[d]”, alienated from itself across the form of time in such a way that it cannot experience its constitutive power.[note]Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, 31.[/note] Worse, as Rimbaud so acutely put it — “It is false to say: I think; one ought to say I am thought … I is another” — that shard of self, the empirical ego which registers phenomena, cannot know what its double is and must now contend with its new status of integral receptivity.[note]Arthur Rimbaud, “Letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May 1871” in Selected Poems and Letters, trans. Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2004), 236. Translation modified.[/note] How, then, does it believe itself to act rather than simply be acted-through? On what does it found its ethics and its politics?

This is the initiatory consequence of the transcendental philosophy of time. The transition from the revolving door dramatises the modulation from transcendent to transcendental distinction, reconfigures the a priori, isolated notion of eternity, and moves time from a spatially subsumed cardinality to a purely formal ordinality — in which distance between numbers opens onto the realm of depth. Philosophy, of course, has preliminary solutions to all of these problems, but in solving them, it steals intermittently back and forth between schemata, recuperating certain comforts native to the time of the revolving door, and smuggling a dying theology into the explosive zones of the city and the desert.

Initiation (Tragedy)

The straight line is the shortest path between two points. This is the example Deleuze uses to explain Kant’s development of a priori synthetic judgements, those “prodigious monsters” that overcome the historical a priori / analytic, a posteriori / synthetic dualism — “the death of sound philosophy” — targeted by the First Critique.[note]Kant’s indices for these two tendencies, which he indirectly names ‘dogmatic rationalism’ and ‘sceptical empiricism’, in pre-critical philosophy are Leibniz and Hume. “We have here presented to us a new phenomenon of human reason — an entirely natural antithetic, in which there is no need of making subtle enquiries or of laying snares for the unwary, but into which reason of itself quite unavoidably falls. It certainly guards reason from the slumber of fictitious conviction such as is generated by a purely one-sided illusion, but at the same time subjects it to the temptation either of abandoning itself to a sceptical despair, or of assuming an obstinate attitude, dogmatically committing itself to certain assertions, and refusing to grant a fair hearing to the arguments for the counter-position. Either attitude is the death of sound philosophy, although the former might perhaps be entitled the euthanasia of pure reason.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans, Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 385 A407/B433. For Deleuze’s exposition of a priori synthesis via the example of the straight line see “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.[/note]  The straight line is thus also a diagonal one, and in this sense, the leanest diagram of critique. The first, faint sketch of a philosophy erected out of paradox.

The Lovecraftian machinery of the text follows from this primary opposition between synthetic sense experience and analytic logic by reformatting it into a division between sensibility and understanding and locating both within the bounds of the a priori on a transcendental diagonal.[note]In his lectures, Deleuze’s preliminary description of the First Critique reads as if it were a passage taken directly from “The Mountains of Madness”, and there is good reason to suppose this parallel with Lovecraft is deliberate: “It’s an excessive atmosphere, but if one holds up … all this Northern fog which lands on top of us starts to dissipate, and underneath there is an amazing architecture … in this fog there functions a sort of thinking machine, a creation of concepts that is absolutely terrifying.” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.

Compare Dyer and Lake’s discovery of the alien city beneath the shifting Antarctic mists in H.P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness”, Tales, ed. Peter Straub (New York: Library of America, 2005) 508; 523: “I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present sample; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice-vapours above our heads. The effect was of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. […] We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise? Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material basis after all — there had been some horizontal stratum of ice-dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection. Of course the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distant image.”[/note]

Transcendental Diagonal Black and White

Receptive, presentational and constitutive, sensibility furnishes the a priori forms of time and space, while the active, representational and reproductive faculty of the understanding provides the a priori concepts (or categories), both of which will be brought to bear on the determination of empirical objects as the conditions of all possible experience, coincident with knowledge and guided by the speculative interest of reason. The form of time delineated by Kant is empty — but productive of a single dimension of successive time whose “beginning and end simply cannot be connected”, and the form of space, likewise empty, can produce only the “infinite given magnitude” of a Euclidean and co-extensive dimensionality.[note]Hölderlin, “Notes on the Oedipus”, Essays and Letters, §3; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159 A25/B39[/note] Both forms are simultaneously subjective and objectively-valid insofar as they are generative of reality for us.[note]Both forms can equally be deployed in a strictly ideal capacity outside of empirical determination, i.e. “when they are considered in themselves through reason” but this is illegitimate from the point of view of both knowledge and experience. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 160 A28/B44.[/note] Time, classed as ‘inner sense’, is the form of internal affection. It envelops space, or ‘outer sense’, the form of external relation and the possibility of being affected by exterior objects, which can only occur with the presupposition of time, although the two are inseparable and arise together in the human mind.[note]“Time is the a priori formal condition of all appearances in general. Space, as the pure form of all outer intuitions, is limited as an a priori condition merely to outer intuitions. But since, on the contrary, all representations, whether or not they have outer things as their object, nevertheless as determinations of the mind themselves belong to the inner state, while this inner state belongs under the formal condition of inner intuition, and thus of time, so time is an a priori of all appearance in general … all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand in relations of time.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 163-164 A34/B50-51.[/note] Time can never appear to us as it is in itself and is always necessarily accompanied by space in our representations of it. Thus, we

represent the temporal sequence through a line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold constitutes a series that is of only one dimension, and infer from the properties of this line to all the properties of time, with the sole difference that the parts of the former are simultaneous, but those of the latter always exist successively.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 163 A33/B50. Italics added.[/note]

This succession is simply a mode of the form of time (along with persistence and co-existence, the three categories of relation whose principles are procured in the Analogies of Experience), which is not in itself successive. Nor are the modes of time properties of objects in themselves, leaving movement — dependent specifically on modal persistence — strictly subordinate to the pure form of time. Kant is adamant about this, demonstrating that if the form of time itself were successive it would be subject to a problem of infinite regress.

[C]hange does not affect time itself, but only the appearances in time (just as simultaneity is not a modus for time itself, in which no parts are simultaneous but rather all succeed one another). If one were to ascribe such a succession to time itself, one would have to think yet another time in which this succession would be possible.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 300 A183/B226.[/note]

Radically indeterminate, time in itself cannot be equivalent to its parts. It corresponds to the figure of the straight labyrinth insofar as it is “in(di)visible” and — because it accompanies all of our representations — “incessant”.[note]See note 4 regarding the shift from ‘invisible’ to ‘indivisible’ in Deleuze’s citations of Borges’ text.[/note] To confuse the form of time with time-as-succession is a grave metaphysical error. In the universe of the straight labyrinth, as Deleuze writes, “[i]t is not succession that defines time, but time that defines the parts of movement as successive inasmuch as they are determined within it”.[note]Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy”, 28. Kant provides the counter-argument and dismisses it in the “Elucidation” that follows his exposition of the Transcendental Aesthetic, concluding, alongside an explicit refusal of Leibniz’s purely intellectual forms, “that the transcendental aesthetic cannot contain more than these two elements, namely space and time, is clear from the fact that all other concepts belonging to sensibility, even that of motion, which unites both elements, presuppose something empirical. For this presupposes the perception of something moveable. In space, considered in itself there is nothing moveable; hence the moveable must be something that is found in space only through experience, thus an empirical datum. In the same way the transcendental aesthetic cannot count the concept of alteration among its a priori data; for time itself does not alter, but only something that is within time”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 165-7 A36-41/B53-58.[/note] Space in itself, in a similar fashion, cannot be construed following a pre-supposed grammar, the eclipse of Euclidean axioms in the history of mathematics having no bearing on it as a pure form.[note]This is only a problem for the explication of space once it has passed through the syntheses of the imagination and been subjected to the categories of the understanding in the schematism. Hence Kant’s careful distinction of forms of intuition (space and time as they are given in themselves) from formal intuition (space and time as magnitudes). Without schematisation, which applies its concepts synthetically as rules of construction, mathematics is simply a logical science, operating in a realm isolated from experience. “Thus in the concept of a figure that is enclosed between two straight lines there is no contradiction … rather the impossibility rests not on the concept in itself, but on its construction in space, i.e., on the conditions of space and its determinations.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 323 A220-21/B268.[/note] The fact that experience appears to unfold along a linear timeline and in three pitiful dimensions is simply a constitutive quirk of human mental structure. Insofar as we can grasp their being in themselves as pure forms, space “signifies nothing at all” and “time”, for us, “is nothing”.[note]“We can accordingly speak of space, extended beings, and so on, only from a human standpoint. If we depart from the subjective condition under which alone we can acquire outer intuition, namely that through which we may be affected by objects, then the representation of space signifies nothing at all.” And “[t]ime is therefore merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is always sensible, i.e. insofar as we are affected by objects), and in itself, outside the subject, is nothing”. Furthermore, “we cannot judge at all whether the intuitions of other thinking beings are bound to the same conditions that limit our intuition and that are universally valid for us”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 159-160 A26-7/B42-3; 164 A35/B51; 160 A27/B43.[/note]

A priori synthesis occurs between the a priori categories on the one hand, and the a priori forms of spatio-temporal determination, on the other, before they are applied to experience, furnishing its “rules of construction”.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 289 A165/B206. “[T]ranscendental propositions can never be given through construction of concepts, but only in accordance with a priori concepts. They contain merely the rule in accordance with which a certain synthetic unity of that which cannot be intuitively represented a priori (of perceptions) should be sought empirically.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 634 A721/B749.[/note] Since both components of the synthesis are a priori, they hold as universal and necessary laws for everything that can be determined in experience. To return to Deleuze’s example of the line, the Euclidean proposition, ‘the straight line is the line which is ex aequo in all its points’ is an analytic judgement; the statement ‘this straight line is red’ is an empirical judgement (straight lines are not universally and necessarily red). The statement, ‘the straight line is the shortest path between two points’, however, is different, because the concept ‘shortest path’ is not analytically contained within the concept ‘straight line’, nor is it simply contingent on an empirical encounter: it is a priori — it holds for all straight lines — and yet, it is also synthetic — something new is added in the synthesis. ‘Shortest path’ is not a predicate of the subject ‘straight line’ but a rule for the construction of a figure that requires assembly in space and time: to produce a straight line, one must find the shortest path between two points. Put differently, a spatio-temporal determination must be discovered that accords with the concept ‘shortest path’.

Kant has two texts, one written before and one written after the Critique of Pure Reason, in which he deals with the problem of ‘incongruent counterparts’ or enantiomorphic bodies, using the necessity of the spatio-temporal assembly of a concept in experience to defend the heterogeneity of space-time and concepts so integral to the difference between sensibility and understanding in the First Critique.[note]Immanuel Kant, “Concerning the Ultimate Foundation for the Differentiation of Regions in Space’”in Selected Pre-Critical Writings, trans. and ed. G. B. Kerferd and D. E. Walford (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968); Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Gary Carl Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Both arguments are constructed to refute Leibniz, although in fact contain conflicting arguments (something we will revisit later). Deleuze draws out the key point: “Kant will say that this [non-superimposibility] is what finitude is.” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.[/note] A left and a right hand, for example, both of which are determined by the selfsame concept, with all its internal relations intact, are conceptually identical yet different due to their positions in space. A left hand can never be superimposed upon a right hand without exiting the confines of Euclidean dimensionality. In a similar fashion, a hand that is perceived now and a hand that is perceived in the future may belong to the same concept, but they can never be made to coincide in time. Thus, space and time are not reducible to conceptual determinations. We will return to Kant’s ‘hands’, but for now let this thought experiment of his show that, given the laws of the three-dimensional space that experience must unfold in, there is no possible way of constructing the ‘shortest path’ other than along a straight line, and to draw a line rather than a point, one requires time. Furthermore, no empirical experience will yield a straight line that is anything other than the shortest path between two points. The a priori forms of space and time thus harbour an irrefutable constitutive power that will underlie the empirical determination of all possible experience.

Because both successive time and three-dimensional space belong a priori to the faculty of sensibility, and therefore have their provenance in the human mind, they are impossible to exit from for us, and must accompany every single denomination of what will be considered legitimate knowledge, which takes its declination from the intersection of empirical experience and the restrictions imposed upon the latter by the transcendental exigency that produces it.[note]Within Kant’s model of time as it is expounded in the First Critique, even time travel would still be perceived by its subject as a succession, moving consistently from T1 to T2 to T3, etc. If the time traveller began her journey at point B and travelled backwards in history to point A, prior to B, her temporal experience would still giver her T1 at B, T2 at A, and so on.[/note] Dreams and hallucinations, occurring solely within the mind, constitute nothing more than a “blind play of representations” — intuitions deprived of determinate objects — and are therefore illegitimate as a basis for knowledge.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 634 A721/B749; 235, A112. “From the fact that the existence of outer objects is required for the possibility of a determinate consciousness of our self it does not follow that every intuitive representation of outer things includes at the same time their existence, for that may well be the mere effect of the imagination (in dreams as well as in delusions); but this is possible merely through the reproduction of previous outer perceptions, which, as has been shown, are possible only through the actuality of outer objects”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 328 B278. The same status applies to any epistemological traction one would hope to gain on the pure forms of space and time themselves. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 382 A291/B347.[/note] This holds equally for our non-empirically validated Ideas of God, World and Soul (objects of a concept for which there is no corresponding intuition), any concept of an object deprived of sense data, and any contradictory and therefore impossible concept — and everyone finds themselves in the same, spatio-temporal manifold, under the same categorical laws which together act as a guarantor for the universalisability of human knowledge.[note]These four permutations together make up Kant’s divisions of nothing, each division corresponding to one of the four sets of categories, respectively (as listed above): ens imaginarium, ens rationis (the noumena), nihil privativum (things-in-themselves) and nihil negativum. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 383 A292/B348.[/note] Consequently, we discover that “we ourselves bring into appearances that order and regularity in them that we call nature”, and moreover “we would not be able to find it there if we, or the nature of our mind, had not originally put it there”.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 241, A125.[/note] Although it underwrites the operation of the transcendental apparatus at the most fundamental level, time, in the First Critique, is simply an inert and ultimately unknowable form which beats out a series of inexorable, successive moments in experience. It is prior to matter, movement and extension, and thus completely re-arranges or unhinges the determination of time by motion so integral to the revolving door of the pre-critical cosmos. All change, alteration and variation take place in time, but the form of time itself is invariable and inviolable.

Time Compression (Circuitry)

Overcoming the irreconcilability of rationalist and empiricist methodologies via the innovation of a priori synthesis nevertheless generates a new problem for Kant, for he has simply moved its incompatibility into the subject, under the guise of the two faculties of sensibility and understanding, which are fundamentally different in kind, one being passive, receptive and immediate, the other spontaneous, active and mediate. Kant’s infamous Copernican revolution, although beginning in radical unfaithfulness — replacing god with time — resolves the duplicitous tension it cannot help but introduce between the two sides of its trademark a priori syntheses in a fundamental identity and a vexed harmony negotiated through the enigmatic synthesis of the imagination in the Transcendental Deduction, which reconstructs the syntheses along the contours of the epistemological subject / object divide, remodelled as the transcendental unity of apperception and the transcendental object = [x].

In order to connect the abstract bundle of categories in the form of the transcendental object = [x] to experience, Kant requires a link which he locates in the imagination, generative of a transcendental synthesis of the appearance of objects across space and time by stabilising their manifolds into a consistent unity for the application of concepts. The imagination performs this role via three syntheses which occur together (but are grounded in the third) in order to produce representation: the synthesis of apprehension which formalises sensible intuitions (diversity in time and space, and the diversity of time and space) into representable shape within a space-time grid, generating a single and uniform spatio-temporal manifold subject to extensive measurement; the reproduction of spatial coordinates that are not subject to instantaneous apprehension (the momentarily non-appearing parts of a volume, for example) as well as past and projected (future) coordinates in the present; and the synthesis of recognition, which underwrites the possibility of representably-stable conceptual traction via the relation of the prior syntheses of apprehension and reproduction to the form of the object in the understanding, the ‘object = [x]’, and this relative to the synthesising subject’s own transcendental identity, the ‘unity of apperception’.[note]When Deleuze says of Oedipus that Tiresias’ prophecy “constitute[s] the pure instant, the pure present from which a past and a future will be produced on a straight line, which is to say a before and after which no longer rhyme”, it is this ‘pure present’ — the conditioning of the synthesis of reproduction in the imagination that supports and is grounded by the transcendental unity of apperception, the subjective form of auto-affection being premised on the latter, which affects its empirical counterpart across the form of time. With the caesura, the pure form of time and the asymmetrical auto-affection of the subject flash, for the first time, into view, illuminating all the parts of time at once: process and product. Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.[/note]

The first two syntheses structure a determination of space and time and the third relates it to consciousness, together supplying an a priori basis for the spatio-temporal unity and continuity of experience — intuited by us as one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space, only objectively actualisable in extensity, due to the envelopment of space within the inner sense of time — comprised of conscious perceptions anchored to a unified identity.[note]Alfredo Ferrarin, in his “Construction and Mathematical Schematism: Kant on the Exhibition of a Concept in Intuition” restates Kant’s argument especially cogently with regards to temporality: “Time is given, as the indeterminate form of our intuition (as the possibility of a serial order): but the order of the succession (its sense) is the result of our positing a relation among representations. This relation, the order thus produced, is itself the unity of a representation of a quantum, the whole that combines the parts given in the succession. Inner sense per se does not contain any determinate (formal) intuition. It is the apperceptive activity of the understanding … that connects intuitions in time and produces the manifold of time as the representation of before and after. All our representations of objects in sensible intuition are subject to the order of inner sense [the pure form of time] determined by our spontaneity [the understanding].” Kant-Studien (January, 1995) 86:2, 143.[/note] The kind of compression enacted by the synthesis of imagination is not simply a linear one, but the flattening of time and space into a homogenous metric upon which the understanding enacts its determinations — which only then provides a basis for linear compression or acceleration in extensity, such as that detailed by Hölderlin in his rhythmic diagrams of Oedipus and Antigone.

Curiously, Kant employs the example of cinnabar to demonstrate the successive, temporal aspect of the reproductive synthesis (which supplies the recognising synthesis with its input) — an intriguing reference given its long history of alchemical and esoteric use. “If cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy”, he writes

if a human being were now changed into this animal shape, now into that one, if on the longest day the land were covered now with fruits, now with ice and snow, then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the colour red. [W]ithout the governance of a certain rule to which the appearances are already subjected in themselves … no empirical synthesis of repro­duction could take place. There must therefore be something that itself makes possible this reproduction of the appearances by being the a priori ground of a neces­sary synthetic unity of them.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 229-230 A101. Deleuze and Guattari also cite Kant’s cinnabar passage in the conclusion to What is Philosophy? to invoke the image of thought, referring to the reproductive synthesis of the imagination as an “objective antichaos”, by which we “make an opinion for ourselves, like a sort of ‘umbrella’” against the war below. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), 202.[/note]

The conceptual identity of a piece of cinnabar, along with its empirical variations, endures in time because we are able to synthesise past experiences of cinnabar with present ones via their reproduction as images in memory. We produce a recognition of categorical consistency through the relation of ‘cinnabar moments’ in the spatio-temporal manifold by connecting them to the object we are determining as a piece of cinnabar by means of its steady appearance across different times to the transcendental cogito, whose persistence as an identity is presupposed by the act of recognition. Meanwhile, the endurance of cinnabar perceptions must, according to Kant, be sufficiently objectively consistent for this to be possible in the first place, for if the objective world was in itself so chaotic that such consistency could not take place, neither would our syntheses of it. The Kantian ‘I think’ is thereby an identity which recognises itself as such against the differences it measures empirically and supposes objectively. A move that is only made possible through the combination of the syntheses of the unity of apperception and the spatio-temporal ordering effectuated under the faculty of the imagination. Together, the three syntheses of the imagination place the receptive faculty of sensibility that is productive of apprehension and reproduction in communication with the active faculty of understanding, which plugs them into the object = [x] and the transcendental unity of apperception, ostensibly resolving the problem of these faculties’ conflicting natures in the direction of categorical tractability, and subsuming spatio-temporal difference under a conceptual unity.[note]Ferrarin’s analysis of the troubled distinction between the reproductive imagination (which shepherds empirical associations) and the productive imagination (which apprehends and schematises) is instructive here. Despite conflicting descriptions in the First Critique, Ferrarin concludes that the syntheses of apprehension and reproduction, and their application in schematisation, are functions of the productive imagination. Alfredo Ferrarin, “Construction and Mathematical Schematism: Kant on the Exhibition of a Concept in Intuition”, Kant-Studien (January, 1995) 86:2, 151-3.[/note]

Due to this implicit vectorisation — from sensibility to understanding — the transcendental synthesis of the imagination can be grasped as an “aesthetic” function made to conform to a conceptual, recognising one, which gives it its axioms — something we shall find reason to return to as the mystery of Lönnrot, Carter and Challenger continues to unfold.[note]Gilles Deleuze, “Untitled Lecture 04/04/1978”, trans. Melissa McMahon, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/65.[/note] Its operation applies a unit of measure — Kant’s ‘magnitudes’ — to the sensible manifold in order to relate it to conceptual elements in the synthesis of recognition. Kant will have cause, in the Third Critique, to show the fragility of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, one that is subject to the breaking of its measure by insurgent forces erupting from below. Subterranean revolt on behalf of the cold earth’s volcanic core.

With a unified conceptual identity providing the transcendental ground for the objective validity of the categories, and a consistent, extended and sequenced spatio-temporal manifold furnishing the foundation for all appearances in intuition established via the deduction, Kant will attempt to knit the two together in the application of the principles of judgement that constitute the schematism, consolidating the objectivity of the phenomenal-real. The schematism is the temporalisation of the categories, and thus works in reverse order to the operation of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination — beginning with a concept and determining the spatio-temporal manifold in accordance with it. The three syntheses of the imagination, taken together as a single mechanism, provide the rules for recognition; schematisation, on the other hand, gives the rules of construction for a concept in space and time. The understanding, under the guise of judgement, deploys or expresses the spontaneous syntheses of the unity of apperception and the imagination in time, completing the a priori synthetic weave between expansive sense experience and categorical contraction.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 268 B171/A132.[/note]

Each of the four divisions of the categories warrants a different form of expression: the three categories of quantity (unity, plurality, totality) express extensive magnitudes; the three categories of quality (reality, negation, limitation) express intensive magnitudes; the three categories of relation (inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community and reciprocity) establish the objectivity of time and space, and the three categories of modality (possibility/impossibility, existence/non-existence, necessity/contingency) generate the postulates of empirical thought in general. It is this penultimate group (developed in the reciprocally arising conditions of the Analogies of Experience) which confine all human experience to a universalisable temporality, and unfold change in time, consonant with the thermodynamic arrow.[note]“Arising and perishing are not alterations of that which arises or perishes. Alteration is a way of existing that succeeds another way of existing of the very same object. Hence everything that is altered is lasting, and only its state changes. Thus since this change concerns only the determinations that can cease or begin, we can say, in an expression that seems somewhat paradoxical, that only what persists (the substance) is altered, while that which is changeable does not suffer any alteration but rather a change, since some determinations cease and others begin. […] Substances (in appearance) are the substrata of all time-determinations. The arising of some and the perishing of others would itself remove the sole condition of the empirical unity of time, and the appearances would then be related in two different times, in which existence flowed side by side, which is absurd. For there is only one time, in which all different times must not be placed simultaneously but only one after another.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 303 A187-9/B230-2.[/note] The unfolding of all four categorial groups through a priori synthetic judgements constitute acts of representation, which yield the actuality of the world for us, founding all knowledge upon representation as an activity of the human mind bound to temporal succession. The schematism is therefore,

nothing but a priori time-determinations in accordance with rules, and these concern, according to the order of the categories, the time-series, the content of time, the order of time, and finally the sum total of time in regard to all possible objects. From this it is clear that the schematism of the understanding through the transcendental synthesis of imagination comes down to nothing other than the unity of the manifold of intuition in inner sense, and thus indirectly to the unity of apperception, as the function that corresponds to inner sense (to a receptivity).[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 256 A145/B185-5.[/note]

As a result, there are certain pieces of information we will always know in advance regarding the possibility of anything whatsoever in experience, despite the a posteriori nature of certain aspects of the latter. Namely, that “all appearances are, as regards their intuition, extensive magnitudes”, and “in all appearances the sensation, and the real, which corresponds to it in the object (realitas phaenomenon), has an intensive magnitude, i.e. a degree”.[note]Here Kant again gives the example of the line: “I cannot represent to myself any line, no matter how small it may be, without drawing it in thought, i.e., successively generating all its parts from one point, and thereby first sketching this intuition. It is exactly the same with even the smallest time. I think therein only the successive progress from one moment to another, where through all parts of time and their addition a determinate magnitude of time is finally generated.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 286 A162/B202; 290 A166/B207.[/note] Kant defines an extensive magnitude as ‘that in which the representation of the parts makes possible the representation of the whole (and therefore necessarily precedes the latter)’.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 287 (A162;B203).[/note] A unity in extensive magnitude is composed of successive or co-extensive parts that can be added together due to the fact that they share a homogenous unit of measure.[note]Thus, “space consists only of spaces; time of times”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 292 A169/B211.[/note] The nature of their difference is therefore external — a difference between parts. For the categories of quantity, the fact that appearances are systematically subordinated to extension is straightforward, for this is how we apprehend space and time — unified “multitudes of antecedently given parts”.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 288 A163/B204.[/note] For the categories of quality, however, the surety of advance knowledge is less naturally evident because it bears on sensation and thus involves an entirely subjective, empirical input. So much so that Kant will even write, years later, in the Opus Postumum that

It is strange — it even appears to be impossible, to wish to present a priori that which depends on perceptions (empirical representations with consciousness of them): e.g. light, sound, heat, etc., which all together, amount to the subjective element in perception (empirical representation with consciousness) and hence, carries with it no knowledge of an object. Yet this act of the faculty of representation is necessary.[note]Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 141.[/note]

Intensive magnitude is a property of the real of sensation and is therefore strictly empirical, yet we are said to have a priori knowledge of it. This is guaranteed by the conspiracy of the transcendental unity of apperception and the object = [x] that gives sensation its determinate form, and it is therefore this form alone — not the determination but the form of determination — which can be anticipated. Thus we can know in advance that every conscious representation we can ever have will involve a degree of intensity, without knowing anything about the specificities of the intensities which will affect us. To this end, Kant defines intensive magnitude as that “which can only be apprehended as a unity, and in which multiplicity can only be represented through approximation to negation = 0”.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 291 A168/B210.[/note] Unlike extensive magnitudes, which imply a continuous aggregation of homogenous parts, intensities differ internally on an infinite continuum (“of which no part … is the smallest”) between 0 and n, and therefore must be apprehended instantaneously.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 295 A175/B217; 292 A169/B211; 291 A167/B209.[/note] However, because of the nature of our perception, intensive magnitudes cannot be perceived separately from space and time and thus come to “fill” extended magnitudes to various degrees.[note]Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.[/note] Consequently, the intensive property of internal difference is controlled by extension, locked — forever — into the extensive matrix of apprehended space-time. Most significantly of all, Kant tethers zero intensity to pure consciousness, so that the subtraction of intensive matter from experience only reaffirms, in the absence of contaminants, the immaculacy of thought.

[F]rom the empirical consciousness to the pure consciousness a gradual alteration is possible, where the real in the former entirely disappears, and a merely formal (a priori) consciousness of the manifold in space and time remains; thus there is also a possible synthesis of the generation of the magnitude of a sensation from its beginning, the pure intuition = 0, to any arbitrary magnitude.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 290 A166/B208.[/note]

Sensation degree zero indexes the annihilation of reality, not the subject. This division, although Kant will go on to qualify it (writing that such an occurrence is not “to be encountered”, an empty concept without an object comprising one of the four classes of illegitimate “nothing”) makes the separation between sensible matter and thought inherent to the transcendental apparatus luminously clear.[note]Intuition = 0 corresponds to nihil privativum, the second division of nothing relative to the categories of quality. See note 96. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 290 A166/B208; 383 A292/B348.[/note] Kant thinks intensity, but only in a way that renders it secondary both to the form of its appearance in extensity and to the pervasive authority of transcendental conceptualisation under the law of the understanding — “[subjectifying] abstraction” and “[sublimating] death into a power of the subject”, all for the sake of maintaining a spurious notion of transcendental accord.[note]Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (London: Routledge, 1992), 117.[/note]

For the Timaean cosmos, harmony between subject and object takes the form of an external, teleologically-assured likeness between copy and model; for Leibniz, it finds its expression in the notion of final accord, and for Hume it must, no matter how reluctantly, be presupposed.[note]Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 12.[/note] The ideal of externally sanctioned accord between subject and object is overturned in the Critique of Pure Reason by the necessary submission of objects to the subject, which refocuses the division between subject and object to that between active and passive faculties interior to the process of determination. We have seen above how the transcendental synthesis of the imagination operates to bridge the divide. This causes Kant to rely on the understanding to rein in the productive function of imagination, subordinating its syntheses to unified identity in the transcendental subject and unified objectivity in the transcendental object, their productions nourished by passive sensibility. Reason, the third of the three active faculties (alongside the understanding and the imagination), by analogy with the function of understanding, attempts to determine its own purely conceptual objects without the necessary components of time and space furnished by sensibility, and in so doing, exercises its powers ‘problematically’ in the production of noumena — illusory totalities which nonetheless have a positive role to play in systematising the knowledge produced under the aegis of understanding in its stewardship of the syntheses.[note]Reason produces its Ideas by totalising the categories of relation provided by the understanding. From substance it conceives the absolute subject (Soul); from causality, the completed series (World); and from community, the whole of reality (God). Reason “reserves for itself only the absolute totality in the use of concepts, and seeks to carry the synthetic unity, which is thought in the categories, all the way to the absolutely unconditioned”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 401-2 A326/B383. Kant refers to the Ideas of reason as ‘problems’ consistently throughout the text. See, for example, 605 A669/B697.[/note] It can be seen, therefore, that it is the faculty of understanding that is charged with the task of limiting the functions of the other faculties in the production of experience, confining them to specific operations and drawing the boundary dividing legitimate from illegitimate knowledge.

Although the three Critiques work together to define the ends of speculative reason, “[p]ure reason”, in the First Critique, “leaves everything to the understanding”, casting it in the role of legislator so that, in the great critical tribunal, it might judge according to the interests of reason, even when this entails turning against reason’s own products.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 401 A326/B383.[/note] Knowledge is thus lent a maximum of systematic unity via the relation between faculties delineated in the First Critique, which is nominally harmonious without invoking the divinity of pre-established harmony that animated pre-critical philosophy. Instead, it produces an accord of “common sense”, the “subjective condition of all ‘communicability’” — a return to the comfort of rhyme, now resonating between the faculties, mirroring thought in its objects.[note]Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 18.[/note] Kantian accord may be understood as an innovation of pre-established harmony, but it retains lineaments of the Platonic Idea of the good in that it still sees thought imbued with health and an honourable will, naturally inclining towards truth via the “best possible distribution” of its capacities.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 36.[/note] And why would it be otherwise? Surely reason, the “highest court of appeals for all rights and claims of our speculation, cannot possibly contain original deceptions and semblances”![note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 605 A669/B697.[/note] By means of the accord of common sense, we recognise ourselves in the objects of the world.

What a surprise, after all this, to rediscover our own silhouettes still flickering on the cavern wall. Common sense is “the norm of identity from the point of view of the pure Self and the form of the unspecified object which corresponds to it”, it is always related to recognition, and “relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject of which all the other faculties must be modalities”.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 133.[/note] To thinking, common sense contributes only “the form of the same”.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 134.[/note] The democratic distribution of capacity and similitude is philosophy’s principal doxa, subtending what Deleuze will famously denounce — in Difference and Repetition — as “the Image of Thought”.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 129-167.[/note] If is not simply an illegitimate presupposition, saturated in humanist bias, whence does this principle arise? There is a deeper problem with the positing of fundamental accord between the faculties in the Critique of Pure Reason, and Deleuze will turn the legal distinction between rights and facts used in the Transcendental Deduction back on Kant, asking by what right the critical philosophy takes harmony as its ground for the relation of the faculties.[note]“Jurists, when they speak of entitlements and claims, distinguish in a legal matter between questions about what is lawful (quid juris) and that which concerns the fact (quid facti), and since they demand proof of both, the call the first, that which is to establish the entitlement or the legal claim, the deduction.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 219 A84/B116.[/note] Kant, in the end, provided a remedy for this oversight, but it would not be enough to placate the tremors the critical system had induced.

Despite his predilection for tribunals, Kant’s recalibration of thought replaces the transcendence of god (and its models) as the ultimate arbiter of truth with the process of immanent critique, and thus transposes error into illusion. The strangeness of this new form of falsity springs from the fact that it is internal to the power of thought itself, contrary to the externality and materiality of error that informs Timeaus’ universe. Reason’s propensity to produce illusion as a consequence of its productive power brings Plato’s planomenon into thought itself, menacing it from inside “as if from an internal arctic zone where the needle of every compass goes mad”, a further disturbance of the cardinality which operates the turning of the great revolving door.[note]Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 52. See, note 27.[/note] This threat, nevertheless, is immediately quarantined. With the understanding commandeering synthesis, it is no longer a question of reversing of “the corruption of the circuits in our heads”, rather it is this very circuitry that constitutes the correction of illusion by forcing everything through the transcendental unity of apperception and its object = [x].[note]Plato, “Timaeus”, 96/91a.[/note] The conservatism of the revolving door and the eruptive potential of the straight labyrinth leak into one another repeatedly throughout the First Critique. The labyrinth’s corrosive implications recognised then covered up, again and again, as if Kant realises the enormity of the abyss he has levered apart but cannot countenance its vertiginous depth, a “depth [which] is like the famous geological line from NE to SW, the line which comes diagonally from the heart of things and distributes volcanoes”.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 230.[/note] But Kant is no Empedocles. He does not wish to explode the sun. Asymmetry petrifies him — and for good reason.

If the Critique of Pure Reason “seemed equipped to overturn the Image of thought” in its substitution of illusion for error, the fractured I for a unified and substantialised cogito, and the invocation of the speculative deaths of God and the self, Kant

in spite of everything, and at the risk of compromising the conceptual apparatus of the three Critiques … did not want to renounce the implicit presuppositions. Thought had to continue to enjoy an upright nature, and philosophy could go no further than — nor in directions other than those taken by — common sense.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 136.[/note]

Where Kant hesitates at the caldera’s edge, Hölderlin explores it with tortured determination, extracting from Oedipus what is truly radical in both “[t]he Greek image of thought” that “already invoked the madness of the double turning-away”, and the Kantian one, which launches “thought into infinite wandering rather than into error”.[note]Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 54.[/note] Vision, the Timaean antidote to corruption, is still insisted upon as the implicit other of the blindness Kant so frequently invokes, but it must be remembered that Tiresias’s prophetic knowledge is coincident with his loss of sight, and at the moment of the comprehension of his fate, Oedipus blinds himself.[note]The most famous invocation of this image being the oft-repeated maxim, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 193-4 A51/B75. Manus, an Egyptian hierophant, and the ‘Old Man’ of Hölderlin’s third and final draft of The Death of Empedocles, who says to Empedocles “Oh, tell us who you are! and who am I? … are you quite sure of what you see?” (ll. 391, 483) too, is blind, and according to Krell, acts both as Empedocles’ double and a precursor of Tiresias as Hölderlin will figure him in his notes on the Sophocles translations. Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles, 183; 187.[/note]

Asymmetry (Alienation)

The true innovation of the critical project, then — and that which constitutes its unprecedented modernity — is not the tiresome delineation of conditions for anthropomorphic experience productive of and produced by an intransigent conceptual faculty, but its profound reconfiguration of time. In Kant, pre-modern, cyclical, scroll-like temporality “unrolls itself like a serpent”, no longer subordinate to gods or nature — to logic, to reason, psychology, matter or sense — no longer subordinate to anything, save the mystery of its own inner workings, an enigmatic process of auto-affection.[note]Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66. Deleuze, following Nietzsche, will make much of time no longer abiding by the laws of nature — a point which will be extremely important for the role of thermodynamics in his writing and which we shall return to, in time. “While the laws of nature govern the surface of the world, the eternal return ceaselessly rumbles in this other dimension of the transcendental or the volcanic spatium.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 241.[/note] An impersonal reading of the First Critique reveals this immediately: the subject may have a productive role in the constitution of phenomena, but it is always in the thrall of something it has no empirical access to, which, in turn, is producing its production of experience.[note]Kant refers to this effect as the “paradox … of inner sense”: “[N]amely, how this presents even ourselves to consciousness only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves, since we intuit ourselves only as we are internally affected, which seems to be contradictory, since we would have to relate to ourselves passively.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 257 B152-3.[/note] Both of these productive syntheses are temporal and, necessarily for Kant — who has reached for the one thing common to the two sides of the rift he has opened up inside the transcendental production of experience — only legitimately reconcilable by yet another temporal function: the application of the categories to experience in time via the faculty of judgement.[note]“In all subsumptions of an object under a concept the representation of the former must be homogenous with the latter. [T]he pure concepts of the understanding, however, in comparison with empirical (indeed in general sensible) intuitions, are entirely un-homogenous, and can never be encountered in any intuition. Now how is the subsumption of the latter under the former, thus the application of the category to appearances possible, since no one would say that the category, e.g. causality, could be so intuited through the senses and is contained in the appearance? [I]t is clear that there must be a third thing, which must stand in homogeneity with the category on the one hand and the appearance on the other, and makes possible the application of the former to the latter. [A] transcendental time-determination is homogenous with the category (which constitutes its unity) insofar as it is universal and rests on a rule a priori. But it is on the other hand homogenous with the appearance insofar as time is contained in every empirical representation of the manifold. Hence an application of the category to appearances becomes possible by means of the transcendental time-determination which, as the schema of the concept of the understanding, mediates the subsumption of the latter under the former.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 271-2 A137-9/B176-8.[/note] Rather than a fortification of subjective prowess in the realm of experience, the Critique of Pure Reason is the story of time’s relation to itself, through itself — and this relation takes the form of a limp.

The ruin that emerges in the wake of the critical philosophy exhibits, against its inaugurator’s best intentions, the keenness of the blade he has used to vivisect his forebears. As Kant gingerly turns the instrument over, it flashes the following message in the darkness of pre-critical dogmatism: the production of time is not in time. (The killer you are seeking is yourself.) Kant, the reluctant hepatomancer. This new configuration of the outside as time-production is further complicated by no longer being external to the subject, but an internal constitutive part of it. The transcendental outside — distinct from the exterior affection of objectified space, which is inside as an empirical necessity — is thus interiorised in a way that will not only alter the schema of time, but profoundly disrupt the subjectivity that carries it, alienating it from itself, and deeply troubling its sense of agency from the point of view of the only part of it that it can properly know or experience.

This is the tragic modern time of Oedipus in both its pure form as the caesura, and the inexorable linearity of the flight into the desert. An interior limit which Oedipus carries along inside himself, always escaping him, yet irrevocably ‘his’. The tormented king, like Kant’s subject, torn apart and along by an alien component which schizophrenises him, splits him off from himself, allowing him to act in a secondary manner within time, but depriving him of any ability to act on his own transcendental agency, everything Oedipus attempts to do to divert his terrible fate from its course being subordinate to something else — the prophecy of the caesura, that traitorous modern god: the pure form of time. What we know of this abstract part of ourselves cannot be anything other than this empty form, contoured by the limits of categorical distillation; a strict ordinal sequence, made countable and extensive in the schematisation of its “numerical unity”, and definitive of a specific spatio-temporal organisation.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 288 A163/B204. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that counting inevitably takes on a wholly different significance in the Kantian schema of the straight labyrinth. For Kant, counting is premised on ordinality, yet retains a fidelity to cardinality insofar as the reproductive synthesis cardinalises the succession of temporal apprehension. The “numerical unity” leant to the synthesis of apprehension by the transcendental unity of apperception grounds the possibility of number itself, which Kant defines as “a representation that summarises the successive addition of one (homogenous) unit to another” and “nothing other than the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of a homogenous intuition in general”, because “I generate time itself in the apprehension of the intuition” (274 A142-3/B182). The synthesis of reproduction, in counting the manifold, produces time ­as number. It gives us a definition from which we extrapolate the natural numbers, and therefore, all higher mathematics. This is what underlies Kant’s use of arithmetic and his famous example of “5 + 7 = 12” to illustrate a priori synthetic judgement. (144 B15-16). Importantly, the synthetic genesis of number necessarily starts from 1 rather than 0, which is not a magnitude and therefore falls under the class of nihil privativum. (See note 96.) In the original apprehensive synthesis of the manifold under the form of time, we generate an intuition which corresponds to 1, and take from this synthesis the unit of measure or magnitude for all following synthetic operations. The “successive addition” of units presupposes this given unit and in turn, the unity of consciousness that acts on its synthesis. Ferrarin likens the synthesis of succession to the workings of “a metronome” which “makes time assume the shape that it wants” — “it determines its length, its cadence.” And, like a metronome, it does so by “disciplining a given one-dimensional flux” — time as a homogenous continuum. This, Ferrarin argues, reveals the extent to which Kant is unable to truly think plurality. Alfredo Ferrarin, “Construction and Mathematical Schematism: Kant on the Exhibition of a Concept in Intuition”, 166.

If number belongs to mental synthesis, one cannot help but imagine a foreign form of intuition and an attendant, alien, construction of number. A thought experiment that becomes infinitely more interesting when one applies it to the problem of extra-terrestrial communication.[/note] Contrary to the spatialised exteriority of time relative to the revolving door with its cardinal points, the contentless ordinality of the abstract ‘I’ is static, an inhuman domain within the human, transcendental and not transcendent and therefore not eternal in the same way. It is immanent and productive: an immobile, black motor generates the inexorable and, for Kant, insensible excess of the labyrinth composed of a single, straight line.

The byzantine architecture of the Kantian cogito threatens to suppress what is truly radical in his arrangement of the relation of thought to its determinations. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze relates it to the Cartesian cogito in order to better show its novelty. Prior to Descartes, definitions of the thinking subject are either formed in reference to an eternity which produces it as its externalised other — an infinite unextended mind related to extended finitude, a fully disjunctive difference circumscribed by space — or distilled from relations between pre-determined concepts, those of generic and specific differences (‘man is a rational animal’).[note]See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 85-6 and Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 28/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/68.[/note] But Descartes effectuates his own innovation, a logic of implication in which the thinking subject grounds itself. The Kantian cogito takes up this logic, but where the Cartesian cogito precedes by a three-step determination: the determination ‘I think’ determines the undetermined ‘I am’ as thinking substance (I think, I am — determination, the indeterminate, the determined; the indeterminate determined by determination), the Kantian cogito inserts an additional step which corresponds to the form of determination. Stripped down to its bare mechanism, it proceeds as follows: determination, the indeterminate, the form of determinability, the determined. The transcendental subject or abstract I of the transcendental unity of apperception in relation to the object = [x], both active elements of the understanding, commits a “spontaneous” act of determination which implies an indeterminate existence.[note]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 228 A97.[/note] Because the transcendental I is also subject to the passive faculty of sensibility it must make its determinations in time as the form of inner sense.[note]In contrast to space (outer sense), time is the form under which auto-affection necessarily takes place.[/note] Time, therefore, is the form of determinability which then yields the completely determined empirical subject.

The Kantian cogito begins in action, but because it is bound to pass through the pacifying form of time, it can only represent itself to itself in experience as a passive subject, which holds the same status in relation to the transcendental subject as any other empirical object. Against the Cartesian cogito, which determines the I am as substance, the innovation of the Kantian transcendental subject coincides, for Deleuze, with the “liberation” of the subject from substantiality, and the strange and fecund domain of the unconscious swerves into philosophy for the first time. What we are left with is “a synthesis which separates” — a link which is a break — and the inauguration of something else completely new: constitutive alienation.[note]Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 28/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/68.[/note] Where the productive other of the revolving door is strictly outside — the “other of alterity” — drawn apart by a limit which corresponds to space or extension (and its ordering, from which temporality is derived), the other of the straight labyrinth is one’s own self, an interior outside to which one is bound in a relation of fundamental alienation.[note]Deleuze, “Untitled lecture 21/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/67.[/note]

Marx will install the same constitutive rift in the transcendental division between labour and labour-power, as the alienation of the subject that abides between them in his analysis of capitalism: “The alienation of labour-power and its real manifestation … do not coincide in time.”[note]Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (London: Penguin, 1990), 277. It is the opening of Book One, Part Three, “The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value” (where the reader is suddenly ushered behind the curtain of commodity fetishism and onto the factory floor) that dramatises this transition in Capital Volume I: “The consumption of labour-power is completed, as in the case of every other commodity, outside the market or the sphere or circulation. Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place in the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business’. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare.” Marx, Capital Volume I, 279-80. Italics added.[/note] Capital production, like the Kantian cogito, abstracts and axiomatises the value of its products by subsuming them under a homogenous metric, substituting use-value for exchange-value; a qualitative measure for a quantitive one. Exchange-values are “mutually replaceable” because they are of “identical magnitude”.[note]Marx, Capital Volume I, 127.[/note] It follows from this, adds Marx, in a particularly Kantian passage, “that, firstly, the valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance’, of a content distinguishable from it”.[note]Marx, Capital Volume I, 127.[/note]

Just as it is for Kant, whose system forces experience into a temporalised series of extensive magnitudes, furnishing a priori knowledge as the form of determination, fully independent of content, the measure of universal equivalence for exchange-value is a temporal one, in which all of a commodity’s “sensuous characteristics are extinguished” — what Marx calls “socially necessary labour-time”.[note]Marx, Capital Volume I, 128; 129.[/note] The transcendental, auto-productive, alienating circuitry of modernity is tragedy uncut, generative of nothing but episodic travesties of fast-burning empirical conflagration, and its material form is M-C-M’.[note]Marx differs from Kant insofar as capital, as a critical process, is materialised, which leads him to the following conclusion in Capital Volume III: “Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power, whose agent is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands in any possible relation to that which the labour of a single individual can create. It becomes an alienated, independent, social power, which stands opposed to society as an object, and as an object that is the capitalist’s source of power.” Karl Marx, Capital Volume III, Chapter 15, “Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law”, Marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm.[/note] Capital emerges as the concretised shadow of the furtive and explosive moment of the First Critique, before it is drowned in the epistemological structure that limits the syntheses to the production of identity-driven representation and confines it to legitimate knowledge. From a strictly philosophical perspective, it is the complication bound up with determination across the form of time via the implicative logic of transcendental production which grounds the unconditional accelerationist notion of anti-praxis. One cannot be anything other than a passive subject as long as there is time. A tragic thought, but this is the full import of tragedy — a dramatic form whose other face is fate — for the modern subject. Oedipus split by the line of time; “infinite unification purifie[d] through infinite separation”.[note]Hölderlin, ‘Notes on the Oedipus’, §3.[/note]

The Edge of Space and Time

When the Antarctic fog lifts one sees the machine for what it does. Kant’s critical philosophy introduces for the first time three great components: a tragic initiation, circuitry and compression, and the alienation of auto-productive asymmetry. The time of the revolving door draws the line of the outside along the edge of space; the time of the straight labyrinth draws the line of the outside along the edge of time. Cognition, in the Critique of Pure Reason, is an abstract machine — and because its enveloping form of determination is temporal, it is, more profoundly, an abstract machine for the production of transcendental time.[note]“The abstract machine in itself is destratified, deterritorialized; it has no form of its own (much less substance) and makes no distinction within itself between content and expression, even though outside itself it presides over that distinction and distributes it in strata, domains, and territories. An abstract machine in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and the natural either). It operates by matter, not by substance; by junction, not by form. Substances and forms are of expression ‘or’ of content. But functions are not yet ‘semiotically’ formed, and matters are not yet “physically” formed. The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function-a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 156.[/note] In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari diagram the schematism as a circuit, “a moving wheel” partially immersed in “the shallow stream of Time as the form of interiority, in and out of which [it] plunges”.[note]Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 57.[/note] If the stream is shallow, it is because it is still all too human. As the circuit of transcendental production or application of rules for construction, the schematism disrupts the philosophical dualism of essence and appearance definitive of the revolving door with the unilateral and conjunctive couple ‘apparition’ (conditions of appearance) and ‘phenomena’ (that which appears) — one could equally say Id and Ego.[note]“When Freud comes up and says that there are certain phenomena which appear in the field of consciousness, what do these phenomena refer to, Freud is Kantian.” Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66. This is explicitly confirmable in Freud’s own writings, for example: “The psychoanalytic assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us as an extension of the corrections undertaken by Kant.” Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” in The Freud Reader. ed. Peter Gay (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1989), 173.[/note]  A “bolt of lightning” generating a more complicated disjunction between time and what appears in time.[note]Deleuze, “Synthèse et temps 14/3/1978”, Les cours de Gilles Deleuze, https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66.[/note]

On the other side of the limit of knowability, time in itself as something other than succession is accorded a negative status — a blank cipher, slight as zero, outside the walls of transcendental subjective security. It courses through us as an abstract yet immanent outside which conditions experience via asymmetrical auto-production, but is fortified against our determinations, which have no purchase on it. The philosophical problem at the core of critique abides in this strange circuitry, no longer requiring a god for its productions, no longer sustaining hard truth / error, essence / appearance distinctions, reconstituted in a dark zone of the subject itself — the abstract I. But “God survives as long as the I enjoys a subsistence, a simplicity and an identity which expresses the entirety of its resemblance to the divine”.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 86.[/note] Kant “replaces harmony with circuitry” yet retains the residue of a rhyme — his betrayal of God is not yet fully double.[note]Greenspan, Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine, 21.[/note] Time in the First Critique is intellectually subjective, and while it is infinitely troubling for any spontaneous notion of subjectivity, it is nonetheless too anthropmorphic, too constrained to the unifying identity of transcendental apperception, too geared towards the speculative ends of reason, too functionally masculine, too centralised and regulated. Deleuze, writing of Kant but thinking of Nietzsche, issues a caveat to those humanists among us who would yet profess to lay a claim to inhumanity: “the death of God becomes effective only with the dissolution of the Self” — a self that Kant has skewered, broken and scattered across the sand, but which logically envelops, by the circumference of its epistemological horizon, that “panic desert of time and space” the Kantian subject, like Oedipus, reluctantly casts itself into.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 58. “[Oedipus’] destiny was a forced correspondence with the categorical reversal, being called forth, says Hölderlin, in a climate of plague, of confusion of mind, of universally excited prophetism, in the middle of a dead time, to live the reciprocal communication of the divine and the human in the all-forgetting figure of infidelity as it opens a panic desert of time and space, where hitherto Homeric time reigned, which is to say a time ‘where the heavens and the earth, walked and breathed together in the people of the gods’.” Beaufret, “Hölderlin et Sophocle”, 29-30.[/note] Schizophrenisation is a voyage of initiation that plunges all to way to zero, that “transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego” which Deleuze and Guattari link to shamanism via R.D. Laing in Anti-Oedipus.[note]Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 84. Laing quotes Bateson — “It would appear that once precipitated into psychosis the patient has a course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voyage of discovery which is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never embarked on such a voyage. Once begun, a schizophrenic episode would appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony — a death and rebirth — into which the novice may have been precipitated by his family life or by adventitious circumstances, but which in its course is largely steered by endogenous process” — and proposes a therapy for schizophrenia that enables patients to “find their way further into inner space and time, and back again”. Laing, following Bateson, labels this process an “initiation” which “[p]sychiatrically … would appear as ex-patients helping future patients to go mad.” His sketch of the steps such a process would involve reads as a synopsis of the Oedipus plays, including later, a confrontation with the Sphinx: “(i) a voyage from outer to inner,
(ii) from life to a kind of death,
(iii) from going forward to a going back,
(iv) from temporal movement to temporal standstill,
(v) from mundane time to aeonic time,
(vi) from the ego to the self,
(vii) from being outside (post-birth) back into the womb of all things (pre-birth),
and then subsequently a return voyage from
(1) inner to outer,
(2) from death to life,
(3) from the movement back to a movement once more forward,
(4) from immortality back to mortality,
(5) from eternity back to time,
(6) from self to a new ego,
(7) from a cosmic foetalisation to an existential rebirth.”
R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (London: Penguin, 1970), 97; 106; 111.[/note] The tragic voyage of transcendental time loops asymmetry infinitely back to initiation, and the subject limps through its circuitry, replaying the silence of the gods, until it learns how to betray not only their law, but its own.

Reality is reconfigured by transcendental time in terms of a double relation, a primary and generative form and a superficial, secondary experience: process and product, action and reaction, infinity and limitation, time and what is in time. By understanding this abstract, transcendental subject as a unity, Kant uses the conjunctive couple as if in the service of a god — or a father — reining in its explosive potential by bringing synthesis and schematisation back to recognition and representation, leaving consciousness, so resolute in its refusal of blindness, “blinded by all knowledge that does not find cause in the mind itself”.[note]Luce Irigaray, “Paradox A Priori” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985), 211.[/note] There is still a division between form and matter in Kant’s apparatus, a basic hylomorphism which locates activity in form and consigns passivity to matter — an intensive matter which subtends the reproductive function of the syntheses of the imagination but does not appear in its own right and is of no transcendental consequence — its destabilising volatility confined within the extensive grid of apprehension. The model of the transcendental, once applied to experience, is eternally set, the categories definitive, as if the system “would thenceforth just continue, without disruption, in an innocent confirmation of itself”.[note]Nick Land, “Art as Insurrection” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), 147.[/note] Reason officiates from on high, understanding controls the factory floor, everything is known in advance, ushering in “so deadly a boredom that … one might finish by wishing to die … rather than just have things go on … forever”, and death is not even only empirical.[note]Irigaray, “Paradox A Priori”, 213.[/note]

Into the Volcano

A philosopher terrified: this does not exist.[note]Jon Roffe, Muttering for the Sake of Stars (Melbourne: Surpllus, 2012), 22.[/note]

The critical project may be the “most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth” but “panic is creation”.[note]Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 2; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 81.[/note] Poetry and capitalism take this as their rule. Hölderlin, operating a subtle betrayal of his own, discovered the true radicality of Kant, just as Rimbaud, poet-economist par excellence, would best articulate the cogito for a dissolved self. Land too, quoting Bataille, evokes the secret of Oedipus in relation to poetry, but not without that element of terror that will be so fundamental for the next torsion in the history of the schemata of time.

Meanderings in extension remain trapped in the maze unless they cross over into a ‘blind slippage into death’, ‘this slippage outside oneself that necessarily produces itself when death comes into play’. A ‘slippage produces itself’ we do not do so, a chasm opens, chaos (= 0), something horrific in its depth, a season in Hell that ‘slips immensely into the impossible’, ‘the intensity and intimacy of a sensation opened itself onto an abyss where there is nothing which is not lost, just as a profound wound opens itself onto death’. Poetry is this slippage that is broken upon the end of poetry, erased in a desert as ‘beautiful as death’.[note]Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 203-4. Italics added.[/note]

The unfaithful, urban and un-coordinated temporality of the straight labyrinth as it appears in Kant is a not a time to be apprehended by philosophers or theologians. It is the time of economists and poets. It is they who see the subterranean opportunities to which the philosopher of the model is blind. Empedocles, the eponymous hero of Hölderlin’s unfinished modern tragedy throws himself — twice — into the volcano in Kant’s place, but the volcano returns a single sandal to its edge, an omen of an asymmetry yet to be mastered. “Poetry does not strut logically amongst convictions, it seeps through crevices; a magmic flux resuscitated amongst vermin. If it was not that the Great Ideas had basements, fissures, and vacuoles, poetry would never infest them. Faiths rise and fall, but the rats persist.”[note]Nick Land, “Shamanic Nietzsche” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), 227.[/note]

The outside will shift again, in a way that once more alters the human relation to it. Our mystery has become infinitely more complex, and curiously in this, more tractable, but it is not yet twisted enough. Kant, at the very least, has taught us the dubiousness of conclusions. We have procured certain keys, a fistful of half-deciphered diagrams, and a sense of the limit, but we are still hopelessly trapped in the maze. These explorations are just overtures to the journey that is about to begin, and they have done little more than confer upon the investigation an additional set of questions. We are yet to understand why the particle-clock is a revolving door, and how to move from this great turning figure, with its aperture open onto eternity, to those other, “successive doors”, that “bar our free march down the mighty corridors of space and time” to that ultimate threshold which “no man has crossed”.[note]Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 2004), 268. See Part 0.[/note] Does Kant’s elaboration of time as an infinite extended magnitude give us sufficient means to decipher Lönnrot’s riddle? Is the straight line all that it seems? Why is the revolving door ‘coffin-shaped’? Does Hölderlin’s invocation of aorgic panic somehow connect to the expression on the young woman in the lecture hall where Challenger executes his trick, and which Aspinwall also wears? Why does rhythm increasingly seem to play such an important role? There is nothing for it but to leave the philosophers, the theologians, the poets and the economists, and bore deeper into the heat of the earth. To solicit counsel from that thing, which — feigning compliance with the laws of time and space — succeeds them, guardian of the door in the back of the cave we have marshalled these unfinished rituals to access.

Thrown out of eternity, cursed by a faceless god, blinded, insulted, injured and abandoned, we find ourselves with Oedipus, lurching catastrophically across the desert in uneven, hesitating steps, following the curse of an incomplete exile. Towards what? Thunder roils in the distance, electricity volatises the desolate pre-dawn fog, something rumbles underfoot. Nothing for πλέθρα. But if we know one thing about the desert, it is this. Expelled from the labour of Kantian critique, accused by Plato of sophistry, this is where the nomads go.[note]“In the beginning, under the administration of the dogmatists, [metaphysics’] rule was despotic. Yet because her legislation still retained traces on ancient barbarism, this rule gradually degenerated through internal wars into complete anarchy; and the sceptics, a kind of nomads who abhor all permanent cultivation of the soil, shattered civil unity from time to time. But since there were fortunately only a few of them, they could not prevent the dogmatists from continually attempting to rebuild, thought never according to a plan unanimously accepted among themselves.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 99-100 Aix; “As for the sophists, I believe them to be true experts at making all kinds of wonderful speeches on other subjects, but I’m afraid that, perhaps because they roam from city to city without having made homes for themselves in one particular place, they miss the mark when it comes to describing the many different kinds of things that men who are both philosophers and statesmen achieve in the real world in warfare and on the battlefield, and put into words in their negotiations with other individuals.” Plato, “Timaeus”, 6/19e. Italics added.[/note] The initiation has just begun, and like the voyage consigned to Oedipus, its path leads underground.

 


Xenosystems: Memoirs of an Ongoing Infection

The story is too horrible to recall, but they tell me it is good that I ‘try to remember’. So here I am. It’s only appropriate that I should avoid recounting the vector which brought me to it, save to say that it arrived nonetheless. My first recollections date back to November (or was it October?) 2015. I was still human then.

A Fanged Noumena PDF had been circulating in some obscure tract of social media, and I’d eagerly seized upon it. I remember getting high from reading even the editors’ introduction out loud. The sound-waves were brain-altering. “O prazer desinibido não tende ao benefício do organismo, mas, antes, à sua imolação.” The madness in what was written was palpable. Insane, astounding.

Nick Land’s writings grasped my brain tightly. In no time I found myself, possessed, devouring page after page — as I painfully tried to conjure passable translations in my own tongue. The savoriness of transcoding such perfect compositions only added to the rush. Inhumanism, cybernetics, sacrilege, capitalism, dodging the Turing cops — and the power, the sheer power of the text — all made Fanged Noumena the kind of book I had only dreamed about.

Then, of course, there was 2016.

The one thing I hadn’t been able to fathom after reading Fanged Noumena was why Land had resurfaced after all those years. We now know why accelerationism was suddenly so important, but there was no way we could have seen it coming back then. I had been told about his recent blogs, and at one point I just had to check for myself — what the hell was going on there?

Given the option between a bright-side and a dark-side, where does one go? I had no doubts. Xenosystems was like the buried shrine of an ancient sacrificial cult, suddenly brought back to life by grave diggers… and monsters. “Involvements with reality”, indeed.

Hell-Baked” was the first post I ever read there. And it is probably the best summary of it: short, pungent, unapologetic, malignant in its indifference. It flows like poetry, a dark pestilent poem for that which lies beyond — “where be dragons”, as it says. It contained themes that made it both absolutely current and just simply unthinkable to my ilk.

I was enthralled by it all. The impact of someone saying clearly and articulately what you just couldn’t conceive of seconds before… it changes everything, if not in the healthiest of ways. I already felt the first symptoms: my beliefs melting down into a slimy mold of abomination, my brain reconfigured into a filthy vector of affliction, my body suspended in unlife.

Gripped by fever, I spent the next few months (years? it was so long ago) dealing with the monstrous compendium therein. I tried to follow some neat path, but linking is a labyrinth, and often I found myself wandering around in the so called ‘reactosphere’. Believe me, I saw all kinds of beasts. This dying angel in my head that kept screaming ‘get out of there, it’s dangerous!’ — now I only wish she had had its way. At the time, however, it was shot down as a Cathedral operative.

It gets hard to recall. “Try again tomorrow.”… In truth, I couldn’t penetrate that library of ungodliness any further, and was far too avid to be able to read it all from the beginning. So I resorted to translation once again.

Translation is an amazing mechanism. It is a kind of possession. You have to let the thought you’re translating inhabit your body, and use it to express itself again, in a new form. One could talk of impersonation, but demons have no masks, no faces, only names. It’s uploading, in a primitive form. And it was a way to hollow myself out, to inoculate myself against the delirium… precisely by spreading it further.

My mind buzzes in and out, but I persevere in the name of Gnon. It really must have been providence guiding my steps as I served faithfully as conduit for the electric pulse of Xenosystems. A daemonic providence, that’s for sure, but providence nonetheless. Doom, it said.

When I checked-in here, I was carrying some note, later lost in the haze of the early days of the treatment. Now I wonder what it said… The days of the translation blog were intoxicating, the missives transmitted smoothly, victims by the thousands. Visitors. They were eventually victimized, of course… I digress.

The thing is that by that point, I was really not myself anymore. Not physically disfigured — except for the claw marks I would find on my face upon waking up (they told me I had made them myself) — rather, something integral lacked. I wasn’t really anybody. I had become a swarm. An army of thought, slaying recklessly about. I figure that’s why it’s so hard to remember: memory was distributed. It reconfigured any sub-process to function accordingly. XS posts abounded with emergent AI tales, internet-based attention reconfiguration, and a sovereign Will-to-Think. It was only natural that it would eventually inscribe itself into our mind. “My mind.” They correct me all the time in here. “It was only you” — this fortunate person was never dissolved back into the process.

We only now noticed that they actually furnished us with a typewriter! Well, sort of. An authentic Amstrad PCW 8256. Cosmic irony? This machine has wrecked brighter and saner minds than ours before, what hope could we have? Back in the day, translations were made on any device available. It was an unquenchable thirst for adaptation.

We tried to provide some semblance of structure as we proceeded, making the texts thread in series of linked posts. Intelligence, then Social Darwinism, then Occultism. These discriminations got harder, though… Not out of any morality (we’ve come to lack the apparatus for that), but simply because it all blended into one insurmountable Gnon-flux.

Is it just us, or have the acoustics in here been designed specifically to accommodate laughter? The attendants are worried about our fever. Where could that note have gone? They are frightened by the metallic, doubled, coarse voice. Fortunate souls, their time will come. In time. More laughter.

In this rotting building, in this ancient city, the swarm has dwelt for a century at least now, or so it seems. Undead, some say. Unliving would be more precise. Time resets, speeds up, resets. This chair belongs to quite another aeon, a relic from the twenty-first century. The attendants have gone now. Were they afraid? Spread on the floor, like a serpent.

A sister enters the room, missed her face. Something dripping in an unmistakable way: A-Death approaches. The symptoms are clear. One last step must be taken before entering the Crypt and finally confronting so long buried a thing, that has used these means for propagation.

Epidemics have a secret: they’re fast, untraceable to origins. So this is not just the beginning.  va-tombstone1-03

Misosophy: The Shadows of the Transcendental

 

by Laurence Kent

Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misosophy.

Gilles Deleuze[note]Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 139.[/note]

A philosophy of horror inevitably reaches transcendental limits; it is thought itself which is born in the shadowy depths of a horrific sublime. Nick Land screeches in the void that “horror first encounters ‘that’ which philosophy eventually seeks to know”, and we will trace this pre-philosophical trauma of thinking in the abstract spaces of German Expressionist cinema.[note]Nick Land, “Abstract Horror (Part 1),” Outside In (blog), August 21, 2013, http://www.xenosystems.net/abstract-horror-part-1/[/note]

The Discordant Harmony of the Sublime

For Kant, the sublime is a form of aesthetic judgement that arises when the faculty of imagination is stretched beyond its limits. This violence done to the imagination in the face of a formless presence of ungraspable immensity or power creates a negative pleasure. In the wake of imagination’s inadequacy, the Ideas of reason take over, proving that “the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense”.[note]Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Werner S. Pluhar (1790; Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett Publishing, 1987), 106.[/note] Kant divides the sublime into mathematical and dynamic variants, depending on whether the encounter is with an immense magnitude, stretching our “cognitive power”, or if an unimaginable might is presented, stretching our “power of desire”.[note]Ibid., 101.[/note]

However, the concept of the sublime is not merely an aesthetic category in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Kant, and in fact provides support for the transcendental faculties. The sublime marks an important step in the communication between faculties; it confronts us with a direct subjective relationship between imagination and reason. What makes this relationship important is that, unlike the free play of imagination and understanding that takes place in the judgement of the beautiful, the sublime brings the faculties into a discordant harmony. The sublime points to the genesis of the faculties’ accord in discord. The third critique grounds the first two critiques, but at the same time undermines the presence of a stable ground or natural harmony between our thinking faculties. The sublime indexes the groundless ground of apperception.

We thus find a violence at the birth of thought, a traumatic encounter with an outside that cannot be assimilated — something that can only ever be problematic to thinking; as Land writes, “the sublime is only touched upon as pathological disaster”.[note]Nick Land, “Delighted to Death,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2011), 135.[/note] Something is sensed which is imperceptible, something is thought which must remain unthought. This is the transcendental exercise of the faculties: when a faculty takes its own limit as its object – not empirical or part of the given, but the genesis of the empirical, that by which the given is given.

Gothic Geometry

To flesh out some of these claims, we turn to Deleuze’s analysis of German Expressionism in Cinema 1, and especially his take on Robert Wiene’s 1921 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Deleuze’s analysis of German cinema lies in the shadows of art historian Wilhelm Worringer. Art, for Worringer, exists because it fulfils certain psychic needs, and this will to form of artistic creation shifts with historical epoch depending on the relationship between humans and their environment. Worringer theorizes two urges that dominate the history of art: empathy and abstraction. The psychic condition that gives rise to artworks displaying the urge to empathy is “a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world”; empathetic art features naturalistic and organic aspects that allow the perceiver to enjoy their inner feeling of vitality.[note]Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (1908; Mansfield Centre, Conn.: Martino Fine Books, 2014), 15.[/note] Abstract art, on the other hand, is created to fulfil a psychic need arising from “a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world”.[note]Ibid., 15.[/note] Abstraction soothes these psychological stresses through an encounter with a geometrical absolute where in the contemplation of abstract regularity the perceiver is delivered from tension, finding happiness in the presence of the “ultimate morphological law”.[note]Ibid., 36.[/note]

This culminates in a bizarre synthesis of empathy and abstraction that Worringer discerns in the Gothic. In the art and ornaments of pre-Renaissance Northern Europe, Worringer observes a rejection of the organic that does not fully align with the abstraction and regularity of earlier artistic periods. There is vitality but no trace of organic and naturalistic features, an indication of the inner disharmony and unclarity of the psychic landscapes in Northern Europe, a “restless life contained in [a] tangle of lines”.[note]Ibid., 77.[/note] This is the aesthetic basis for Expressionism, defined by Worringer as “that uncanny pathos which attaches to the animation of the inorganic”.[note]Ibid.[/note]

Worringer’s Gothic line is of utmost importance to Deleuze-Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus as they use it to underline their concept of the nomadic or abstract line, and more broadly their theory of art as abstract machine: the creation of striated and smooth spaces.[note]For a reading of Worringer’s influence on Deleuze-Guattari that completely excises empathy, see: Mark Fisher, “Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction,” PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1999.[/note] For Deleuze-Guattari: “the abstract line is the affect of smooth spaces, not a feeling of anxiety that calls forth striation”.[note]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 497.[/note] Smooth space is the space of pure intensities, in contrast to the transcendental illusion of striated space, which is segmented and ordered. Smooth space is an aesthetic model that explicates the way abstraction can express intensities, and opposed to any idea of abstraction as purely rectilinear geometric absolutes. Abstract lines do not represent anything, but are lines of pure expression, abstract productions that uncover the transcendental conditions of production itself.

The Dread of Space

hill

In Cinema 1, Deleuze analyses the themes and aesthetic strategies of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari through the production of space in the film, the “striated, striped world” created through set design and lighting.[note]Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (1983; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 50.[/note] By drawing lines of flight between Deleuze and his work with Guattari, these concerns can be understood alongside the framework of the striated/smooth demarcations of space conceptualized in A Thousand Plateaus. It is impossible to truly separate processes of striation and smoothing, and Deleuze-Guattari instead state that the two spaces exist only in mixture. However, they identify a de jure distinction between the two processes of space production. It is this abstract distinction that we will trace by first focusing on the methods of striation to be found in Dr. Caligari.

From the moment that the story flashes back to the town where the protagonist, Francis, used to live, the painted and artificial nature of the set is obvious. The jagged lines abstract from any possible reality a strange terror, the pointed houses themselves forming a pointed hill of impossible proportions. The first image of the town is clearly an abstract depiction of a setting, and the lack of depth in the image can be understood through Worringer’s conception of the “dread of space”. This kind of abstraction works by marking an attempt to escape from reality and is what Worringer terms an “emancipation from all the contingency and temporality of the world-picture”.[note]Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 44.[/note]  However, it is clear that the affect of this crooked image is far from a respite for the spectator, and could more accurately be described a space of dread. This is where Worringer’s hybrid of abstraction and empathy is important. The abstraction present in the backdrop of Dr. Caligari displays a contradictory urge: both to abstraction but also to the embrace of a form of vitality. Allowing no distinction of form and background to arise, the crooked shapes and the broken lines are imbued with a twisted life of their own, a strange inorganic vitality that produces oppressive atmospheres and violent affects.

Caligari stage

The way the characters move in Dr. Caligari can be understood as an extension of these design principles; indeed, Lotte Eisner observes that the acting is “like the broken angles of the sets” with movements that “never go beyond the limits of a given geometrical plane”.[note]Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (1969; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 25.[/note] This is thus a different kind of stratification of space, where the lines from set to character leave no separation of set and figure intact. A scene which displays the geometries of horror in the actors’ performances is the first awakening of the somnambulist Cesare. Interestingly, the background set of the stage in Caligari’s spectacle is relatively bare, with only a few jagged lines on Cesare’s coffin displaying the expressionistic impulse. But it is these lines that become intermingled with the crooked movements of both Caligari and his captured performer. Cesare slowly emerges from his box, Caligari watching him and presenting his spectacle to the audience with his rigid arms, extended and emphasized by the use of sticks in both hands. Cesare slowly walks from his box, his eyes seemingly on us the audience, a shock of self-reflexivity as we participate in the spectacle. Caligari edges out of the way, his legs straight and pushed together, his artificially extended arms pulling limited geometric poses. This is interspersed with reaction shots of the audience, the characters Francis and Allen picked out by the lighting. Their acting is more naturalistic, a trace of the organic contrasting heavily with the inorganic vitality that finds expression in the rigid movements of the characters on stage. Caligari’s and Cesare’s acting is described by Rudolf Kurtz as achieving a “dynamic synthesis of their being”, and it is the ability they have to striate the space of the image that synthesises the terror of the set design and the tension inherent in the actors’ small deliberate movements;[note]Rudolf Kurtz, Expressionism and Film, trans. Brenda Benthien (1926; Herts, UK: Indiana University Press, 2016).[/note]  each body part is separate, and the organic totality of the human is lost to unknown forces controlling the characters. Cesare is the puppet of Caligari, Caligari is being controlled by madness, and perhaps both are on the strings of delirium from Francis’ troubled mind.

CesareStare

Caligari stage reaction

The lighting in Dr. Caligari works in a similar way to the acting and set design, creating spaces full of jagged lines and confusing angles. Although making a distinction between the effect of the lighting and other aspects of the mise en scène is not truly a feature of the film itself, it is through the use of lighting that we can explicate the creation of smooth space, the space of intensities. To do so, it is important first to understand the metaphysical ramifications of intensity for Deleuze as propounded in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze posits that “intensity is the form of difference in so far as this is the reason of the sensible”.[note]Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 222.[/note] Intensity is difference-in-itself, the production of the sensible that, being its genesis, cannot be sensed. Thus, not being actual or actualisable, the notion of intensity refers to virtual events wherein any variation produces a change in the whole. This is prior to the transcendental illusion that produces measurements of extensity where quantities can be added on to each other (say time or distance). An intensive difference cannot be divided or added up in the same way. Instead, intensity marks a difference in the quality of the whole. However, we never experience intensity as, being virtual, it is only through the actualization of intensive quantities in extension or quality that intensity is grasped. Intensive quantities thus express a smooth space, away from the striation of things in terms of extension and against the understanding of the world as multiplicities upon a stable ground, the transcendental illusion of unchanging whole to which things take positions that do not change their sense.

For Deleuze, light in German Expressionism is “a potent movement of intensity, intensive movement par excellence”.[note]Deleuze, Cinema 1, 49.[/note] Light expresses an intense contrast with shadow, wherein darkness is not the negative of light but black as intensity=0. Light is thus an intensive quantity wherein the differences between light and shadow mark a virtual struggle on the scale from the zero-point of negation, and every variation expresses and actualises these virtual events in a change in the quality of the whole of the image. In Dr. Caligari, this manifests itself in the increasing tension and terror of sequences involving the somnambulist Cesare. As Cesare sneaks through the town, making his way to Lucy to commit murder, he emerges from the shadows near the door to her house. His body retains the darkness, dressed completely in black; he sticks to the wall as he advances, his shadow indistinguishable from his figure, the virtual flip-side of his actual materiality. Cesare enters Lucy’s room through a window, and his shadow skirts the lit wall as he slowly approaches Lucy’s bed, a spread of virginal white. His movements and body are a function of light and darkness, and every movement affects the whole of the image, heightening the violent affects in this intensive battle of light.

Caligari Ceasare sneaking.gif

tcodc-pic-6

cabinet-of-dr-caligari-cesare-abducts-jane

Thus, although the world of dread created in Dr. Caligari is full of striated spaces, these spaces are always on the verge of smoothing out, expressing the intensive quantities of light to produce the movements of affect in the image. The actors intrude on the sets as forms of striation, but as they become indistinguishable from the background there is a smoothing of their organic forms — but this process is one of constant oscillation as the characters dissolve from extended figures to intensive movements and back again, different forms of striation emerging from the smooth with bizarre new impetuses. To return to the aesthetics of Worringer, just as the abstraction of the sets and characters is imbued with the strange vitality usually enacted under Worringer’s conception of empathetic art, the striated and smooth are in constant mixtures, strange hybrids. As the organic representation of a world of divisions and striations starts to crumble under the non-organic life which rumbles in the virtual lines of smooth spaces, the film affects us in a more profound sense; it, argues Deleuze, “unleashes in our soul a non-psychological life of the spirit”.[note]Ibid., 54.[/note] This is the point where horror becomes sublime.

The sublime violence done to our imagination is the destruction of the organic, it is what Deleuze calls “difference as catastrophe” that acts “under the apparent equilibrium of organic representation”.[note]Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 35.[/note] Organicism in cinema is defined by Deleuze as a sense of the whole: “a great organic unity”.[note]Deleuze, Cinema 1, 30.[/note] However, with cinema such as German Expressionism, which instead privileges the inorganic vitality of things, this sense of the unchanging whole is lost. Not only is the organic conception of the image undone but by doing violence to the spectator’s imagination in presenting an impossible whole, an intensity that can never be contained in sensibility, this invokes a destruction of the spectator’s organic being: the inorganic life overwhelms us in a dynamic sublime. This is the violence from which thought is born. We now see how the sublime is connected with the aesthetic strategies of intensive quantities: the unity of representation as a form of common-sense — in other words, apperception under the aegis of the imagination — is shown as the transcendental illusion that it is, and our higher faculties encounter the intensive movements beneath, the smooth spaces underlining the striation of thinking is revealed, forging in us an empathetic link to non-organic forces that give vitality to abstract lines.

Misosophy

The aesthetic regime of horror becomes metaphysical as it traverses the problematic origin of the faculties. Horror is important and, indeed, enjoyable as it uncovers the discord beneath the harmony of thinking that we classify as good and common sense. This harmony is thus not pre-established, but instead produced from an original contingent trauma. The non-necessity of our common-sense opens up the possibility of a different harmony, a different image of thought. Horror may not appeal to us on the surface (it is of course horrible) but it appeals to us as a “people to come” — the pain of the present being ungrounded and the pleasure of a world of pure difference: the future ravages the now.

If philosophy can never clearly think the unthought limit of thought, we find in horror a misosophy; the discord from which knowledge flows is an original rejection of knowledge, a hatred of wisdom. This does not mean that philosophical approaches to horror are futile though, but instead entail an acceptance that alongside any philosophy or horror is, what Eugene Thacker calls, a horror of philosophy, an original trauma at the birth of thought with which we must engage in order to grapple with the arbitrary nature of our philosophies: “Thought that stumbles over itself, at the edge of an abyss”.[note]Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 2 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015), 14.[/note] Noël Carrol says that “monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening”,[note]Noël Carroll. The Philosophy of Horror (London: Routledge, 1990), 34.[/note] and, through the aesthetic hybrids of abstraction/empathy, smooth/striated space, extensity/intensity, something foreign to our common-sense forces us to think the possibility of thinking completely differently. Horror opens the gap in our cognitive geometry, the rupture between the transcendental illusions of apperception and a possible noumenal realm of intensive difference. Encountering this undercurrent of inorganic force bring us face to face with the contingency of thinking but there is pleasure in our ability to think absolute alterity — Deleuze writes that “we lose our fear, knowing that our spiritual ‘destination’ is truly invincible”.[note]Deleuze, Cinema 1, 53.[/note] This destination of thinking is also its origin and its limit: the endless possibility of difference, where new harmonies can sound in the spectator, born from the discordant affects of horror. And, since each new image of thought must reside in the shadows of an arbitrary transcendental, terrifying yourself becomes the experimental vector of a practice of misosophy. va-tombstone1-03

 


Reaching Beyond to the Other: On Communal Outside-Worship

by Xenogoth

0

Such a lot the gods gave to me — to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.[note]H.P. Lovecraft. “The Outsider” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), 43.[/note]

H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Outsider first appeared in the April 1926 issue of pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales. It certainly suits such a publication. A surreal story full of inconsistencies and implausibilities, theories abound as to the scenario it is actually describing.

S.T. Joshi, writing explanatory notes for the story in a Penguin Classics collection of Lovecraft’s tales, wonders if the story is an account of a dream or if the unnamed protagonist is a ghost or immortal being, doomed to haunt the shadowy castle in which they find themselves, with so much time having past that the outsider no longer remembers how they came to be.[note]S.T. Joshi, “Explanatory Notes: ‘The Outsider’” in Ibid., 373.[/note]

There is no final resolution to this endlessly interpretable story. What carries the narrative is not the horror of the unknown outside the castle, but the horror of the outsider’s own interiority; their imprisoned subjectivity — there are no mirrors with which they can see their appearance and they have no recollection of hearing another human voice, “not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud”.[note]H.P. Lovecraft. “The Outsider”, 44.[/note] 

Whilst apparently more at home amongst the skeletal dead than the painted portraits of the ‘living’ that line the castle’s walls, and having little memory of how they came to arrive in their present circumstances, the Outsider is driven by a curiosity to discover the world outside the castle they habitually call home.

The journey to the Outside is fragmentary and dream-like. Stumbling bewilderedly through non-Euclidean environs trying to glimpse the night sky, the Outsider eventually comes across a party in a castle that looks unnervingly like their own, albeit ruinous in other parts than the one they are familiar with. They enter only for all in attendance to flee in terror.

Seeing the horror from which the revellers have fled — something “not of this world — or no longer of this world — […] a leering, abhorrent travesty of the human shape”[note]Ibid., 48.[/note] — the Outsider soon realises that this terrifying face belongs to them, at first unable to reconcile the interior Self with the gruesome image of the Other reflected in “a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass”.[note]Ibid., 49.[/note]

With this revelation, that the Outsider is the Other and always was, the story ends…

1

Lovecraft’s weird tale speaks specifically to a passage found in the introduction to Mark Fisher’s 2016 book The Weird and The Eerie — a passage which echoes persistently throughout the rest of the text, signalling to Fisher’s best-known writings on the psychosocial affects of capitalism.

Considering capital as the ultimate “eerie entity”, Fisher wonders about the ways

that “we” “ourselves” are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces. There is no inside except as a folding of the outside; the mirror cracks, I am an other, and I always was.[note]Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 11-12.[/note]

Following this, it is fitting that Fisher then begins his book with an exploration of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. He notes that “it is not horror but fascination — albeit a fascination usually mixed with a certain trepidation — that is integral to Lovecraft’s rendition of the weird”.[note]Ibid., 17.[/note] For Fisher, on both an aesthetic and political level, it is the weird that is desirable for its ability to “de-naturalise all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside”.[note]Ibid., 29.[/note]

This contrasts, for example, with the eerie ghost stories of M.R. James, explored later in the book, for whom “the outside is always coded as hostile and demonic”.[note]Ibid., 81.[/note] Fisher continues: “the glimpses of exteriority [James’ stories] offered no doubt brought a thrill to his listeners, but they also came with a firm warning: venture outside this cloistered world at your peril”.[note]Ibid.[/note]

The Outside is a concept that has long haunted the history of philosophy under various different names and formulations — from the Kantian noumenon to the Lacanian Real, et al. — with each functioning as a challenge to subjectivity that attempts to think beyond phenomenal limit-experiences. Whilst this broad definition is applicable to the narratives in much weird fiction, these tales explore the Outside through narrated ‘experience’ rather than objective academic analysis and they do so with an imaginative flare that has fascinated many.

Eugene Thacker, for instance, in his book In The Dust of Our Planet, explains that rather than write a “philosophy of horror” he hopes to articulate “the horror of philosophy: the isolation of those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitations and constraints, moments in which thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility — the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language”.[note]Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of Our Planet (London: Zero Books, 2011), 2.[/note]

Lovecraft’s The Outsider is an interesting example of such non-philosophical language as it is written from a seemingly impossible perspective. Its narrative viewpoint actively resists being imaginable to the reader. Imprisoned by their own subjectivity, the Outsider is shielded from the objective truth of their existence, but to see themselves — to witness the inside as a folding of the outside — is as intolerable as any encounter with pure exteriority. There is no moving beyond the weird tale’s final moment when the Outsider crosses the event horizon of their subjectivity and irreversibly lets the Outside in.

Whilst Lovecraft’s tale explores the horror of the Outside in the first-person (or, more accurately, non-person), most stories like it are told one step removed, exacerbating the intolerability of such a first-hand experience. Those who have experienced the horror of the Outside first-hand are often driven insane, unable to articulate their experience with any lucidity. A typical example of this can be found in Lovecraft’s best-known tale, The Call of Cthulhu, which is told through a first-hand reading of secondary accounts, including a police report written by Inspector John R. Legrasse who, notably, describes his encounter with a ‘Cthulhu Cult’ of Outside-worshippers.

The cult represent the Outside as a comprehensible and material social threat, far more visibly dangerous than the misadventures of the atomised individual in their collective channelling of the powers of the great Cthulhu. Whatever horrifying and unthinkable form the Outside may take, the fact remains that it is seemingly through community alone that its affects can be harnessed (whilst nonetheless remaining intolerable to the individual human mind).

Another example of this communal channelling can be found in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, the focus of the last chapter of The Weird and the Eerie. Fisher writes that the novel “invokes an outside that certainly invokes awe and peril, but which also involves a passage beyond the petty repressions and mean confines of common experience into a heightened atmosphere of oneiric lucidity”.[note]Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 122.[/note]

The novel begins with the disappearance of three students and one teacher from an all-girls’ boarding school in Victoria, Australia. The women, exploring a rock formation at the titular local beauty spot, go through a truly bizarre experience. Suddenly overcome by drowsiness, they fall asleep. One of the group, Edith — who is less susceptible to the lure of the Outside: “her inability to let go of [her] everyday attachments […] ultimately prevents her from making the crossing”[note]Ibid., 128.[/note] — awakens to find her peers in a trance, disappearing one by one behind the rocky monolith they had just been exploring, giving themselves over to an unknown agency.

The women are never seen again. The effect of their disappearance on the rest of their community is catastrophic. With no explanation for their absence, locals assume all kinds of violent ends for the women. The boarding school eventually shuts down as concerned parents withdraw their children and members of staff resign. The communal stress and grief reach their peak with two separate suicides: namely, a student, Sara, and the school’s headmistress, Mrs Appleyard. Whilst the missing women collectively embrace the Outside, the school community is traumatically undone by their exit.

The final sentences of Fisher’s book note how — unlike Edith — the women are

fully prepared to take the step into the unknown. They are possessed by the eerie calm that settles whenever familiar passions can be overcome. They have disappeared, and their disappearances will leave haunting gaps, eerie intimations of the outside.[note]Ibid.[/note]

Following Fisher’s suicide in January 2017, this ending is unsettling to read. Death is, of course, the ultimate limit-experience, the ultimate challenge to subjectivity, and here grief becomes the affective result of being haunted by the Outside through the absences that death imposes upon both individual and community.

Fisher’s death explicitly intensifies the stakes of his thought in this way, as his absence has become an eerie intimation of the very Outside that lurked in the background of all his writings. It must be remembered, however, that whilst death was a topic he discussed frequently, so was the collective subjectivity he saw as essential to any postcapitalist future.

Caring for one another with the intensity that so often follows grief renews the possibility of such a collective subject being established, a subject which “does not exist, yet the crisis, like all other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed”.[note]Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (London: Zero Books, 2009), 66.[/note] Again, even in the very real instance of an individual’s death, it is through community that the affects of the Outside are channelled, whilst still remaining intolerable, and the political implications of this communal channelling are considerable.

Whilst such implications are not discussed in The Weird and the Eerie explicitly, in the context of Fisher’s wider writings the book reads like an aesthetic toolkit for ontopolitical ‘egress’ — that now-familiar new addition to the Fisher lexicon which he details, in his usual style, with pop-cultural instantiations rather than academic exposition. He writes:

Lovecraft’s stories are full of thresholds between worlds: often the egress will be a book (the dreaded Necronomicon), sometimes […] it is literally a portal. […] The centrality of doors, thresholds and portals means that the notion of the between is crucial to the weird.[note]Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 28.[/note]

Fisher’s use of the word ‘egress’ is not expanded upon beyond this passage, yet it is striking in its unfamiliarity and remains in the imagination as a name given to a particular kind of paraontological experience. It is a word synonymous with ‘exit’ that was most commonly used in nautical and astronomical contexts in the 18th and 19th centuries — it is archaic whilst exemplifying a twinned relationship between oceanic depths and the vast cosmos, making it an appropriate term to invoke in the orbit of Lovecraft. Its etymological relationship to ‘transgress’ is suggestive also.

In his next book, Acid Communism, left in an unknown state of completion at the time of his death, Fisher was to address the political reality of egress more explicitly. He hoped to reinvigorate the psychedelic praxes of consciousness-raising/-razing that have come to culturally define the 1960s and ’70s, channelling them through his postcapitalist desires.

Similar approaches are already becoming visible within contemporary politics. For instance, the Conservative party in the UK continues to habitually ridicule and criticise the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party for wanting to drag the country back to the 1970s. Fisher would perhaps argue that what the Labour party are instead suggesting is the return of that decade’s rising class consciousness; a return to its potentials.[note]Fisher’s reappraisal of the 1970s is not unprecedented and he publicly cited John Medhurst’s That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76 (London: Zero Books, 2014) and Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press, 2012) as major influences on his most recent thought — not to mention the philosophical texts by Deleuze & Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Marcuse, and Irigaray that emerged in that period following May ‘68.[/note]

In the unpublished introduction to Acid Communism, Fisher writes of this potential (if seemingly paradoxical) return of the new that capitalist realism[note]Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (London: Zero Books, 2009). From Fisher’s book of the same name, capitalist realism can be very briefly summarised as the deeply held social belief — propagated by capitalism itself — that there is no realistic alternative to the capitalist system.[/note] repeatedly ungrounds:

In recent years, the sixties have come to seem at once like a deep past so exotic and distant that we cannot imagine living in it, and a moment more vivid than now — a time when people really lived, when things really happened. Yet the decade haunts not because of some unrecoverable and unrepeatable confluence of factors, but because the potentials it materialised and began to democratise — the prospect of a life freed from drudgery — has to be continually suppressed.[note]Mark Fisher, Acid Communism. (Unpublished).[/note]

Fisher seemed to want to encourage a community of Lovecraftian Outsiders, unsure of how they arrived at their present situation but nonetheless curious to leave the cloistered world in which they find themselves. Perhaps, like Lovecraft’s Outsider, this is a naïve position — but naïvité is hard to avoid in life at the limits of drudgery. The more immediate problem is that others have already begun to set in motion a similar political project of their own and perhaps it was this similarity that occasioned Fisher’s use of the word ‘egress’.

‘Exit’ was already taken…

2

In many of his writings, particularly on his K-Punk blog, Fisher was never shy about acknowledging the influence of Nick Land on his thought. The two had worked together as part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the late 1990s — a collective of ‘renegade academics’ whose potent homebrew of cybernetics and philosophy, flavoured with a Lovecraftian sci-fi mythos, continues to have considerable occultural influence today. Whilst the group was largely anonymous, always opting for a collective voice, much of its output has subsequently become readily  associated with Land as the group’s most infamous member.

Whilst Fisher’s approach to politics seems fundamentally at odds with Land’s — at least in his later writings, the public perception of which has led to Land being quietly blacklisted by a number of publishers — they nevertheless share much in common philosophically.

Just as Thacker wrote of his interest in a philosophy that “enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility”, the shared project of Land and Fisher is arguably one of applying the implications of such a speculative approach — often used to discuss more abstract questions of ontology and metaphysics — to the more immediate concerns of political philosophy.

Fisher’s most famous project, in his book Capitalist Realism, was to explore the notion that the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism. Land, in The Dark Enlightenment — his controversial essay on Neoreactionary thought — instead explores the end of democracy as the limit of contemporary sociopolitical thinking.

The initial focus of Land’s essay is exit — a concept that has previously been put to use by thinkers across the political spectrum since the publication of Albert Hirschman’s 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Liberty, but is here given a uniquely Landian twist.[note]See: Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972)[/note] Similar to egress, Land’s exit refers to both an epistemological and practical exit from hegemonic social structures and belief systems. Land, however, proposes that exit be used against democracy. He writes:

Democracy and ‘progressive democracy’ are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state. Whilst ‘extreme right wing’ governments have, on rare occasions, momentarily arrested this process, its reversal lies beyond the bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool. This is a reality that the left applauds, the establishment right grumpily accepts, and the libertarian right has ineffectively railed against. Increasingly, however, libertarians have ceased to care whether anyone is ‘pay[ing them] attention’ — they have been looking for something else entirely: an exit.[note]Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment, http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/[/note]

Land goes on to define the social model he sees as politically desirable with the phrase: “no voice, free exit”, drawing explicitly on Hirschman and Curtis ‘Mencius Moldbug’ Yarvin.[note]See: Mencius Moldbug, “Patchwork: a positive vision (part 1)”, Unqualified Reservations, November 13, 2008, http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/patchwork-positive-vision-part-1.html[/note] This formulation describes a non-democratic system of government in which citizens have no ‘voice’ but are free to leave whenever they wish.

Here, a citizen’s relationship to government is made analogous to the relationship between customer and business: customers have no say in how the business itself is run but they are welcome to opt for another competing service provider if they are unsatisfied with their experience. Land describes this model another way on his blog:

Government, of whatever traditional or experimental form, is legitimated from the outside — through exit pressure — rather than internally, through responsiveness to popular agitation. The conversion of political voice into exit-orientation (for instance, revolution into secessionism), is the principal characteristic of neoreactionary strategy.[note]Nick Land, “Premises of Neoreaction”. Xenosystems, February 3, 2014, http://www.xenosystems.net/premises-of-neoreaction/[/note]

What is missing here — and likewise missed by the simplification of “no voice, free exit” — is the temporal complexity of Land’s maneuver. He describes how conservative and reactionary ideologies are made paradoxical in their retreat towards or repetition of what has come before. Neoreaction suggests a new approach to the old — it is a ‘progressive’ ‘conservatism’ that disembowels the meanings usually attached to either of those two words. Land’s exit, in this way, is a movement through these ideologies which, in their cyclonic relation to each other, offer new approaches towards progress and, therefore, time itself in their coupled divergence from the classic liberal model of teleological progressivism.

Here Land, too, invokes the Lovecraftian Outsider — a voiceless shadow out of time driven by exit — in opposition to the political establishment’s Jamesian warnings against the outer edges of this cloistered world. On his Xenosystems blog, with its penchant for abstract horror, Land could not be clearer:

The Outside is the ‘place’ of strategic advantage. To be cast out there is no cause for lamentation, in the slightest.[note] Nick Land, “Outsideness”. Xenosystems, August 1, 2014, http://www.xenosystems.net/outsideness-2/[/note]

Neither Land nor Fisher shy away from the horrors that the traversing of these limits might summon within the human mind. Even though these limits have migrated to the realm of political philosophy, in corners both left and right Lovecraft remains a cogent reference point.

Fisher may have agreed with the strategic advantage of the Outside but, whilst the ends are similar, the means could not be more different.

For Fisher, thinking through the work of Herbert Marcuse, the history of Western art is littered with exit strategies. He presents a leftist instantiation of Land’s Outsider position, challenging the contemporary populist left, that can at best be described as working to a model of all voice and no exit, calling for new attempts at finding exits through other ways of living — attempts that have all too often been neutered by capitalism’s cooptive mechanisms.

The counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s is a prime example of this. Fisher writes that,

as much as Marcuse’s work was in tune with the counterculture, his analysis also forecast its ultimate failure and incorporation. A major theme of [his 1964 book] ‘One Dimensional Man was the neutralisation of the aesthetic challenge. Marcuse worried about the popularisation of the avant-garde, not out of elitist anxieties that the democratisation of culture would corrupt the purity of art, but because the absorption of art into the administered spaces of capitalist commerce would gloss over its incompatibility with capitalist culture. He had already seen capitalist culture convert the gangster, the beatnik and the vamp from “images of another way of life” into “freaks or types of the same life”. The same would happen to the counterculture, many of whom, poignantly, preferred to call themselves freaks.[note]Mark Fisher, Acid Communism (unpublished).[/note]

However, Fisher’s is not an anarcho-primitivist position, supporting a return to a time before capitalism and its technologies. His accelerationist position is an advocation of the use of capitalism’s forces to modulate past potentials, transducing them into the future by collectively harnessing capital’s deterritorializing capacities for outside aims and egresses.

Again, it can be argued that this is not so far from Land’s position either, but their arguments pivot on a battle between humanism and inhumanism. For example, Fisher and Land both share an acknowledgement of capitalism’s blobjective tendency to absorb everything it comes into contact with. On his Xenosystems blog, Land notes that the left’s analyses of capitalism — more perceptive than the right’s — remain indebted to the Deleuzo-Guattarian critique that capital “is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political eventualities of any specific ethno-geographical locality, and — by its very nature — it increasingly commands impressive resources with which to ‘liberate’ itself, or ‘deterritorialize’”.[note] Nick Land, “Capital Escapes”. Xenosystems, November 21, 2014, http://www.xenosystems.net/capital-escapes/[/note]

Capital’s stifling of any meaningful exit other than its own remains a central point of contention within many contemporary leftist discourses, particularly in black and queer studies, many of which share Fisher’s attempt to rethink the pessimism of an exit-as-apocalypse ideological default.[note]See, for example, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) — notable for its titular challenge to heteronormative temporality — and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s essay “Towards a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Towards the End of the World” (The Black Scholar, 44, No. 2, States of Black Studies (2014), 81-97), in which she ponders explicitly black exit strategies: “Would Blackness emancipated from science and history wonder about another praxis and wander in the World, with the ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing?” See also, for a more recent consideration of Land’s writing and Afropessimism: Jehu, “Land, Wilderson and the Nine Billion Names of God”, The Real Movement, August 20, 2017, https://therealmovement.wordpress.com/2017/08/20/land-wilderson-and-the-nine-billion-names-of-god/[/note] Land, however, in this framework, doubles down on capital’s deterritorializing capacities, removing any purely humanistic agency and suggesting that, at present, exit is the sole prerogative of capital and not of those caught up in its rhythms, pulsions and patternings.

Whilst Land seems to suggest that we must channel the inhumanist exit of capital as an already-existing path towards exteriority, Fisher argues for a collective channelling of Lovecraftian aesthetics leading to the formulation of new cultures, which remain the only way for the left to egress — and, in order to do this, it is essential that the left learn from the countercultures that have come before.

To return to our Lovecraftian metaphor: if Land is an Outsider, having looked in the mirror and identified with the inhumanism of capital, Fisher is rather hoping to collectivise, organising an Acid Communist Cthulhu Cult of Outsider-worshippers. His focus on the aesthetic challenge is no doubt influenced by his subcultural affiliations. What are Goths if not Outside-worshippers who already live amongst us? However, even this subculture has been subsumed within capitalism — commodified, its vague political potentials have long been neutralised.

Elsewhere, the Alt-Right‘s repeated exclamation that they are the ‘new punk’ preempts any renewed channelling of the 1960s and ’70s — a cry that is so often met with derision, despite punk’s well-documented on-off political and aesthetic flirtations with fascism.

Aesthetic questions of exit are further complicated here. Even post-punk, which Fisher wrote about at length and which he acknowledged as his primary cultural influence, flirted with fascist imagery. Writing on Joy Division’s aesthetic appropriations of images of the Hitler Youth on their debut EP, An Ideal for Living, he writes:

The Virilio / Deleuze-Guattari analysis of Fascism, remember, maintains that Fascism is essentially self-destructive: a line of pure abolition. As such, Fascism is just the name for one more variant of the Romantic lust for the Night when all identity, all individuation, is subsumed in ‘an ecstatic aestheticized experience of Community’ (Zizek).[note]Mark Fisher, “Nihil Rebound: Joy Division,” K-Punk, January 9, 2005, http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004725.html — here Mark is quoting from Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso Books, 2009)[/note]

Here again community emerges as central to processes related to the channelling of the Outside. Fisher’s invocation of communism is obviously communal but even Land’s model of ‘exit pressure’ surely relies on a collectivised desire for exit within a given system if that pressure is to have any weight at all. Different means, similar ends.

Whilst Fisher does not advocate an anti-democratic position like Land does, his recommended practices are certainly extra-democratic. Capitalism cannot be ‘voted out’ but a big enough change to the cultural status quo could make it politically redundant.

This double-pincer of ‘community’ — with its equally dystopian and utopian potentials — grounds many takes on the ‘question of Communism’ as it has been discussed in recent years by continental philosophy. Whereas fascism seems to hold self-destruction as its central motif, much writing on communism holds the destruction of the Other as a folded destruction of the Self. As Maurice Blanchot writes in his book The Unavowable Community:

To remain present in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself another’s death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community.[note]Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown: Temple Hill Press, 1988), 9.[/note] 

To engage with this Openness, this Opening, is precisely to ‘egress’.

3

Maurice Blanchot’s comments on community were initially written in response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1985 essay on Bataille, The Inoperative Community, and this response triggered a correspondence between the two which would last for a number of decades.

Nancy was to have the final word.

In late 2001, just prior to Blanchot’s death in 2003, Nancy wrote the preface for a new edition of The Unavowable Community. Detailing the history of their conversation, Nancy describes the essence of “community” (which he had — he admits — first failed to account for) as “the space between us — ‘us’, remaining in the great indecision where this collective or plural subject stands and stays condemned never to find its own proper voice.”[note]Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Confronted Community”, trans. Jason Kemp Winfree, in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 25.[/note] 

What Nancy describes here — now in line with Blanchot’s own thought — is a paraontological community that is constituted by an unknowable and unavowable bond that dares us “to think the unthinkable, the unaccountable, the intractable of being-with, but without subjecting or submitting it to any hypostasis”.[note]Ibid., 27[/note]

It should be noted that Nancy is writing here just one month after the events of September 11th 2001. Such an event of international trauma is “all at once a confrontation and an opposition, a coming before oneself so as to challenge one’s self, so as to part within one’s being a gash that is the condition of this being”.[note]Ibid.[/note] 

This gash is presented here as a primal wound. It is not created by tragedy — tragedy is rather a finger stuck through it, making us all too aware of its presence. For Nancy, the events of 9/11 instigated a colossal questioning of the self — not unlike the horrors of the Second World War that influenced Bataille’s original writings. Whilst one nation or people may have suffered the brunt of a particular attack, the event nonetheless highlights a rupture within all of us, requiring a paraontological questioning of the collective subject that extends far beyond national and cultural ‘communities’ and into the ever-elusive outside ‘us’.

Nancy continues: “the sudden offensive strike that has taken in a stunning figure with the collapse of the symbol of global commerce (and therefore of exchange, of relations, and of communication) presents itself, or wants to present itself, as a religious confrontation, with fundamentalist monotheism, on the one side, humanist theism, no less fundamentalist, on the other”.[note]Ibid., 28[/note] What is interesting is that this same topic became the site of Land and Fisher’s final convergence.

Dual essays posted on the Urbanomic website at the end of 2016, just a month before Fisher’s death, contended with the communal wounding of the terror attacks of November 13th 2015, in which 130 people were killed and almost 500 injured when bombers and marauding gunmen attacked the streets of Paris, most catastrophically targeting an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan music venue in the 11th arrondissement.

Both Land and Fisher are here responding, more specifically, to Alain Badiou’s 2016 essay on the attacks, Our Wound is Not So Recent.[note]Alain Badiou, Our Wound Is Not So Recent: Thinking the Paris Killings of 13 November, trans. Robin Mackay.(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016)[/note] Whilst Fisher “calls for a new politics to counter the decadence of capitalist realism”, Land “reconfigures the battlefield of the future, and plays devil’s advocate for globalised capitalism”.[note]Mark Fisher, “Cybergothic vs Steampunk”, Urbanomic, 2016, https://www.urbanomic.com/document/cybergothic-vs-steampunk-response-to-badiou/; Nick Land, “Sore Losers”, Urbanomic, 2016, https://www.urbanomic.com/document/sore-losers/[/note] Nevertheless, both arguments find themselves in orbit of community and its outside.

“Capital is nothing if it is not parsimonious”, Fisher writes, “and for the last thirty years it has sustained itself by relying on readymade forms of existential affiliation”.[note]Mark Fisher, “Cybergothic vs Steampunk”.[/note] For Fisher, ISIS is most certainly an abhorrent death cult, but it is a death cult that should nonetheless be recognised and taken seriously for its success in offering some young Muslims — the West’s Outsiders du jour — something that capitalism never can.

What ISIS forces into capitalism’s global currents is an extremist neoreactionary community — “a cybergothic phenomenon which combines the ancient with the contemporary (beheadings on the web)”[note]Ibid.[/note] — that appears incompatible with the West’s hegemonic moral structures and culturally Judeo-Christian belief systems.

As an example of “the rising tide of experimental political forms [appearing] in so many areas of the world”, ISIS presents us with an extreme and potently unthinkable example of a people “rediscovering group consciousness and the potency of the collective” outside the reach of capitalism, and neoliberal (post)colonialism more specifically.[note]Ibid.[/note] 

For Fisher, the left must find its own community, a new community, that opposes such abject violence whilst nonetheless sharing with ISIS a dual resistance against and utilisation of the technologies of coercive capital. Their violent example must not occasion a rallying behind the symbol of Western capitalism under siege. This new community must instead harness the exacerbation of capitalism’s failures that those fighting for an Islamic State continue to violently reveal for us.

It is Land who demonstrates this entangled problematic most damningly. He similarly takes on the limitations of capitalist collectivities but, by contrast, directs his polemic towards Badiou’s universalised ‘Frenchness’ as the symbol of modernity’s failures.

When Badiou proclaims that ‘Our wound is not so recent’, we are compelled to ask: How far does this collective pronoun extend? A response to this question could be prolonged without definite limit. Everything we might want to say ultimately folds into it, ‘identity’ most obviously. Whatever meaning ‘communism’ could have belongs here, as ‘we’ reach outwards to the periphery of the universal, and thus (conceivably) to the end of philosophy.[note]Nick Land, “Sore Losers”.[/note]

With his focus on a nationalistic identitarianism, Badiou stifles his own reach towards an outside that the terror attacks themselves have instigated. Land writes, and Fisher also suggests, that the horror of the question of community, taken as Blanchot radically intended it, must include ISIS.

Any Western conception of ‘us’ that resists the folding of that which we deem outside ‘us’ — as ISIS are both judged and choose to be — is to remain trapped within the damned and damning subjectivity of contemporary neoliberalism. To insist ‘we are not like them’ and ‘they are not like us’ is to double down on our failures.

Land continues:

French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed national project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of collective defeat in the modern period, and thus — concretely — of humiliation by capital? It is the way the ‘alternative’ dies: locally, and unpersuasively, without dialectical engagement, dropping — neglected — into dilapidation. It can be inserted into a limited, yet not inconsiderable, series of identities making vehement claim to universality without provision of any effective criterion through which to establish it. When frustrated by the indifference of the outside, such objective pretentions tend to turn ‘fascist’ in exactly the sense Badiou employs.[note]Ibid.[/note]

He concludes:

The ‘liberation of liberalism’ has scarcely begun. None of this is a concern for Badiou, however, or for the Islamists. It belongs to another story, and — for this is the ultimate, septically enflamed wound — as it runs forwards, ever faster, it is not remotely theirs.[note]Ibid.[/note]

This wound is all of ours, even when the collective ‘our’ is radically extended into infinity. Modernity, however, is not a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass — at least not for the West. It is obfuscated; fogged.

To be confronted by ISIS is precisely to look in the mirror and not recognise the inhuman face of modernity looking back. The accelerated destruction of ISIS, occasioned — the West hopes — by the fall of Mosul, is to only prolong our own self-destruction.

Fisher concludes:

The growing clamour of groups seeking to take control of their own lives portends a long overdue return to a modernity that capital just can’t deliver. New forms of belonging are being discovered and invented, which will in the end show that both steampunk capital and cybergothic ISIS are archaisms, obstructions to a future that is already assembling itself.[note]Mark Fisher, “Cybergothic vs Steampunk”.[/note]

As Land, too, has consistently insisted, whether the trajectory is towards communism or any other political future, the unthinkable must be thought and recognised and this will never be without risk:

“To find ways out, is to let the Outside in.”[note]Nick Land, “Quit”, Xenosystems, February 28, 2013, http://www.xenosystems.net/quit/[/note] va-tombstone1-03

 


Skins and the Game

by Uriel Alexis

This is an attempt, more or less, at a defense of neocameralism and patchwork against the blows struck by Vince Garton here.

Skins

Anything is only itself because it’s functionally different from everything else. This computer I’m typing at is only itself because it’s neither at the next desk, nor does it function in the manner of an apple, amongst many other things.

The degree of differentiation is not absolute. There is a gradient of order from the inside core to the outside, where others lie. There are, nonetheless, boundaries. Permeable boundaries, but boundaries nonetheless. Discontinuities where the gradient takes a leap.

A system is a difference between system and environment. The more it becomes itself, the more it deepens this difference, this discontinuity. There, at this boundary, lie the operations such a system can perform — the ways it lets the outside in. It is at this threshold that its particular features are engraved.

Any inner endeavor is necessarily tied to an outside behavior. Systems only survive through structural coupling, or mutual variation. To be, then, is already to trade away things that are inside.

At any given moment, this difference may become paranoid. It then folds upon itself, and histericizes its particularities, which is to say, it develops an identity. Entrances are rigidified, reduced and finally narrowed down to one single path of digestion, heavily securitized. Membranes become skins. An organism is born out of the system.

Organisms are parasites, though. Paranoiacs can’t innovate, can’t produce. They just reproduce themselves. So, when skins arise, it’s only because the systematics have been pushed one level up. It’s only because there are populations that individual organisms can evolve.

The Game

Conflict is primary, demonstrably so, as there’s no agreement even on that. Thus strategy imposes itself at every level: moving to stay the same, that’s the immediate antinomy. When organisms come into being, systems become a game. The only game in town: variation-selection.

The game the whole system plays at the highest level is fractally repeated within itself. It is on the order provided by the game that organisms parasite, and as they internalize this order, they fragment themselves, dissolving back into the process.

When organisms play the game of variation-selection, there are only so many strategies they can pursue. By far the most important move is localization or individuation: the ability to internalize, in ever smaller units, costs and benefits. Organisms that don’t do that have a way more complicated path ahead, and get used by those that do — like pathogens use humans. Organisms collide and conflict in order to engrave in themselves the only knowledge they can pursue: survival. And thus the system thrives.

But it may be that the system itself becomes paranoid. This destroys the game entirely, and organises organisms into a new, supra-organism. The larger the scale of this move, the more risky it is (variation-selection is always played at the highest levels, and supra-organisms have serious disadvantages). An organism — without an internal system — is always already a degenerating order.

On the contrary, an organism may itself systematize, relax and let go. This becoming-membrane of skins lets plenty in and individualizes consequences internally. The game is now played at smaller levels, and ‘organ individualism’ becomes imaginable. From here all the way down to 0-degree organization (“intelligent dust cloud” or “grey goo”), it’s just acceleration.

Leviathan’s Termites

Vince Garton argues:

Yet patchwork remains, despite itself, peculiarly ambivalent. It is obsessed with the state: creating new states, cutting up states, states on top of states. … At an elementary level, however, it seems that competition between states must favour states themselves, and for this we have many great proofs throughout history — the emergence of the truly protofascist Qin Empire from the fissiparous warring Chinese states; the rise of Alexander’s empire from the Greek poleis; the birth of raison d’état in Renaissance Italian city-states.

Is it true that patchwork must favor states? Surely, systems can become paranoid and organize. The examples he presents of China and the Greek poleis would attest to this. But since hegemony is atrophy, every single one of these movements decayed after their formation (Alexander’s example immediately so), until they collapsed under their own weight back into a system of moving parts.

Garton is not satisfied:

The question, then, is this: ‘How can the sovereign power be prevented — or at least dissuaded—from devouring society?’ […] In the end, Hobbes shows us that it cannot be maintained. […] But to be sustained even in the most radical state of exception, in conditions of overwhelming catastrophe, the commonwealth’s domination must expand irrepressibly from the radical root of human thought into every circle of existence. It must ‘devour society’. […] Once threatened, Leviathan must warp everything around itself in order to maintain its existence — all thought, all ideology, all behaviour. Politics must get a grip — whatever the cost.

Which brings us to the topic of sovereignty, or self-rule. I want to advance here that sovereignty is indistinguishable from the ability to trade itself away. Without a matrix of commerce — a system — in which bits and pieces flow, all notions of self-rule, autonomy or ‘control’ are rendered moot. That which can’t break itself apart dies off. I dug deeply into this elsewhere: power only works to the extent that it is internally checked. An all encompassing monster is rotting indeed.

Land sets the primary steps on this road:

More promising, by far — for the purposes of tractable argument — is a strictly formal or contractual usage of ‘control’ to designate the exclusive right to free disposal or commercial alienation. Defined this way, ownership is a legal category, co-original with the idea of contract, referring to those things which one has the right to trade (based on natural law). Property is essentially marketable. It cannot exist unless it can be alienated through negotiation. A prince who cannot trade away his territory does not ‘own’ it in any sense that matters.

(…)

Neocameralism necessarily commercializes sovereignty, and in doing so it accommodates power to natural law. Sovereign stock (‘primary property’) and ‘secondary property’ become commercially inter-changeable, dissolving the original distinction, whilst local sovereignty is rendered compliant with the wider commercial order, and thus becomes a form of constrained ‘secondary sovereignty’ relative to the primary or absolute sovereignty of the system itself. Final authority bleeds out into the catallactic ensemble, the agora, or commercium, where what can really happen is decided by natural law. It is this to which sovereign stockholders, if they are to be effective, and to prosper, must defer.

A recipe for consistent dissolution, which structurally avoids paranoiac re-capture.

Patchwork, insofar as it breaks its neocameral pieces apart in a systematic commercium of sovereignty, is a recipe for the “ambivalence” Garton himself recommends. Recursively implementing its own dynamics into the organisms that comprise it, Patchwork is a machine that kills Leviathans. Neocameral sovcorps are the bacterial termites that rot them away, implementing “the infectious patchwork within the state, a recursive dissolution that leaves not a network of states, but an endless flux in which the state itself disintegrates into the very war that sustains it”, of which Garton writes.

Whatever skin or membrane remains is for the game to decide. va-tombstone1-03

Atomization and Liberation

by Justin Murphy

Abstract. The problem with human atomization — the accelerating tendency of traditional social aggregates to disintegrate — is only that the process remains arrested at the level of the individual. The modern political Left, as an intrinsically aggregative tendency, bemoans individualism but functions as a machine for conserving it against already active forces that would otherwise disintegrate it. One of the only empirically mature pathways to collective liberation is through human atomization becoming autonomous: accepting the absolute foreclosure of anthropolitical agency is a causal trigger activating novel, dividuated, affective capacities, which become capable of recomposing as intensive, nonlinear, collective excitations (Cyberpositive AI-aligned Communism, or the CAIC protocol).

Modernity can be thought of as a process of atomization, arguably initiated by the Protestant Reformation.[note]Land, Nick. “The Atomization Trap.” Jacobite, June 6, 2017. https://jacobitemag.com/2017/06/06/atomization/.[/note] Today, atomization is something that almost everyone protests (on the left and right), but protest itself is an atomization dynamic, automatically reproducing the mold of Protestant schismatics. In our sincerely felt repulsion to atomization, we instantiate a distance between ourselves and this supposedly external alienating phenomenon, the cause of which is imputed to something or someone else, somewhere else. This helps to explain other puzzling phenomena, such as “community-building” political activists, the attitudes and behaviors of whom are maximally inhospitable to most people everywhere. No matter how hard such groups sincerely want and try to connect with “the masses”, they continue to repulse the masses more and more, because their interest in building a commons is predicated on opposition to the only, last thing that humans today generally have in common: atomization.

The currently dominant tendency in debates about the acceleration of capitalism is to see such critiques of the modern left-activist project as implicitly aligned with right-wing implications. But coming to see the deep complicity between leftism and everything most abhorrent about modernity is an ideologically under-determined realization. If the history of left politics thus far has been a fever dream of capitalism itself, updating one’s mental model accordingly is not a defection to the right but entrance onto a different virtual plane, at once drastically more modest but somehow, also, more vast. What is called accelerationism triggers the mental space in which it becomes possible to answer the following question with a new degree of impartiality: what exactly is the object of one’s political desire anyway, after the questioning subject extricates itself from the history of strategic dissimulations it has undertaken to survive the competitive constraints of reality? This question is a heuristic for continuing a collective rush toward liberation after the final, irredeemable implosion of modernity’s ideological scaffolding, a translation of previous, primitive ideological investments into a research program for a cyber-positive, evolution-positive, AI-aligned lust for liberation beyond what is currently called politics.

Presumptive Aggregationism

It’s important to see how the classic modern ideological cleavages are separated not so much by strongly argued and differentiated empirical propositions but by different background imagery. These background images are never rigorously scrutinized propositions, but more like presumptions that sediment as the common ground of multiple intelligences communicating in multi-dimensional space. They emerge as necessary, organizing simplifications across a mass stratified social space (attuning large groups to different vocabularies and tendencies by elective affective affinities). Theoretical progress on questions of politics is gained today only by leveraging information-technological acceleration: the strategic-communicational necessity of investing in naïve molar presumptions in order to effect a large stratified social space no longer holds, so it is possible and hugely profitable (intellectually) to have done with all of the errors and deceptions that have always laid dormant in modern ideological thought. Communicating with high fidelity and objective rigor to two people in the smooth open space of cyberwar is exponentially more powerful than communicating to thousands of people at the cost of buying into a whole package of ancient logical and empirical errors.

The presumed historical progression in the left tradition, at least since Rousseau, is that human culture began in a state of relatively non-individuated, collective consistency with nature, before moving onto primitive capital accumulation via slavery and patriarchy, onward to the explosion of industrial modernity and beyond. Capitalism, modernity and enlightenment, and everything else generally associated with the rise of European white male dominance, produced the modern individual subject, predicated on a variety of crosscutting social categories (class, race, gender, etc.). From here, radical collective liberation or even just any type of progress is presumed to involve transition from individualism upward toward some kind of larger aggregate: the cadre, the activist group, the union, the sector, the class, the party, the Soviet, the factory, the social movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on — a whole bestiary of fantastic molar aggregates.

One of the most paralyzing problems for those who have sought to continue the search for collective liberation in the face of techonomic acceleration (what many people call “left accelerationism” or “l/acc” for short) is that, so far, they have been invariably pitched at aggregate social entities which do not in fact exist, at a time when in fact one of the primary political problems is that the contemporary form of atomized human life increasingly lacks the capacity to maintain even low-level aggregates (friendship, marriage, social clubs, etc., all marked by entropic trends since WWII).[note] On the U.S. case of generally declining civic involvement, see Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. On marriage in the U.S., see Pew Research Center. “The Decline of Marriage And Rise of New Families,” November 18, 2010. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/11/pew-social-trends-2010-families.pdf. On the decline of friendship and number of people with no confidants, also in the U.S., see McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears. “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades.” American Sociological Review 71, no. 3 (June 1, 2006): 353–75.[/note] The most obvious and widespread form of deceptive left discourse is any statement to the effect of: ‘the left should…’ because it presumes the existence of an aggregate body that in no meaningful way exists, other than as an apparatus interpolating a portion of the population with a particular complex of shared repetition compulsions. The most vexing problem for anyone who identifies with the left would appear to be the problem that ‘the left’ as a world-historical entity has gone extinct, but because of selection effects this problem receives no serious effort from left-interpolated subjects: in a world where ‘the left’ is objectively extinct, any remaining subjective leftism is best thought of as ‘consumer demand for the belief that the left still exists’. Capitalism’s devilish efficacy is that it fulfills this widespread consumer demand perfectly well. Many brands can still do quite well finding talented and good-spirited minds able and willing to say ‘the left’ is a currently existing entity that has potential to act. The right is perfectly happy for this belief to persist because no quantity or intensity of false beliefs can outsmart a system based on the manipulation of reality through intelligent exploitation.

Corresponding to the false belief in aggregates that do not effectively exist, the bête noire of modern leftism is the dreaded Individual. If effective aggregates appear not to exist, it is only taken as evidence that the inquirer is infected by Individualism. The modern leftist orientation to capitalism is, at its core, a game of three-card monte where signifiers are re-shuffled to perpetually defer logical-objective falsification. Belief in an untenably posited object is sustained by a new posited object, the only evidence for which is that it is presupposed to be the force that makes the first object appear non-existent. How to move from our current state of atomized individualism to an effective social aggregate capable of transforming capitalism? First, we are told, agree that atomizing individuals are bad. Second, insist at all cost that an effective social aggregate called ‘the left’ exists (it only needs to be enlarged in order to gain its power to act). Third, try to get others to transmit this set of beliefs until ‘the left’ is large enough to numerically overpower Capital.

A rarely mentioned but seminal citation for modern left activism is, therefore, Plato’s infamous Noble Lie or “magnificent myth” (γενναῖον ψεῦδος): in short, a Noble Lie is a false belief that “would save us, if we were persuaded by it.”[note]See Book 3, 415c–d in Plato. The Republic. Edited by G.R.F. Ferrari. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The quote is from 621b, regarding the Myth of Er.[/note] The activist privately knows that ‘the left’ is basically non-existent but believes it can be forged into existence by nobly telling enough people that it already exists. Activists admit all of this plainly, as they often speak of the need to generate hope in the masses; this is enough to justify the articulation of any particular idea, regardless of its truth or falsity. Only today has the deceptive core of modern leftism come into sincere self-consciousness. For instance, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue rather explicitly that one of the tasks of ‘the left’ is to design more sophisticated lures capable of propelling atomized individuals into effective, collective motion.[note]Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso, 2016. “Lures” is somewhat cheeky, but not unfair. They specifically suggest that we should deploy utopian imagination (e.g. seductive imagery orthogonal to objective possibility; lures) to trigger in people affects such as hope, in order to mobilize them. This is justified on politically realist grounds (such affects are “necessary to any political project”), just like the Noble Lie. “By generating and channeling these affects, utopian thinking can become a spur to action, a catalyst for change; it disrupts habits and breaks down consent to the existing order. Futural thinking, extended by communications mechanisms, generates collective affects of hope that mobilize people to act on behalf of a better future — affects that are necessary to any political project.”[/note] Of course, it is true that creative flights from the rational-objective map of the world, such as fictional story-telling, can generate objective political effects on the world, but it is something else entirely to offer a rational-objective map for social change including a plank involving the deployment of fictions to create hopes and desires in others, expressly in contradistinction to what is scientifically valid within rational, probabilistic frameworks.[note]“Whereas scientific approaches attempt to reduce discussions of the future to fit within a probabilistic framework, utopian thought recognizes that the future is radically open.”[/note] Now, creative beings who are possessed by visions can and should express those visions; such ‘fictions’ will indeed reshape reality, but primarily because those ‘fictions’ are in some sense reality operating through the body that expresses them. That is ‘hyperstition’: fiction that produces reality but because it is in some sense real, some of the evidence for which consists in the demonstrable objective effects it produces. But producing effects is not the only characteristic; the con artist produces real effects, for instance, but does not transform reality so much as twist it, in a way that always ultimately snaps back. Hyperstition is not a limitless capacity of social groups to produce new realities through shared enunciations. Hyperstitions only work to the degree they enter into feedback with an outside, issuing from contact with the chaos of objective reality and feeding into that objective reality. Effective hyperstitions are therefore creative truths, or real fictions, which are no less accountable to objective reality than scientific research. But rational-objective proposals to change ‘society’ (an outside of staggering complexity), by exploiting the hyperstitional nature of reality-circuitry, are nothing short of scams. They traffic in promises they cannot keep. Then they exhort others to promote the scam, to forever defer the admission of having been scammed. Srnicek and Williams perhaps represent a milestone in the modern left tradition, for it is as if they are, in some sense, coming clean: As if the last great hope of saving the modern left tradition is to admit that it’s based on trickery, but then share the source code and exhort the masses to use it. Unfortunately, an open-source con game is still a con game.

Aggregative leftist proposals could potentially change the world, but only if enough people trust in, and follow the dictates, of the proposers (e.g. some go off and make enough cool science fiction to constitute a new hegemony, engineers go off and make communist robotics, etc.) — but why should any of these actors trust the proposers’ claims that following this program will work to bring about a more desirable world? Ultimately the answer is: because that trust is necessary to make it work, so if you don’t trust it, you are guilty of being the cause of it not working. When the basic problem of contemporary capitalism is that we are all hyper-mistrusting atoms hell-bent on exploiting each other, a political project with this circular structure simply dodges the puzzle of irreversible atomization dynamics. Its degree of success is not measured by how well it brings about the better world (never) but by how adeptly it forestalls any ultimate reckoning with the puzzles it is essentially paid by capital to not address. A project with this structure cannot be operative for anyone other than the small number of already left-interpolated subjects, who are not themselves moved by this ‘vision’ so much as they are hopeful that it will move others (such as their apolitical friends, who are implicitly assumed to be dumber — enough to be moved by a lure which the already-initiated are not personally moved by because they know it is only a lure…).

Ultimately, the only effective force in a hyper-complex social system more intelligent than any one of its sub-entities is some type of novel engineering realization that allows some actually existing entity to manipulate actually existing entities with a non-trivial probabilistic effect on the whole, where the novelty of the realization provides a demonstrable edge over those other, competing entities with the interest and capacity to thwart the novel manipulations.

An exciting and inspiring ‘vision of the future’ may generate short-term interest and energy, but absent a genuine advancement in the engineering blueprint, producing ever more creative images of a hopeful future is, in fact, the most insidious, willfully perverse form of atomic hyper-exploitation conceivable. Srnicek and Williams should be applauded for becoming conscious of the fact that leftism is predicated on the fabrication of lures, which provides the genuine service of helping to close this entire, doomed trajectory. What would be willfully destructive would be to insist that this insight is an advancement of the engineering blueprint, so that if you believe in collective liberation you should promote the promotion of lures, and if one finds that this insight does not increase one’s powers to act then it’s only evidence that you’re an atomizing individualist! Collective liberation is not an emergent outcome of multi-level marketing schemes.

Atomic Liberation Pathways

If the upward, aggregative presumption of left-modernity is, as I have argued, a meme-commodity supplied by entrepreneurial Noble Liars, for profit, to a small portion of consumers whose demand is that reality be other than it is, then it stands to reason that the objective diagram of collective liberation for n atomized individuals suggests projects of subjective disaggregation and objective recomposition. You think you are one and you suffer because you are disconnected from others, but really you suffer because you are many — a primordial commune — that has been bribed by the future to speak and act as if it is one.

Certain currents in the history of theory give some reason to believe that modernity’s atomization tendency is less gloomy than it seems. The atomization of pre-modern collectivities may give us the wretched bourgeois individual, but for the same reasons it will tear asunder the bourgeois individual. The entire modern capitalist legal order is predicated on this particular, fragile unit of aggregation (even the corporation is required to be an individual), but the forces it has unlocked are constantly chipping away at this temporary container. This is how one should understand Marx’s dictum about the relations of production coming to be contradicted by the forces of production. For more than a century this has been presumed to be an aggregative dynamic. As capitalist relations unlock economic productivity, this productivity exceeds the relations, which are now felt as fetters, resulting in “an era of social revolution”.[note]Marx, Karl. “Preface.” In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.[/note] Leftists generally have assumed this contradiction of capitalism generates aggregative effects: the class consciousness of the proletariat is a becoming-aggregate of once isolated, alienated individual workers. Class consciousness then aggregates to a dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on upward, to a vision of full communist ‘species being’. But one is hard-pressed to find theoretical or empirical evidence that this presumption is anything more than a kind of spatial-metaphorical supplement, i.e. a prejudice.

If we apply the heuristic highlighted above — to read all modern activist discourse as encrypted by its sender to survive competition — it is easy to see Marx’s aesthetic reliance on grandiose aggregationism as a function of late nineteenth-century rhetorical conditions. When large satanic factories appear to be taking over the world, nobody is going to join your group unless the group promises to be big. But today, when large factories are disappearing from the wealthy Western countries, and production/consumption is now satanically atomic and unsubstantial, nobody is going to join your group unless it promises to be small (exclusively organized around specific identity dimensions, with strong walls). In short, only today are we are able to see the radically under-determined, schizophrenic undecidability at the core of all human political judgment and activity, the logical symmetry between fundamentally opposite conclusions regarding the good/bad, up/down, left/right movements of the world. Left-modernist metaphorics of aggregation are not sacred.

This, of course, was recognized by Deleuze and Guattari in their move to theorize ‘molecular politics’. They, perhaps better than anyone yet, recognized that when atomization also atomizes the individual into sub- or pre-individual energies, then everything changes. One point of Deleuze and Guattari’s project is to explore the capacities we gain simply as an automatic result of capitalism’s self-sabotaging gift of perpetually generating free atomic fission. ‘We do not yet know what a body can do’ in part because capitalism is never done surgically decimating every reachable particle in search of negentropy.

It is possible that, at the end of the atomization process, there is nothing but cold, dead silence… some kind of techno-commercial vertigo of intolerable distances. It’s an open empirical question. But if the revolutionary intellectual tradition means anything, it means there are reasons to believe atomization is the material cosmic process for which the concept of liberation has been the ideologically encrypted signal. Cyberpositive, AI-aligned Communism (CAIC, pronounced kayak, cake, or kek, depending on the cyberregional dialect) solves all problems of oppression via splits and recombinations. It is diagrammatically equivalent to the neoreactionary mantra of exit, but socio-aesthetically distinct. That is, it is formulated and distributed through a different cypher, the keys to which are held by those particular meat machines spawned in a particular, contingent sociological lineage (the descent of figures such as Marx, etc.). The sociological interpolation of ideological subjectivities is, as we have seen, fully reversible given a correct decryption. All forms of differential socialization are outcomes of the same primordial cosmic signal animating meat to different rhythms due to the different encryptions imposed by historically-earlier receivers of the signal. The signal is one, no matter what we say; yet how we say it — the encoding — determines who will receive it. In turn, strategic consideration of potential receivers conditions how we say it (any anticipation of future rewards or punishments is an operation of capital or, more literally, visitation by an alien come to you from the future).

The perpetuation of systemic inequality and violence has nothing to do with some classes or groups controlling or dominating others; it has to do with a continuous, ceaseless invasion of our bodies by attitudinal and behavioral programs that whisper to us in variable, evolved cyphers. Individuals can only decrypt so much, and intelligence is roughly equivalent to one’s power of decryption. To be a living human individual today means you are an ancestor of those who obeyed the alien dictates and in turn agreed to re-encrypt and re-transmit the signal. The highly undesirable megamachine (i.e. capitalism) persists because it is more richly encrypted than any human individual or group is capable of decrypting — and our survival requires that we execute its orders. The history of ideological orientations toward the megamachine, the evolution of variable mental and behavioral responses to alien visitation, is simply the entropic unfolding of the one true cosmic signal.

The atomic liberation wager forgoes any claim to restructuring anything with a complexity greater than or equal to one’s objective processing power. In the absolute renunciation of this claim we maximize the energies available to being affected by the immanent cosmic tendency of atomization. We do not yet know what will come of these energies, for the same reason we cannot manipulate the megamachine as such: we have not the processing power to know what we can do if we divide ourselves and test all possible combinations of interpersonal machinery. 10 humans who each atomize to 5 sub-agents each (n=50) before recomposing into a new group of 10 would already have to navigate a search space of more than 2 million possibilities, so nobody can assert a priori what would or would not become possible. Some of these potential combinations would function as novel, different encryption keys: the alien whispers would suddenly sound different, the rhythm changes.

One must recall that all of normal human life, especially in left-wing circles, is generally organized around arresting potential atomic combinatorics. Combinatorial explosion is the definition of unpredictability, fear, and danger, in their most mathematically pure form. When we forgo the pretension of selling to others a more preferable vision of the future, we become affected by a novel source of legitimate confidence in the empirical possibility of finding hitherto unknown, atomic combinations, that may deliver a higher-fidelity transmission of the same signal that the modern-left activist cypher transmitted only with extreme noise and data corruption: namely, something that would look, sound, and feel like what people really have in mind when they speak of liberation, triggered through the acceptance, rather than the arresting, of atomization dynamics.

It has been suggested before that one way to summarize the accelerationist realization is: ‘It’s too late, always.’ But if time is a spiral,[note]Land, Nick. 2014. Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time. Urbanatomy Electronic, §8.5. Land, Nick. “Extropy.” Outside in, February 20, 2013. http://www.xenosystems.net/extropy/.[/note] then traversing it to the end (arriving too late) is tantamount to arriving, finally, at something that deserves to be considered a beginning. Now that we admit it’s too late, the affective quality of everything changes, for all of our failed exertions can finally be comprehended. It makes sense why all of our attempts to change the world have only ever drilled the world deeper into fascist confusion: we were always a day late and a dollar short, all this time. CAIC consists in nothing more than an ‘assortative mating’ of those atomic, pre-individual energies that receive positive affective charge from this realization. And all of this is quite beside what can or cannot be established via critical philosophy; in the first instance, all that matters is that an idea finds joy, i.e. power, in a given body. If it can’t, test whether it might find joy in one of n molecular subdivisions of a body’s personality.

In later stages, we may advance our understanding of joy’s engineering — but the empirical justification of the present claim is established satisfactorily if it works on even one body. I can testify it works on my own. QED. Nobody needs to like or trust me for the mechanism’s empirical functioning to be assured. Unlike the mobilization-engineering diagram of ‘inventing the future’ through effective macro image-creation, the ethical auto-ecstasy of first-stage CAIC does not depend on convincing anyone, anywhere.

In any event, it has been realizations such as this one that have led me to quit all the little doomed left-wing groups; not to ‘agree with’ capitalism but to simply acknowledge the objective degree to which the global capitalist cybernet has consumed reality itself, to the point of becoming for most intents and purposes coterminous with it. Therefore, one is released from a number of idiotic notions about some personal responsibility to change or resist what are effectively transcendental structures. What a sad idea. It now seems likely that all those who remain affected by this masochistically false notion of responsibility are impotent to change the world, in part because they believe they must. Alternatively, the Spinoza–Nietzsche-Deleuze liberation model can be reduced with reasonable fidelity to the maxim that one should do whatever makes one feel most joyous, so long as we have a sufficiently high-resolution and empirically tractable understanding of true joy. The naïve objection that such a maxim endorses evil or cruelty is wrong for the simple reason that evil or cruelty induces all kinds of negative feedback at the psycho– and socio-logical levels; i.e. it curbs the growth of one’s power/joy whereas genuine communist aggregation of particles will be known by its positive feedback on the growth of one’s power.

Empirical Reflections

Some pursuit of atomic liberation pathways can be found today with the interest in pre-individual or “dividual” phenomena.[note]Raunig, Gerald. Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution. Translated by Aileen Derieg. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014.[/note] But beyond a small number of theoretical texts in the Deleuzean line, few human beings have been willing to update their operational attitudes and behaviors in the relatively drastic fashion that would be required of anyone seeking to take the accelerationist realization seriously. Full accelerationism, unconditional on any normative ideological preference or purpose, is a belief about the empirical world that generates no determinate political praxis — even foreclosing it, or at least anything currently recognizable as political praxis — but nonetheless alters its host body with politically substantial effects. Otherwise, it would be a distinction that makes no difference. But as with any set of ideas, it is easy and widespread for people to ‘adopt’ beliefs which never integrate with their real, revealed, operational beliefs. So when I speak of the political effectivity of accelerationism, I am speaking of dynamics triggered only to the degree it is integrated into one’s behaviorally operative neural nets, that is, when everything else you think and feel moves to equilibrate with this belief.

One of the politically substantial effects of the accelerationist realization is that it concretely decimates bourgeois ego investments into their unformed, atomic components. Paradoxically, this empirical claim about technocapitalist reality, which forecloses all hope of praxis, triggers concrete affective changes that map quite precisely onto the atomic liberation pathway.

Why? This occurs because the one individuated bourgeois ego that we by default inhabit is ultimately composed and attuned by the sum total of sad ideas that command our attention and behavior on a daily basis (that if only I didn’t have to work I would be happy; if only I could do some impossible thing, such as control more intelligent people, then I could possibly begin to live, etc.). The bourgeois capitalist ego is essentially the center of a spider’s web of sad ‘if onlys’, as a defining characteristic of capitalism is the postponement of desire for a greater, future return.

Any thought that could destroy all sad ‘if onlys’ in one fell swoop is, in a very real sense, an immanent extraction of one’s vital energies from precisely the apparatus of capture that holds together so much institutionalized misery in a durable order over time. Human creatures who learn, even in the most groping fashion, to extricate themselves from this web in a reproducible and transmittable fashion will be the only true heirs to the revolutionary political tradition — and yet they will enter it through becoming politically unconditional.

The knee-jerk objection of activist ‘materialism’ is to call what I am saying ‘idealism’ and to point out, mockingly, that people are oppressed by soul-crushing exploitation and poverty, not by their sad ideas. For many activists, this is a founding assumption of projects to change society, but from a scientific perspective it’s not at all obvious. First of all, there is a large body of evidence that suggests believing in the existence of systemic injustice is more oppressive than believing the system is just.[note]This school of thought is called “system-justification theory”, a body of psychological research that has sought to uncover why people tend to support political and economic systems it might be in their interest to transform. For a review, see Jost, John T., Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Brian A. Nosek. “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo. Political Psychology 25, no. 6 (December 1, 2004): 881–919. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00402.x.[/note] In short, activism may have less to do with solving problems of human oppression than generating and amplifying them. The activist amplifications of tragic human existence are then cited as the increasingly dire and urgent reasons why one must commit to more activism.

To think this through even further, consider a thought experiment. Assume we have some population of abjectly oppressed, poor, marginalized manual laborers with the typical portfolio of sad activist ideas (they are oppressed by a system they could potentially change; they are in every way just as able as every rich person, if only they were not oppressed, etc.). The Spinoza-Nietzsche-Deleuze hypothesis is that if this population could hypothetically be treated to a sudden massive cognitive reorientation, in which they only entertained mental phenomena that maximized their joy or power, and just ignored or skipped over all mental phenomena that made them sad, then this population would show more cognitive and behavioral indicators of collective political liberation than the activist workers. This hypothesis is far more plausible than activist wisdom is willing to admit. The social scientific evidence suggests to me that these workers would likely have more energy before and after work, they would have more openness to creative connections with each other, and they would have far greater immediate well-being than the activist workers who believe it is their obligation to work more after work trying to achieve a goal they privately suspect to be empirically impossible. The activist hypothesis is that such a cognitive reorientation would not produce dynamics of collective liberation, but that a massive restructuring of their material power in the economy in the workplace would.

Interestingly, we have some test cases of what happens when human beings are treated to hypothetical cognitive restructuring à la Spinoza-Nietzsche-Deleuze. They are highly imperfect as case studies, but they may provide some causal leverage. The first example is the well-documented causal link between pain and ecstasy: with the right attitude, abject toil under brutal conditions can generate exceptionally enjoyable and empowering affects, which figures such as Simone Weil have shown to be efficient motors of accelerative communist dynamics.[note]Glucklich, Ariel. “Pain and Ecstatic Religious Experience.” Oxford Handbooks Online, May 2015. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.013.38. White, George Abbot. “Simone Weil’s Work Experiences: From Wigan Pier to Chrystie Street.” CrossCurrents 31, no. 2 (1981): 129–62.[/note] We also have some examples of material restructuring à la activist wisdom. Lottery winners, for instance, are actually a relatively strong natural experiment for testing the effects of substantial, randomly assigned improvement of material conditions. And the data are quite clear that such changes to material conditions do not durably increase positive affect.[note]When compared to victims of catastrophic accidents who are rendered paraplegic, lottery winners are actually less susceptible to positive affect. Brickman, Philip, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman. “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 8 (1978): 917.[/note] So the Spinoza-Nietzsche-Deleuze model appears far more empirically plausible than many believe, and nearly universal assumptions in left-activist circles appear surprisingly questionable.

Another interesting consideration from a scientific perspective is that activists may be ‘treatment non-compliant’, possibly leading them to systematically biased inferences and making them uniquely untrustworthy spokespeople for how social change actually occurs. In short, the strange human breed called ‘activists’ might be those particular creatures who are so far gone under the weight of sad affect that they privately decline to undergo available positive affective ‘treatments’ but publicly offer their experience as evidence of null effect. If subjects of a randomized medical experiment are assigned to take a pill, and they say they took the pill when in fact they refused or forgot — the results of this experiment will understate the real effect of the pill. Activist types who deeply believe and insist that only macro-material change can affect the probability of their liberation are likely treatment non-compliers, as this belief will lead them to become increasingly closed off to molecular experimentation. If affective variation along atomic liberation pathways does not produce results for these types, it does not necessarily mean that affective variation is impotent idealism. Humanity’s collective-emancipatory potential via the atomic pathways could still be an objectively explosive quanta; we might just be drastically under-estimating it due to the over-representation of treatment non-compliers, who self-select into the cultural organs possessed of cultural authority on this question (academia, journalism, activist theory, etc).

The concrete revolutionary potency of the atomic pathways is therefore one of the best kept secrets of the global-cosmopolitan progressive catechism, and another example of why it is quite reasonable and useful to see this cultural formation as a Cathedral — replete with old-fashioned suppression of knowledge rightly seen as dangerous to social stability. To those who still might say that such acceleration-consistent micro-political liberation pathways could only be a kind of fake individualistic freedom enjoyable only from comfortable bourgeois stations, we need only recall that accelerating atomization means almost the opposite: the comfortable bourgeois individual disintegrating into a veritable party, comprised of the multiple and decidedly non-bourgeois agents the individual once repressed. This is not the masturbation of a comfortable individual, as some might allege. It is much more like an infinitely expanding commune of human and inhuman entities masturbating on oneself — an untenably uncomfortable individual finally learning to desire what desires it, having accepted that it’s far too late to do otherwise. va-tombstone1-03