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readthis.wtf /writing/pomophobia/ Pomophobia (with Mark Fisher) - 1996 Watch yourself! There is always a camera hidden somewhere. 1996; London: THIS IS ART As cutup Super-8 reels of Stalin’s funeral flicker on the white walls, Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ plays on the sound system, overdubbed by blasts of spoken-word Adorno text. In another part of the room, slides of old people on holiday flick by. Cultural detritus, discovered in junk shops and church fetes, forming a jaded carnival of negative authenticity. A joyless juxtafest where ‘found objects’ recline passively, waiting for your listless stare to turn their way. The scene could have almost been set up to illustrate Baudrillard’s weary polemic. ‘Any object, any individual, any situation today could be a virtual ready-made…’ (VI 99) The ready-made, Baudrillard writes, ‘extracted from its context, from its idea, from its function, becomes more real than real (hyperrreal) and more art than art (it enters into the transaesthetics of banality, of insignificance, of nullity, where today the pure and indifferent form of art is to be seen).’ (VI 99) Your body feels unbearably heavy. Your head turns lethargically to each exhibit in turn, and then begins again. You feel the same ennui you would reading and re-reading old magazines in a waiting room, then remember, horrified, there’s nothing to wait for: this is the event. A dreadful self-consciousness pervades the whole scene. People carefully and consciously perform the actions that they would have made were they dancing, were they enjoying themselves, carefully simulating, and being seen to be simulating, all the gestures of carefree pleasure. As if sim-life lip-syncing to kitsch classics, moving with the confident self-consciousness of photographic models. Jacques your body… ‘We have swallowed our microphones and headsets … We have interiorized our own prosthetic image and become the professional showmen of our own lives.’(VI 96) ‘No more actions save those that result from an interaction— 1/6

complete, if possible, with television and built-in feedback.’(TE 46) Sim-panopticon, and you’re always on stage. Circuiting everything through the automonitor, showing a series of reruns and sim-programs in your place while you theorise yourself into existence. As if … You’re wise enough to know it’s impossible to do anything, following commands from the automonitor: DISCLAIM YOUR BODY IMMEDIATELY. Abandon your desiring machines all ye who enter here. Everything has already been screened, circuited through the auto-monitor, this psychic appendage capable of unlimited metabolisation. Auto-monitoring PoMo is a machine, but IT ARRIVES LIKE LIGHTNING, sweeping away any evidence of its origins as instantaneously as it establishes its miraculous reign as prime cause of everything. Immanent to its workings is a suppression of intensity behind the screens of representation, epistemology and signification. It’s either meaningful or meaningless; in any case, it’s saturated with significance. Before anything gets through security it has to check in with the Jacques officers. You have to ask what it means to do something rather than just doing it. The PoMo machinery will convert any input into a signifying formula. Whenever anything is working, it will ask: What does it mean? What is it? There’s nothing outside the text because nothing gets in unless it’s already been textualised, complete with brackets and quotation marks, converted into canon fodder. ‘There is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense’, Nietzsche wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture’. His scattered accounts of this infinite and infinitely frightful ‘boundless ocean’ forewarn of the throbbing inescapable ache of irony, knowing self-mockery, the interminable stepping in and out of cultural idiom which we might recognise as popular postmodern culture. He concludes: ‘The oversaturation of an age with history seems to me to be hostile and dangerous to life…It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism.’ But surely the only danger here is that of a comprehensive neutralization, the second-hand miming of irreverent destruction, a wilful squandering of energy. Playing in the ruins, then is our game—a desultory and arbitrary sorting though of the mass of valueless junk left at our disposal. Some take a certain glee in this abject practice, a fervour for revival, citation, surreal juxtaposition and all the other characteristic tropes of popular postmodernism. However this is what Nietzsche describes as ‘Pessimism in decline…as growing effeteness, as a sort of cosmopolitan fingering, as “tout comprendre” and historicism.’ The cardinal features of PoMo—the arbitrary aesthetics, the simulated gestures, the boredom, the poignancy of the lost object—combine to produce a transcendental miserabilism: a deep sense not only that there is nothing to be done, but that nothing could ever have been done. Zarathustra’s Ultimate Man, ‘inexterminable as the flea’ says ‘irony’ and blinks; ‘They are clever and know everything that has ever happened : so there is no end to their mockery’ (Zarathustra, Prologue, 5). 1991: NO FUTURE (US reprise) Punk arrives in America: Nirvana on MTV. ‘“Smells Like Teen Spirit” begins as if on Jupiter, where body weight has hideously increased, the music pressed down by a fatigue, lassitude, why-bother: “Never mind”, as Cobain says to kill a line.’ (ALD 29) 2/6

What Cobain’s weighed down by above all is the dead heaviness of the past, the overwhelming sense that everything has already been done. When Kurt Cobain first heard the punk records that would excite and inspire him, they were already old news, the fading afterglow of long-extinct stars. He lived, he always knew, in the arid cultural interregnum that Jameson, referring to an ostensibly very different cultural sphere, called ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.’ (PCS 18) NO FUTURE had a gleeful edge when Rotten sang it, a sense, not only of being relieved of an obligation to the future, but of being freed from a responsibility to the past. But from where slacker was, Rotten’s sneer, even Mclaren’s demystifying Svengali strategies, looked as nostalgic as the Silver Jubilee they supposedly opposed. Where the xerox revolution of punk emerged in the wreckage of disciplinary societies, as an escape from the dreary treadmill of school and dead end jobs, Slacker was in a control(led) loop from the start. Its every move anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knows that he’s just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV. Knows that his every move is a cliche, scripted in advance. Knows that even realising it is a cliche. This epistemological spiral may seem like a runaway ride but at escape velocity it simply goes into a cold orbit, processing everything through the automonitor. The result is a dreadful physical paralysis. ‘Words take a long time to emerge from this gravity, from Cobain’s hoarse, seemingly shredded throat. It might be months on the radio or MTV before you begin to catch what’s being said in Nirvana songs—“sell the kids for food”, “I don’t mind if I don’t have a mind”, “I feel stupid and contagious”, “I’m neutered and spayed”, “at the end of the rainbow and your rope”, “I don’t care if it’s old”—but the feeling of humiliation, disintegration, of defeat by some distant malevolence, is what the music says by itself.’ (ALD 29) It’s Baudrillard who is the consummate philosopher of Slacker and its correlative physical state, the lethargic couchpotato impotence, the affectless, doped tension-free of the terminally defeated. ‘One day the image of a person watching a television screen voided by a technicians’ strike will be seen as the the perfect epitome of the anthropological reality of the twentieth century.’ (TE 13) Metaphoresensic analysis screens events before they happen. They arrive prepackaged and prefiled as niche commodities: tragedy, massacre, political condemnation, all-party talks mediamatically pattern recognised, the extirpation of contingency going hand in hand with the proliferation of categories, vocabulary. The significatory categories have to be established before anything is allowed to ‘happen’. When Baudrillard says the Gulf war didn’t happen, it’s because, on the terminal beaches of PoMo, nothing happens any more. ‘Events’ belong to the past; all that’s left are commemorations, anniversaries, revivals, remakes, remodels. Events were precisely that which could have happened differently. The Gulf War, meanwhile, had the scripted inevitability of a TV programme—a carefully designed real-time apocalypse scenario that unfolded as it was broadcast, in an uninterrupted (and uninterruptable) telepresent simultaneity. Which is why the Gulf War played the same symbolic role for Slacker that Vietnam did for the sixties. Generation X was always out of time: arriving after the orgy, it found itself exiled from the progressivist aspirations of the sixties counterculture and thrown into the seamless temporality of MTV—a temporality Jameson, writing just as MTV was just beginning to broadcast, was already describing when he wrote of ‘the disappearance of a sense of 3/6

history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change…’ (PCS 28) But this simultaneous perpetual present is nothing but the endless reiteration of the past: the airless no-time of ‘the classic’, a timeless eternality removed from history because bereft of any sense of contingency. So while the postmodern scene is obsessed with the past, it is only historicist in the way that Nietzsche’s ‘cosmopolitan fingerers’ are. What Jameson has called the nostalgia mode is characterised by an atemporal mix‘n’match aesthetic that has moved beyond the model of linear development on which historical narrative is premised. That constantly recurring feature of the postmodern scene, the ironically revived text, is ‘a complex object in which on some level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deep and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old artifacts through once again’. (PCS 19) A deep cynicism lies hidden behind an apparent generosity: Britpop may just be a reheated version of the past, but it is ‘new to the kids’, giving them ‘a chance to experience what they missed’. The revived artifact emerges as doubly transcendent, offering a transcendence not only of the present (from which it seeks to escape into a supposedly more coherent past), but also of the very past it affects to fetishise (since ironic distance and a little modification here and there allow us to enjoy the past without the embarrassment of being actually immersed in it). Britpop is only one example of the British version of PoMo which, if anything, is both more cynical and more wistful than its American variant. The interlocking milieux of late-night TV, retropop and graduate comedy, protected by a demystificatory barrier that ensures it won’t get fooled again, languishes in the citational abyss of an increasingly friction-free revivalism. We look at the old days with a certain pity, a certain tenderness, and a great condescension: they are what we can never be, unconscious of the great weight of their existence, unembarrassed, whilst we can only simulate, in thrall to the authority of an absent authenticity, slave to a dead god. Enkitschment, or ironical reinvestment, is invariably followed by a sneer at the reconstructed naivete which is, however, cherished despite its apparent embarrassed acquiescence at the hands of PoMo ‘cynicism’. A superficial glee accompanied by a nostalgic sigh—if only we could really go back to those simpler times, watching Bagpuss in our nylon Starsky and Hutch T-shirts. The miserable relativism of PoMo is already invited by the inherent pathos of Kant’s metaphysics, backed up by the barely disguised theocide of rationally enforced regulative principles and transcendental simulations (the as if). As the grund falls away, you have to learn to police yourself. The transcendental as a generalized apparatus of capture, locking intelligence into closed circuits, simultaneously produces and fulfils impoverished expectations. The repressive force of this machine can only be gauged by the absurd amount of energy expended upon its maintenance. PoMo’s transcendental miserabilism, a last cubby hole of humanity amidst the swarmachinic rhizome of technocapital, domicile where once was dominion, purposiveness without purpose, constitutes a multi-story ‘as if’ where only a residual conceit secures homeostasis. Fiercely protected, PoMo is all about cults, clubs and cliques. Nothing gets in without prior inoculation. The shocks to this system come from the darkside, from the unanticipated and unprepared for. What is genuinely new will evade the pre-scripted categories—‘the new Beatles’, ‘the new Punk’—which have already neutralised any possible deviation from the already processed. Technocapital, as generalized decoding machine, is the basis of a numerical or synthetic culture whose ability to break down, display and replicate code into asignifying, machinic elements within virtual systems puts it on a line of 4/6

flight away from all signifying language, unleashing a generalized decoding which irradiates the whole culture. ‘While decoding doubtless means understanding and translating a code, it also means destroying the code as such, assigning it an archaic, folkloric or residual function’ (AO 245) Capitalism displays antithetical tendencies, tenaciously reaffirming redundant cultural forms with one hand while ruthlessly decommissioning them with the other. Bourgeois tragic culture revels in a retro-reactive fascination for these archaisms (kitsch), building them back into the system at the level of ironic simulation (which further strengthens the reflection-reproduction of a self-satisfied human interiority under the great weight of its own poignant degeneration). But regardless of chronological priority, simulation is always secondary to and derivative of synthetics. The arbitrariness of transcendental simstim regulations does not itself necessitate the reification and metaphorensic examination of this lack of a ground (which itself serves as the basis of transcendental miserabilist aesthetics/ philosophy/theory). This is more the product of the already existing bourgeois culture and its decadent tendency to translate its own petty problems into grand gestures. Fed on the endlessly regurgitated brains of dead philosophers, post-structuralism degenerates into the spongiform Hegelianism it always-already was, proudly dwelling on its own desolate but strictly delimited ground while barely concealing its delight that we can’t escape from the narratives of modernity. Theory remains tethered to the ‘post’, given over to interminable rumination on what is superseded but, supposedly, never overcome. All texts are pre-texts —also post-texts—flimsy tracing papers colonially irrigated and preemptively captured by reassuringly dull, appropriately academic, subtitles. Pun colon verb definite article academic designation. “Jacquing off, Offing Jacques: Derrida, Lacan, and the Self-referentiality of the Academic Subject”. Rapid response is rendered impossible, the danger of embarrassing oneself by saying something that has not been rigorously automonitored, ruminated over for a punitively extended period of scholarly detention, is too great. Nietzsche’s critique of the clogged digestive system of the West’s Last Men, itself often perversely interpreted as a metaphor, expresses all too acutely the constipated Eurocontinence of these constricted bodies, themselves minor fascicular elements of a resonant system of transcendental miserabilism disseminated across all levels of culture. The dreary textocratic dribblings of post-theory are merely the transcendental idealist counterpoint to the empirical realism of postmodern culture. Kurt Cobain embodied what theory disembodies, the raging stomach pains which plagued him finding their disintensified correlate in the the chin-rubbing, brow-furrowing protocols of urbane academic anxiety. Smells like Hegelian Spirit. By contrast, synthetic culture disorganises the docilising regimes of disciplinary body politics. Hip hop and jungle work on the body, not in the overlit luminotopological epistemoscapes of necrospective mummification, but in the dark zones where you don’t have a chance to think about what things would mean before they happen. Effects arrive before objects, scrambling the operating system of the automonitoring signifying apparatus. Samploid music and video games emerges as the leading probe-heads of synthetic culture precisely because of their overt machinism, their asignifying functionality, their indifference to epistemological conundra brewed up in the depths of the strata. There’s nothing to believe in, only a cyberpositive circuit to plug your body into. The asignifying codes of synthetic culture are not at all to be identified with the great inarticulable deferred transcendental object blearily hallucinated by senescent Bavarian Catholicism and lingua-Francophony neo5/6

communitarian dessicated Judaism in their post-theoretical guises. Materially functional numerical systems, these codes represent nothing, but are real parts of abstract machines, hooking up desiring machines by way of a continually complexifying axiomatic. What is dissolved in synthetic culture is not commodification per se, but commodity fetishism as it regulates the bourgeois object system, in which everything is assigned a proper place. Synthetic culture sheds no Benjaminite tears for the lost aura of objects in the age of mechanical reproduction, celebrating instead the way in which the subject-object dichotomy and its attendant pathos are reconfigured as machinic circuits in the age of cybernetic replication. ‘The transaesthetics of banality’ plays upon the poignant, if bathetic, aura of found objects, but for abstract culture everything that’s ready made, or mass-marketed, is there to be dismantled and relocated into the unfamiliar architectures of the synthetic composition, the ‘uncanny adjacencies’ of the hip hop or jungle track, where they have a machinic, rather than merely a citational, role to play: decomposable elements on a plane of consistency, not cut up fragments. To the jaded eyes of the PoMophile, sampling can appear to be part of its own aesthetic of incongruent bricolage, yet another example of the crippling self-consciousness bedevilling a culture so exhausted it is fit only to sort through its own entrails. But, far from being imprisoned in the past, synthetic culture unlocks the machinic surplus value in the already actualized, stretching and warping time into nonorganically reprogrammed somatic circuits of inhuman speeds and slownesses. A breath of fresh air, a little relation to the outside, that’s all schizoanalysis asks. It’s a matter of synaptic connectivity, crashing the Kantian mainframe, burning the cranial arboretum, switching on desiring machines. References ALD – Greil Marcus, ‘Art of the Living Dead’, <em>Wire</em> 109 (March 1993) AO – Deleuze/Guattari, <em>Anti-Oedipus</em> PCS – Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ TE – Baudrillard, <em>The Transparency of Evil</em> VI – Baudrillard, ‘The Virtual Illusion: Or the Automatic Writing of the World’ 6/6

readthis.wtf /writing/capitalism-and-schizophrenia-wildstyle-in-full-effect/ Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Wildstyle in Full Effect - 1997 Guerrilla dance, guerrilla musicality, coming from anywhere, taking what is needed. (Two Fingers and Kirk 1995: 191) The increasing ubiquity of sound-recording technologies (essentially diagramming or stratigraphical systems) has, in transforming sound into stored material, deritualized and demystified the experience of music. Increasingly appreciated as much for abstract sonic qualities as for ostensible musical ‘content’, able to employ a vast range of sonic resources, ‘performed’ unceremoniously every day and everywhere, music is drawing nearer to an immanence with general ambient sound. At the same time, we are growing accustomed to the experience of absolutely synthetic sound, sound only made possible by the recording technologies themselves. Analysis of the production of machinic surplus value in such processes and the exact fate of such excess machinic production provides a key cross-section of the abstract machine of capitalist production and its future. On this route through the phylum of the sonic assemblage, abstract matter becomes not only a comprehensible and applicable term but an uncompromisingly tactile phenomenon. Beginning with Capitalism and Schizophrenia’s insistence that the diagram is never simply a tracing, or a representation, the key process of capitalist machinic abstraction and its enslavement to the docilizing powers of consumer capitalism can be approached through the sonic wemblage: the interaction between the human body and the fundamental molecular disturbance which constitutes sound, and the machines which interpose and mediate within it. Hearing already presupposes a complex of syntheses, biological and mnemotechnical apparatuses of capture. The function of memory in the feedback loops of the simplest humanoid-sonic assemblage introduces the possibility of continually sophisticating circuits of reception and transmission, the exploitation of coded sound. Rhythmic disturbances become interpreted as traits of external phenomena in recognition patterns where meaning can already be analysed into signaletic frequency response: All that can be inferred from a signal may appropriately be called the ‘meaning’ of this signal. Depending on the complexity of an organism’s nervous system, the meaning of a signal can vary from a simple initiation of a feeding response, that is, the signal means ‘food’, to a realization of the most complicated relationships in an environmental 1/16

situation. (Foerster and Beauchamp 1969: 7) This may primarily be made possible by the production of a reliable method of recording, for a stable storage system is necessary for such a process to take place. That there are biological, even inert, recording technologies is established by Capitalism and Schizophrenia‘s ‘Geology of Morals’. Systems of Stratification, deducting similar elements from a material flow and arranging them in resonantly ordered compounds, produce stabilized, resistant matter. Therefore corporeal reality as such is constituted as a gigantic memory, densely embedded synthetic compounds differing in degrees of plasticity and modes of composition. Although contemporary recording processes allow us consciously to treat sound as a synthetic assemblage, there have been few attempts to discuss music in terms of its machinic processing. Music would perhaps like to remain the stratified and secretive reserve of soulful artists. Pragmatically, however, the field of sonic production has provided an unparalleled fertility for strata-analytical procedures to emerge and develop. Given the preponderance of interpretative ‘readings’ of all manner of subjects, it is refreshing instead to be able to listen to strata-analysis in action. Writing more often than not provides a system of recording whose ‘object of study’, exploiting it parasitically, nonetheless surpasses it in terms of machinic connectivity (this piece being no exception). The written word proves redundant, disintensified and insufficiently plastic. An effective strata-analysis requires a system of recording which fulfils the required criteria immanently without pretending to a relationship of absolute objectivity, the theatre of representation, thus becoming the writing of the State. A writing is required which operates on vectors directly consistent with other matter. By listening to the strata-analysis achieved in the sonic assemblage, steps can be taken towards such a writing-machine. *** The musical division of sound into pitch and duration (the stave) deducts audible vibrations, and folds the audible continuum at a threshold point (physically about nineteen cycles per second, although the threshold is rarely explored), to form two exclusive time-series which articulate sounds as complicit relations of content and form. Pitch assigns a signifying value (note) to cyclical transformations of molecular compression and rarefaction, and duration gives the metric length of the tone, which positions it in relation to other tones, or ’empty’ spaces. Even phonography freezes intensive differences into extensive surface inscription, disjoining intensity and duration. The recording made by a phonographic apparatus depicts sound as a waveform etched onto a moving surface, with time and amplitude (amount of molecular displacement) plotted perpendicularly. For any given sound, pitch rises as duration is shortened, and duration is lengthened as pitch is lowered (think of changing the speed of a recordplayer). Sounds become packaged objects for the clockspace of a mechanical duration, two measures in reciprocal presupposition, biunivocal time-series: one naming (pitch, amplitude), the other counting (time signature, recording speed). Compressive/extensive (content/ expression). Double pincers locking into compensatory homoeostasis. Vibrations are perceived through rapidly oscillating differences in pressure, the measure of amplitude, and consequently the sensation of acoustic intensity, being relative to a molecular equilibrium. The vibratory continuum plugs into the delta and theta waves of the brain, into bodily sensation and ultimately into temperature, at hyper- and sub-sonic values. Pitch slides into duration as it decreases, as harmony becomes manometric rhythm (the properties of consonance and dissonance result from the factorial resonance of combined frequencies).1 And sound, on its broad peripheries, creeps out of the brain and into the body, then out of conscious sensation altogether. Since mechanical recording apparatuses know no such distinctions, human territorializations of the vibratory continuum on 2/16

all levels—psycho-physiological, cultural and musicological—can only be relativized by the acute analysis of sound. Stratal schema are transcendentally deduced from experience. They map real memory systems, but these are only guaranteed sovereignty for as long as they are venerated as the final cause of the intensity which is articulated through them: fetishism (Pythagoras: ‘Everything is number and harmony’). The distinction between content and expression is always real, in various ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their double articulation. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 44) The reinforcement of material and conceptual stratifications of sound makes Western music a wasteland of redundancy. Sonic technology locking into the song as tragic-orgasmic structure, emotional engineering overlaid by the signifying power of words; the cultural fixing of molar arrangements of specific instruments (orchestra to rock band) with a certain predictable range of musical effects. Harmony and counterpoint limiting the sonic to a grid of resonant points. Harmonic and manometric form itself as Hellenic beauty, right through to the transcendental despotism of Kant’s Stimmung, is endemic in Western art. In the Western tonal musical form, the tension of dissonance is always relieved by a consonant homecoming; this is implied even in the facetious mischief of the avant-garde. Formed by these resonant coding systems, the reproduction of Westem music has long been a specialized technique, its performance linked to ritualized spectator events and expressions of power and its graphism being the preserve of specialized cognoscenti. Mechanical recording makes these techniques entirely procedural, and the mode of production and reproduction of sound becomes an increasingly dispersed network. At the same time as it immanentizes music, speech and other ‘noise’, mechanical sound-recording potentially flattens the divide between musician and listener, allowing the latter a (perhaps modificatory) hand in the performance. The digital manipulation of sound accelerates to the point of breakdown the loop between playing and recording, composing and listening and even between composer and sound. Summarized and abstracted in the circuits of digital sound manipulation are the obvious virtues and the incidental features of the entire history of sound-recording technologies. This latest stage of the abstractive vector of the sonic assemblage stands in relation to late 1990s capitalism as the phonograph stood to the industrial era. The phonographic diagram, given its direct transduction of physical wave to mechanical impulse or electrical signal, provides a code both precisely reproducible and potentially editable. There is no need of specialized knowledge to interpret the phonographic record: where the score represents, phonography simply transduces and can evidently not be described as a system of writing, but only as a diagram, despite its inventors’ wishes: (T)hey intended it as surface for the preservation of representation, in other words, a protector of the preceding mode of organization. It in fact emerged as a technology imposing a new social system, completing the deritualization of music and heralding a new network, a new economy and a new politics—in music as in other social relations. (Attali 1985: 89) Sound remains stratified only to the extent that systems of observation and recording are the preserve of the powerful or wise, and their codes and territories appear as the divine presupposition of acoustic phenomena. But if the locking-in and conceptual reinforcement of such coding systems are inevitable, then also a very different process necessarily follows from the increasingly radical analysis and resynthesis of sonic material. The production of a sonic technology implies the construction of principles on the back of a deterritorialization (the production of an 3/16

interruption or break in the assemblage at a certain point and the arbitrary repetition of redeparture from that point, transforming the conditions of possibility for sound production) and a decoding (rendering any regime of soundordering relative within a field of chromatically variable parameters) whose efficacy potentially releases, or releases the potential of, the matter of sound. [T]rends in the evolution of Western Music begin with Pythagoras and terminate—open-ended—with the theories and experiments of (electronic music)…. What are these trends? They are most clearly understood in information-theoretical terms, namely as a gradual reduction in the redundancy in works of music or, expressed differently, as a continuous increase in the complexity of sound and composition, hence an increase in the amount of auditory information transmitted during a given interval of time. Redundancy reduction has been achieved over the last two millennia by a steady abolishment of constraints on three levels: specificity of waveforms, selection of frequencies, and rules of synchronism and succession. (Foerster and Beauchamp 1969: 9) The sciences are incomprehensible apart from their combination with currency (communication): processes are only modelled in order to abstract and reproduce them on a more efficient basis, at will, or in bulk quantities. But concurrently, the street finds its own uses, and always produces strange offspring. In the middle of the processes of analysis and synthesis, the diagram or abstract machine of the assemblage at issue is seized upon by uninvited forces. Instead of simply reproducing, the diagram slowly yields its machinic surplus value. As soon as the deterritorialization of sonic matter into vinyl abstracts it from the moment, and makes music into this random-access memory available time and time again, the sonic matter is susceptible to temporal mutation, warping, looping. The simple laws of selection and connection of elements within any medium used to store an abstracted signal produce a machinic surplus value anexactly proportional to the differential between its immanent logic and that of the ‘original’ medium, or its derangement of temporal normativity (deterritorialization). The contact between vinyl and hand, the technique of ‘scratching’, is an interface between temporal systems: rendering the abstract tactile (abstract matter is not a figurative or metaphorical term), this unplanned interaction makes audible more about the technology than even its designers were able or willing to realize. The memory-system of a phonographic record could easily be (and was intended as) a simple archive, exerting a minimal derangement easily counterbalanced by the State-friendly effects of pseudo-propaganda (Edison envisaged us listening to stirring records of political speeches rather than music). Only in materially realizing the temporal derangement—the abstraction—which had taken place, by creating something new out of the record, was the machinic potential of the apparatus unlocked. Despite the contemporary omnipresence of such abstract matter, a huge amount of energy is spent in preventing this from happening—docilizing consumers into using it simply as archival material, or as negative-feedback entertainment. However technology decodes human experience, redundant forms are tenaciously reaffirmed. Even in the age of digital technology, the production of a gigantic surplus value is suppressed or absorbed by the fetishistic packaging of ever-reproduced classical and ‘classic’ Western forms and the recording industry’s strangely hypocritical (if not surprising) promises of authenticity and faithfulness. While decoding doubtless means understanding and translating a code, it also means destroying the code as such. assigning it an archaic, folldoric or residual function. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 245) 4/16

Bourgeois tragic pop culture revels in a retro-reactive fascination for these archaisms, buUding them back into the system at the level of ironic simulation, or as ‘classics’—further strengthening the reflection-reproduction of a selfsatisfied human interiority under the great weight of its own poignant degeneration. Nomads are more interested in migrating, investigating where else technological synthesis can take them, via the abstract, the diagram, the plane of consistency. *** A synthesizer places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradually making ‘fundamentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each other in some way’. The moment this conjunction occurs there is a common matter. It it only at this point that one reaches the abstract machine, or the diagram of the assemblage. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 109) Likewise the sampler places disparate sonic elements upon a plane of consistency without destroying their particular traits, the intensities produced in the sonic assemblage by their singular complex of rhythmic disturbances. Instead it enables these to be systematically diagrammed, edited, merged, manipulated as virtual entities, then reactualized. Sound becomes a series of partial objects for engineering, rather than an object of admiration for heavenly metaphorics. Even unassuming theorists who provide reconnaissance data for nomadic war upon the strata know to some extent what they’re doing: I would hope that we could soon find whatever…excuse we still need to quit talking about ‘mellow timbres’ and ‘edgy timbres’, and ‘timbres’ altogether, in favor of contextual musical analysis of developing structures of vibrato, tremolo, spectral transformation, and all those various dimensions of sound which need no longer languish as inmates of some metaphor. (Foerster and Beauchamp 1969: 128) The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor – all that consists is real. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 69) It is truly the minority whose experimentation has begun to explore the full potential, the true alien nature of abstract matter. The question will be, what sort of tactics are most efficacious in the releasing of machinic potential (surplusvalue)? And how is it that, speaking in terms of the sonic assemblage, the vernacular cybernetics of underground subcultures have already sent such vectors crashing through the strata? *** Lift the needle, bring it across, smooth, gliding, frictionless, cue it up and then let it delve into that 12 inch plane of existence. (Two Fingers and Kirk 1995: 37) Hiphop, house, techno and jungle (‘Hip hop with the last vestiges of “natural” funk removed+house shorn of all humanist glitz/gospel evangelism+digitized reggae+ … metallic voodoo simulacra+’ (Fisher 1995: 5)) as strains of clandestine anti-music. A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks. These breaks should in no way be considered as a separation from reality. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 36) 5/16

Breakbeats—cannibalized rhythmic segments of soul and funk records, looped and mixed endlessly, becoming dehumanized chunks of sound migrating from their function as a ‘break’ within the song. DJs invaded by turntable logic, forming non-organic circuits to produce another time. MCs overlaying breakbeats and misappropriated soundbites with street neologisms, comic-book mechanismo and afro-blag, and returning them to vinyl. Planet Rock, Afrika Bambataa’s rerouting of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express through the warzones of the South Bronx, provides the soundtrack to robotics and breakdance—a neo-industrial voodoo-tech somatics of the grey area between the white lines of neo-classical German synth-pop and the legacy of the black heroes of funk and soul. Hip-hop, together with many other sources, recycled once (many times) more in dance tracks where, de/reterritorialized as digital signal, sound is redesigned and reprocessed and once again returned to vinyl for DJs to mix into complex layers and sequences, melding tracks together. At every stage of this sonic metallurgy, a complex feedback and slippage between the functions of crowd, musician and machine, where sounds produce and execute their own evolutive pressures. New strains emerge faster than you can count. As LA’s gangsta rap played uncomfortably upon black American youths’ status as ‘niggaz’ and revitalized the memory of soul and funk pioneers, jungle, from the inner cities of the UK, recalls racist taunts, immigration policies, inner-city meltdowns, and the hybridities of dub, rave, jazz, ska and twotone. It synthesizes distorted patois gun talk, horror video samples, dubterranean sub-bass and accelerated razor-sharp rhythms digitally cut into precise flurries. The rhythmic eccentricity, anexact precision, and constant development of jazz lines shot through with the mechanical pounding of funk and house and the cavernous low-end of dub. Africa filtered through Diaspora, alienation, urban decay and techno-virtuality, the supposedly ‘impossible combination of blackness and the future’ (Fisher 1995) lethally injecting the colonial terror of the living jungle and its ‘natives’ with SF future-shock. Sound is no longer experienced as whole, recognizable and familiar structures, associated with persons or instruments; it doesn’t signify. Sounds could have come from anywhere, and can potentially go anywhere, mutating as they pass through multiple vinylurgical singularities (tracks). They engender their own vast, clandestine plane which is nothing apart from what moves on it but is nonetheless real, transversal, tilting though heaps of bastardized techno-junk, Cubasing across bedroom studios…swerving through clubland, into advertising…sinking back into James Brown and P-funk and Dub and Voodoo…diving through magnetic signal, vinyl, vibration, intensity . transmitting as cultural virus, pirate radio, illegal duplication…opening onto insomniac planes, fashion codes, violence and ecstasy, social disintegrations. Composition by experimentation: the keys of the synthesizer keyboard have only a machinic relation to the sounds they trigger. Unlike the state-numerical system of the musical scale, the digital sequencer operates nomadically: number systems with no necessary hierarchical relations but available to be assigned for maximum functionality, references and designations reassignable and manipulable on every level, numbers working rather than signifying. Samplers making time for the future: timestretching, a digital technique commonly used in jungle which elongates sounds without altering their pitch, demonstrates how the speed at which levels of acoustic intensity are digitally recorded (around 44,000 samples/second) means that a certain level of destratification is automatically accomplished. Since magnitudes (of acoustic intensity) are all that each sample bit contains, they can be manipulated so as to operate underneath the stratification of pitch/ duration which depends on the differentiation of the relatively slow comprehensive temporality of cycles per second.2 Designed to tune up samples of musical instruments, timestretching is employed as a means of creating periods of disorientating duration, impossible speeds and slownesses, realizing the temporal disturbance it is capable of. This is only to repeat again that acute analysis of 6/16

strata presupposes sub-stratic sampling and so is tantamount to their dissolution, and the freeing of machinic potential. This principle also applies to sampling in the more usual sense, as the decontextualized use of pieces of recorded sound (and to similar techniques in other media). Most of the accumulated techniques of today’s sonic engineers were acquired by chance, or as a response to some mechanical or economic limitation. That’s the story of hip­-hop, the cyberpunk history of a new sonic assemblage taking shape with neither metanarrative nor progressive urgency. Unexpected convergences during the bricolage of machine-sequenced sound count more than planned outcomes. Following the grain of sound, rolling with the rhythm. Distributed wildstyle jamming, describing polyrhythmic lines of metamorphosis which take in at irregular intervals sample, sequencer, composer, party crowd, DJ. The much-vaunted connection between avant-garde movements such as serialism and musique concrete and hiphop techniques needs to take account of the fact that, far from being an intellectual experiment, hip-hop has always been concerned with producing the maximum intensity where it matters: bodily sound, made for dancing, no interpretation necessary. This reticular phylogenetic webbing of transcodings and deterritorializations marks out hip-hop and its progeny as the sound of superheated anthropo-technic circuitries, where decoded flows begin to leave meaning behind, and escape from molar commoditization by means of a constant flight underground. Uprooted shapes and. mounds merge and rescript, break up and repermutate in the virtual machinery of the sampler whilst social fabric warps into localized chaosmosis. A subterranean diagonal which unconditionally migrates from its habitat: accelerating BPMs (no time to understand), reprocessed percussion (Neither harmony or noise), timestretching (violating the chronogenic homeostat of pitch/duration) and sub­-bass (sound becoming uncompromisingly physical) retune the neuro-auditory apparatus to awesomely intricate and dense abysses of sound, and permeate the body as an amnesiac addiction. Becoming-sound. Freight weight bass rolling over me. The Rumblism in full effect. From back to front a wave of sound, heartbeatstopping rumblism…Jungle is me and I am the Jungle—no distinction, no separation. (Two Fingers and Kirk 1995: 101,109) But why was it the bass and percussion breaks that set the ghettos alight, that demanded a line of flight out of the song? The operation of rhythm within the African socius involves physicality and communication, rather than signifying sound shut up in the soul of the music-lover, merely an adjunct to the harmony of the spheres. African rhythm is a body technology, a precise component, like African art which is assigned its function by nommo, power of the word (Jahn 1961: ch. 5), and discarded when it bas been used, rather than being retained for eternity in the museum (a scandal which led the ‘art-world’ to have serious doubts about its value). It is the Western art object which is the ‘fetish’; and it is logocentric Western world history which cannot understand the transitive voice of the drum. Voodoo loa are rhythms, or traits immanent in the social machine, which manifest themselves in response to needs of that machine.3 From where voodoo is, the Christian God is oppressively manometric and dysfunctional. When the Haitian authorities tried to force the slaves to convert to Catholicism, the slaves received a new god into their pantheon, wondering only why the white man lets just one (dull) loa ride him. For the divine nature of the loa is in their immanence and availability, not in a miraculous transcendence at once inutile and terrifying which despotically inscribes its disjunctions onto the social body, allowing no feedback. Even Bon Dieu is neither feved nor praised. ‘Vodou isn’t like that…it isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done’ (Gibson 1993: 111). Voodoo drums call Legba, loa of the pathways, to remove the barrier (the black mirror) 7/16

which seals the street of the loa off from the human world. Intoxicating polyrhythm calls the loa to ride the initiates, to possess them, to inhabit them with their trances, their traits, their dances. Sound experienced as bodily sensation, rather than spiritual recreation (Jahn 1961: 122) shows how African languages express non-visual intensity as tactile. The bassline. Bass it all. Going back to the beginning of everything…. The tribal notes, the lost civilization of drum and bass. Bass is the vanishing point on the horizon where all black music disappears back to. (Two Fingers and Kirk 1995: 100–1) The climatic impracticability of an extensively developed writing system in early African history produced an asignifying semiotic which resisted the vertical flight of interpretability and signifiance. The drum functioned as immanent memory system and transmitter of cultural history, co-intensive with the intonation and percussion of African languages (a coupling still present now in hip-hop). The somewhat repellent modus operandi of the slave trade was to capture tribes, destroy the drums, and then claim disgustedly that Africa had ‘no history’. Not that the ROM-museum of Western history could claim any filiation with the vastly distributed machinery of a communicative social machine whose resilience defies genocidal colonialism. The virtual history of the drum gradually rematerializes, irrupting into Western music like a long-awaited revenge for its brutal silencing. Speaking for centuries in all outlawed musical forms, those which explored the virtual spaces of sonic assemblages rather than reciting texts, and currently in cyberflux digi-processed afro-futurist, it steals sounds and speaks them back in its own becoming-Creole (nommo is always a becoming-word and a word-becoming which does not signify but (re-)invents what it is applied to), its own complex of rhythms. The meme­grinder. Predator, indiscernible jungle warfare. All State authorities, like the Haitian plantation-owners, fear the materiality of sound, and the unintelligible, ungodly rites that surround it (sampled/sequenced music is the first form of music to have its performance specifically proscribed by an Act of Parliament). Again and again the drums are confiscated, but the Black Secret Technology continues. Voodoo, the practice of rhythmic contagion, is the tactile point of contact between the social body and the deterritorialized socius, proceeding by means of decoded sonic affect to reinsert the social into the pulsive maelstrom of matter-flows. Dahomian snake­becomings (plunging desiring-machines into the BwO) transform into distributed and refined subsocial programs under ascendant pressure from secured State molarity, travelling unnoticed by icebound damping systems. *** The Critique of Pure Reason’s ‘profoundly schizoid’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 19) theory maps reality as intensive magnitude, ‘beginning in pure intuition = 0′ (Kant 1933: 202 A166/B208), ‘continuous’ and ‘flowing’, the ‘matter’ of experience (Kant 1933: 204 A170/B211). Rational categories supplant the positivity of intensity with the ultimate and empty form of experience, zero intensity as negation, as the miraculous hypnostatic attractor of pure intuition. A complete stasis, an escape from ‘that element which cannot be anticipated’ (Kant 1933: 204 A170/B211), which brings us closer to the god of the disjunctive syllogism. The tautological death of pure form: a favourite trope of philosophy. Capitalism and Schizophrenia‘s zero intensity is not a zero of absence or negation, but more like the zero of MIDI which designates the establishment of a plane of communication. The surface of a full body where intensity ebbs and shatters. Or think of the way morphing drum patterns glide and trip across the surface of their own momentum. Disjunctive synthesis as primary is replaced in Capitalism and Schizophrenia by connective synthesis: ‘… and …’. The rational scaffold of Kantianism, the matter/form distinction together with the privileging of the latter, dismantled 8/16

into the immanence of desiring-production, the machinic unconscious: It is high time to replace the Kantian question ‘how are synthetic judgements a priori possible?’ with another question: ‘why is belief in such judgements necessary?’ (Nietzsche 1973: 11) Like Nietzsche’s will to power, like Bataille’s general economics, the machinic unconscious is a cipher for the dissembling force of critique whose runaway feedback loop consists of increasingly sophisticated analyses of its own stratification. Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a program for desirevolutionary autocritique, a toolbox for migrating (=) intelligence. Reality production is described as a process of silting, mnemonic residue, stratification, the freezing, quantizing and subsequent coding and territorialization of sequences of intensities. So ‘the question is not how things manage to leave the strata, but how things get there in the first place’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 56). Pragmatically the simulation or diagramming of strata is always the first task of stratoanalysis. But reality consists also and contemporaneously in the circuit virtual-actual­virtual. The swoop to zero intensity and back, reinsertion into connective synthesis, the unfolding and metamorphosis of machinic potential into the experience of passage through its actualizations. Memory systems provide the spaces between which communication takes place, at the risk of their own dissolution. Schizophrenia-paranoia as the poles of desiringproduction, the tensorial polemos which produces intensive gradients as frictional oscillation (Spinozan passion). Stratification is simultaneously cruel persecution and aboriginal reality. Repulsion-Attraction, Paranoia-Miraculation. Transcendental simulation. Reality as black humour (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 11). Mobilization: second task. To accelerate virtual-actual circuits; to constantly bring codes and territories as close as possible to their mutation or dissolution, prospecting for a new earth, new planes of communication, whose vast possibilities lie in lurker-space waiting for an escape/invasion. Memory-space is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for social or desiring-production. Intensive machinery is always in play, on transversal circuits. Technology is an index of social sophistication since diagrammatic recording in the service of replication is precisely this impossible intimacy of stratification and communication. Digital communications technology is a hysterical stage in the history of this tension: its products must at once be invisible data-ducts and carry a trademark. So even ‘late’ capitalism still sees decoding equipment sold as, and in constant desperation to retain its identity as, sedentary consumer goods (digital publishing, home audio and video, communications, consumer credit, the Internet—one of the best examples being the lamentable familial-archival use made of camcorders). Privatization coupled with deregulation in general involves a decoding of flows contrary to the establishment of a molar social machine. Capitalist social reproduction must domesticate intractable flows, although in the field of technical machines this function becomes almost automatic, the rate of technological dissemination necessitating great standardizations to ensure global compatibility. This techno-miraculative locking acts as a ratchet for intelligence, inscribing progressively sophisticated and autonomous coding systems upon the social body. Revolutionary systems which accelerate communication find commerce already waiting patiently for them, but because they lock into systems of resonance and redundancy under market pressure, their machinic potential is squeezed into sedentary structures which resist the drift of a deterritorializing socius. The embedding of these systems engenders an estrangement between the schizophrenic movements of the social unconscious and its corporeal reality. Darkside operates rhizomatically, 1pontaneoualy digesting complexification into its maelstrom and creating new monsters. Progressive ascendancy operates by heaping systems into functional axiomatics, 9/16

reconstituting molarity where possible. They approach convergence in lurches, as disordered desiring-machines catalyse the molecularization of the social, reciprocally acquiring new influxes of estranged desire. The bombed-out schizophrenic is the one who takes this diagonal too far too soon, before the socius can digest it: Artaud, binned by society, obsessively decoding vocal and/or logographical systems into the ‘gasps and cries’ of schizonautic BwO burnout, ‘sheer unarticulated blocks of sound’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 9). The alphabet as an object of exploration, of machinic exploitation, an apparatus of migration. Consonants are break-cuts in a vowel-flow. Permutation hunts down potential. Various coding systems, some human, some unknown, emerge and are submerged in turn: katarsun dafrer urfru omprend unon non stop onmprend …tscharfukt (Artaud 1946: vol. 25: 193/216) Not ‘mistaking words for things’, but using words as machine parts. Maximwn slogan density—the delirious opus postumum of a psychotic advertising exec, short­circuiting the market to testify, alone and already a crowd crisscrossed by nommo, to the incarceration of rnachinic potential in ‘natural’ language. Using the frayed edges of words which connect like a hidden passageway to their milieu of exteriority to irradiate the whole system. Playing de/coding apparatuses tactically against their fetishistic tendencies (solvent abuse) is a thoroughly schizoanalytic procedure—riding the cusp of cyberpositive commodification without turning into a shopkeeper, or rushing into black-hole deterritorialization. The perversity and ambivalence of capitalist production (exemplified by the advertising industry’s enslavement of orphaned chunks of language-intensity to vapid consumerism) is the key to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a justification in itself for that untimely coupling of cracked-up heads. But at its outer limit, the capitalist socius is the machinic unconscious. It clicks into desiring-production as decoded language clicks into rhythm. Capitalization agitates for decoded communication, the abstract general equivalent, whilst performing a gross overcoding which dichotomizes monetary exchange as capital/ cash, one mapping an intensive series, non-linear positive feedback, the other mapping extensive, linear and unproductive circles: investor/consumer. Cash is livestock for the capitalists’ table. Keep the animals stupid, hand them little morsels and reap the profits, consumer spending constructed as an endlessly reconstituted lack expressed in molar units (financial psychoanalysis). Capital as a mysterious flow which is always intensifying, distributing and travelling. But the double bind is not to be identified with contradiction, and besides, contra Marx, ‘no-one has ever died of contradictions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 151). The plication (stratogenesis) of capital and cash is a further manifestation of the twin tendencies of capitalism: a ceaseless expansion of its inner limits, and a labyrinthine flight from its outer limit – BwO. The clandestine channel of communication (cataspace) between investment (non-linear complication) and bovlne consumerism (linear compliance) is the escape valve, the diagonal of the articulation: its covert presupposition and its greatest fear. The abstract currency/current which is always imagined as complicit (matter-slave-worker-woman-machine-money-data). But K-circuits inevitably tend towards positive feedback, accelerating each other. The circuits (even those of the black markets) are their own escalation, just as money is its 10/16

circulation. The technological industries, in their tireless pursuit of efficiency and reproducibility (analysis), must retain increasing margins of decoding, cutting edges of deterritorialization, which are always exploited by vagabond science and guerrilla commerce, speeding reality circuitry into posthuman micro smear-cultures (catalysis— ARPANET becomes Internet, 303 becomes Acid Machine, car becomes ramraider, turntable becomes instrument, spraycan becomes paintbrush). There have always been hackers (because ‘there was ice before computers’ (Gibson 1993: 169)). The capitalist socius has always been (in) the process of disturbing its own striation, just as critique endlessly throws itself on its inner limits. And catalytic microcultures which induce BwO migration (lines of flight) are crucial to the cyberpositive surges which accelerate the process. Anti-Oedipus‘ synthetic process of desiring-production played out in macro feedback turbulence—'(T]he more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 151). Code is viable currency only insofar as it exploits its margins of decoding. Internalism (and the separatism of hierarchized representational schemae) produces poverty. Trade barriers prevent development, and black marketeers always creep put the border guards. Decoding is always possible and usually inexorable. Successively decoded currents sweep through cold circuits, rendering them more conductive as they circulate. The circulation is the conductivity, the surplus value of code produced by/as desiring-production which renders territorial consolidation a volatile subcomponent of the material process. ‘Stages’ of capitalism are nomadic encampments. All currencies float on the full body of capital, and in their mobilization, mutate. [A) code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it…There is no genetics without ‘genetic drift’…Every code is affected by a margin of decoding due to the supplements and surplus values–supplements in the order of a multiplicity, surplus values in the order of a rhizome. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 53) Will the margin of decoding and deterritorialization (a closed system’s diagonal drip-feed) gradually widen until, as in the State’s worst nightmare, in a cataclysmic spasm, the system is collapsed out of ‘itself’, irradiated by its own conditions of possibility? The nightmare of decoded flows, BwO? Always on the cusp of its own extropy, capitalism is a continually intensifying plateau which sweeps all of history along into its trail. And if it feels like it’s gonna blow… you haven’t seen anything yet… (of course Apocalyptic SF is one essential genre of ‘late’ capitalism). (C)apitalism has to deal essentially with its own limit, its own destruction—as Marx says, insofar as it is capable of self-criticism (at least to a certain point: the point where the limit appears, in the very movement that counteracts the tendency). (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 140) The ‘limit’ point which trips the fuse-switches of panoptic power, reterritorializing on all of the BwO’s good work, ancillary State apparatuses trying to arrogate to themselves a share of the surplus value, or absorbing it just in order to endure. Crisis after crisis, the critical ambivalence appears in all its insane glory. The risible panic government of the post-Thatcher /Reagan State. The end of the family, of the social, interpreted by State priests as motives for consolidation, quiescence and/ or despair. Fascist resurgences. Fetish marketing of consumer products under threat of pandemic anonymous black-market replication. Copyright clampdowns on sampling. Revival of the good oldfashioned pseudo-tragic pop-chart song as the response to decoded sub-scene sonic networks. The tendency of code to drift and the consequent trade-off between migration and security, which at every subsequent stage must necessarily become less an option than an impulsion (hence the plasticity of the axiomatic), means that such Illegitimate policing is a never-ending task requiring huge influxes of energy. Thus not only doe1 a 11/16

vast pool of machinic potential lie unexplored or become absorbed and neutralized, but regulators are constantly being assembled to prevent anything from escaping, overcoding and reterritorializing in a frenzy of xenophobic activity. Illegitimate policing, coding to abolish migration, communication, external functionality, is an old story: Plato and the sophists, Kant and the nomads, psychoanalysis and schizophrenia. Confiscation of the drums and ‘fetishes’. Eliminating all but the most impoverished gestalt transmissions, to create autonomous systemic reality-machines. The State works so hard at its laziness, paying for the luxury of stasis with a general enervation and self-affirming sedentariness, revelling in its disengagement. In philosophy the schism between theory and practice (arithmetica/logistica), the intellectual’s disdain for commerce and business (which is obviously reciprocated), developed into a perennial State trope on the basis of Hellenic slavery. The related love of static and ordered forms extends especially to the marriage of music and mathematics. The Pythagorean scale, which traps music in harmonic redundancy, geometry as a spatial overcoding of the social machine (polis), which freezes mathematics for centuries, deleting the problematic nature of Babylonian ‘algebra’ (nomos). Such policing is eschewed by Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which instead assembles the tools necessary for micro-engineering stratoanalysis. Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a diagram of the highly schizophrenic assemblage of capitalist reality production, and hints at techniques for exploiting its suppressed potential, its ironic and critical movement, the process of its endless finalities and its artificial realities. Queer Mechanics. ‘The schizoanalyst is a mechanic, and schizoanalysis is solely functional’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 322). Diagonalization invades/escapes stratification by producing apparatus which decouples reciprocal and vicious articulation-series. Finding again the intensities which are split (schiz-), in a process which of course includes further reterritorializations, further codes. A left-handed cartography in which, however, it is the further which takes precedence in a sinister divergence from the straight (State) line made of metric-spatial points. The diagonal frees itself, breaks or twists. The line no longer forms a contour and instead passes between things, between points. It belongs to a smooth space. [t draws a plane that has no more dimensions than that which crosses. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 505) In its insistence on the practicality of stratoanalysis (icebreaking), Capitalism and Schizophrenia plugs into the vernacular cybernetics of Gibson’s street-voudu, emphasizing the power of minority microcultures whose pragmatic survivalism precludes for them the bourgeois marginality of the avant-garde or the heroic martyrdom of resistance politicos: [W]rite with slogans… (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 24) Theory is already practice at the level of intensity; it is only by a conscientious disintensification that academia sends itself into the woods. Dislike of memetic transfer, popularity, becoming-style. Must keep it precious…Heidegger singing peasant ballads on the folk-dub circuit, the senescent Deleuze and Guattari’s touching concern for the plight of philosophy in the age of advertising (Deleuze and Guattari 1995: 10–12). HIT ESCAPE 12/16

Clandestine planes consist of technological (recording and reproductive) systems gradually escaping their instrumental definitions and designator-functionality to communicate through subterranean channels, between marginal non-agents, those excluded from the official processes of social recording and reproduction. CONTROL DISABLED Clandestine planes escape macro socio-theoretlcal and philosophical monitoring apparatuses because they operate transversally, without reference to molar categories or overcodings. No prescribed forms underlie the unfoldings and catastrophes of matter in such processes. No under-standing. Swarm. Hivelocity. WILDSTYLE SOUND Interference patterns and polymetric disturbances in a strange milieu, weaving, modulating and transcoding: temporary agglomeration and interplay, the track, or plateau. Writing-machine as remix, sample-heavy. If such an assemblage uses Capitalism and Schizophrenia, reactualizing its concepts (replication is not duplication, ‘no genetics without genetic drift’), it is not as an object of veneration. As soon as the concepts ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘decoding’ leave the page they are already doing deterritorialization and decoding. Philosophical personae become irrelevant upon machinic engagement, and any misuse of terminology derives from schizoanalysis’ nature as vague (vagabond) science: don’t try and get it straight—bend it out of shape even more. Use the rough edges of the plateaus to slot them into others, creating new planes of consistency in a process which is not personal any more than hip-hop and jungle are the inventions of a benevolent music-lover. ROUTES NOT ROOTS Don’t expect answers or origins, just lines twisting, converging and crossing as well as diverging; not arborescent but rhlzomaniac. No original but always the vershon. Wildstyle like the graffiti that accompanied hip-hop—an unseen and unplanned alliance cross-fertilizing traits through the medium of the wall or the subway train, inciting unknown associates further and further into baroque foldings (aparallel evolution). The glistening surfaces of K-culture, videogames, advertising, twisted into Escher-space, projecting-probing-splitting and joining in unfathomable planes of colour until the word disappears beneath its own superfluity…neither really simple, nor really complex, but desimplified in the course of its production. Overlaid like a second skin onto the subway trains that criss-cross the subterranea of NYC, Wildstyle creates a clandestine cataspace, a mutant topology of unanticipated connections, at the same time eliminating the name in favour of the tag, the offhand flourish of the magic marker that stands for a multiplicity and its traits, something that once passed through here, leaving its art behind… SPIRIT SUPERKOOL KOOLKILLER ACE VIPERE SPIDER EDDIE WOODIE 110 SHADOW 137 the urban city…is the cut-up space of distinctive signs…(it) is a ‘body without organs’, as Deleuze says, an intersection of channelled flows. (Baudrillard 1993: 76-7, 79) The city is becoming-wildstyle, and wildstyle uses capitalism’s decoding equipment (‘the terrorist power of the media…symbolic destruction’ (Baudrillard 1993: 76-7) against the social and semiological reterritorializations of consumer capitalism. By tattooing walls, SUPERSEX and SUPERKOOL free them from architecture. (Baudrillard 1993: 82) TRACKS NOT SONGS 13/16

The creation of the track as a singular coincidence of a swarmachine of sampled material, filter sequences, abstract gradients and resistances–the engineer tracking an anonymous and collectively constituted sonic phylum, actualizing it in the track as nomadic anarchitecture. Bass has no face, only a machinic probe-head which collects and connects, and is called on by means of a cthulic cipher: PHOTEK HYPE LEMON D TEK 9 A-ZONE FLYTRONIX SYSTEM X Urban style music. The city is a jungle. It’s a whole new world under the cover of darkness, hiding from the beast, tuning up in anticipation of the dance. With flow of sound hanging thick in the air, crowding in and out of your lungs, becoming the oxygen you breathe, you realise that the youts in this for real. (Two Fingers and Kirk 199S: 4) Clandestine in voodoo nights of microcultural mutation. Zero as machinic assemblages mash-up and cross-fade. Diagonal as markets lock into guerrilla commerce, ever-decamping nomad cultures, melting in the heat of the chase. Current. Beyond the face lies an…inhumanity…cutting edges of deterritorializa­tion becoming operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine, make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 190–1) If it is inevitable that mnemotechnics should take hold of life in such a comprehensive fashion, it is only on the condition of a necessary and immanent indiscipline. The principal component of technological sophistication, analysis, is the progressive disintegration of corporeal machines into virtuality (catastrophe). Darkside influence functions as retroactive non-linearity (anastrophe), catalysing virtual components into new artificialities which reprocess the present through its machinic potential. Clandestine becomings plug the present into the future, looping virtual-actual into RAM-mutation, intersecting the black mirror which chronologizes non-linear temporal plurality. The history of the White Man Face will appear in Count Zero Vodou as a temporary dissipator for labyrinthine convergences, science fiction more alien than it ever dreamt it would be. ‘The dark continent we’re heading towards’ (Fisher 1995). The living jungle, where to survive is to activate mutant lines, become-imperceptible in order to perceive, and follow diagonal paths marked out only by chromatic gradients of intensity (Schwarzenegger in Predator). Jungle has nothing to do with a fetishistic ‘primitivism’, but signals a twofold movement whereby diasporic flows of abstract matter, alien(ated) forces, activate their potential irrespective of the apparently triumphant system of neutralizing, metabolic molarity. The micro-striation of the capitalist socius tends toward a smooth space whose inorganic zones of machinic detritus overwhelm the State apparatus, short-circuiting modernocratic optimism. Voodoo was already in cyberspace; it was just waiting for the Technics to arrive. Technologies less visible, less obvious than those of the West: forcibly virtualized on the Atlantic passage, ready for reactualization in local conditions, a vernacular cybernetics, a rhythmic contagion, local and specific, functional and asignifiant. The beats rolling over me, faster and more insistent, dark and dangerous, nebulous, underwater, slowing down time and interpretation. (Two Fingers and Kirk 1995: 190) 14/16

Stratoanalytical technique: sampling at substratic speeds and scrambling coding systems, feeding intensificatory experimentation back into the strata to optimize darkside convergence. Stratoanalysis is never distinct from its mode of operation: indeed certain modes of operation ‘accidentally’ invent stratoanalytic lines, or forgotten techniques suddenly resurface as tools of a new stratoanalytic practice. Preliminary diagonalyses suggest that such so-called ‘spontaneous phenomena’ may result from the clandestine operation of photonic timestretching devices, steering junglist vectors from futurelooped loatronic encampments. Catalytic microcultures stretched across time, rhythms without sense assembling non-organic lives. As they touch us, we are immersed in new sonic assemblages where abstract matter becomes tactile. An into-body experience and a new model for thought that cuts through the grid-lines of acoustic, aesthetic, social and economic composition. The synthetic future, no longer enlightened, with a clear vision of the future and able to shut its eyes against the ‘internal south’, but coming from the dark spaces in the middle, when least expected. Disturbance of equilibrium… vibrations through the body; breaks and cuts. Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible. (Attali 1985, 11) At a certain threshold, the experimental dismemberment of codes no longer just prevents us from complicitly saying what we didn’t want to say, but arrives at a mobilization or a complication of flows which ‘we’ were never aware of, lines which emerge from another zone and meet in wildstyle on the darkside, in the jungle, in full effect. It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of stratoanalysis proceed. Bibliography Artaud, A. (1946) Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard. Attali, J. (1985) Noise, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bataille, G. (1992) On Nietzsche, trans. B. Boone, New York.: Paragon. Baudrillard, J. (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I. H. Grant, London; Sage. Delany, S. R., Tate, G. and Rose, T. (1993) ‘Black to the Future’, in M. Dery (ed.) Flame Wars: The D1scourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Deleuze, G. and Guattari, Felix (1983) Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone. — (1995) What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson, London: Verso. Deleuze, G. and Parnet, Claire (1983) ‘Politics’, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, On the Line, New York: Semiotext!e], 1983. Eglash, R. (1995) ‘African Influences in Cybernetics’, in C. H. Gray (ed.) The Cyborg Handbook, New York and London: Routledge. Fisher, Mark. (1995) ‘Black Noise’, ***collapse 2. Foerster, H. and Beauchamp, J. W. (eds) (1969) Music by Computers, New York: Wiley. Gibson, W. (1993) Count Zero, London: HarperCollins. Helmholtz, H. L. F (1954) On the Sensation of Tone, trans. A. J. Ellis, New York: Dover. Jahn, J. (1961) Muntu: The New African Culture, trans. M. Green, New York: Grove Press. 15/16

Kant, I. (1933) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith, London: Macmillan. Metraux, A. (1972) Voodoo in Haiti, trans. H. Charteris, New York: Schocken. Nietzsche, F. (1973) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Two Fingers and Kirk., James T. (1995) Junglist, London: Boxtree. Select Discography Dr Octagon, Blue Flowers Remixes, Mo’Wax Ed Rush, Check Me Out, DeeJay Recordings HeavyWeight, Oh Gosh, Rogue Trooper Lemon D, Urban Flava Pt. 1, Metalheadz Marvellous Cain, Gun Talk, Suburban Base Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, RCA Remarc, In Da Hood, Suburban Base –– Menace, Whitehouse Various Drum & Bass Selection 1–6, Breakdown –– Platinum Breakz, Metalheadz –– Routes From the Jungle, Virgin –– Techsteppin, Emotif …Thanks also to Switch, Turbofunk, Zc2 and Cur, who helped mix it. 16/16

readthis.wtf /writing/francis-bacon-squalor-alcohol-and-creation/ Squalor, Intoxication, Creation - 2004 The Mews Slow churning, metal on metal; dog-skull masticating tin cans. During long inebriated nights, his words, together with this continuous grinding, soundtrack visions of craggy mountainscapes. Distant peaks with flame-red sunset tips blearily confabulated by glazed eyes and nodding heads. At their foot, bared, red rock. A veneer-framed fire-mountain-scape occupies the top third of a cheap electric fire. Below, the flat illusory panorama blossoms into fully-sculptured coals, cast in translucent plastic and scumbled with soft red and black. Cracking off this plastic shell as one might prise open an oyster would reveal the source of the interminable rasping; Spitlike there turns a metal rod, sprouting small paddles at regular intervals; their role being to interfere with the light from a bulb now dead and frosted-over with dust, but which would impart to the plastic rocks the illusion of an animated and wholesome blaze. 1/4

Further below, as justification for this decrepit artifice, nothing more than a two-bar electric fire: two bars meaning a total of four combinations: No bars, and stay cold (the room loses heat swiftly and regains it slowly). Two bars, and 50p in the meter every evening. One or the other bar—multiple theories exist, yet untested, concerning their relative potency. God knows where the ugly thing came from. Mind you, the whole fucking place is a dump. Strewn with images and things that might be parts of images: torn edges, fold-marks, stains, burnt-out circles, flashes and pools of pigment, slowly-solidifying emulsions. A butcher’s block for signs. Can’t spot the join between the images and their material environment, or between one image and another. Can’t even see the floor, you just know it’s there, like the canvas beneath the paint. Crucifixions, paralytic children, dogs walking [interrupted], open mouths. Cooked children of Thyestes trussed up in Harrod’s food hall. Not sufficiently surreal! The front bar, aglow, is afflicted by perfectly circular spots of char-gray where, bending low as if in promethean sacrament, George would light his cigarettes (Not another fucking fag!). As he did so, you would have noticed infernal reflections play on the chitinous hair, slicked over with a substance liable, were he to bend an inch closer, to combust a great deal more enthusiastically and with a more cordial warmth than that fire had ever provided. With his heavy determined grace, the Kray bearing, he would topple back on his polished Bond Street brogues and, at the termination of a smoke-traced arc, set himself back in the chair. But no more, ‘George is no longer. George no more! Boo hoo!’ he plays callous nursery-rhymes with the absence, taunts himself and appals his audience, celebrating something tougher than death, more important than life. Love is the Devil. ‘Idon’treallyknow,’ he retorts dismissively to some imbecile inquiry, taking a further draught of the stuff whose influence imparts the abrupt inkiness to his cavernous gob, the same poison blackening the dank interior and bestowing its wine-dark fluency. In the dark cube of the room this yawing block of head-meat, apparently bereft of an owner, hovers and sways in the dim glow of the speckled bar, a cheshire cat with its teeth smashed in. Pope-robepurple lips poised on the brink of black concepts. They tremble, they thin in contemplation, they tumesce in silent anticipation, but for a moment nothing tumbles out from the cave. The fire-stirring axle continues to crank. He fixes you with his wavering, milky eye, a crackle of cruelty anticipating the next revelation, the ultimate bon mot which will surely shock ’em: another superficial outrage, mere shadowplay of the obliteration, the utter psychic carnage that would descend…if they only knew. Only a Drinker Only a drinker could really know that giddy feeling of a perception not quite staying still for long enough to become a thought, phasing in and out and in as something not exactly the same. (Robert o’Toole) Only a drinker could so understand and utilise the power of vague visual suggestion. Staggering out of the Colony Rooms, veering like a breached longship. Vagabond navigation by means of uncertain forms smeared through the vapour of dipso nights. Functioning in below-ground shadow worlds, where men become monsters before your eyes, where smoke-filtered light turns and tricks, making shadows flesh, flesh meat. A world through the champagne glass —as in Maynard’s biopic or ‘study for a portrait’, where glasses and bottles are improvised lenses distending the image into an approximation of its subject’s vision. But isn’t his masterstroke the inversion of this principle, the deliberate reverse-engineering of reality from from a manufactured smear? A seer and a hunter/tracker as much as a painter. Reading spilt viscera. On the verge of surrendering himself to despair and death in the wilderness. Suddenly spots occult suggestion in a mess of colour 2/4

(‘…involuntary marks on the canvas which may suggest much deeper ways by which you can trap the fact you are obsessed by.’) Continues the hunt. Borderline paths which may be ‘mere’ fabulations, imagined from the slightest differentiation. Followed, they become real. Recognizably patterned outcomes retrospectively prove the significance of ambiguous omens. Belief in the significance of accident, sincerely felt, will always corroborate itself. Performing a pissed-up transcendental deduction, he posits the logical necessity of a fantastic reality, given the deliberately corrupted evidence of deranged senses. Kickstarted, the process can’t be stopped. The mess suggests A, so B must be the case. Add B. Repeat until something becomes real. The Gilded Gutter The shaman, an outcast no less vital for his existence outside the social framework. A queer aristocrat (never ‘gay’, he disdained the politics of identity, preferring to remain afflicted by his condition) who unacceptably scrambles hierarchies (when working as a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, he turns his employer apoplectic and gets the sack immediately by appearing one day at the next table at the Ritz—and probably wearing a suit of superior cut too.) It’s not only in the artistic sense that he believes himself to be, of necessity, ‘working outside any tradition’. This was the emerging postwar world of faltering delineations, of barriers melted in the heat of battle and no longer reparable. And in any case the interzones of Soho and Tangiers were prefigurations, futures arrived early, just as in urbanomic drift cities prefigure the future of outlying districts. Peculiarly, when the future arrives this generalised declassification is realised as an attractor-basin of affordable mediocrity rather than as a plane for extreme experimentation, a multitude of roles available for the enjoyment of their differences. This other future, however, persists as a perpetual possibility, a virtual zone. Gambling also fosters a Heraclitean appreciation of the reversibility of all things, as in the following poignant anecdote: I remember once in the Ritz going up with a rich man who happened to be in the lift, and he’d been in Soho shopping to buy some peas and new potatioes, and the bag burst, and it all fell on the floor of the lift presumably taking him up to his room, where I imagine he had a little oil stove where he was able to cook the peas and potatoes. Well, that is luxury for a rich man. It’s entirely due to fortuitious circumstances of life—circumstances that perhaps would have destroyed or reduced to subsistent mediocrity another person—that he becomes able to address the question: What is left for the artist when all the certainties of class, place, hierarchy, and tradition are stripped away? [O]ne can only want to record one’s own feelings about certain situations as closely to one’s nervous system as one possibly can. Ersatz orange fire illuminating the crags of his brow, glittering on his tongue as the spit turns relentlessly; in the midst of the most appalling morbid excogitations, the cheap, silly optimism of the nervous system imbues him with cheer, keeps him warm. A purported ancestor booms out, laughing, in the half-darkness: It is worthy the observing that there is no passion in the mind of man so weak but it mates and masters the fear of death ; and therefore death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can win the combat of him. 3/4

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readthis.wtf /writing/utopia-in-humbrol/ Utopia in Humbrol - 2004 ‘I’m looking for evidence,’ says Shaw. ‘I’m not sure of what. Perhaps that I was here.’ George Shaw’s apparently parochial, minutiae-focussed paintings are the result of slow, deliberate and reflective work: not (at least not only) in the fabrication, but in the preparation, in the preliminary examination and thought which goes into laying out in front of the artist the abstract material which he will proceed to transform. In fact, Shaw’s whole life has been this preparation, his uneventful childhood the fixed point through which everything else is looped. 1/3

It’s 4 ‘o’ clock…I’m walking home from school…the sky is darkening… Shaw’s emotional involvement in the act of painting extends to his use of Humbrol enamel paint, a medium which he has made entirely his own, and which imparts to the paintings their simultaneous eerie superrealism and tawdry glossiness, as well as their exquisite detail and rich colour palette. The Humbrol brand is to Shaw a magical symbol, the sine qua non of his artistic practice, and a tangible connection to the childhood whose haunted council estate scenes he returns to compulsively. Shaw’s skies are particularly magnificent, the enamel paint luminously capturing the muted chromaticism of the drab lid that is the typical midlands sky; infinite tints of gray. They are perhaps the best British skies since Turner (although Shaw’s favoured painterly point of reference is Caspar David Friedrich); a visual ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’. Places where you go to inexist. Shaw has an appreciation of the profound mystery of the persistence of the banal, the unglamour of the ‘purely factual account’. But at his best he doesn’t cleave to the latter-day angloromanticism of decline, or the aestheticising poetics of poverty. Shaw paints stasis, waiting, the empty spaces where the time of childhood is frittered away. The experience of place is reduced to an underlying electric hum of nondescript, unobserved facticity. The paintings exclude people, both in their content and in the viewer’s engagement. They are places where the viewer is forgotten. You can’t get into them unless you agree to disappear from the world. Past the leisure centre, left at the lights Scenes from the Passion: The Path Behind the Shops This mystery is the only thing we can really call our own. Our own utopia, the nowhere to which we belong but which has literally nothing to offer us except silent meditation on our own unimportance. We fall between the cracks of existence, we can’t own what we are, the places proper to us are rarely mentioned (rare exceptions: Shaw’s paintings, Pulp’s songs). How remarkable, how valuable to us it is to see an artist not only understand but take the time to make a painting of a scene like The Path Behind The Shops. It’s not a ‘validation’, which would entail a sort of proprietorial pride over these banal origins, a longing for ‘representation’; it’s more a joyful wonder at Shaw’s 2/3

ability to capture so precisely and positively, that which one had always marked down as an absence, at most something to be overcome or left behind. To Paint the Unutterable Shaw is also a writer, and many of his stated influences (Beckett, Lawrence) are literary rather than visual; perhaps the intensity of his paintings stems from their being a negative artefact of his literary endeavour, the stubbornly inarticulable residue which it is impossible to force into prose. ‘I paint bits of rubbish, but I don’t hark back to things like old designs for Coke or Fanta cans.’ Shaw works from his own photographs, and the informal, ‘found’ style of the paintings obviously owes much to the aesthetic of photography. But the manifest evidence of the photograph is thoroughly transformed in the act of painting so that this relation is complicated, the very nakedness of the photographic image brought into question. He is unapologetic about his own presence, or interference, in the process of image making: ‘I rarely draw anything without an emotional involvement with it’, he says. Consequently Shaw’s paintings, on anything more than the most cursory examination, are utterly resistant to being interpreted as an aleatory postmodern game, or an ironic joke. The work is not an attempt to transform the ridiculous into the sublime, the banal into the elevated, it’s not a case of excavating the intense occult forces beneath the veneer of an apparently boring suburbia. But neither is it mere nostalgia, although it is, in the proper sense of the word, a disquisition on home and the unhomely; not a longing for home but a puzzling at the relation between the arbitrary materiality and its emotionally compelling certainty. ‘The most successful paintings look out, not in: these are like me, as a kid, looking out at the world.’ Adults submit the relationship of the shared, outside world with the intensive, inner landscapes to a severe disjunction, a deceptive decision that sunders the emotional from the factual. Like Proust’s delirious navigation through time and memory, the clarity of Shaw’s reconfusion allows us to revive the world of the child for whom round the back of the garages is as magical place as any. We recover not exactly an innocence, but perhaps an autonomy anterior to the cleavage between self and world, an ability to step out into a solitary, indeterminate imagination still open and teeming with possibility; unfocussed yet dazzling; unremarkable yet luminous; a gray area. Facts are never as banal as they look. 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/insert-coins-for-toshihiro-nishikado/ INSERT COINS….for Toshihiro Nishikado - 2004 It’s the prototype of all electronically-induced audio fear, a serialist symphony of digital terror. It begins life as an occasional squared-off blip of sub-bass as the alien forms jerk lazily across the empty black sky. Ripples pass across the phalanx as the 8080 processor struggles to render them in their new positions (suggesting that the fearful acceleration as they are dispatched owes as much to technical artefact as to design). The ominous slow-motion percussion is totally consistent with the putative scenario; the aliens hang in the air, malevolent, their slow progression across and down the screen as yet a distant threat. Midway through the proceedings, your shields eroded by an increasingly relentless battery of missiles, the descending four-note phrase becomes a sort of ironic oom-pah, a muffled intimation of an advancing army’s marching song. Then suddenly you’re alone, with one surviving invader. The struggle takes on a personal aspect, the little white shape pursuing a fevered kamikaze vendetta against your beleaguered turret. And the sonic accompaniment drops all pretence of being anything but a terror tactic militating against your survival. The blocks of sound merge into each other, the manic buzz of the oversized insect descending too fast. Their vibration bristles in the fingertips of your cramp-plagued hands. A saucer glides overhead, a remote presence monitoring the status of the endgame below, an ullulating waveform accompanying its reconaissance flight. But there’s no time to target it. The boustrophedon movement that in full 1/2

phalanx seemed so stately is now an insane zigzag that doesn’t leave you a second to think. Need to calculate relative trajectories with pinpoint precision. Every pass it makes, writhing tentacles blur, closer…closer…even if you win the battle, they’ve won the war, they’ve taken over your brain. The xenovirus spreads transversally: first the twitchy feedback loop extends outside the game itself, reconstituted as a parasitical feeding mechanism with a healthy disregard for the comfort of its host (‘Many incidents of juvenile crime surrounded the release of this game. A girl was caught stealing $5000 from her parents and gangs of youths were reported to have robbed grocery stores just so they would have money to play the game.’) And then into social and economic planes (‘The Space Invaders phenomenon stunned conservative adults who were certain the games soured the minds of their youngsters. Residents of Mesquite, Texas pushed the issue all the way to the Supreme Court in their efforts to ban the illicit machines from their Bible-belt community…The game was so amazingly popular in Japan that it caused a coin shortage until the country’s Yen supply was quadrupled.’). It’s the catalyst for a new industry which within 30 years will be one of the most financially significant forces on the planet, a global stealth invasion of youth by alien xenotonic compulsions. One last explosion of random pixels and it’s over. WELL DONE EARTHLING THIS TIME YOU WIN NOW DO BATTLE WITH OUR SUPER FORCES 2/2

readthis.wtf /writing/notes-on-the-incalculable-real-and-chaitins-omega/ Notes on the Incalculable Real and Chaitin’s Omega - 2004 I.HILBERT AND GÖDEL Hilbert’s programme required that an axiomatic system be composed of axioms and rules of inference, be consistent, complete, and have an algorithm (a literally mechanisable procedure, although this virtual implication unfolds in parallel with its technical actualisation) for deciding whether or not a theorem is true (belongs in the system). The system can be thought of as a black box that takes in strings of symbols, evaluates them and returns other strings of symbols. Gödel showed the impossibilty of the completion of the Hilbert program by: 1.Demonstrating the possibility of mapping a symbolic system onto number in such a way that any symbol or string of symbols has a unique identifier (number-name) (the mapping being therefore reversible (allowing translation back to the original symbolic order). So any string of symbols s has a Gödel number G(s) 2.Thereby, propositions about the symbolic system become arithmetical propositions (propositions about relationships between numbers, or formulae which can either be true or false): ” ‘1+2’ is the beginning of the proposition ‘1+2=3’ “ becomes G[ödel number for](‘1+2’) is a factor of G(‘1+2=3’) and in general x has metamathematical relation R to z or R(x,z) can be given an arithmetical (that is, mechanical, programmatic) definition. One such purely arithmetic relationship is proof or demonstration: x proves z Dem (x,z) 3.Metamathematical characterization of variable substitution sub (m,13,m) specifies the G-number of a formula resulting from variable substitution – ‘the result of substituting 13 for variable ‘m’ in the formula whose G-number is ‘m’. This is not a formula but a naming of a number, a designator instead of carrying out the calculation. But since it designates the result of an arithmetical operation, it can itself be designated within the system. NB: if there _is_ no variable ‘m’ in the formula numbered G(m) then the result is simply the result of the formula numbered G(m) (the substitution has no effect) 4.so – 1/8

(x) ~Dem(x,z) – of all G-numbers, there is none which stand in a Dem relationship to the Godel-number z – or, of all possible formulas (strings of symbols), not one proves the formula of which z is the Gödel number. (x) ~Dem(x, sub(y,13,y)) – of all G-numbers, there is none that stand in a Dem relationship to the G-number for the formula produced by substituting 13 for variable ‘y’ in the formula whose Gödel-number is y. given the Gödel number for the above proposition n, we can construct: (x) ~Dem(x,sub(n,13,n)) – of all G-numbers, there is none that stand in a Dem relation to the G-number for the formula produced by substituting 13 for variable ‘n’ in the formula whose Gödel-number is n -” this formula denoted by n being, of course, the very same (x) ~Dem(x,sub(n,13,n)). Thus this proposition is saying that it itself is unprovable, resulting in either inconsistency or incompleteness. II.CHAITIN: FIXED POINTS AND PARADOX-AS-VIRUS Chaitin generalises on the Gödel procedure, showing how in a programming language you can construct a ‘fixed point’ (an expression which yields itself) first by creating a function that ‘quotes’ itself twice function f { given variable x, output “x” “x”;} so that applying it to itself: (f f) yields itself “quoted” as a string twice: “f” “f” forcing an evaluation of these quoted strings, however (ie running them through the system as code): eval (f f) precipitates an attempt to process the result “f” “f” as code, leading to a copy of the function ready to process itself as input: {given variable x, output “x” “x”;} {given variable x,output “x” “x”;} …or (f f) so that eval (f f) == (f f), the function yields itself or is a “fixed point”; any number of eval eval eval eval (f f) will always yield (f f). Chaitin uses a biological metaphor for this process: ‘the first f is an organism, and the second f, the one that’s copied twice, that’s the genome. In other words, the first f is an organism, and the second f is its DNA!…Just as in biology, where an organism cannot copy itself directly but needs to contain a description of itself, the self-reproducing function f cannot copy itself directly (because it cannot read itself – and neither can you [by which presumably Chaitin means that it is unable to process itself as process]). So f needs to be given a (passive) copy of itself.” 2/8

In Gödel’s argument, the proposition (x) ~Dem (x,z) – there is no formula that proves the formula denoted by G-number z needed to be given a copy of itself in the form of a numerical designator (its own G-number); this was done by the underhand method of using the substitution subroutine to specify the result of the formula-with-substitution (although there would be no actual substitution! ): (x) ~Dem(x,sub(n,13,n)) can then be seen as a viral algorithm that reproduces itself. Later on Chaitin remarks “(f f) works in an environment that has a definition for f, but that’s cheating [the analogue would be if Gödel already had at his disposal a readymade designator for the proposition]. What I want is a standalone…expression that reproduces itself. But f produces only a stand-alone version of itself, and _that_ is the actual self-reproducing expression. (f f) is like a virus that works only in the right environment (namely in the cell that it infects), because it’s too simple to work on its own.” The ‘cell environment’ is the ability of the system to interpret data as code; to interpret bits of DNA as instructions. The analogue in a programming language is the ability to evaluate a string as a programming expression (which in most programming languages is forced explicitly by the command eval(“x”)). This ability to translate from data to code is both a strength and vulnerability in programming languages and biological systems alike (it allows both for evolution and for viral corruption). For instance, if a web application contains an eval (x) statement, there is always the possibility that a user can access the x variable, allowing them access not merely to the prophylacticallyprotected variable-space in the runtime of the application but to the executing power of the programming language itself. We could compare this disastrous situation with the breaching of the Weissman barrier, meaning that the cell, rather than producing data which is ported externally to create new cells, could itself be ‘reprogrammed’ by its data. In Gödel’s system part of the ‘cell environment’ is the power of the number-designator to be both a name for an expression and a number in an expression. This was introduced in the phase of the argument where it was shown that meta-mathematical propositions could be dealt with inside the system, thereby collapsing the transcendent relationship of statements about the system to statements within the system. Chaitin argues that it is the self-replicating nature of Gödel’s argument that is the most important; the fact that he needs to devise an underhand way to make this work (arithmetizing metamathematics) is, like the actual system of Gödel numbering, incidental, despite its undeniable elegance. Given the assumption that there is such a thing as a valid-proof-checker (a minimal requirement for any axiomatic system), and a suitable medium (one in which you can talk both about expressions and evaluate them – both name and process strings – in other words, where data and code can flow into each other) a viral program will always be able to assert that its own unprovability. The details of the system do not matter at all. Abstractly, then, start by defining a statement that asserts of whatever you give to it, that the formula it represents, applied to itself, is unprovable function g {given variable “x” output ‘it is impossible to prove the formula designated by “x” “x” is unprovable’} 3/8

and then you apply it to itself: (g g) yielding it is impossible to prove the formula designated by “{function g’}” “{function g}” [this is the expression that asserts its own unprovability.] next we extract from the output the part where the output ‘names’ itself: last-two-segments-of (g g) yielding “{function g’}” “{function g}” and evaluate them eval last-two-segments-of (g g) yielding an ‘uncoated’ g applied to itself {function g} {function g} which, of course, is identical to (g g) III.TURING Turing’s argument, unlike Gödel’s, does not rely on any technical knowledge of the inside of the system and can be said to be a purer form of virus. It takes the same form – a piece of code comprises a description of the halting algorithm/proofchecker within itself: function t {given variable ‘x’ create representation “x” “x” intenally; using halting algorithm determine whether it halts; then do the opposite} once again when run on itself: turing turing yields (internally to the program, this time): “turing” “turing” if halting algorithm says the program this describes will halt then eval (“turing” “turing”) [creating an infinite loop] if halting algorithm says the program this describes will not halt then stop.[halt!] with the resulting, paradoxical, output. IV.FROM VIRUS TO OMEGA 4/8

We’ve seen how Gödel demonstrated incompleteness using a sneaky virus, and how turing’s uncomputability result cemented this by the same method, proving that there is ‘no answer’ to the halting problem and getting incompleteness as a side-effect. The mechanical immanence of process and processed is no surprise to us: after all, everything that happens on a computer is on one plane: ultimately it is all flattened onto a memory device that is a serial arrangement of binary bits. (And the halting problem is a real computational problem (how long does an operating system wait before deciding that an application has crashed?)) Rather than using an artificial device to ‘break’ axiomatic systems or to perversely break the proof-checker, Chaitin will demonstrate how one can calculate the probability of a program’s halting; and show that this probability is strictly random: there is no rule that can predict or generate it; each bit is totally disconnected from the others around it; the only way it can be produced or recorded is by producing or recording ita bit at a time; it is irreducibly, uncalculably real. He does this by considering an axiomatic system – that is, a programming language – that consists of binary strings for programs. We need to calculate, given all possible programs which halt, the probability that any given program will halt. Chaitin calls this probability Ω and defines it as Ω = Σp:U(p) halts2-|p| (Omega is equal to the summation of 2 to the minus |p| (program length) for all programs p that halt.) To pick a program at random to see whether it will halt – and we are assuming that the programs in this system are binary – you just need to toss a coin for each bit of the program. Ω is the probability that a program created randomly like this will actually do something, rather than getting into an infinite loop and never terminating. Lets say you have a list of all the programs which halt: 0001 1001110 0111000 since the probability of getting a 0 or 1 for each bit is 1/2 (like tossing a coin), the probability of getting program one is 1/24, program two 1/26 and program three 1/26. So the probability of the computer halting when running a random program, or the Ω of the system, is simply all of these probabilities added together: Ω =1/24 + 1/26 + 1/26 or, in binary: .0001 (probability of getting program one, 4 bits long) .000001 (probability of getting program two, 6 bits long) .000001 (probability of getting program three, 6 bits long) ———.000110 5/8

One important condition that Chaitin had to add is that for this to work programs must be ‘self-delimiting’. This means that no extension of a valid program is a valid program; if 001 halts, then we don’t count 0011 or 0010 or 0010000100101010. So each halting program in fact chops out a whole swathe of others. In this way, the limit case would be if the two shortest programs in a binary system: 0 1 halted: then the probability of halting would be Ω =1/21 + 1/21 or: 1 0 – 1 Ω =1 ! without the self-delimiting clause, Ω can diverge to infinity rather than converging to a probability 0 < Ω < 1. The result of this is that if we know _n_ bits of Ω , then we can predict (the probability of) a program n bits long halting. Chaitin’s algorithm for calculating Ω works like this: for every value of parameter K 1,2,3,4,5…. run every possible program up to K bits in size for K seconds. This computes a _lower bound_ on the halting probability (obviously, more accurate as K increases) – it tells you how many programs halted before K time elapsed. As K increases, Ω converges to its true value. “And as soon as the first N bits are correct, you know that you’ve encountered every program up to N bits in size that will ever halt.” (Chaitin notes: ” It should be mentioned that the stage K at which the first N bits of Ω are correct grows immensely quickly, in fact, faster than any computable function of N. “) Ω is the solution to the halting problem in its kernel form – the most highly compressed ‘answer’ that can be given to the halting question. Since each bit of Ω can only be found out by calculating it (not from any other more compact rule), each bit must be added as a separate axiom to a system that wishes to make use of it. Each bit is “true for no reason”, in the same way an axiom is – it represents a real unground of mathematics – which is worse than the regulative grounds that fundamental axioms represent (rules that form the basis of a system but have no justification). Worse than that, there are an infinite number of bits in Ω, which means an infinite number of axioms. V.SPECULATIONS… In his actual proof, Chaitin constructs a diophantine (using only natural numbers) equation that carries out this procedure, thus demonstrating that simple number theory can produce uncalculable results. He argues that this makes certain areas (at least) of mathematics quasi-empirical. But the problem now is “knowing when things are 6/8

irreducible” [We would perhaps have to go back to Kant’s 3rd critique here and say something about pattern, teleology, paley’s watch. The difficulty of defining information.] Chaitin quotes Leibniz’s Discours de métaphysique: Dieu a choisi celuy qui est… le plus simple en hypotheses et le plus riche en phenomenes [God has chosen that which is the most simple in hypotheses and the most rich in phenomena] Mais quand une regle est fort composée, ce qui luy est conforme, passe pour irrégulier [But when a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes for random] (When does a rule r for creating data d become so detailed that they are indistinguishable? Algorithmic Information Theory may be the only way to address such questions.) Chaitin’s omega, the discovery of irreducible mathematical facts, uncalculable reals, is the breakdown of the principle of sufficient reason, of the basic belief that the universe is rational, that everything has a reason other than “It’s just there”… And perhaps a partial return to experimental, empirical mathematics, against the tradition of Platonic rationality. Chaitin interestingly links this to the birth of the polis: “In ancient Greece if you wanted to convince your fellow citizens to vote with you on some issue, you had to reason with them. Which I guess is how they came up with the idea that in math you had to prove things rather than just discover them experimentally, which is all that it appears that previous cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt did.” Whereas Gödel and Turing’s results caused what we might call ‘formal shock’, their impact on actual mathematical practice was minimal (Gödel complained in a letter to his mother that his ideas had failed to have the impact in mathematics that Einstein’s had in physics). Mathematicians realised that these viral contraptions were very unlikely to come up in the course of any calculation, so they could be simply ignored. Chaitin’s contention is that his demonstration Ω heralds a more serious shock to the system; it isn’t just an assertion that formal systems can be overturned by certain methods, it’s the discovery of real mathematical entities that defy systematic rationality, so it’s more of a positive fact than the aporias of incompleteness and uncomputability. It is extremely interesting that Chaitin should quote the following, also from Leibniz: Sans les mathématiques on ne pénètre point au fond de la philosophie. Sans la philosophie on ne pénètre point au fond des mathématiques. Sans les deux on ne pénètre au fond de rien. [Without mathematics we cannot penetrate deeply into philosophy. Without philosophy we cannot penetrate deeply into mathematics. Without both we cannot penetrate deeply into anything.] What is this if not Badiou’s call to arms, the re-entanglement of mathematics and philosophy. And yet Chaitin’s speculations lead in an entirely different direction to Badiou’s platonic refoundation: or rather, where Badiou seeks to found ontology on the void of being supplemented by the unknowable excess of truth, Chaitin shows that what is in excess of the ordered system of knowledge is a seething mass of uncomputable reality that can only be brought into the system on its own terms.[2] My work on Bacon, although not initially concerned with Badiou, set out to explore an irreducible real that I believe his rationalist “materialism” cannot deal with, even explicitly rejects (as being-small-b) -” the point of indiscernibility between phenomenology and materialism (which, obviously, needs more careful formulation). But to give Badiou’s 7/8

position the credit it deserves, to avoid being consigned to the scrapheap of phenomenological pottering, I would need to show a mathematical account of real irreducible being-small-b that supercedes the platonic-ontological account of mathematics as Being-big-B and argues for a vagabond vs royal science. To make contingent materiality, rather than ‘subjectivity’, the source of excess over dead knowledge . To overturn Badiou’s mystical excess of void (which remains entirely the property of the Gödelian aporia) in favour of an overflowing of the positive real on the full BwO, a nonorganic life from outside. I believe Chaitin’s work provides the necessary tools for this, and that in this light it appears rather [3] that it’s Badiou’s position that repudiates the holocaust of mechanicity that was the enlightenment; in favour of an unknowable connection (pineal gland?) between Being and truth. And Chaitin’s speculation about a new quasi-empirical “‘biological’ complicated mathematics’ is particularly poignant given Badiou’s dismissal of biology as “that wild empiricism disguised as science”[4] (as if empirical research represented some kind of unacceptable dionysian incontinence!) Maybe the re-entanglement of philosophy and mathematics needs to go not by way of Plato but back further, to the Pythagorean brotherhood and the quasi-empirical experimentation, tracking the real of number, which had as much in common with occult numerology as with scientific rationalism. On the side of art where the irreducible real must be accessed by abandonment to automatism without reason via the diagram; so on the side of mathematics it must be accessed by abandonment to an automatism without reason via the dogged pursuit of the uncomputable. The mathematician, becoming-automated, meets the artist, becomingautomated, in the uncalculable real. This real continually leaks into the system, provides the mechanosmos with what it needs to exceed reason. [1] All of the information here is extracted (sometimes almost verbatim) from Chaitin’s many publications, all of which are available at this site in digital form. There is also a LISP interpreter and code that enables you to run versions of his proof (and Gödel’s and Turing’s) yourself. [2] This point is made brilliantly by Ray Brassier in his paper “Nihil Unbound: Remarks on Subtractive Ontology and Thinking Capitalism” in P.Hallward (ed) “Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy”, Continuum 2004, to which I am endebted for my introduction to Chaitin’s work. I don’t claim to have added anything to Ray’s argument here (apart from a more detailed run-through of the Omega algorithm), these notes are mostly just clarification for my own purposes. [3]Again, see “Nihil Unbound’. [4] Badiou “Mathematics and Philosophy – The Grand Style and the Little Style”, in “Theoretical Writings”, Continuum 2004. 8/8

readthis.wtf /writing/cross-the-great-stream/ Cross the Great Stream - 2005 Part I It’s obvious to anyone who’s tried it that the yarrow-stalk method of consulting I Ching is superior in terms of the production of a meditative state through the routine automatism of the fairly long and convoluted process of drawing stalks. The result is ‘seeded’ right at the beginning, in the sense that you could count the number of stalks in the two piles and immediately tell the result. However the long drawing-out of the consequences of the random/unconscious division of the stalks seems as important; there’s an interesting sense in which the automatism of following the trail seeded by the division, in turn ‘seeds’ the contemplative state necessary to make the next division. Anyway, I’d wondered for a long time about the probabilities involved: it seems obvious that the stalks are a more complex procedure than coins and that the chances of getting the different lines are not identical. Luckily, before being tempted into what would inevitably have been another lengthy bout of painful number-crunching, I found a summary which shows the probabilities as follows: -x- Yarrow : 1/16 Coins : 2/16 --- Yarrow : 5/16 Coins : 6/16 - - Yarrow : 7/16 Coins : 6/16 -o- Yarrow : 3/16 Coins : 2/16 Obviously, the stalks are far more ‘weighted’, and arguably more interesting for it; the slight disparity between the 7 and 8 (‐‐‐ and ‐ ‐) lines, and the radical disparity in the chances of getting the two moving lines. It’s easy to work out that (not including moving lines, that’s too much to do by hand!) there are four composite probabilities of getting the trigrams : 125/4096 (all 7s), 343/4096 (all 8s) 245/4096 (two 7s one 8) and 175/4096 (two 8s one 7) ___ ___ ___ Chhien = 5/16 * 5/16 * 5/16 = 125/4096 001111101 / 100000000000 - - - Khun = 7/16 * 7/16 * 7/16 = 343/4096 101010111 / 100000000000 1/19

- - --Chen = 7/16 * 7/16 * 5/16 = 245/4096 011100001 / 100000000000 - --- Khan = 7/16 * 5/16 * 7/16 = 245/4096 011100001 / 100000000000 --- - Kên = 5/16 * 7/16 * 7/16 = 245/4096 011100001 / 100000000000 ----- Sun = 5/16 * 5/16 * 7/16 = 175/4096 010101111 / 100000000000 --- --Li = 5/16 * 7/16 * 5/16 = 175/4096 010101111 / 100000000000 - ----Tui = 7/16 * 5/16 * 5/16 = 175/4096 010101111 / 100000000000 The composite probabilities of the hexagrams, then: Chhien = 125/4096 * 125/4096 = 15625 / 16777216 Khun = 343/4096 * 343/4096 = 117649 / 16777216 Chun = 175/4096 * 175/4096 = 30625 / 16777216 Mêng = 175/4096 * 175/4096 = 30625 / 16777216 Hsü = 175/4096 * 245/4096 = 42875 / 16777216 Sung = 125/4096 * 175/4096 = 21875 / 16777216 Shih = 343/4096 * 175/4096 = 60025 / 16777216 Pi = 343/4096 * 175/4096 = 60025 / 16777216 Hsiao Hsü= 245/4096 * 125/4096 = 30625 / 16777216 2/19

Li = 125/4096 * 245/4096 = 30625 / 16777216 Thai = 343/4096 * 125/4096 = 42875 / 16777216 Phi = 125/4096 * 343/4096 = 42875 / 16777216 Thung Jen= 125/4096 * 245/4096 = 30625 / 16777216 Ta Yu = 245/4096 * 125/4096 = 30625 / 16777216 Chhien = 343/4096 * 175/4096 = 60025 / 16777216 Yü = 175/4096 * 343/4096 = 60025 / 16777216 [....TBC.....] By pairing up the trigrams, you’d expect there to be more distinct probabilities, but surprisingly there are fewer because 175*175=245*125. But you can see that pairing up the trigrams results in huge disparities, of an order of magnitude, in the likelihood of getting (to take the worst instance) Chhien and Khun. More generally the slightly smaller probability of getting a broken line means that the more a hexagram is dominated by these receptive/female lines the less likely it is to turn up (this takes no account of the different meanings of the relative positions of the lines, of course). Part II Thinking about the process involved in the yarrow-stalk method of I Ching divination led to a problematising of the provenance of the probabilities given for each line: -x- 1/16 (0.0625) --- 5/16 (0.3125) - - 7/16 (0.4375) -o- 3/16 (0.1875) Given that the process begins with the person consulting the I Ching dividing the stalks, thus presumably providing the basis for the end result, it makes sense to ask whether any systematic factor (that is, any factor other than the specific number of stalks in each of the divided piles, which numbers are analytically tied to a specific result) could be identified as having an effect on the probabilities of obtaining the different types of line. It didn’t seem at all obvious that however unequally the pile was divided the probability distribution would remain identical. The experiment described below suggests that the division of the stalks ‘into two equal piles’ represents a ‘perfect model’ or limit of the system, a limit, moreover, from which the system has to stray in order for it to ‘work’ (the constitutive importance of human error, noise or ‘randomness’). Furthermore, it shows how the tolerated range of this straying from the ‘perfect model’ affects the probability distributions, and ultimately, the judgments obtained through this method of divination. Although ‘noise’ plays a random-like role, the amount of noise as a measurable quantity is correlated with definite changes in the system. Algorithmic Model The random seeding takes place with the removal and discarding from the entire pile of 50 stalks P of one stalk and the splitting of the remainder into two piles: so the initial domain is all (a,b) where (a+b=P) 3/19

or, I suggest, all (a,b) where (a+b=P and (.5P-x)<a<(.5P+x))) Where x is the limiting factor of how differently-sized the two piles may be (how far either may diverge from P/2 or half of the original pile size) before they are no longer to be realistically considered an intuitive ‘half-and-half’ split. I would suggest that rather than a constant, x should be proportional to the pile size, so: all (a,b) where (a+b=49 and (.5P-(P/x))<a<(.5P+(P/x))) Whether or not the variation of x has any bearing on the probability distribution of the final result is an interesting question in regard to the possibility of the person consulting the oracle’s subconsciously influencing the result (say, if the more equal the piles were, the more likely one was to obtain moving lines, or something of that nature). One of the stalks from the right pile is ‘stored’ in the left hand, following which the left pile is counted out modulo 4 (four at a time, with the remainder, <=4, being stored). At this time the total of ‘stored’ stalks is then: 1 + a mod 4 [I’m aware that this is a misuse of ‘mod’ – if anyone can suggest the right notation let me know] Next the right pile is similarly counted out and the remainder stored: 1 + a mod 4 + (b-1) mod 4 Where the possibilities are: 1+4+4, 1+2+2, 1+1+3 so either 9 or 5, with a 2/3 chance of 5. In this first count, with its extra stalk, 9 counts for 8, 5 for 4: so r1 = (1 + a mod 4 + (b-1) mod 4 ) -1 The tricky part is that 4 is considered a ‘whole’, thus it is ultimately counted as 3, and 8 a ‘double’, counted as 2. But we will deal with this later. Now we divide the remaining stalks again, giving a member of : all (a,b) where (a+b=(49-r1) and (.5P-(P/x))<a<(.5P+(P/x))) and once again: r2 = (1 + a mod 4 + (b-1) mod 4 ) -1 and a third time, where we yield a member of: all (a,b) where (a+b=(49-r1-r2)) and (.5P-(P/x))<a<(.5P+(P/x))) ending up with: 4/19

r3 = (1 + a mod 4 + (b-1) mod 5 ) -1 Our three results will be: r1-1 = 8 or 4 r2 = 8 or 4 r3 = 8 or 4 which together make up one line (which can be 6,7,8, or 9): 12 (4+4+4) = (3+3+3) => 9 16 (8+4+4) = (2+3+3) => 8 20 (8+8+4) = (2+2+3) => 7 24 (8+8+8) = (2+2+2) => 6 The order reversal (the smaller values becoming the larger) arises from the intermediate translation of 4 to 3 (“unity”) and 8 to 2 (“double”) which is an axiom of the system. The same result can easily be obtained as follows 12 - (((r1-1)+r2+r3) / 4) So, given that each subsequent line will be probabilistically independent, and assuming that x remains constant through the three draws (not unreasonable since presumably we would attribute x to the person consulting the oracle) our question will be: what is the probability of obtaining 6,7,8 or 9 with the following algorithm: F = 12 - ((r1-1)+r2+r2 / 4) given (P,x,a,b,a',b',a'',b'',r1,r2,r3) where: a+b=P and (.5P-P/x)<a<(.5P+P/x), r1 = (1 + a mod 4 + (b-1) mod 4), a'+b'=(49-r1) and (.5(P-r1))-(P-r1/x))<(P-r1)<(.5(P-r1)+(P-r1/x)), r2 = (1 + a' mod 4 + (b'-1) mod 4 ) a''+b''=(49-r1-r2)) and (.5(P-r1-r2)-(P-r1-r2/x))<(P-r1)<(.5(P-r1-r2)+(P-r1-r2/x)), r3 = (1 + a'' mod 4 + (b''-1) mod 4 ) Testing the New Model Testing this for every combinatorial possibility of a,b,a’,b’,a”,b”, for different values of x would therefore yield the probabilities for each line for each x, from which we could proceed to the combined probabilities for whole hexagrams. A perl program was written to sum results from all combinatorial possibilities given x. As might be expected, the results show that the initial division of the pile acts as the random ‘seed’; this done, the outcome is fixed. However the real question was whether the probabilities would be as stated. An initial run was tried with x=16, meaning that the size of the divided piles could not vary more than P/16 from P/2 – in the initial division this means that neither pile can be less that (49/2)-(49/16)=24.5-3=21.5 or more than (49/2)(49/16)=24.5-3=27.5, giving a total of 6 possible divisions (22/27, 23/26, 24/25, 25/24, 26/23 and 27/22). With the 5/19

disparity of the piles thus limited, the probabilities of obtaining the different lines, expressed in percentages and probabilities, are as follows: 6 Old Yin - x - 3.157 (0.3157) - suggested (0.0625) 7 Young Yang 8 Young Yin ----- 38.421 (3.8421) - suggested (0.3125) -- -- 39.473 (3.9473) - suggested (0.4375) 9 Old Yang - o - 18.947 (1.8947) - suggested (0.1875) As can be seen, the relationship between these probabilities follows proportionally that suggested, but the fit is by no means exact. This once again returns us to the intuition that the role of x is non-trivial, and that the probabilities given were the result of fixing x. Modifying the program to iterate x from 20 down to 2 (that is, from P/20 to P/2) yielded a matrix of the probabilities of obtaining each type of line given these different values of x. The results are surprising. Although some noise could be expected in the progression, due to the effect of rounding to the “nearest stalk”, the graph below shows clear divergences as x drops. [graph lost in the mists of time, sorry] Of course, our limit case of x=2 is unrealistic (we can safely assume that no-one, asked to split a pile of 49 stalks in half, would split them into two piles of 48 and 1 stalks respectively), but the data shows that a significant divergence between 7 and 8 (yin and yang) lines begins much earlier, at around x=15. This value of x describes a situation where a disparity of 49/15=3.26 stalks between divided piles would be tolerated, a level of ‘human error’ that is not at all unreasonable to expect (indeed, arguably the whole system depends on such human ‘noise’). Moreover, the probability of obtaining a 6 (Old Yin) line, the least probable outcome, actually doubles from 2 to 4 percent between x=20 and x=14, a very significant shift. The obvious conclusion from the data is that x plays a non-trivial role in the distribution of probabilities when using the yarrow-stalk method of I Ching divination. It is important to note that what has been demonstrated is not merely that the division of the stalks acts as the ‘random seed’ for the judgment: this much is obvious. The significant result has been the revealing of a continuous, systematic change in the distribution of probabilities correlated with a variable that could be a possible candidate for subconscious influence. For instance, a line of interpretation that could be developed is that a mind in turmoil is more conducive to a disparate split, so increasing the likelihood of obtaining the Old Yin and Young Yang lines. The results suggest positioning the given probabilities for the I Ching system within a larger field of ‘possible systems’, with different values of x, and different values of P also. In this expanded context, the probabilities would represent the basic, continuously variable quantities of the system, with their distribution being limited by the choice of x and P. The divergences shown above would form a local feature of this expanded system. (We might want to suggest a range of x that is to be considered ‘realistic’. One issue that needs to be addressed is the fact that as x increases, it becomes increasingly possible that one of the piles will fail to yield any line, because it contains too few stalks, which may skew the results. That said, however, the point of divergence at x=15 would surely fall within such a ‘realistic’ range.) The Hexagrams Re-Ordered 6/19

The real question is whether the divergences in the distribution of probabilities relate to any cogent change in the sorts of hexagrams, and therefore judgments, likely to result. What remains then, is to process the probabilities of the hexagrams again, this time factoring in different values of x and if possible including moving lines. The results from those values of x corresponding to the significant divergence points of the data will then be examined to see the results of these divergences in the judgments. Part III Full results (machine-processed, but programmed by me so it still might be wrong ;)) of the yarrow-stalk I Ching, ordered by probability (and secondarily by value).1 (Meanwhile please note that my original post had several errors, but the point still stands that the two ‘poles’ of K’un and Ch’ien are statistically separated by an order of magnitude when using the yarrow stalks, whereas using the coins they would have exactly the same probability of turning up. Hence I would suggest the use of coins has to be regarded as an degraded mode of access to the I Ching that gives the false impression of the absence of internal systemic bias or difference.) The asymmetrical probability of obtaining yin or yang lines has as its consequence a rather nice asymmetrical clustering of the probabilities of these binary values occurring: {63} 117649 / hexagrams with only broken lines 16777216 {62,61,59,55,47,31} 84035 / hexagrams with one whole line 16777216 {60,58,57,54,53,51,46,45,43,39,30,29,27,23,15} 60025 / hexagrams with two whole lines 16777216 {56,52,50,49,44,42,41,38,37,35,28,26,25,22,21,19,14,13,11,7} 42875 / hexagrams with three broken, three whole lines 16777216 {48,40,36,34,33,24,20,18,17,12,10,9,6,5,3} 30625 / hexagrams with two broken lines 16777216 {32,16,8,4,2,1} 21875 / hexagrams with one broken line 16777216 {0} 15625 / hexagrams with only whole lines 16777216 The same clustering applied to the hexagram’s order numbers in the book: {2} {24,7,15,16,8,23} {19,36,46,51,40,62,3,29,39,45,27,4,52,35,20} {11,54,55,32,60,63,48,17,47,51,41,22,18,21,64,56,42,59,53,12} {34,5,58,49,28,26,38,30,50,61,37,57,25,28,33} {43,14,9,10,13,44} {1} Hexagram Name // Binary // Value // Order // Probability ___ ___ 7/19

___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ K'un (The Receptive) 63 2 117649/16777216 (approx 1/142) ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ Fu (Returning) 62 24 84035/16777216 (approx 1/199) ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ Shih (The Army) 61 7 84035/16777216 (approx 1/199) ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ Ch'ien (Modesty) 59 15 84035/16777216 (approx 1/199) ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Yu (Harmony) 55 16 84035/16777216 (approx 1/199) ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ 8/19

___ ___ ___ ___ Pi (Union) 47 8 84035/16777216 (approx 1/199) _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Po (Falling Apart) 31 23 84035/16777216 (approx 1/199) ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ Lin (Approach) 60 19 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ Ming I (Darkening of the Light) 58 36 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ Sheng (Ascending) 57 46 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ Chen (Thunder) 54 51 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) 9/19

___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ Hsieh (Removing Obstacles) 53 40 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ Hsiao Kuo (Small Excesses) 51 62 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ Chun (Initial Difficulty) 46 3 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ K'an (The Perilous Pit) 45 29 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ Chien (Arresting Movement) 43 39 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ 10/19

___ ___ ___ ___ Ts'ui (Gathering Together) 39 45 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ I (Nourishment) 30 27 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ Meng (Youthful Inexperience) 29 4 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ Ken (Mountain) 27 52 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Chin (Progress) 23 35 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Kuan (Contempation) 15 20 60025/16777216 (approx 1/279) 11/19

___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ T'ai (Peace) 56 11 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ Kuei Mei (The Marrying Maiden) 52 54 42875/1677721 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ Feng (Abundance) 50 55 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ Heng (Perseverance) 49 32 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ Chieh (Regulation) 44 60 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ 12/19

___ ___ _______ Chi Chi (Completion) 42 63 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ Ching (A Well) 41 48 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ Sui (Following) 38 17 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ K'un (Oppression) 37 47 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ Hsien (Influence) 35 51 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ Sun (Decrease) 28 41 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) 13/19

_______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ Pi (Adornment) 26 22 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ Ku (Arresting Decay) 25 18 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ Shih Ho (Biting Through) 22 21 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ Wei Chi (Before Completion) 21 64 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ Lu (Travelling Stranger) 19 56 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ 14/19

___ ___ _______ I (Increase) 14 42 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ Huan (Dispersion) 13 59 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ Chien (Gradual Progress) 11 53 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ P'i (Stagnation) 7 12 42875/16777216 (approx 1/391) ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ _______ Ta Chuang (Power of the Great) 48 34 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ Hsu (Waiting) 40 5 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) 15/19

___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ Tui (Joy) 36 58 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ Ko (Revolution) 34 49 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ Ta Kuo (Excess) 33 28 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ Ta Ch'u (The Great Taming Force) 24 26 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ K'uei (Disunion) 20 38 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ 16/19

___ ___ _______ Li (Clinging) 18 30 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ Ting (The Cauldron) 17 50 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ _______ Chung Fu (Inmost Sincerity) 12 61 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ _______ Chia Jen (The Family) 10 37 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ ___ ___ Sun (Gentle Penetration) 9 57 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ _______ Wu Wang (Correctness) 6 25 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) 17/19

_______ _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ ___ ___ Sung (Conflict) 5 28 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) _______ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ ___ ___ Tun (Retreat) 3 33 30625/16777216 (approx 1/547) ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ _______ _______ Kuai (Removing Corruption) 32 43 21875/16777216 (approx 1/766) _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ _______ Ta Yu (Great Possession) 16 14 21875/16777216 (approx 1/766) _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ _______ _______ Hsiao Ch'u (The Taming Force) 8 9 21875/16777216 (approx 1/766) _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ 18/19

_______ _______ Lu (Treading Carefully) 4 10 21875/16777216 (approx 1/766) _______ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ _______ T'ung Jen (Fellowship with Men) 2 13 21875/16777216 (approx 1/766) _______ _______ _______ _______ _______ ___ ___ Kou (Coming to Meet) 1 44 21875/16777216 (approx 1/766) _______ _______ _______ _______ _______ _______ Ch'ien (The Creative) 0 1 15625/16777216 (approx 1/1073) 19/19

readthis.wtf /writing/counter-insurgency-axiomatic/ Counter-Insurgency Axiomatic - 2005 0. The following axioms constitute the RULESET of the GAME 1. The PARAMETERS of the GAME are U (terrain upper limit) L (terrain lower limit) D (process divisor) T (catastropheperiodicity) S (Number of counters to start with) 2. The GAME consists of the PARAMETERS, several PLAYERS, POPULATIONS, and the GAMESPACE. 3. IMPLEMENTATIONS of the GAME consist of the GAME together with PARAMETER VALUES, MODES OF ADJACENCY, rules for the granting and revocation of access to MODES OF ADJACENCY to PLAYERS, and a DIAGRAM. 4. Any number of PLAYERS may join at any CLICK in the game. 5. Each PLAYER who joins the GAME begins with a virtual population of quantity S. 6. The first dimension of GAMESPACE are a series of TERRAINS indexed by numbers beginning with L and generated by the rule n’=n+1 where n'<U 7. A TERRAIN has the capacity to contain any number of POPULATIONS of any quantity 8. ADJACENT TERRAINS are those terrains which are related one to the other by the PRIMARY MODE OF ADJACENCY T2=T1+1 or by any MODE OF ADJACENCY introduced in a given IMPLEMENTATION. 9. Every PLAYER has access to some or all of the available MODES OF ADJACENCY and MODES OF ADJACENCY may be granted to or revoked from PLAYERS. 10. The second dimension of GAMESPACE is articulated as a series of CLICKS indexed by numbers beginning at 1, generated by the rule n’=n’+1, and with no upper limit. 1/3

11. The passage from one CLICK to its successor is effected by the discrete occurrence of an ACTION or a CATASTROPHE within the TERRAINS, resulting in a transformation of the GAMESPACE. 12. ACTIONS are either DEPLOYMENTS, MIGRATIONS, or ATTACKS. 13. A DEPLOYMENT occurs when a PLAYER places his POPULATION of S COUNTERS into a TERRAIN. A PLAYER can DEPLOY a POPULATION only into an TERRAIN empty of other POPULATIONS. 14. A MIGRATION occurs when a PLAYER moves some or all of a POPULATION from one TERRAIN to another ADJACENT TERRAIN. When a POPULATION MIGRATES from TERRAIN A to ADJACENT TERRAIN B, it constitutes a new POPULATION. The results of a MIGRATION are: – the POPULATION suffers an attrition of sqr-rt ((total alien POPULATION of TERRAIN A)+(TERRAIN B number + total alien POPULATION of TERRAIN B))/D 15. Only one POPULATION per PLAYER may occupy a TERRAIN at a given CLICK. Further POPULATIONS moved or deployed into the TERRAIN will merge with the PLAYER’S resident POPULATION in that TERRAIN. 16. Any number of PLAYERS may occupy a TERRAIN with their POPULATIONS at a given CLICK. 17. A player can ATTACK an alien POPULATION in a given TERRAIN with his own POPULATION within that TERRAIN. The results of an ATTACK are: – The defenders POPULATION will suffer an attrition of (sqr-rt attackers POPULATION size)/D – The attackers POPULATION will suffer an attrition of (sqr-rt (defenders POPULATION size + TERRAIN number) /D 18. CATASTROPHES are of one type only, the GROWTH CATASTROPHE. The GROWTH CATASTROPHE occurs after the occurrence of T ACTIONS. During the GROWTH CATASTROPHE, all POPULATIONS occupying a TERRAIN within the GAMESPACE are augmented by sqr-rt (POPULATION size / (sqr-rt TERRAIN number)-1)/D 19.POPULATIONS augmented by CATASTROPHES or diminished by ACTIONS may include fractional values. These fractional values will not be counted in ATTACK ACTIONS and cannot be MIGRATED. They will, however, be counted in further CATASTROPHES. 20.If a fractional POPULATION is left on its own in a TERRAIN it immediately diminishes to nothing. 21. At any time a PLAYER may broadcast a freeform MESSAGE using ASCII characters to all other PLAYERS. The MESSAGE has no immediate effect on any dimension of the GAMESPACE. 22. Every PLAYER has access to the HISTORY which details the ACTIONS and CATASTROPHES that occur in all 2/3

CLICKS previous to the current CLICK, along with their numerical outcomes. HISTORY does not, however, include MESSAGES. 23. This ends the RULESET for the GAME 24. The following axioms constitute the IMPLEMENTATION known as DECAPLEX-1 25. The PARAMETER-VALUES are U=1000 L=0 D=3 T=9 S=100. 26. The MODES OF ADJACENCY are : T2=T1+1 (“Creep +”) T2=T1-1 (“Creep -“) T2=T1+10 (“Plumb +”) T2=T1-10 (“Plumb -“) 27. All PLAYERS are granted access to all MODES OF ADJACENCY. There is no revocation of MODES OF ADJACENCY. 28. The DIAGRAM for this IMPLEMENTATION articulates the first (TERRAIN) dimension of the GAMESPACE as a grid of numbered TERRAINS set out as follows: n+9 n+10 n+11 n-1 n n+1 n-11 n-10 n-9 and the second (CLICK) dimension of GAMESPACE as successive revelation in chronological time. 29. This ends the IMPLEMENTATION conditions for DECAPLEX-1 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/of-the-refrain-tramp-with-orchestra/ Of the Refrain: Tramp with Orchestra - 2005 I am eternally grateful to Robert Elms for introducing me to Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. To hear this piece of music, so extraordinary in itself, emerge from the radio one morning was a truly astonishing experience. Elms apparently made a principle of playing the piece a couple of times every year, and the station was always inundated by listeners phoning up in tears asking for the title of the piece. Hearing it was a ‘life-changing experience’ not in the sense that it led to any momentous decisions or sudden realisations, but simply that it divided time into a distinct before and after, hearing it altered you somehow. It was not actually for some years that I found the CD, and earlier this year I was lucky enough to see Bryars conducting a live performance of one of the very few pieces of 20th-century orchestral music that have touched me in any way. In 1971, Bryars had isolated a small loop of tape from the offcuts of a documentary he had done the sound for, about the vagrant population who lived in the ramshackle ‘cardboard city’ in the centre of the roundabout at Waterloo. This, of course, was, until they were evicted and replaced in the centre of the roundabout by an Imax cinema, an architecturally null steel-and-glass number, and almost always empty of custom, a real symbol of (as the marketing has it) LondOn (presumably capital of Cool Britannia). Having left a tape loop of one of the tramps giving an impromptu rendering of a (still unidentified, and possibly extemporised) hymn, playing in his studio, he returned five minutes later to find the normally lively room unaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual, and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping. I was puzzled until I realised that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man’s unaccompanied singing. It was obvious that, if his idea of creating an orchestral piece around this repeated phrase was to work, it would have to be treated with great sensitivityin order not to overwhelm whatever subtle magic was frozen forever in the medium of those few seconds of magnetic tape. Jesus blood never failed me yet Never failed me yet Jesus blood never failed me yet This one thing I know For he loves me so It is hard to describe the piece (simply the tapeloop, repeated for 20 minutes, and accompanied by an orchestral score) without it sounding religiose or sentimental. Or just a curious piece of avantgarde nonsense. More remarkable, then, that it is none of these things. It became Bryars first great success and set the course for all of his work to date, with its huge sensitivity to sonic texture and its refined harmonic sensibility regardless of the combination of media he uses (the choice never owes anything to modishness or technophilia, he often uses new technology but much of his work it is simply orchestral). Bryars does not studiedly avoid harmony or melody (unlike many of his new music peers) but has developed a characteristic and sophisticated way of enrichening it and 1/4

delicately building up harmonic textures through impressionistic washes of sound (bringing to mind that other Engish master of sonic impressionism, Delius) whilst preserving the essentially tonal nature of his craft. He shares this attitude with Erkki-Sven Tüür, an Estonian composer whose pieces Passion and Illusion Bryars included along with Jesus’ Blood on his programme at the RFH. As Tüür says: the world of modern composers is divided between two poles…there are composers who are writing tonal, quasitonal or modal music and…composers who are very rational. What I’m trying to do is connect these two worlds in a single composition so that it’s not a mixture but a structurally-felt and built musical totality. It is a similar outlook that makes Bryars one of the few composers of “new music” who is immediately listenable by the untrained ear. The Novelty of Monotony While much of the twentieth-century music, popular and avant-garde, that is built on the tape loop and its technological successor sampling, has been concerned primarily with the disclocating effects of brutally cutting and repeating found sounds, Bryars took an entirely different path. The vastly predominant form of the use of found sound is to submit it to a regular metric beat, ironically counterpointing its ipseic idiosyncrasy, its meaning or sense, with its new role as abstract sonic building material. Few have taken the more difficult route of following those idiosyncrasies, pursuing that sense, through repetition. So while Steve Reich’s repetition pieces such as ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ cut human voices into metrical segments, making pulsing, inhuman squawks of his street corner preacher, Bryars takes a complete musical sung phrase and builds an orchestral piece around the intricate peculiarities of its meaning, diction, timbre and inexact rhythm. This marks out Bryars as one of the few artists to have stood the demand of the 20th century on the (nonconceptual) artist: to craft the manifest inevitability of the work of art from the mass of recorded fragments, rendered contextually senseless, that constitutes our situation, rather than cynically redoubling that desolate situation. To make a symphony from accident. Where Reich’s work has a kinship with the cold, fascinating mechanicity of Pop Art, we might call Bryars a fellow of the lyrical, malerisch Francis Bacon, a painter who created inevitability from accident, either in the shape of the informality and visual artefact of a photographs, Muybridge’s images of bodies caught in motion; or, ultimately, from the random play of the matter of paint itself, whose suggestions he monitored with attentive eye. More Pop than Pop For me at the time, this idea related to both Pop Art and Minimal Art: a kind of non-abstract repetition but with emotional overtones. However I soon found that Jesus Blood Never Failed me Yet was far too complex and rich a resource for such a simple idea. Indeed, the project immediately exceeded the remit of Pop Art: for where pop art inserts found images into a strictly metric rhythm, thus amputating their soft edges, sawing off meaning, Bryars is engaged in a far more subtle practice. His route to sonic abstraction is both less brutal and more rewarding. Instead of an easy dehumanisation through stark metricisation and mechanisation, he allows the voice its natural periodicity, and builds his score around its every detail, calling attention to the traits, the timbre, of this one human voice, captured at one moment in time. 2/4

The piece begins with the voice alone. The gently cresting, lightly inflected melody punctuated by the blunt pauses of the word blood. Other, indecipherable voices flutter in the background of the field recording. The hymn feels like a faltering attempt at flight (we cannot tell how much the trembling in the voice is the man’s own, how much an artefact of the worn-out tape), with each never failed a wavering, attenuated arc, each yet an exhausted respite from the effort. And the strangely cheerful, almost humorous curling of the words I know, followed by the deliberate speed of the last line, which then fades into silence; and the whole begins again. Bryars’ characteristically rich but oblique, subtly interlacing chords wash around the voice, buoying it up without overwhelming it. A lesser composer, more nervous of the monotony of repetition, might have had the accompaniment swell and hush in counterpoint to the vocal loop, but not Bryars, who puts his trust in the sonic and musical depth of the frail cycle of words. The orchestral score underlines its unusual authority and the faltering inexactitude of its rhythm, even showing its fidelity by petering out at the end of each repetition, together with the voice, to return again in another repetition. The accompaniment, then, is allowed no liberties. As Bryars says there is an innate, untrained musicality in the old man’s voice. And it this that the piece explores, doing nothing more than developing what is already present. Bryars background is in jazz, and one way of understanding his approach in Jesus’ Blood is to understand the tiny snatch of song as a ‘standard’ which Bryars is approaching from shifting harmonic angles. He uses the hymn ‘Autumn’ similarly in The Sinking of the Titanic, applying the jazz principles of harmonic exploration to this methodist ‘standard’, approaching it from slowly kaleidoscopically-changing harmonic perspectives. We could say that his intimate knowledge of jazz explains Bryars’ persistent belief that there is always more to a simply melody than meets the ear, and his consequent refusal to abandon tonality even in its most apparently obsolete form, the popular hymn. Because for jazz, the very simplest melodic pattern, the most mawkish popular tune, constitutes an inexhaustible potential. Much of Bryars’ work also shares the brooding, oblique harmonic textures of film scores, and in fact the Jesus’ Blood tape loop proved to be the coincidental element that completed an idea Bryars already had for a piece inspired by film: For some time, I had had the idea of making a piece of music which repeated in a gradually incremental was but which had something of the emotional tone of the late 1950s American war films…I had in mind in particular the end of a film…where we hear the distant sound of the Mormon tabernacle choir humming….as the faces of the dead heroes appear superimposed on the clouds above the desert. It is entirely typical of Bryars’ approach that he would set out to evoke, to distil and purify, a nameless, fleeting emotion: an emotion, moreover, made possible only by the medium of film. It is this that makes him a truly contemporary composer. And although as he says Jesus’ Blood overpowered this initial conception and turned it into something far more ambitious, it entirely succeeds in realising this filmic vision. Since the tramp’s voice is recognisably English, recognisably from London even, in my mind it takes on more of the spirit of an imaginary closing sequence of a monochrome Dickens film adaptation of the 30s, or a wartime kitchen-sink drama, the camera slowly backing away from the family now reunited around the fireside after their tribulations; gliding back through the glass panes of the window; into the street where the snow swirls down beneath the gas lamps. With the camera still gradually rising, the shot would take into its compass the whole street, with a few people hurriedly crossing with armfuls of presents, and finally the whole snow-shrouded, silent, sleeping city, with its sooty chimneys belching smoke, its snowcapped roofs, its thousands of inhabitants “each with their own story”. Such a valedictory climax might last for thirty seconds, as a choir, of the sort Bryars had been so struck by, joins the theme music, swelling into 3/4

a crescendo, and…roll credits. But Bryars concentrated patience has this slow elevation last for the best part of an hour (with each version since 1971’s vinyl LP, Bryars extends the length of the piece to the maximum length of each new recording medium). The listener has ample time to explore the richness of this celluloid emotion, guided by the gradually transforming orchestral accompaniment to what has now become, in my imaginary soundtrack, a peculiar christmas carol; emphasising our implication in the universal struggle of joy and sorrow, the preponderance of the latter meaning that simply continuing takes a measure of the same faith or absurd hope expressed in the tramp’s song. The endlessly-repeated cyclical journey of the old mans voice is the fabric of tragedy, the sound of the wheel of fate in its turning. A perceptive comment on Amazon.com pinpoints my film reference perfectly, saying : Critics might say that what we are doing is adding cheap Hollywood (or Ealing) imagery to the music. It is to Bryars’ credit (and again perhaps this is due to his involvement with jazz) that he realises that ‘the potency of cheap song’ is a worthy object of concentrated investigation, of development. Finally, let us distinguish once more Bryars use of the mechanically-repeated phrase from the dominant, metric model. The voice in Bryars piece exceeds the human, not through its subjection to an external machine and reduction to ready-material, but through an appreciation of its own molecular grain, and the peculiar relation of this consistency to our ears, its musicality in other words. The piece is thus an inquisition into music itself, music as infinitely complex, still-unanswered question. It is defamiliarisation through total absorption, not dislocation. The loop as a magnification device, an intensifier. Again, we can refer to Bacon, who ultimately had such regard and such a singular passion for the human form, who was able to delve into the body so deeply that he showed its inhumanity, its constitutive suffering, its untapped power and its brokenness. Bacon knew that the photographs he was so fascinated by exposed the vulnerability of the temporal, the pain, in a trapped glare, of being lacerated by a slice in time, isolated and consigned to eternal repetition. How to address, augment, intensify, the uncanny images of ‘ourselves’ caught in the particles of a recording surface, was one of the challenges of the twentieth century artist. With the ironic evidence of our absurdity reproduced and distributed on a massive scale, it was an act of great audacity to reassert that artistic synthesis stll had anything to add, and few had the vigour to make this assertion. Bryars met the challenge, and if tragedy represents the keenest attunement we can attain with the irremediably faulty human instrument, he managed to capture its resonance here as fully as anyone, with a contemporaneity and a technical subtlety that is still not fully appreciated. He proved that we do not yet know what music can do, even in its simplest forms. That the vast compass of the emotions, their extent and their recombination, remains for the most part uncharted. The rhythm of his vocal line may be erratic and there is considerable irony in the relationship between what he is singing, and his circumstances at the time. But for me there is great poignanccy in his voice and, though I do not share the simple optimism of his faith, I am still touched by the memory of my first encounter with what Grainger would call the “human-ness” of his voice, and through this piece I try to give it new life Let me do you the same favour as that errant DJ did for me: buy this CD, sit down, turn off the lights, if you have loved one(s) insist that they do the same: Listen through the whole piece without interruption. Let yourself be altered by it. 4/4

readthis.wtf /writing/the-gutter-life-ungilded-studies-for-a-portrait-of-adrian-maddox/ The Gutter Life Ungilded : Studies for a Portrait of Adrian Maddox 2005 It is he who prescribes the location; the rendezvous is presented as something of an esoteric initiation rite. For the New Piccadilly is one of those select few establishments that exert a powerful emotional hold on the Maddox psyche. Resonating centres of a mysterious force that the corporate world seems determined to pulverize into inexistence. Adrian Maddox dedicates an increasingly large proportion of his time to preaching their salvation, and doggedly cataloguing their decline. Fings ain’t what they used to be 1/8

He has been called ‘the Pevsner of mid-century cafe architecture’ and ‘a Daniel Farson for the post-Nathan Barley generation’—Pevsner being the tireless notary of English architecture, and Farson being, of course, the writer whose dogged adhesion to the periphery of 50s bohemia made him the foremost cultural chronicler of Francis Bacon’s Soho. Maddox leaves alone the churches and monasteries—his monomaniac speciality is the classic English (but invariably immigrant-run) working mens cafe, the singlehanded excavation of whose history the now vast and labyrinthine Classic Cafes website celebrates. And with his messianic fervour for the world of sugarpourers and tea urns he also has the edge over Pevsner, the aridity of whose prose alone renders it distinguishable from ditchwater. Meanwhile, although he has perfected the dishevelled enthusiasm and shows promising signs of a genuinely Farsonian binge-bloated waxy pallor, half a century after the heyday of bohemian Soho few artists of note make themselves (and their money) available for all-night champagne and oyster bunfights. This constitutes no inhibition to the Maddox narrative, however: for he is a periphery unto himself, whirled in an eccentric orbit about his own ego, the gravitational force of which is so pronounced that on occasion (and doubtless intentionally) the man will seem to have actually produced by sheer force of will the people and places that inspire his fervid delirium. To say of his presence in the Piccadilly, the rightly celebrated Denman Street establishment that serves as cathedral to his seedy caff-worshipping cult, that he ‘acts like he owns the place’, would be severely to understate the case. It doesn’t take long, after he has welcomed us to his fabled ‘office’—a cramped corner booth flanked by two worn wooden benches, around a slab of vintage yellow formica—before his dervish ranting in support of the proper iconic status both of himself and of his caffological charges begins to make it seem that this imperfectly-preserved formica palace might actually be a figment of Maddox’s own tea-drenched cranium, dandy proprietor Lorenzo a pure product of his HTML-addled post-literary imagination. Among the welter of weighty questions thrown up by this feat of trompe l’oeil psychotopography: which came first, classic cafes or Classic Cafes? How has Maddox singlehandedly managed to drag the shiny happy network technology of the dotcom revolution into a lowlife slough of wilful despond at the same time as raising modest establishments such as the Piccadilly to the status of cherished masterpieces? Is it all an exercise in postmodern fetishism, retro chic; is it just one lonely man’s obsession; has he genuinely managed to eke out the dying breath of british bohemia for another generation, or is he a deluded hyperreal puppeteer trying to make the corpse of cafe society dance? And why does this tea taste vaguely fishy? (Some light —albeit of an apocryphal nature—is shed on this last by the legend that the Piccadilly boasts its own exclusive water supply, drawn from one of the ancient subterranean sources of the Thames.) Non domandare all’oste se ha buon vino Retiring further west to chew over these conundra for a while, sheltering from the rain in Shepherd’s cafe in Mayfair (yet to be awarded with the Maddox imprimateur), we return to the Piccadilly to find a celebration underway, albeit one whose occasional pretext is unconvincing (an unspecified, but presumably successful, Harley Street medical 2/8

procedure for the grand homme of the establishment). Nevertheless, any doubts soon take their leave as the effects of Lorenzo’s proprietary (chemically formulated?) Italian cava begin to tell on our party. Shadowy acquaintances make fleeting appearances on the benches, some testifying to the media currency of Maddox’s current incarnation (a journo working up a piece on the caffista for the Grauniad), some recalling past adventures in the ‘creative industries’ (an adman with a fetish for military uniform taking a risotto break from editing M&S commercials). Maddox and Englishmen Diners (tired businessmen, japanese tourists, unemployed actors) look up testily from their ham egg and chips as the champion of cafe culture launches into another stream of spluttering, undirected profanity, whilst Lorenzo, cravat unruffled, looks on with the resigned gaze of a indulgent dog owner watching an scrofulous cur scrape its arse along the ground in mixed company. Occasionally, between completing the crossword, maintaining the ambience (Classic FM with a switch to Radio 4 for The Archers) and teatowelling the china, he will drop in a well-timed bit of banter. There is undoubted mutual profit here—the two constitute a mutual theatre of parasitism, Maddox lolling in the glory of the inflated legendary status he has created for the establishment and its proprietor, Lorenzo pulling in the punters off the back of the Classic Cafes mediaplex franchise. However loath one might be to add to the unhealthy skein of myth, self-aggrandisement and misinformation that Maddox has woven around himself, it must be admitted that there is something about the man. As the evening wears on, we finally realise just what it is: a swarm of Lorenzo’s treasured drosophila piccadiliensis (a variant breed cultivated in isolation at the cafe over decades and now in great demand in laboratories worldwide), attracted by the tepid organic fug of overbrewed tea that surrounds the still-unflagging author: they are feeding on his words. 3/8

The waiters in their outsize busboy uniforms skate elegantly around the aisles bearing canneloni and risotto (although Classic Cafes dogma has it that ambiance far outweighs food in importance, both are highly recommended). They grin warily at the unshaven maestro’s anecdote recitations. Behind the counter where the imposing electric-pink espresso machine fumes silently, a copy of The Book itself is displayed under the solid wall of postcards whose faded technicolor array makes for something like a cheery holiday version of Bacon’s ideogramlittered studio floor. Equally Baconian is the visual rhythm of the evening, heightened by the freely-flowing cava: the subsonic rumble of central London, forgotten like a bad dream but still grinding on beyond the chairs that block the doorway; the backwards-read neon sign grunting its monosyllabic EATS into the unconscious, bleeding into peripheral vision insistently like a premonition of a thumping headache; the hand-drafted bezier-curves of the formica twitching like a hair in the gate on a bad porno movie, or the broken capillaries of a bloodshot eyeball; and above it all (in volume if nothing else) the sheer, waxing torrents of Maddox verbiage (thus Lorenzo: ‘he’s so domineering after a bit of pomagne’). Randomly-batted disconnected phraselets chase each other raggedly across the sticky formica (‘It’s a sort of erotic dunking…they’re expecting a horde of locust bug-beasts…I’ve got a deerpark right outside my door…’) Piccadilly Palare Egged on, the potato-peeler from Pisa regales us with soho mythemes: Lollobrigida, Burroughs and the cheesecake, etc. And reveals the origin of the ‘no drinks without food’ notice still displayed amongst the theatrical posters: to keep out riffraff with rough trade in tow: only gentlemen who could afford to sit down and eat were allowed to play pocket billiards under the tables of the New Piccadilly. However, Denman Street’s most-photographed man assures us of his discretion: not even muckraker Maddox has managed to get names out of Lorenzo Marioni. 4/8

Welcome relief comes as, stepping through a threadbare plastic ribbon curtain into the spartan facilities at the rear of the premises, the whole cacophony is heard anew, smeared and muted as if monitored through a long subterranean rock tunnel, or bounced off the bare walls of a prison corridor, as in the opening sequence of Porridge. I almost want to lock myself in, but I know however long I wait, he’ll still be out there, calling for more cava. Caffsploitation Indeed, on returning, the pressure of the Maddox ‘wall of bull’ hasn’t let up: Now a bellowingly-inebriated Willam Hague soundalike who avowedly ‘gets all his clothes from Peacock’s’, now a righteous saviour of our heritage and rogue semiotician who ‘used to have vicious arguments about logocentrism’ with his flatmate. We hear of the furious media and letter-writing campaign to pressure English Heritage into listing this fine establishment. But there’s the rub: Is Maddox about to be recuperated, a part of the heritage industry? Will caff-culture eat itself? Will he be asked back after his first appearance on the Late Show? Shake hands with the heritage minister? 5/8

A mythmaker on a cottage-industrial scale, Maddox has no compunction about getting high on his own supply of fullenglish and formica. He’s a conservationist who fetishises decay, and so neccesarily on a trajectory of cultural autoasphyxia. He fakes up rollieflex portraits with a FinePix and photoshop, and he calls it Art. He has fraternised with the enemy, hooked new media up to old bohemia to synthesize authenticity in HTML, all the while affirming a cast-iron categorical distinction between his own lonely battle and the ongoing march of theme-park cultural reclamation. Unconvinced, Iain Sinclair has him down on his hitlist, right below Peter Ackroyd. Right now, freeze-framed between the bowing ceiling panels and the buttercup formica, he is living in a strange place somewhere between wholesale adoption by the style troops and chronic outsider intransigence. It’s an uneasy place, it’s a queasy place: it’s exactly where he belongs. 6/8

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readthis.wtf /writing/london-in-black-white-hex-ica-remix/ London in Black & White : Hex ICA remix - 2005 Wattle one century, timber the next, then brick, then stone, then brick again, then concrete. Building new foundations on old ruins. And sprawling out across the fields when there haven’t been enough ruins to go around. In the result it’s been growing up as well as growing, and it must be about mature by now. Even a bit past its prime, perhaps. Beginning to go back on itself, as it were, may be.1 If there be ‘true’ londoners, they are to be pitied Born into its cradle, the city a true home, a negligible backdrop, a place of comfort; Those who feel equal to its sophistication. Only those from outside discover the real London (‘Real’ not ‘true’—a distinction that must be upheld: A never-complete becoming, irrational number As opposed to a supposedly-known entity). We do not presume to say those who are born and bred cannot attain this state; only that they also must cultivate alienation, throw aside the blanket of homeliness they cast over the city. Must accept they too share the utter dislocation Of which London is the perpetual cinema. 1/10

Equally, the outsider, drawn ineluctably into the phantom web of workaday normality must free himself, by gargantuan efforts of will; Wrest himself loose, flee back into vagabondage Only the immigrant is wide-eyed and anxious enough to imbibe this raw chaos a little. Like the smog that catches in his throat, first of all an assault, then a queasy symbiosis in which he begins to exude London and then London begins to penetrate into his darkest dreams Black and white: Bill Brandt’s study in monochrome. Francis Bacon under the gaslamp, Hampstead Heath. The heath jumpcuts abruptly to african scrub and blurred animal forms heaving in the heat. Burrowing below-ground where light makes shadows flesh, staggering out of the Colony Room smog, veering like a breached longship. Vagabond navigation, reading the signals through vapour of dipso nights. 2/10

A world through the champagne glass, through the lugubrious camera lens of Deakin AKA Conlin, the notorious dwarflike lowlife photographer2 An emigré, self-described slum boy from Liverpool He gropes, one-eyed, semi-conscious behind the lens toward the heart of this infernal machine. The stranger’s first glimpse of london is most likely to appal 3 And Thomas de Quincey, Mancunian exile —all of Wales could not contain his wandering— walked, a solitary and contemplative man through London: Oxford Street, stony-hearted stepmother! Thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans and drinkest the tears of children.4 —He paced the terraces, scouring the valleys north to Marylebone. And Arthur Conan Doyle, an Edinburghian come via Vienna, dissected eyes with Freud; Dickens, Portsmouth to Chatham, to Marshalsea prison; From Birmingham Sax Rohmer, Limehouse Exoticist. Its greatest luminaries are those who came from without; Its proper essence fiction, miscegenation. The reality of the fictional London overflows the truth on every side. 3/10

When the Elephant Man appeared as if from nowhere in a shop premises in the Whitechapel Road towards the end of November 1884, he was in his early days as a professional freak.5 David Lynch’s movie The Elephant Man draws on an already-potent fictional tradition: I understood a certain English thing, you know, but for the film I got inspiration or ideas more from books of London than from London itself…6 And an inheritance: Brit Celluloid BC (Before Colour: before its mendacious promise of a kaleidoscopic future beyond the seedy decline of british society). Ealing noir, day-for-night east-end police chases issuing in endgames played out across the steam-shrouded tracks of railway sidings. Oppressive and gloomy. And David Lean’s Dickens flicks: These were no ‘adaptations’: The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then; as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines….7 Dickens in monochrome; writing like a camera (Eisenstein discovered a ‘lap dissolve’ in the text). Blood and Soot for Magwitch, gibbets under red clouds; Ash and lace, Miss Havisham: White veil…dress…shoes…hair of white…8 4/10

The essential is that London is black and white: an energy-processing monster that incites its elements to extreme lambency and then discards them as light-absorbent, burnt-out crusts. I was walking around a derelict hospital and suddenly a little wind-like thing came and entered me, and I was in that time – not only in that time in the room – but I knew that time. I knew what it was like then, and it came out of that hospital. Architecture is a recording instrument. I’m sure that’s right. And that’s what happened. It was just unraveling and I was picking it up.9 The Old Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel Road, A time-tunnel into apocryphal London, brings the unhuman breath of Lynch’s inspiration full-circle. Synonymy of human body and industry….Darkness. Boiled and bleached bones. White clouds rising from below. 5/10

Steam and Scalpel. The hospital museum houses a replica of Merrick’s sackcloth hood. The stitches bring to mind that slow, deliberate zoom into the single square eyehole, into the nightmares of the Elephant Man: Filled with puffing steam-monsters, dark smoggy streets, and the curse of monstrosity and the lash of cruelty. No more compelling exhibit than the building: Merrick is only a monstrous sign, avatar of a psychogeographical papilloma. This perplexing structure, haphazardly extended to house medical technologies that always stayed one step ahead, new pathologies of the industrial revolution. Treves bowed over the prone figure of a man on an operating table: we’re seeing more and more of these machine accidents nowadays.10 Or you see pictures of explosions – big explosions – they always reminded me of these 6/10

papillomatous growths on John Merrick’s body. They were like slow explosions. And they started erupting from the bone… what got me going was the idea of these smokestacks and soot and industry next to this flesh.11 Steam is the element of Merrick’s kindly soul: his birth is announced with the slowmotion billow of a puff of steam. Recaptured, abandoned, his return journey is heralded by white clouds; The train, the steamship, and then again the steam train, ending at Liverpool Street. White ineffable clouds. But in his dreams he wanders cities of blackness, dirty streets populated by jeering children, factories with rows of men chained to great machines in which they are pistons. Despondent resonance of Dickens’ Coketown, distilled essence of the industrial city, where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.12 With the opening shots, visual reconstruction of the showman’s florid etiology of Merrick’s condition, we already understand a strange transmutation of image into flesh ; knocked down in the street by elephants, the frightful image of the creatures on the retina of Merrick’s mother as she faints passes directly 7/10

into the womb, imposing its form upon the budding embryo. According to the logic of the film, which is the logic of this city, at the limit, images impregnate, mutate what is inside. Everywhere, relics of paradigms overthrown. Discarded piles of 50s minicomputer tangled with pieces of iron bedstead. The arteries of long-obsolesced fuel supplies, studded with taps and switches and cast-metal outlets, still cling to the walls like dead vines. In many places they simply lock the ghosts in, doors never opened again save by wrecking-ball. The saturation of history not yet wrung out And each time the sensation passes through another agent it thickens, and reaches consistency, fiction and environment a sensory emulsion. 8/10

Perpendicular surfaces intercutting; Every wall is an encrypted photogram. This piece of celluloid adds yet another one. A membrane inserted between place and consciousness. Photography is a mediumistic practice not a self-expression, it dowses for sensations in their raw state: neither fiction nor document. The camera unearths sensory proclivities, your own hidden, subterranean connections; Continuity with this dense, indifferent, impossible fabric. The city in reality is a surface which is all exterior. No dwelling within it, no breaking the surface (so that photographs recollect more accurately than memory itself): Thus there is no comfort but this abrasive immanence upon which one grazes and is grazed, injured, disclosed to oneself. A thousand walks made alone in which I often thought my pleasure in this ‘exterior’ could never mean anything except how I was failing in certain ‘interiors.’13 But why berate the surface for its lack of depth, when we could equally accuse our depths of lacking surface?14 Being young, our souls lack the fibre of this dense irrational number, which, though one cannot encompass its impossible totality, cradles us: no matter which figure we elect as focus we feel its whole, incomprehensible extension. 9/10

London is an atmosphere, a state of being.15 A participation in other people’s fictions. A self-fulfilling prophecy its authors cannot halt. Submission to the real; brute point of concentration Until the journey outward, until we reach places where one can no longer say the name ‘London’, though its taste remains, bitter on the lips. And the last tube station, the workers filing out; their grey-eyed sagging march a salutary reminder. Those for whom London is just an odious chore— do they know it steals their energy to make dreams? And then finally out. That tremendous relief. Like a decompression. Life seems lighter. Greener. You’re elsewhere now. Relaxed. Your thoughts turn to London. 10/10

readthis.wtf /writing/badiou-mallarme/ Badiou/Mallarmé - 2006 Even within the context of the always provocative work of Badiou, his reading of Un coup de dés cannot fail to strike the reader as audacious. Coming after eighteen densely-argued chapters whose expositions and exegeses sought to expose the intrication of mathematics and philosophy, the introduction, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, of ‘a poem by Mallarmé’ is as much of a surprise as it is, perhaps, a relief to the weary reader. This uninitiated reader, asking himself what place Mallarmé’s notoriously contorted poetic productions could have within a philosophy which has wagered all on the subtractive power of mathematics in its superlative clarity (and sets the latter in a relation of ‘tacit rivalry’ with the poem) might well answer that, just as, notoriously, anything can be proved with figures, so the mischievous exegete can call Mallarmé’s more obscure writings to the defence of any philosophical position. As a poignant example, we can read Deleuze in an early work employing Mallarmé’s image of the fan to introduce the implicative relation of Life with the lives that are folded within it. As Mallarmé himself stated, the poem is ‘a mystery whose key the reader must seek’; or as Badiou has it, ‘There is a certain element of the detective novel…what crime, what catastrophe, what enormous misadventure is indicated by these clues?’ [BE 191]. The reader is forewarned that what follows is more than a simple deduction—error is possible. In fact, between Comte (and Taine) on one side and Swedenborg on the other, between an oppressive positivism— obscene, commercial—and a neoromantic mysticism—seductive yet lacking the precision and discipline behoving the poet—the symbolist aesthetic was bound from the start to diverge from the properly oracular or illuminist tradition to seek a new mathesis, a mental discipline and a corresponding practice, which would be neither that of pathos nor that of logos. So, whereas for Baudelaire it was still more or less a matter of direct revelation, for Mallarmé the work of poetry became a punishing labour whose inhumanly high standards consigned him to hover perpetually between sterility and transcendence. It is this continual invention or search for a definition of the poetic art, to the poimnt where the poem no longer expresses or invokes but seeks a sensuous exposition of the pure lines that articulate reality, that, for Badiou, allows modern poetry to escape definitively from pathos. But upon closer examination of Badiou’s extremely selective group of poets, this apparent redemption of poetry from the severe excommunication to which Plato consigned it doesn’t seem quite so generous. It simply flips poetry from pathos directly into logos. An impression that is reinforced by his extremely selective reading of them. Mallarmé’s crowning ‘failure’, Un coup de dés, consists of the painstaking deployment of a constellation of semantic, syntactic, and typographical energies: phonic and lexicographical particles are held in tension across pages, creating the waves of intensity that course through the text. And doesn’t this musical verse also consist in a manipulation of tone, of sound, an attempt to find the ringing ‘prime word’ that sets vibrating the great memory of language—in striking the right note(s) that would resonate the entire 1/3

hazardously accumulated abstract body of linguistic matter, the matter of culture, rendering its lines of articulation luminous, if only for the duration of a single word? Badiou does in fact succeed in convincing us that the poetic resonances, indeed amplifications, between Mallarmé’s thought and his own, amount to far more than opportunism or hazard. But if he succeeds in this, there is no miracle at work: it is no doubt because the evolution of his philosophical thought took place in an atmosphere already imbued with a lifelong familiarity with Mallarmé’s work: there is no relation of forced application here, rather Badiou’s philosophical themes themselves emerged through the effort of unravelling Mallarmé just as much as through the long nights poring over textbooks on set theory. All the same, it is necessary to mention the aspects of the work which this reading leaves unremarked: not to demand that Badiou account for the whole effect of the poem, as if this were even possible, but to help us to understand in what consists the severity of his interpretation, and what it leaves behind as mere residue. Rather than the portico of the ruined temple through which we enter Badiou’s magnum opus—where are inscribed the founding intuitions of the one and the multiple—let’s imagine ourselves before the temple of Nature whose ‘living pillars sometimes allow confused phrases to pass through; Man passes there through forests of symbols which observe him with familiar gazes’. Because Mallarmé belongs to the aftershock of the frisson nouveau brought to French poetry by Baudelaire, and in particular the promise of Correspondances, in which the above lines appear. This is the promise that the poetic pursuit of relations of analogy and universal symbolism could reveal a universe as luminously distinct and as irrecusably real as that of mathematics, but placed well beyond the limited sphere of the latter. Through a disciplined deciphering and reduction, poetry was to seek the pure concepts that structure the absolute. Now, we have to remark that in the prose explication offered by Badiou, these potentials seem ultimately to be discharged, neutralised, and implicitly rendered redundant. It’s not clear whether Badiou is suggesting that the poem itself is simply an argument overlaid by linguistic flourishes. It is certainly fair to say, though, that in unfolding and explicating Mallarmé’s own text, Badiou tends as a consequence to implicitly deflate any claims made on behalf of poetic language, to the benefit of formalised language. Thus the practice of poetry as distinct equally from invocatory intuition and formalised conceptual thought —as precisely the indecisive in-between, neither animal nor number—is not sufficiently upheld. The danger of erring on the side of logos, and this despite Badiou’s own protestations to the contrary, is one of reducing everything that is not conceptual thought to a decoration of or a route toward conceptual thought. If the poem is more than this, then the philosopher must somehow account for, or at least indicate, its excess over the concept, and admit at least in this one instance, that the translucid transmission of knowledge, of formal symbolism, gives way, in certain obscure regions, to rhythmic contagions, vagabond significations, and symbolic flights. In fact there is every difference between the symbol which, steeped in what Yeats called the ‘great memory’, owes its energy to the fathomless density of historical and mythological association, and the axiomatically-defined symbols of a mathematical corpus. Presumably the former, for Badiou, are tainted by their ‘revelling in meaning’, in verbal, onomatopoeic, and semantic transits, and by anthropological artefacts. But what does this mean for the poet’s self-understanding? 2/3

Perhaps to the inevitably myopic ‘working mathematician’ whose quotidian manipulations contribute little to the thinking of number, we might add the analogous figure of the ‘working poet’ who, in writing, does not yet understand what it is that poetry thinks or Is capable of thinking. It seems that poets are submitted to a disciplinary injunction which would have them, abandon, so to speak, their trade, if they would think its truths. The history of poetry would enact its ontological revolution as blindly as the history of mathematics; it would take a Badiou to finally explain to Mallarmé what he had been doing. There is no doubt that the severe standards to which the ‘conditions’ are submitted can appear in danger of repeating an old philosophical condescension toward the more ‘worldly’ professions. Badiou himself is hardly restrained in this regard, speaking of the ‘commercial usages’ which consign language to a relation of ‘vain and prosperous reality’. He takes to far greater extremes than Mallarmé himself the idea of ‘giving a purer meaning to the words of the tribe’. This ‘completion’ of the Mallarméan operation, wiping out any vestiges of analogical and symbolic thinking therein, is a most characteristically Badiousian epuration sauvage. But it was precisely through the common fund of tribal symbols that we were to attain access to what the poem proposed. For Badiou, the poem needs the philosophical explication in order that it can carry out the operation of (symbolically transmissible) thought secreted within it. But, returning to the importance of Mallarmé for Badiou’s own development, we shouldn’t forget that this philosophy had need of the poem—of those effects of the poem which, ultimately, cannot be distilled into conceptual discourse—in order to provoke, to catalyse that very discourse, to raise the philosopher to the place from where, in turn, he interprets the poem. Which is the condition? ‘Man passes here through forests of symbols which observe him with familiar gaze’: it is this journey from the everyday situation of language, however ‘commercial’, toward the purity of the concept, which goes largely unmarked by Badiou; it is the ladder to be discarded. Here, however, lies the process—neither a mystical initiation nor a mathematical demonstration—by which poetry provokes thought. 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/biohorrors-of-scholasticism/ Biohorrors of Scholasticism - 2006 Henry of Hesse (1325–1397) was one of the schoolmen of 14th Century Paris who, together with those of Merton at Oxford, began seriously—albeit by stealth—to challenge Aristotelian doctrine. As Pierre Duhem has shown, in questions such as the latitude of forms which proposed quantitative and comparative treatment of ‘virtues’ or ‘forms’ such as heat, brightness, etc. many of the concepts of early modern science developed ‘under cover’ of scholasticism. They are difficult to recognise as such since they often appear in the guise of horrendously convoluted and apparently fatuous debates on Christian virtues: Does a person’s charity increase by one charity being added to another, or by a single charity increasing, or by an infinite series of charities each of which disappears to make way for a greater? Henry of Hesse advocated the view that the indwelling ‘occult virtues’ of things must be dispensed with altogether and that an infinite number of variations in form (intensity), combination and variable proportions of four primary qualities could account for all things in nature; thus each part of a body would have its degree of heat or cold, dryness and wetness, etc. and the whole could be described as a complex (complexio) of measurable elements in certain ratios with each other. This not only anticipated a science for which meaning and proper place would be subordinated to position and measure (just as the mathematical treatment of movement by ‘The Calculator’ (Suisset) at Merton challenged the Aristotelian idea of moving objects having inbuilt tendencies) but also opened the possibility of infinite new, unknown combinations occuring within nature: Nature would thus no longer be a bounded, taxonomically-delimitable field but a combinatorial pool itself composed of sub-individual elements varying continuously along multiple parameters. According to this incipient substitution (anticipative of the violence of scientific reason) of ‘functional’ criteria for the Aristotelian categories descended from banal intuition, rather than being explained by indwelling properties the nature of an object or creature would be referred to its characteristic complexio or proportional combination of elements each with a certain latitude of form (i.e. the range of heat and cold, or wet and dry, that it could withstand without being corrupted). Medicine would be the ‘art of latitudes’, the art of knowing the range (latitude) of forms (qualities) that each organ of the body could tolerate: and different creatures would be defined by their particular complexio of such latitudes: Man, because of the lesser latitude of his complexio, is more liable to disorders than a beast, and the beast is more easily put out than a plant. When the latitude of the complexio is exceeded, recovery is impossible. Thus the supposed fact that the poisonous herb mandragora has a figure and material organization like that of man, and yet its form differs in species from that of man, raises the question whether the soul of man can have a like proportion and intensive configuration of elemental qualities to that of the form of the mandragora. It is suggested that during the corruption of the human body the first qualities might be altered to the proportions in which they occur in some other living being, although it would seem that the vast number of possible permutations and combinations would render this very unlikely. That a fox might be generated from a dead dog is also seriously considered. This in its turn soon merges into a discussion of the relation between the form of the living man and of his corpse, and the 1/2

question whether, and if so how soon, a plant or animal of another species can be generated from a dead body, human or animal. Henry furthermore credulously tells of the body of a dead saint in England that has to be shaved regularly. His explanation of the marvel is that some vital form, only vegetative in character however, has been introduced into the matter of the corpse, and has kept the hair growing. In the twentieth chapter he discusses the difference between substance and accidental forms. It is asserted that another living substantial form never immediately succeeds to the corruption of a living being, and that between the complexio of a living man and that of his corpse there intervene innumerable species, and yet in fact there is always made immediately the jump from the one extreme to the other.1 If this doesn’t yet disabuse you of the notion that scholasticism is so much arguing about angels, read on: for this new conception had even greater psychedelic horrors to unveil… corpses which had been of the same species when living might differ in species from one another when corrupted.2 2/2

readthis.wtf /writing/on-reza-negarestanis-undercover-softness/ On Reza Negarestani’s ‘Undercover Softness’ - 2007 In what is considered Plato’s most penetrating examination of the theory of Ideas—that is, the theory of worldly actualities as copies of eternal abstract essences—the Parmenides, Socrates is driven to ask whether the power of such a theory does not break down if we have to consider that even ‘vile and paltry things’ such as hair and dirt have their own Idea. At this point, Socrates admits, ‘I fall into a black pit of confusion’. I propose to read Negarestani’s formalisation of decay—and undoubtedly this amounts to a tangential reading or a ‘reterritorialization’ on familiar philosophical ground, if not (I hope) a betrayal of Negarestani’s intentions—as a contribution to the theory of Ideas which, far from capitulating to it as aporia, looks directly into the black pit. In decay, a construction reveals its Ideal form according to itself—we might say the Idea it has of itself: an abstraction which is not that of any design, geometrical abstraction, or signifier. For a construction neither analyses itself in terms of its primary elements—it is not pulverized to dust nor dissembled unit by unit, brick by brick—nor does it follow the abstractive schemas through which it may have been conceived—geometrical, distributive, functional, etc. Rather, as construction, it implicates a proper material destiny, so that its ‘ascent’ to the Idea is a process each moment of whose unfolding inflects the next. The decayed construction reveals what is proper to it beyond the accidents of its conception so that what is most proper (the Idea) is not the origin, but comes last of all. In line with Virilio’s dictum that every technological invention is the invention of a new disaster, then, to construct is always to construct untold infinities of lines of decay, an exquisite declension of virtualities. 1/5

To construct is to open up paths to an Ideal Form in decay. The two directions, the abstraction and expression of decay, will unveil a fate indifferent to design, a dynamic ideality: dissolving apparent discontinuities, revealing singularities where there seemed to be homogeneity; developing minute differences in material structure into monstrous excrescences. If the imposition of a form always implies thresholds of tolerance, in decay everything that was tolerated returns to repudiate the formal imposition. A new order is asserted. The outer casing sags and falls first, or else surfaces survive whilst substance perishes: One of Hieronymous Bosch’s repeated motifs is of the yawning carapace of a fruit’s skin surviving the liquefaction of its flesh, harbouring anomalous creatures or spouting forth crawling things; or the hollow shell of a blasted treetrunk, its obscene orifices belching fetid air. Evil is an hollowness that only hints at what was evacuated, evil is a bad abstraction (the famous ‘treeman’ is the original ‘hollow man’, gazing resignely back at his own vacuity – an anticipation of modernity’s spiritual evacuation?). The infinitely riddled Sierpinsky sponge would be one extreme model: all hole but with a ghoulish objectal insistence, the Idea of infinite rot (and this would be where Negarestani’s analysis of holey space meets with his formalism of decay). However, such a model supposes the object of decay to be unitary and isolated, the rot localised, and the process terminal, ending with a dry husk. Decay is arrested through a local framing. It is only when envisaged on an all-encompassing, cosmic scale that decay will suggest an entire evil ontology. * Bosch’s predecessor Henry of Hesse (1325-1397) was one of the 14th Century scholastics who began seriously to erode an ossified Aristotelianism. His work grew out of what was one of the most important scholastic anticipations of early modern science, the question of the latitude of forms or the variation and measurement of intensive qualities. For Hesse, the specific proper nature of things, as conceived by Aristotle, must be dispensed with: variations in intensity, combination and variable proportions of four primary qualities can account for all things in nature, each part of a body being defined by its tolerated degree or latitude of heat or cold, dryness and wetness, etc. and the whole being addressed as a complexio of these elements in given ratios. Not only does this anticipate a post-Aristotelian science for which finality and proper place are subordinated to relative position and ratio but moreover, it reconfigures nature as an infinite reservoir for anomalous recombinations: Taxonomic boundaries disintegrate and Nature is no longer a bounded, delimitable field of organisation but a dynamic combinatorial pool composed of sub-individual differences in intensity varying continuously along multiple parameters. Every boundary is porous, every identity insists only within the range of a latitude, beyond which decay rejoins it with a cosmological continuum. According to this incipient substitution of ‘functional’ criteria for categories descended from banal intuition, rather than being explained by indwelling properties the nature of an object or creature is referred to its characteristic complexio or proportional combination of elements each with a certain latitude of form (i.e. the range of heat and cold, or wet and dry, that it can withstand without being corrupted, ceasing to be itself). Each creature being defined only by its complexio, medicine then becomes the ‘art of latitudes’, the art of knowing the latitude of forms, the range of intensities, that each body, or organ of the body, can tolerate before it ceases to be itself. This conception of creatures as assemblages of latitudes is reflected in Deleuze’s ethological reading of Spinoza (affect=latitude): […] the human genera, species or even race hasn’t any importance, Spinoza will say, as long as you haven’t made the list of affects of which someone is capable, in the strongest sense of the word “capable,” comprising the maladies of which s/he is capable as well. It’s obvious that the racehorse and the draft horse are the same species, 2/5

two varieties of the same species, yet their affects are very different, their maladies are absolutely different, their capacities of being affected are completely different and, from this point of view, we must say that a draft horse is closer to an ox than to a racehorse. Thus an ethological chart of affects is quite different from a generic or specific determination of animals.1 However, on the other side of these tolerances, decay begins to bite. As Negarestani indicates, decay was the subject of lengthy speculation during this period. Thorndike recounts the outlandish possibilities contemplated by Henry of Hesse: It is suggested that during the corruption of the human body the first qualities might be altered to the proportions in which they occur in some other living being, although it would seem that the vast number of possible permutations and combinations would render this very unlikely. That a fox might be generated from a dead dog is also seriously considered. This in its turn soon merges into a discussion of the relation between the form of the living man and of his corpse, and the question whether, and if so how soon, a plant or animal of another species can be generated from a dead body, human or animal. [Where] he discusses the difference between substance and accidental forms … It is asserted that another living substantial form never immediately succeeds the corruption of a living being, and that between the complexio of a living man and that of his corpse there intervene innumberable species, and yet in fact there is always made immediately the jump from the one extreme to the other […] More bold and alarming is Henry’s suggestion […] that it is not clear whether all men are of the same species or not, and so too with dogs and horses […] [C]orpses which had been of the same species when living might differ in species from one another when corrupted.2 It is not difficult to grasp, then, in these whispered proto-Spinozist horrors spoken in the name of a nascent science, why Negarestani emphasises its ‘cosmically revolutionary’ character. Beyond all taxonomy, beyond all hylomorphism, an immanent materialism comprising knotted lines of differentiation, convergences and anomalous becomings: undead abstract machine. In remarking the scholastic discovery that the decay of a being traverses a cosmology of other beings, Negarestani thus reveals a morbid ‘underside’ to Deleuze’s vitalist reading: So, a draft horse draws into proximity with an ox, a fox’s corpse with that of a dog. But it is gradients of decay that are most important, since they interpolate the species, describing lines of heretical becoming. The question is raised of Negarestani’s ‘anachronistic’ use of calculus: but, in the effort to quantify the relations between intensive states and their extensive deployment, it is this same proto-scientific scholastic framework that anticipated calculus, above all in the treatment of the latitude of forms by Oxford’s (14th–15th Century) Merton School (its brief blossoming of mathematics cut short by bubonic plague), and, in Paris, Oresme’s perpendicular diagramming of latitude and longitude (anticipating analytic geometry). In these discussions we can recognise what we would call rates of change, and the distinction between uniform and difform rates, and then uniformly difform, difformly difform, and even difformly difformly difformly difform, foreshadowing the nested differentiations of a mathematics that would flourish centuries later (Familiar with this legacy, above all through ‘The Calculator’ Richard Swyneshead, Leibniz would later be puzzled why his contemporaries would accept a first differential, but balked at the idea of ‘taking the difference’ of a difference). This conjunction of Spinozist immanence and differentiation inevitably leads us to the ontomathematics of Deleuze, for whom problematic Forms, or Ideas, are infinitely nested differences or intensities, Ideal events only actualised through their degraded expression in quality and extensity. 3/5

The abstractive process of decay described by Negarestani, whereby latitudes are ‘tested’ to their uttermost minimal degree, would here correspond to an ascent—in principle interminable, thus a limit process—to the Idea—not a geometrical, mathematical or dialectical abstraction but an intensive destiny. (Here the political stakes of the question arise: is the effect of terror to reveal the true Idea of a society by decaying it to its ‘minimal’ lineaments?— see Negarestani’s Militarization of Peace in Collapse I) However, whereas for Deleuze Ideas are to be understood as vital reservoirs of expressive power, for a corrupted ontology Ideas are carcasses whose differential expression comports no vital force, but rather indicates an infinite capacity for putrefaction: the articulations of the real are glimpsed only to be churned back into the process. No return to primary elements, but a degeneration to no end, with no end. The bipolar configuration of actuality and virtuality here perturbs itself continually, the depths of Ideas finding their issue in the basest materiality. (This could equally be understood as a critique of Deleuzian vitalism, or as a reconfiguration of it against interpretations for which a ‘dualist’ Deleuze counsels a one-way spiritual ascent from the actual to the virtual.) My father frequently experimented on tree diseases and insects … And this sort of thrills me – this earth, and then these plants coming out, and then there’s things crawling on them and the activity in the garden … And there are lots of things that are attacking the garden. There’s a lot of slaughter and death, diseases, worms, grubs, ants.3 If David Lynch somehow ‘purifies’ and abstracts the Idea of the Hollywood movie, how else is this achieved other than by a process of decay? The attenuated skeleton of structural components—the merest tatters of plot and shells of character—attest to the successful realisation of the Idea. The best Ideas are the rottenest ones. This degeneration also connects with what Negarestani calls poromechanics: in the vermiculated masterpiece Inland Empire the process is taken to the limit, leaving standing only the bare minimum scraps of plot necessary to hold the excessive plot-holes together. The movie has not ceased to be a movie, although it has ceased to be everything we thought we knew a movie was. In its extreme state of decay it somehow becomes more—almost too much—of a movie. * Scraps of photographs from the studio floor, ripped, pitted, mildewed, and clotted with paint, are transcribed verbatim onto the canvas, rephotographed, abandoned. Now, photographers love nothing better than a little scene of ruination, to be framed on a whitewashed gallery wall, like the stuffed head of a tiger above a fireplace. But (beyond any moralistic incrimination of their ‘superficiality’) these images usually reduce decay to the end of a signifier, whose vacillation on the edge of its extinction the photograph will fix and nostalgically attest to. Rather than the infinitely dense, Bergsonian past seething with productivity, the past becomes a litany of absences. Bacon, instead, used the photograph as just another vector for the transversal decay that he was, a process of abstraction that owed nothing to the concept, and an expression that owed nothing to vital spontaneity. Here the aesthetic and philosophical aspects of the question come together: just as the artist guards against fetishising ‘ruin’s romance’ and re-presenting it, rather attempting to put into action an abstract machineof decay, philosophy must seek a formalism for this machine in order to guard against the analysis of decay becoming merely a sophisticated lament for lost presence. Negarestani has made great advances in this direction. But one key question remains: How is decay to be distanced decisively, formally, both from mere entropy and from a vitalism, even a pestilential one? What, finally, could this mean for architecture? That constructions have their own Ideas of what they are or might be. That to watch urban decay is to see buildings theorising themselves. Software such as CATIA gives the architect 4/5

supreme power to disregard matter, making architecture an imperious calligraphy (Gehry’s Guggenheim) whose forms are automatically reverse-engineered beneath the design surface. The ontology of decay might, at least, allow architects to escape from their ‘own’ Ideas, the better to accede to what matter makes of them when, through the unfolding of decay, it abstracts itself. 5/5

readthis.wtf /writing/jean-rene-vernes-and-the-obduracy-of-matter/ Jean-René Vernes and the Obduracy of Matter - 2007 – It’s a matter of data and how you handle it…provided the data exists. Are you interested in mathematics? – It’s becoming more and more important in philosophy…That’s what makes Pascal so amazingly modern: mathematician and philosopher are one. – Ah, good old Pascal. Funny you should mention him, I’m rereading him at the moment. – And? – I’m very disappointed … I feel I know him by heart, and yet it tells me nothing…it all seems so empty. I’m a Catholic, or at least I try to be…But if that’s what Christianity is about, I’m an atheist … Are you still a Marxist? – Absolutely. For a Communist, Pascal’s wager is very relevant today. Personally, I doubt very much that history has any meaning. Yet I wager that it has – so I’m in a Pascalian situation … only that hypothesis allows me to go on living. – Mathematical hope. Potential gain divided by probability. – It was Gorky, Lenin or maybe Mayakovsky who said, about the seizure of power in the Russian Revolution, that they were forced to take a one in a thousand chance, because hope became infinitely greater if you took that chance in a thousand. — Eric Rohmer, Ma Nuit Chez Maud (1969) Jean-Réné Vernes, Le Principe de Pascal-Hume et le fondement des sciences physiques (The Pascal-Hume Principle and the Foundation of the Physical Sciences). We could begin perhaps with what appears to be a commonly-agreed aspect of the critique of ‘correlationism’: that it singularly fails to account for the ‘resistance’ of things in the world, not only to each other, but to our thoughts [see below, ‘The Phantasm of the Object’]. On my reading, it is exactly this resistance that Vernes will identify as ‘matter’ per se, and his work details the consequences of Hume’s failure to make a proper place for it within rational philosophy. Vernes locates the genesis of the declination of modern philosophy from science in Hume’s solution to ‘his’ problem of causation. Apparently revealing the lack of any rational basis for the hypothesis of matter, his solution led to philosophy redefining its role as that of giving an account of the concatenation of sensations – whether under an ‘phenomenological’ or ‘empiricist’ rubric—and thus to its ineluctable divergence from the science of ‘real things’, indissociable from the ‘materialist hypothesis’. That this divergence is held as a constitutive triumph of modern philosophical reason represents a baffling problem for would-be opponents of correlationism—after all, must they not agree that Hume proved that there was no rational basis for causality? In which case, how to escape its fateful consequences? What is strongest in Vernes’ book is that he approaches this puzzle as one that cannot be solved through denying Hume his reasoning but only through a reconfiguration of our model of ‘reason’ itself. The fundamental argument of Vernes’ book is not only that our ‘common-sense’ notion, shared with the working hypothesis of the physical sciences—namely that there is such a thing as matter, independent of our consciousness —is ultimately correct, but that it can be founded rationally. And what is so disconcerting about the survival, the dominance even, within philosophy of the conviction that matter does not or may not exist, suggests Vernes, is not so much its conflict with common sense but its incompatibility with the scientific conception of the world. Vernes 1/8

shows how Hume and Kant, beginning with a quite justified and groundbreaking critique of common-sense realism and its unquestioned trust in the existence of matter, foundered on an important point and failed to establish what would properly be a ‘speculative realism’—one in which matter would become problematic but nonetheless unquestionably existent. Vernes sets out to furnish the missing, positive part of the argument. There is no question of refuting Hume’s argument, then, but rather of showing that Hume himself drew unwarrantedly prohibitive conclusions from it, which were then profoundly exacerbated by Kant. Indeed Vernes claims that it is in Kant’s solution to Hume’s problem, ‘modern philosophy, characterised by its rejection of matter, was born very precisely in 1781, at the moment that Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason.’[p67] Before Copernicus, it was believed that the earth, and man, were at the centre of the universe. The greatness of the actual Copernican revolution was that he replaced this with an ‘objective conception’. But whereas we believed before Kant that it was the properties of material objects that determined the order of our perceptions, Kant adopted Hume’s own misconstrual of his critique of causality and ended up ‘transferr[ing] the necessity of laws from the object to the subject’[p67], with the result that we have lived through ‘two centuries of a strange philosophy, in formal opposition with science’[p67] To replace both common-sense realism and philosophical scepticism with a rational materialism means reconfiguring rationality as such. To do this, we must pick apart the supposedly essential bonds between logic, causality, and necessity: ‘we must reject the rigid conception of reason forged by classical thought on the model of geometry, which leads us to an intransigent determinism, in favour of introducing in parallel to deductive reason an aleatory reason’. Vernes’ proposition is that ‘the existence of matter does not result from the principle of causality, as Hume very rightly showed, but it can be established, with the same certitude as that with which Hume ruined the belief in the principle of causality’ [p.66-7] * Imagine that you—a sharp-witted Scottish philosopher—have just arrived in 17th Century France, eager to immerse yourself in the shady demi-monde of Parisian gambling dens. Arriving at such an establishment, you loiter nearby whilst a game is played with small cuboid objects. Unaccustomed to such games, you take the opportunity, unnoticed, to secretly examine one of these ‘dice’; observing its six equally-spaced and equally-sized sides, and concluding that there is no reason to believe it will fall on one side rather than another, you decide as a rule of thumb that any of the six numbers are equally possible. Armed with this knowledge, you join the game confidently, but in the course of twenty rounds, and apparently to the amusement of the more seasoned players at the table, your die seems to turn up ‘1’ on every single throw. Do you (a) protest loudly that something untoward is at work here, and demand the die be cut open to establish whether it has been ‘loaded’; or (b) conclude that, since your hypothesis has proved useless, and one can evidently know nothing a priori about the outcome of such games, that your only remaining options are either to devote yourself to keeping a meticulous record of every dicethrow you see; or to just slink off with your purse a great deal lighter? It is the fundamental thesis of Jean-René Vernes’ book that such a choice is at the root of a misprision of the nature of reason that has reigned for hundreds of years and that has bequeathed to us all the problems of post-Kantian doubt as to the existence of matter. In short: if Hume had played dice rather than billiards, he would have avoided drawing a conclusion in favour of empiricism from ‘his’ problem, which was an exemplarily rational one. This problem, as is well known, is announced in the Enquiry into Human Understanding through the example of the billiard balls. There is no way to deduce a priori how one ball will react when impacted by another. Any number of 2/8

different outcomes are equally conceivable, and since nothing rationally constrains possibility except for conceivability, no rational basis can be furnished for the principle of causality. Therefore, the principle of causality must be garnered from experience alone. In demonstrating the rational illegitimacy of the principle of causality, observes Vernes, Hume not only breaks any a priori causal link underlying the constant conjunction of perceptions, but also any reference of those perceptions themselves to some supposedly underlying matter. Hume’s solution results in a reversal of the chain of deduction between an independent matter governed by causal laws – now considered illegitimate—and our perceptions. Now it is the concatenation of perceptions alone which, through experience, might give us the idea of an underlying, causally-linked matter, which idea, however, can never be rationally founded. Vernes’ account of the results of Hume’s solution to his problem is dramatic, to say the least. Indeed it is depicted as ‘one of the most important revolutions in the history of philosophy’[21]. Logically, if not historically, it leads immediately to the denunciation of science as ‘transcendent’ on the basis that it posits a material hypothesis which neither rationality nor phenomenology can support. Since philosophy thus comes to see the theoretical part of the physical sciences as illegitimate, then it can represent these sciences, if at all, only in a pragmatic, instrumental register: this is the root, then, of the Heideggerian ‘critique’ of the hegemony of technology and science, on the basis of philosophy’s deeper engagement with the world. However, as we well know, philosophy, being equally deprived of any means to explain ‘how’ things act, must retreat to a contemplation of the fact that they are at all, and their manifestation ‘for us’—the Heideggerian-Wittgensteinian meditation presiding over much of twentieth-century philosophy. Vernes affirms that Hume’s verdict on causality, both impeccably rational and catastrophic, cannot be rescinded. Rather he seeks to return to its scene and, supplementing Hume’s reasoning with a principle drawn from probability theory, to suggest a widened conception of reason itself. Thereby, he suggests, we would not only resolve the vexed question concerning the relation between rationality and the physical world, but would simultaneously bring science —for which the materialist hypothesis is a sine qua non—and philosophy—with its distrust of anything beyond immediate appearance and/or the power of reason—back into accord. * Hume’s operation is firstly to reduce causality to its immediate evidence: certain perceptions follow others consistently, and the analysis of causality is therefore to start with these ‘givens of consciousness’. Concluding that there is no rational basis for our expectation that these constancies should continue into the future, and that all thinkable outcomes of the impact of the billiard balls are, according to reason, equally possible, Hume finishes by admitting an essential contradiction between reason and experience, and by ceding the domain of causality, and thus of matter, to experience: Nothing can be said a priori of the relations between what we had taken to be real material things, nor of their supposed relation to our perceptions. Hence Hume’s peculiar position as both the author of a profound breakthrough in our rational understanding of the world and as the progenitor of empiricism and perhaps even phenomenology, with all its woes: he founds an impeccably rational deduction upon the givens of consciousness, in order to show that the principle most important to our rational explanation of the order of the world cannot be justified. What went wrong? Vernes’ answer is that the first moment of the analysis—that all imaginable outcomes are equally possible—is understood by Hume as a negative conclusion, as the signal for a resignation to experience, whereas in fact it is a highly significant positive rational precept. Of course, for Hume too, everything hangs on this moment: if any one of 3/8

the multiple possible outcomes attendant on the impact of the billiard balls were a priori more thinkable than the others, then the ‘problem’ would not exist at all: the physical order of things would be rationally cognisable. But having secured this important truth, Hume understands it negatively and thus fails to draw the correct consequences from his problem. Kant exacerbated the problem by affirming Hume’s critique but finding nevertheless what seems a solid basis for causality. But the enthusiastic adoption by later philosophers of Kant’s solution failed to take account of the drastic trade-off it entailed: for here causality is saved only by seating it in the subject of cognition and thereby depriving material objects of any independent reality. In effect Kant—again, with impeccable rationality—generalises and infinitises Hume’s ‘negative’ observation: it is not only that we have no reason to think that one or another outcome will result from the impact of the billiard balls; equally, we have no reason to think that they will even remain billiard balls from one second to the next. This radicalisation is clear in the progression from Hume’s example to that of Kant: the latter invokes the famous cinnabar, ‘being sometimes black, sometimes red, sometimes light, sometimes heavy’, and men ‘transforming now into one animal, now into another’. He extends to infinity the realm of possible, thinkable outcomes for any physical situation, seeming to drive home with ever more force the need for a principle of causality to reconcile the gap between thinkability and reality, whilst never rescinding Hume’s demonstration of the impossibility of providing one on a purely logical basis. Thus extending the changeability of things unto their very objectivity, Kant deduces the reciprocity of substance and causality: with no principle of causality, there would be no substance either, nothing whatsoever for experience to grasp. As is well known, Kant then uses what is essentially a transcendentally-inflected reductio ad absurdum to argue for the necessity of a causal principle, arguing that since coherent experience is demonstrably possible, the principle of causality be located factically rather than rationally, in the constitution of consiousness. It is a priori since it is necessary for any experience whatsoever. Whereas Hume had turned away from his incipient rationalism in admitting that, reason being powerless to prescribe a priori the principle of causality, we must rely on experience alone—an estrangement of rationality and experience —for Kant, experience per se must conform to the thinkable, and so he refuses the fallback into ‘habit’, introducing instead an anthropological a priori, satisfying the demand for the principle of causality without betraying Hume’s argument. Now, Vernes salutes Kant’s genius no less than Hume’s, and his appraisal of the contribution of the former brings us to the central argument of the book. It may be true, as was argued almost immediately after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason, that Kant’s solution begged the question, or simply amounted to an inverse statement of the problem (a memorable moment sees Nietzsche lampooning Kantianism’s tendency to account for every capability of reason with the idiotic ejaculation ‘by means of a faculty!’). But what Kant had realised, argues Verne, and what takes his solution a decisive step beyond Hume’s, is that, whereas in asking the question why there is a contradiction between the thinkable—pure cogitation—and real experience—pure perception—Hume had resigned himself to a recourse to an empiricism of pure perception, Kant had discerned that there was no pure perception: experience, in so far as it is ordered at all, in so far as it diverges from the ‘rational chaos’ of pure thought, is always already adulterated by ‘something else’ that explains this divergence. Now, rather than ratifying the commonsense belief that this ‘something else’ was, indeed, matter, Kant was obliged to relegate it to the understanding, since he was so much impressed by Hume’s apparent demolition of the hypothesis of independent matter. Kant thus manages to develop the question further, but his implanting of causality in the subject of cognition merely compounds and, for much of modern philosophy, sets in stone Hume’s failure. 4/8

Hume had had within his reach a ‘new rationality’ that could have founded the principle of causality without conceding the defeat of reason and collapsing into empiricism; likewise, a development of this ‘new rationality’ would have prevented Kant from internalising the principle of causality, thus negating the hypothesis of real independent material objects and cementing the disastrous path to correlationism and the divergence of science and philosophy. And here Vernes is I think as one with Meillassoux: Hume’s new rationalism is never realised – indeed what Vernes calls Hume’s ‘virtual rationalism’ [21] only becomes what we know as ’empiricism’ through its very default. But what resounds throughout modern philosophy as what we might call the ‘founding defeat’ of speculative realism, has a purely contingent premise. According to Vernes, what prevented Hume from seeing this was, purely and simply, that he used the wrong example, and that he did not approach ‘his’ problem with the mind of a gambler. The most banal physical experiments provide the first step towards Vernes’ conclusion: if, like Archimedes, we have two crowns identical in appearance, and we wish to find out which is solid gold, which lead plated with gold, we simply weigh them. Finding that they have different weights, we are faced with ‘something’ beyond our perception that demands to be explained. According to Vernes this alone serves to refute the Kantian explanation: the difference is not to be sought within our understanding, since the perceptions of each are identical, but belongs to a still-problematic ‘something else’. We can, if we wish, cut open both crowns, there revealing a manifest difference which could be said to ‘explain’ the difference in weight – but of course we can continue the process by asking why the two substances gold and lead are of different weights This seemingly banal process provides an archetypical example of the process of materialist inquiry for Vernes, and demonstrates the essential importance within it of an encounter with a problematic ‘something else’ unaccountable either by consecutions of perceptions or by reason alone, and of something like the Principle of Sufficient Reason, as demand for a reason for that ‘something’; their combination resulting in the speculative leap to matter. But for a rigorous Humean, Vernes is suggesting, this experience of two perceptually identical objects that behaved differently would be enough to trigger an empiricist tantrum that would abort all physical science before it had even begun—the thinkable does not coincide with the real, and must therefore be abandoned as any guide to the latter. All we can do is to weigh the crowns interminably. But, asks Vernes, what is ‘the crucial experiment that will obviate all possible doubt in such a proof’?[30] – that is, which will convince us of the rational necessity for an hypothesisation of matter? * Vernes now turns to Pascal’s theory of probability, first developed in an experiment analogous to that of Archimedes’ crown, and which will finally reveal the positive import of the first moment of Hume’s solution. Pascal, asked by a gambling friend to calculate the probability of his winning a game of dice, reasoned that a properly-made die had as much chance of falling with one face up as any other. This, argues Verne, represents an essentially a priori conviction owing nothing to experience (Pascal himself not being a player), which puts forward a positive statement as regards a non-manifest, material structure of the die. Pascal’s principle is that what is equally thinkable is equally possible. And, in throwing the die a large number of times, the hypothesis can be justfied by experience, since each face will indeed come up an equal number of times. If, on the other hand, we throw another die, apparently identical, the same number of times, and most often obtain a ‘1’ we come up against a disparity between what is thinkable and what is real, and hence are led to posit a ‘something’ beyond what we intuit in the die —the contradiction between the thinkable and the real leads us to suspect it is loaded. 5/8

For Vernes this experiment represents the true ‘foundation of physical theory’[p33] for in ‘showing a case where a law of experience comes out naturally from the nature of things, supposed known, it reinforces the belief that we can do the same when we do not know this nature’[ibid.], that is that what is met with in experience can be cognized a priori through a calculus of probabilities. In other words, although our prior belief in causality, and hence substance, and independent material objects per se may derive from experience, from habit or from evolutionary imperatives, with Pascal’s principle it can for the first time be rationally founded. What blinded Hume to this was that, rather than thinking like a gambler – in terms of what likelihood a given outcome had of obtaining, and thus in terms of a space of possibilities – he thought still in terms of classical reason, in supposing the only viable reason to be a necessitistic rather than probabilistic one. It is owing to Pascal’s choice of example that, rather than a negative a priori statement (there is no way to choose any one outcome over another), he is able to draw a wholly positive one (all outcomes are equally thinkable, therefore equally possible). He thus confounds the fallback into empiricism or transcendentalism, and, with the principle of a priori probability instead founds the possibility of a rational physics. Order is an obstacle to thinkability: Experience, in so far as it is ordered at all, can be said to be ‘loaded’ like a die: there is ‘something’ beyond what is thinkable, that makes the real diverge from the latter. Whereas with Hume this apparently inexplicable ‘loading’ of experience, as in the ‘loading’ of a die, was a signal to resign reason and correlate nature with experience alone; and whereas Kant, discerning that experience is never ‘alone’ but unable to reactivate the common-sense belief in matter, attributed the ‘loading’ to the subject of cognition, for Pascal undecidability becomes for the first time a positive rational proposition, the founding proposition of the calculus of probability, a proposition through which we first gain a priori some precious knowledge of that ‘matter’ that is obdurately independent of us. And this principle is necessary for physical experiments: if we put the apparent ‘loading’ of the results of an experiment involving the freefall of a body down to the constitution of our understanding, this immediately forecloses the possibility of any physical theory. However, such a theory, greatly elaborated, enabled scientists to predict, for example, the rate of freefall of the same body on the moon, even before this was verifiable experientially. In short, if Vernes can convince us of its effectiveness, the founding of physical theory upon Pascal’s principle as rational speculative practice averts all the disastrous ‘correlationist’ consequences with which we are familiar. Otherwise, there is no way to understand the accuracy of scientific predictions concerning circumstances of which we have as yet no experience (and of course a fortiori of ‘ancestral phenomena’): If we refuse all existence to matter, we cannot give either an explanation of the events we have already observed, nor a prediction of future events [35-6] But if all this still seems in the realm of a demand (and thus of the Principle of Sufficient Reason), it is Vernes’ final aim to reconfigure the relation between causality, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and a priori reasoning, in order to finally convince us of the efficacy of the Pascal-Hume principle. In supposing causal reasoning to conform to the necessities of geometry, ‘classical reason’ had imputed to it the character of necessity. Thus we had the principle what is a priori unthinkable (for example, a triangle with four sides) is impossible. The necessity of geometry, transposed to the physical world as the principle of causality, first issues in Descartes rational mechanics, wherein an occult ‘quantity of movement’ must be posited. This occult quantity is, if we may say so, ‘sublimated’ in the Principle of Sufficient Reason as a demand of reason; and, still with geometry as the model, the only way this demand can be satisfied is apparently through a necessity. Therefore the positing of 6/8

physical determinism results directly from the configuration of ‘classical reason’: PSR is uppermost; it is satisfied analogously in thought by the laws of geometry, in physical reality by the principle of causality. Hume throws this trinity into chaos in realising that the causal principle, far from being self-evident, or guaranteed by divine providence, is a mere hypothesis; and therefore does not satisfy the demand of PSR. Kant resolves this moment of crisis by reversing the terms, so that in effect PSR ends up justifying the principle of causality, situating the source of its necessity in the laws of the understanding. What should have happened, according to Vernes, is that the principle of a priori probability—that what is equally thinkable is equally possible—ought to have replaced PSR, as highest principle of reason, applicable equally to thought and to physical reality. Seeing sufficient reason not in terms of necessity (which can, as we know after Hume, never be legitimately posited) but in terms of a priori probability, there is opened up the possibility of its rational justification. But ‘[i]s the axiom that what is equally thinkable is equally possible legitimate? For a rationalist it is legitimate because it is the expression of an immediate evidence, as we saw with the game of dice. But a rational confirmation of this axiom can be found in the following observation: there is no other way in which we can explain aleatory facts’[44] That is, if several events are a priori equally thinkable, there can be no rational contesting of their equal possibility. It is possible that repeated experience shows us that in fact they are not equally possible; in this case we uncover ‘something’ beyond our perception of the events that must then be accounted for. (But experience cannot teach us this principle itself; it is truly an a priori principle of rational thought.) Vernes’ more radical reconfiguration suggests that even the principles of geometry are subject to the principle of a priori probability: the reason we need proofs of geometry is because it seems unlikely to us that, for any right-angled triangle, a2=b2+c2 [p45-6]. We can think many other possibilities. PSR—which in classical reason, governs both logical and real reasons according to the model of necessity—in this new model of reason is shown to be derivative of the principle of a priori probability. Likewise, the postulate that underlies logical necessity, that the unthinkable is impossible is reduced to a particular formation of this more powerful principle. * A final, not at all negligible, result of Vernes’ analysis is that there is no paradox, no problem, in this reconfigured model of reason, in accounting for quantum indeterminability: it is an exception that makes manifest the rule. In fact, Vernes suggests that physics has conspired in maintaining its philosophically questionable status: the standard experiments which are held up as exemplary of the physical sciences, like Hume’s billiard balls, obscure rather than manifest the true nature of the principle of a priori probability, because they are non-aleatory cases: this is a block to the imagination in conceiving of the Pascalian principle. Thus, once more, if Hume had chosen crapshooting instead of billiards, the history of Western philosophy may have unfolded differently: Hume’s defeatism takes on the status of a failure of imagination: he could not think in terms of probability; he failed to find the ‘image of thought’ his problem demanded. Therefore he failed to realise the reconfiguration of reason that would replace the necessitarian demand of PSR with the probabilistic principle of a priori probability. Only the latter gives a rational basis for the discovery of matter, in enabling us, beyond the pure observation that ‘experience is loaded’, to discover the infinitely complex nature of this ‘loading’: We thus arrive at the following conclusion: the affirmation that matter exists is a consequence of the principle of a priori probability and not of the principle of causality, as we have believed for so long. The non-recognition of the 7/8

Pascalian principle as fundamental principle of reason is without doubt one of the principal causes which has led us to put in doubt the existence of matter [50] I believe there is also posited here a rationalist argument for the indissociabilty of the problematic-speculative and the materialist; moreover, Vernes argues that not only does such an approach mend the rift between philosophy and science, but affines particularly with contemporary—indeterministic—science. All this, I think, puts into a new perspective Meillassoux’s argument in ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’ (and elsewhere), which is in fact an argument against Vernes. Vernes argues that the reduction of all physical reason to necessity cannot give any account of chance; the latter would necessitate an account of the causal independence of a series of ‘dice-throws’; something that only Pascal’s principle can satisfy: therefore the latter ‘completes reason’ by supplementing ‘necessitating reason’ with an ‘aleatory reason’[43] But for Meillassoux the Pascalian calculus itself amounts to a betrayal of the chaos Hume’s solution opens up to us. Meillassoux argues that whereas probabilistic reasoning can be applied in the world, the transfinite extent of possible outcomes of any real situation proscribes its use in the case of Hume’s problem. Simply, Meillassoux spoils the congruence of Hume’s and Pascal’s principle by arguing that the probability calculus proposed by the latter can only be applied to phenomena already totalised into a set of cases (the die) and not to the thinkable set of all possible universes (which is, precisely, unthinkable). Therefore Hume has not so much, according to Meillassoux, mistaken the import of his solution as fallen short of its most radical consequences: Meillassoux argues that from the solution that Hume understood as merely negative and limitative we can draw a positive rational conclusion which will allow us to make a supplement to reason very different to that proposed by Vernes: where the latter sees the reappropriation of Hume/Pascal as founding a new legitimacy for physical science and as mending of the divorce between science and philosophy, Meillassoux sees it as resolving a post-Galilean schism within philosophical materialism (viz. that between ‘hylozoism’ and ‘eliminativism’) by rationally legitimating ‘irruption ex nihilo’ There are two different questions to be asked here: not only must we examine Meillassoux’s reasoning (which I think we are in a much better position to do having also considered Vernes’ work) but its motivations, when probability is proposed as the basis for a rational foundation for the physical sciences, for insisting upon preserving a ‘supernatural’ role for ‘true chance’, for a chaos beyond probability? I will end in suggesting that we must recognise therefore a fundamental difference between Vernes and Meillassoux: it lies in the fact that, however speculatively bold Meillassoux’s thesis, it appears not to be motivated by the promise of a grounding for physical science nor the prospect of a speculative realism but rather by presentiments of an ethical order. Suffice to say that in the sense that in its insubordination of ‘true hazard’ to any calculation, Meillasoux’s refusal of Pascal’s Wager is maybe of a piece with Badiousian Paulism. (Badiou as sublation of Rohmer’s two antagonists: the catholic-mathematician who finds Pascal’s probabilistic christianity ’empty’, the marxist-philosopher who finds the wager indispensable to revolutionary hope!) Finally, if the whole episode of anti-realism in philosophy was the result of a fateful English disposition not to suspect the good sportsmanship of others, and if the only sure remedy is to bring more cardsharps into philosophy, then we should be doubly glad of Vernes’ presence: he is not only a philosopher but also a world-famous expert on bridge (known best for the Law of Total Tricks). 8/8

readthis.wtf /writing/theory-in-motion-vjam-theory/ Theory in Motion: VJam Theory - 2008 VJ Theory (eds), Vjam Theory: Collective Writings on Realtime Visual Performance (Falmouth, UK: realtime books, 2008) Performances featuring realtime manipulation of audiovisual material have a surprisingly long history. But the emergence of new technologies over the past decade has accelerated what was once an onerous and unwieldy business for the dedicated and seriously hardware-literate into a sleek digital affair. In many cases, prominent performers have been instrumental in developing new software, effects once painstakingly achieved with heaps of gear can now be outstripped with the stroke of a laptop key, and this has favoured increasing experimentation. There is still no rulebook, but a growing body of artisanal knowledge has been built on by successive generations of VJs. The old guard will always find willing customers for its random slideshows and psychedelic oil wheels, but there is no doubting that live digital audiovisual manipulation can now create sense and sensation in a controlled and meaningful way, using complex logics irreducible to those of cinema or TV. With practitioners already racing to catch up with these infinite possibilities, Vjam Theory finds them also trying to sketch out theoretical frameworks appropriate to the new technologies. VJ Theory was created in 2005 by Brendan Byrne and Ana Carvalho as a virtual resource for realtime media performers, who often found themselves working in isolation and without common references to discuss their practice. In Vjam Theory – their first publication – the now extensive and diverse international collective engage in informal and wide-ranging discussions on the definition, the theory and practice, and the future of live AV performance. The opening theme is that of a crisis of identity: Defining their practice through the element of performance or live interaction allows the participants to distinguish it from TV or film-making and from most audiovisual installation art; but this very ‘liveness’ immediately becomes a problem. The question of whether the VJ ought to be seen to be ‘playing’ live recalls similar problems with the performance of electronic music – it’s not always gripping to watch someone staring intently at their laptop, and yet the fact that one is experiencing a realtime performance rather than just playback undoubtedly transforms the experience of an audience. The difficulty for VJs, especially those working in clubs, seems to be that whilst affirming the ambient, immersive nature of the experience they are trying to create, they also crave some audience validation of the skill and individual style of their performances, which by all accounts are intense affairs: Among the most passionate and compelling sections of Vjam Theory are the enthusiastic descriptions of the experience of Vjing – the immersion in a space of infinite possibilities and virtual connections, the immediacy and urgency of a knife-edge visual ‘jazz improvisation’,[p.27] ‘fascinatingly complex and yet … primal’. [p.12] But this enthusiasm is accompanied by uncertainty as to whether this buzz is being communicated. Aiming at the ‘pure magic’[p.27] that occurs at ‘those absolute peaks, when it all really syncs in deep’,[p.12] the performers are never sure to what extent the audience appreciates the unique combination of rhythmic sense and technical intelligence that goes into making this happen (‘are watching images the audience’s main idea?’[p.13]; ‘can the audience tell?’[p.45]). 1/3

There follow some engaging discussions of how the club environment, and visual interventions within it, are ‘read’ by participants. Like DJs before them (a comparison which, one senses, haunts the whole dialogue), VJs find themselves trapped between self-assertion as creative artists with characteristic styles, and the anonymity of ambient cultural caterers in a generic environment. Indeed, the ambivalence about turning the spotlight on the VJas-performer may well stem from misgivings about the way in which a similar dilemma in the early days of ‘faceless’ musics such as house and techno was ultimately resolved in favour of DJs becoming ‘stars’, with a corresponding devaluation of the music itself. The theoretical task at hand seems to consist in integrating the performers’ first-person phenomenologies with an understanding of how the ‘final product’ interacts with the collective dynamic of an audience; and further, in providing a speculative account of the individual subjective shifts that an audiovisual performance can effect, both in real time and after the fact. Much of the book finds the participants in search of various components for such a theory. This necessarily begins with analyses of what exactly it is that they do: How do the abstractions created through the sampling and mixing of images relate to the original artifacts used? What is the the role of rhythm in visual media? How are decisions made ‘live’, and what role do pre-programmed sequences or algorithms play? All of these suggest more fundamental questions about the medium itself, its linearity or non-linearity, its dimensionality, whether it is necessarily read as narrative or can be ‘anti-narrative’[p.33]; and about whether technology can ever be a neutral platform (if the medium is the message, what kind of message is the VJ constrained to transmit?) Where Vjam Theory makes systematic attempts to define realtime audiovisual performance in terms of existing performance paradigms, it succeeds only in confirming how ill-fitting the latter are. Likewise, the various tentative applications of pre-existing theoretical frameworks (Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari et al) are less compelling than the multiple theoretical positions that emerge spontaneously from participants’ own experiences, and which express the singular logic of visceral human interaction with a mercurial time-based medium – sometimes, one senses, with time itself. Perhaps the best reference for this would be Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books, whose goal was not so much a theory of cinema or an analysis of the content of various films as a philosophical expression of the inner logic of the medium, and the unconscious shifts in subjectivation that this medium and its attendant environment made possible. The latter part of the book tends toward this broader approach, reflecting on what the anomalous position of the VJ might teach us as to the contemporary erosion of traditional models of cultural authorship. Veterans of 90s postmodernism might well be wary of sweeping claims about the technological subversion of dominant narratives, but the participants make a good case for the potential of their practices to effect subtle shifts both in perceptual frameworks and in attitudes towards the ownership and authorship of visual media. The realisation of such potentials, however, may depend on the resolution of a contradiction that is implicitly in play throughout the book: Having grown up, since the sixties, on the porous boundary between experimental art practice and the underground music scene, realtime audiovisual performance remains caught between the club experience as immersive, hedonistic entertainment and the deliberate aesthetic interrogations of conceptual art. This tension simmers away in the background here, the participants understandably more intent on building a collective identity than in questioning its basis. But one wonders whether the heterogeneous agglomeration of practices described by Vjam Theory is destined to diverge into household-name superstar VJs (Coldcut, Squaresquare …) and more experimental practitioners working in exhibition spaces (and who may well want to distance themselves from the associations of ‘VJing’). A noble aim for VJ theory would be to avert such a schism, maintaining this tension in a sort of plateau, allowing for experimentation that was not merely moving wallpaper for clubs, but which equally didn’t resign itself to the cheerless strictures of the art world. 2/3

Vjam Theory presents a freeze-frame of a culture in emergence. What may at first seem like a peculiarly retro exercise – compiling what were originally online discussions into a physical book – is validated precisely because it provides an opportunity for a slow-motion reflection on a practice that thrives on the high-speed potentials of new media. The collective nature of VJTheory makes it possible for these theoretical discussions to feedback directly into experiments ‘in the field’, which will in turn provide material for further dialogue. This reflexive circuit, passing beyond the raw technology and its bewildering possibilities, greatly enriches the potential harboured by VJ practice. 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/going-farm-eco-diary/ Going Down on the Farm - 2008 1/11

January The organic pasture glistening moistly in the winter sun seemed to herald the beginning of a new era full of hope. Picture the scene: I was standing in a field halfway up a Welsh hillside knee-deep in slug-infested cabbages. “It’s so cold,” she said, wrapping her arms around my waist, “Can you help me get warm?” Her perfectly created succulent body, soft like a lump of molten butter, was ripe with a wonderful combination of grace, poise and latex harvested from living rubber trees, with a delicious and generous helping of milk-based paints. Harnessing heat from under the earth’s surface, her every movement, so natural and easy, displayed a deep sensual appreciation of the root of the soapwort plant. But his brown eyes, clear and bright and drinking in her Brazilian bio-ethanol, lacked the light and bacterial activity needed to help them degrade. She gave off an aura of peace and harmony with Man and Nature. She was the soil, who becomes trees, who becomes seeds, who becomes squirrels, who become owls who become slugs, who become shrews, who become soil, gentle and loving at first, but soon becoming more urgent. My mind was totally gone at that point and all I wanted to do was to minimize the risk of blight spreading. I smiled knowingly as, with a base of rammed rubble to restrict the downward roots, her joy-bud burst into life. Caught in passionate seizures far superior to any supermarket-bought product, she combined beautifully with parmesan cheese. We lay coupled for a long time, listening to the rain on the roof and now hearing thunder as well. 2/11

February Becoming nauseous, with watery eyes and even asthma symptoms, he soon penetrated the sensitive cleft of my east- and west- facing orientations. I could already feel him growing, in small batches in gleaming copper pans, before being sent off to delis, farm shops and National Trust tearooms in East Anglia. Our growing awareness of food and the sweet musky smell of him, the brown and green staining my knees – these were the greatest pleasures life had to offer. The night air was pleasant, cool and slightly moist. The sky was very blue and the clouds were white and fluffy. The moonlight fairly illuminated our naked bodies. Avoiding the spawning season in order to give the stocks time to recover, we grew our own and foraged with his giant tool, back and forth, keeping time with the motions of the 3/11

changing seasons, always making sure not to lose our precious connection, one part white vinegar to two parts hot water. My skin tingled where the moonlight touched, greatly reducing the environmental impact of buying many different items of partyware. We gasped at the meeting of wet and dry, the union of liquid and solid, where solids dissolve and liquids solidify, as I unzipped my shorts, dropped them and removed my halter, standing only in my pink lacy boy panties. It was just me and Gavin, both of us thrilled to have the world to ourselves, surrounded by the towering trees of the forest, the joining of substantial and insubstantial, the union of under and over, weight and not weight. He sat down in the grass and pulled me back onto his lap. In my newfound lust for soya, I wanted everything: The bumble bees who sleep on flowers, waiting for the morning to warm you, toothbrushes made from local beechwood and natural hygienically treated pig hair, equal measures of comfrey leaves, thyme, hyssop, chamomile and skullcap, dildos and vibrators, chains, ropes, canes, whips and a variety of different materials including hemp, bamboo, organic cotton and fleece, and recycled plastics. Pulped newspapers had been pumped through holes in the walls, producing a thick, syrupy load. The sight of mulberry trees spreading over the wall of a large private house became a long passionate fulfillment of months and months of frustration. I knew that he could think of nothing but their sexy curves, their soft skin and their erogenous zones, the canyons you nestle into, each year deeper than the year before, the tides pushing and pulling against your mouth, the waves mixing fresh and salt. He ran his finger up and down the small, petal-like opening, rubbing a small cotton bud in the flower. Watching him and softly swaying my hips, I tried to make sense of the new unfamiliar delicious sensations that were coursing through my body: The tickling of the sturgeon and the thrusting of the salmon, the girth of that thick heartwood from sustainably managed pine forests. Overcome with pleasure, I murmured: “You are the rain who falls in sheets, explodes onto the ground to leave pocks and puddles. You are the ground who receives this water, soaking it up, taking it in, carrying it deep inside. You are the cracks and fissures where the waters accumulate, flow, fall to join more water and more.” Suddenly, the thick and hot seed burst from his under-ripe, polytunnel-grown Spanish tomato, swollen and larger than some I’ve seen. Massage a beaten egg into your hair. Enjoy the spicy, floral fragrance. Enjoy a nice creampie. I can’t get enough of it. The next morning we breakfasted while still nude. March Once I had donned my armoured gauntlets, I cut back the new growth so he’d have to dig for it with his tongue. If you are satisfied that your bender is as sturdy as you can make it, shiny with his saliva, then it’s time to put up polytunnels. April Freshly ground against her, I bucked in ecstasy as if vine weevil larvae were pupating deep, so deep inside of me. We were celebrating spring with rich indulgences whipped up from butter, sugar, fruits, nuts, spices, and a sprinkle of sulphur chips sliding in and out of my gaping cunt. These were nothing but the plumpest bulbs, heirloom, non-hybrid varieties, selected for reliability and taste. Even though I’d never tongued a woman before, I felt my responsibility toward future generations demanded immediate action – sweet, pink, juicy meat flaking pliantly off the bone. With one fluid motion, the market for soy derivatives peaked, and at last I felt sweet release shooting through me. 4/11

Tom was in the bushes filming the whole thing. But we didn’t know it. May “How full our baskets will be come harvest”, I mused. We are the king and queen of our own universe, and today we are feasting on each other. We are just as concerned about the products we put onto our bodies as we are about what we put into them. Her legs had gotten especially dirty in the field. I mashed the roasted carrots roughly with a fork to reveal the large purple head, so thick that my fingers barely closed around it, and some wild garlic flowers if the fancy takes you. The holistic visions overcame me again: A more balanced life in his powerful hands, the tight fit of his swollen stem base of a cabbage swallowing every last drop, just as the Italians do. The flavour was incredible so we persisted. It was warm and tasted salty, but easily damaged by late frosts, smooth and lightly golden from the sun. Without a word, I released his wrists from the cuffs just as his ‘zero carbon’ goal was nicely browned and irresistible, then squatted over him and guided it home. The bright colours came from natural vegetable dyes all over the tractor seat. Like a fire hose gushing out its white payload into those free-draining sandy soils, the running juices of the fruit provided a deliciously sticky mortar. I headed out to the field to take a solar shower. June There is something unique and wonderful about the smell of a young light brown bush, particularly when in flower – added to the fact that they come early in the summer, when the shutters of our bedroom are slightly open, allowing a gentle breeze to flow through. We sell our carrots unwashed and with sultry brown eyes. On a cool vegetable rack, they will keep until spring, when they are liable to sprout. They will stand out firm and proud, nipples erect, beautifully furnished with a huge king sized bed and expanses of dark polished wood that impart a feeling of warmth, her soft voice almost drowned out by the distant roar of the surf. The point is to understand nature and to find ways 5/11

of working with it while her lover’s tongue drives her towards organic status. When grown without pesticides, on mineral soils, they will positively thrive, even if they unzipped each other’s dresses, which fell silently onto the wooden floor. Around this time of the year, just as the cream spurted, we look for a decent crop with minimum detriment to the soil. She moved her hips gently back and forth on our planet with raw, unprocessed ingredients. An absolutely stunning tart fuelled by local tree thinnings, her fingers probed between the glistening petals with technology appropriate to a small urban footprint. The output of our photovoltaic roof worked the really satisfying feeling deeper and deeper until I felt my hot creamy Demeter-certified biodynamic skin and hair care products spurt deep inside Amanda’s sweet, juicy unrefined shea butter. Improvising with greens such as the slippery cabbage, she pressed my rapidly growing erection urgently until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. A drizzle of truffle oil would make a fabulous addition, but I am also very partial to the feel of a nice, thick mild climate. He lay back in the hay and stroked my ethical audit one last time, took a short, sharp breath and held it, kept in the dark to delay sprouting. I have a belief that we must find a more harmonious and holistic way of living within the limits of her deliciously, firm peachy buttocks – a compost toilet is one of the many nutrient sources. Scoop out the seeds with a small knife, or just with your thumb above her neatly trimmed dark blonde mound moist with the morning dew. Drizzled with good olive oil like a lollipop, tasting, licking, sucking. Then she brought it out from the kitchen to the communal, refectory-style tables in bountiful quantities in her mouth. With her lips closed around the fibrous root and clinging soil, I stepped out into the cool night air through a very fine sieve. 6/11

July It was a sweltering afternoon, and the picnic basket swelled with exotic, sensual fruit without the use of irrigation. Her legs were wide open and the actress was going all out on her sustainable construction. Thinking no-one could see me, I started to exclude light to prevent greening, sourcing locally as the emissions gradually became more and more engorged. I am a pure bred country girl in good condition, but I couldn’t hold back the bulging bags and punnets of wild berries. He knew how to be successful at water harvesting; I wanted integrated pest management now. Needless to say, my wider implications were fertile and I pulled my thin-skinned butternut squash aside, exposing my aching hot haybox cooker and sending up spears of sweet star-shaped flowers. 7/11

He worked rhythmically, grass-roofed, an ideal accompaniment to pruning styles that suit you and your trees. With fantastic and plentiful lunches, a pollen grain on each tassle, the most wonderful sensations about the greenest shower curtain liners started to flood my chill mornings. And, with that, I walked out of the barn. I have not seen him around since. August As I began to enter her forbidden treasure, the sight of wild garlic emerging on a woodland floor made the breeze warm and silky against my skin, brushing over me like a lover’s hand. It made for a lazy Saturday afternoon, the kind that makes you want to lay naked against crisp cool sheets while ants ‘farm’ blackfly for the sticky honeydew they secrete. They had really grown since I had last seen her, impressive yields of fruit in a relatively small space – I knew I would only be able to swallow half of it. She spent the rest of the day amusing herself by making me do and say whatever she felt like, playing with woodenhandled tools with a downy white growth killing off all the leaves and numerous leather attachments coming from the handle. She also has a strap-on and I love it when she takes me to task over the failure of carbon-emission legislation. The entire party, bare-foot, moved out to the sitting room and settled on a sofa. 8/11

September Because of the convenience and accessibility of bamboo poles, hazel has sadly become neglected, but her downy triangle was soft, a haven for pollinating insects. As she neared our modern society, where convenience is such a priority, tiny beads of sweat formed on urine, nettles, comfrey leaves or chicken manure. A bird twittered nearby, gripped by a moist velvet vice, and she felt completely happy, like a wild woman, uninhibited and abandoned to pleasure. That was until she caught him ramming it up the poop chute of a sleazy bleached-blonde honey with fake titties, which has been linked to increased cancer risk. Drawing deep on the cropland, pasture, forests and fisheries of 9/11

other countries, it seemed he was bent on consuming more and more, as our ecosytems became more stressed. Things were getting out of control, but there was no way out. I knew I didn’t have a choice but to open my mouth. This was not going to be a simple game of doctor. My angel had become completely nasty. *** October Then it all happened too quickly. The pleasure came crashing down like an avalanche, and she was moaning and writhing. Changing to a green lifestyle needn’t be a huge upheaval or mean hours and hours of harder and deeper thrusting, vast monocultures of sunflowers, corn (maize), palms and rape, but she just couldn’t help enjoying it. Ethylene, which is emitted by ripe fruit, squirted out uncontrollably like I was a garden hose being turned on. I slammed her roughly against the wall, providing there is some kind of guide wire, trellis or netting. Best of all, a cloche made of rigid bamboo poles, the tightest she’d ever felt. It’s probably worth chitting them if you’ve got time, earthing up your crop and fastening it into a padded ankle spreader. The myriad possibilities offered up by our native orchard fruits of autumn had finally allowed me to release that pent up passion. Its juice dribbled from the corner of her mouth, and I licked it clean. My own breathing was becoming more and more ragged as, heedless of the environmental costs, I started to pound away like there was no tomorrow. Reducing a healthy crop to a field of black stumps, straining against the organic cotton, the perennial and self-seeding juices flooded into her anal cavity, which results in pointless waste. With huge rolling waves of ecstasy that left her shuddering uncontrollably, the sticky sweet carbon imprint swept over Helena and I also started to shoot my flush using rainwater. There were bright red and welts beginning to appear. I tried to fix her with scotch tape, but it didn’t work for very long. There is no such thing as good packaging. Looking on, Robbie said, “Now that’s what I call great landscaping!” and high-fived Mikey. That was the last thing I saw before Carol stepped behind me and covered my eyes with a blindfold. November An nearly inaudible cry rang out, one of anguish, possibly pain, maybe one of passion. Chipboard leeched formaldehyde as I dug my nails deep into his arms, polluting the ground water. It was secluded, but not that secluded. It was near woods. He was mature and skillful, working my forbidden standby button with over-wet, sticky soil. But there was no way he was complying with the Energy Star criteria. Rough and forceful with his uncaring thrusts, he was out of his mind with blind urges, and flung down his EC directives on Waste Electrical and Electronic equipment before they’d had the chance to germinate. The extremely detrimental effect promised to be of enormous proportions. Violent seizures, explosions of pleasure, blasted upwards through my body as his genetically-altered and sterile seed cleared vast areas of forest, smearing optical brightening agents over every single part of my quivering body. Tritium and strontium-90 (both highly toxic substances) began to pump out in painful spasms, destroying ancient woodland and threatening indigeneous communities. The offshore drilling continued mercilessly until he had emptied his redundant landfill-fodder into the throbbing crave-hole of our stark reality. We were both on the verge of an anthropocene extinction event. I was a spent rag, my face a landscape of mascara, green detergent, dried cum, organic mulch and tears. My temperature rise was accelerating into a devastating climate lurch. The pinioning effect of the monstrous steel rod was deadly, its polyisocyanurate foam had the burn of 10/11

some alien ambrosia, contaminating the soil beyond recovery, reducing, chopping, hacking, sawing, bulldozing, and burning me up with his violent passion. “It’s vital that we cut back on this usage,” I rasped helplessly. But something about seeing me in pain turned him on. December Whatever they were shoving up my twat, it was cold and uncomfortable. Still anchored wide apart by the metal chains, I had been teased to the brink, using up precious limited oil reserves. Shipped halfway across the world, I stood there unable to move. I didn’t want to be punished. Feeling trapped, but succumbing to unethical work practices, my large quantities of pesticide residues gradually became more profuse. It was heavy and it hurt. It also made me incredibly wet. As the rays of the morning sun flooded the dungeon, he laid me down on the raised bed again and started drilling or mining raw materials at the expense of the environment. I had realized that he loved nothing better than to degrade and destroy fresh young coir, jute, seagrass, wool, reclaimed wood, natural stone, cork and even bamboo and paper. He literally began cramming it in as if he wanted to irrevocably destroy the habitat. Impaled deep within me, its obscene throb had pushed both the Chinese paddlefish and the Siberian crane to the brink of extinction. Continuing unabated at the current pace, he expelled load after load, each taking hundreds of years to biodegrade. Another second of thrusting and I would’ve exploded, and this way of life simply isn’t sustainable. Intensifying the hunger with volatile organic compounds forever lying just out of reach, he carried on stoking the burning inferno within me, with unneccessary waste and burning of fossil fuels. Sauron’s power was spreading like a cloak of darkness over Middle Earth, with a knock-on effect for wildlife. I felt warm liquid slowly filling my rectum. Meanwhile, transported miles and miles by road, Mindy was now in the middle of one long earth-shaking imbalance in the carbon cycle. Increasingly energy-hungry, her natural capital started decreasing until it disappeared entirely into the bleak future. Unable to help myself, as if possessed by some demonic force, I repeatedly and viciously deforested her large exotic areas of wetland, forcing growers to use more fertilizers and herbicides. Workers in Darjeeling were reported to be committing suicide. I spasmed in the darkness of sheer ecstasy. The number of fish and other aquatic life able to survive in the salty water plummeted. The sounds of pleasure filled the air, as pollutants such as low-level ozone, benzene, carbon monoxide, xylene and formaldehyde flooded me. No way was he about to decarbonize my electricity mix: Jammed in to the hilt, taking it balls deep, pounding like a jackhammer, on the way to complete and irreversible climate catastrophe, we were both totally consumed by blind compulsive urges, overwhelmed by our criminal nature. She was so pretty and peaceful I forgot for a minute she was dead. Then I realised I didn’t care. I really wanted some of that. 11/11

readthis.wtf /writing/esto-e-peor/ Esto Es Peor - 2008 1/7

––fRom–now=on–theRes–just–hell–being–ReheAteD––1 […] The molding machines are noisy and hot. The air is filled with a strong chemical smell. I have to repeat the same motions, over and over […]2 The commandeering of increasingly vast budgets for the development and promotion of toy lines sufficiently intense to compel juvenile consumption machines3 to ‘catch em all’ exerts unprecedented economic pressure on the side of production. From every province of the Middle Kingdom flows of deterritorialised labour are sucked into the circuits of virtual lilliputian realms, to minister to the molding, assembly and decoration of their exquisitely imagineered and highly speciated plastic fauna. Passing through the remains of razed farmsteads now irrigated with rivulets of toxic effluent, the biggest movement of people in human history4 streams towards the dark satanic happy-mills pushing through the blasted earth of the Pearl River Delta. Young female workers, for years at a time, make the barbed-wired high-security industrial compounds their rudimentary home. Anxious, exhausted, haunted by guolaosi (overworkdeath)5 and tales of the many young people returned home from the factories with disfigurements and strange illnesses,6 they troop daily between the new workshops of the world and their annexed bunker-dormitories, where tiny part-objects swim in the feverish half-light of their unquiet dreams: The bionic arm of a robot soldier clutching a diminutive AK47; the dismembered torso of a powder-pink infant; the bobtail of a happy red bunny; a hamburger with a mask and a cheesy grimace … Shards of simulacra from an imaginary whose remote-controlled reproductive organs they have become. The air in the spraying and colouring department was filled with paint dust and smelled sourly of chemicals – acetone, ethylene, trichloride, benzene – and hurt her throat […] she had to paint one every 7.2 seconds – 4,000 a day […] the air was fuzzy with fibrous dust and the smell of burning plastic.7 Severed from family and culture, economically immobilised, plagued by toxic allergies, headaches and blurred vision,8 circumscribed by a battery of disciplinary injunctions, they sweat fear and resignation as they anticipate another day decorating the assault vehicles of imaginary armies under the minutely–attentive gaze of their uniformed supervisors. Passing beneath the gates of the manufacturing compound, they cast an uncomprehending 2/7

but rueful glance at the emblem that arches overhead: A candy–coloured rainbow topped by two bulbous, maniacally-grinning cartoon slapheads: CHAPSBRO™ – Making the World Smile. We are not necessarily in the realm of the childs toy, but that of a demographic ostensibly responsive to different criteria. When, in 1997, Hornby’s Great British trainset empire, which had blossomed thanks to postwar distaste for the finely-engineered and formerly hegemonic German brands,9 evacuated their Margate factory (now slated for redevelopment as a ‘heritage centre’) to shift production to China, they reinvested the cost–savings in more quality and detail and […] more product for their now 70 percent adult customer base.10 We have to […] give them a product that is clearly acceptable as an adult purchase and doesn’t trivialize the interest. So the dimensional accuracy and the decoration and so on has to be absolutely spot on – they’re very discerning.11 Fucking Hell is precisely a collectable for the discerning, a Franklinstein for the Minted; But also an H0–gauge branch-line for Bataille’s locomotive whose wheels and pistons give parodic expression to the perpetual, frenzied motion of a world defined by two primary motions of rotation and sexual movement12 (the terrestrial orb as a fucking hell). There have been countless conflicts in which large swathes of urban cityscapes have been reduced to hardcore. Representing them in model form has always been a challenge. Using Exactoscale brick papers, it shouldn’t be too difficult to make quite a number of damaged buildings.13 The eagerness with which, before the ashes of 2000’s oven-ready Hell had cooled, work began on this new model dwarfing its predecessor in scale, ambition, and sheer futility, only attests to the inevitability with which every serious hobbyist’s quest for every conceivable detail … super-detail … superb realism … intricate detailing … Intricately detailed beyond … wildest dreams14 continually menaces ‘real life’ with its cancerous little empires. There is an old saying in the hobby that a model railway layout is never finished … there is no end to what you can do … Newcomers to the hobby soon find out that layouts and models, even in the relatively small 00 gauge, take up more space than they imagined.15 After only 30 man-years of labour on the part of their long-suffering assistants, it goes without saying that announcement of the ‘completion’ of CHAPSBRO™’s latest work is somewhat arbitrary. Nazis vs mutants – The whole subject is infinitely interesting, with endless ramifications and applications.16 Already in works such as the compendious All of Our Ideas For The Next Twenty Years (1997) CHAPSBRO™ souped up the combinatorial engine of cryptozoological inanity evidenced in the sketches of Bosch,17 as he extrapolates the tragic anatomies, rudely-fashioned prosthetics and ambulatory contrivances of quadriplegic tinkers into enough new lines of slavering hellspawn to furnish the covers of Slayer albums for years to come. CHAPSBRO™’s demons, assembled from a contemporary imagination well-stocked by two centuries of ever more refined atrocity, are deployed in their garden of delights with little allegorical ceremony. Pace the enigmatic symbolism of Bosch’s hellscapes, this universe of pain has nothing to tell us; It aims at an infinite intensification of the plague-logic recorded by CHAPSBRO™ spar Goya: Rightly or wrongly – the same; one can’t tell why – nor in this case; I saw it – and this too; they don’t like it – neither do they – nor do these … Ironic, amplificative or conjunctive, the impassive iterations cross over physical, social and partisan lines, and from horror into horrified laughter, indicating that behind Goya’s edifying pageant of atrocities lurks a Sadean fascination with the senseless fury of which it affords a glimpse. Breaking through negation as a ‘partial process’ compromised by its submission to military directive or natural law and binding the violent act to some projected refecundation, Sade’s ultra–violent appropriation of the Kantian theory 3/7

of Ideas has the cold light of reason tease the libertine with a ‘primary nature’ of the purest violence, tantalisingly unattainable through mere local infractions unless, possibly, through a concerted ‘apathetic repetition’ that would ‘reverberate’ to infinity.18 Fucking Hell represents ‘a further effort’ towards the perpetration of such a ‘perfect crime’ in miniature, a listless vision of eternal return as the perpetual motion of total war gone loco, counteracting indefinitely any congelation on the ‘political’ plane. This is worse. It is also a crime against art, the relentless pursuit of the hobbyist’s petty mania on an industrial scale continuing a campaign against the hygienic narrative of modern art, by toying with the venerable notion of the readymade. Dismembering, reconfiguring and painstakingly painting tens of thousands of miniature bodies, CHAPSBRO™’s production-line for ‘extreme rectification’ elevates a parodically zombified form of what Duchamp denounced as the olfactory masturbation of the stupid painter19 into an artisanal Apocalypse Now (I love the smell of Humbrol in the morning). Where the campaign against the ‘retinal’ subordinated eye to decisive mind, here a simultaneous scopophilia20 and phobia of ocularity21 employs every signifier of intensity to assemble a crawling-all-over nullity. Gluesniffing noses are no longer pressed up against the glass of the shop window looking for proof of existence of the world outside art22 in the shape of ‘real’ (authentically functional) objects – a shovel, a bicycle wheel, a bottlerack – to give a hand up in the world. For there is only outside=inside, selections made from a virtual multitude pullulating in a bacterial dance of zygotic acceleration upon an inorganic and disorganised […] labyrinthine skin,23 a moebian rollercoaster, a delirious modulation of miscegenated phyla opposing itself to the closed theatre of the representative [white] cube24 and its ‘critical’ debates. Duchamp’s infra-thin passage from virgin to bride,25 consummated by the institutionally-sealed name of the artist, gives way to an ultra-thick, labour-intensive combinatorial explosion, seeking only to make things worse, to bring them down in the world. An accelerated and interminable product development cycle detached from all economic imperatives auto–bricolages new, abominable conjunctions, materialising ‘dyslexic disruptions’ and gruesome bad jokes. The name comes only at the end: No longer misreadable as heralding a portentous portrait of the underworld, it is outburst not moral orientation, expletive rather than nominative. Here too, it is ‘the viewer who finishes the work’, with an exclamation: Fucking Hell! A crime against interpretation: This shit doesn’t make sense, it’s impossible to read. Between the two of us, art in the third person is of no significance. It already involves a crowd (What a mistake to have ever said ‘the’ Chapmans). CHAPSBRO™ (multiple-it) is decomposed of viciously deformed matters, distributed according to a scatter-logic that is radial26 or at least lattice rather than linear,27 relayed more by compulsion than by inspiration28 in the manner of an exquisitely-accelerated corpsing between terms whose duplicity affords the product an automatic illegitimacy.29 Its use of the gallery as a control environment30 for experiments in heteromorality nourishes the suspicion that some invidious contrivance, some unnatural assemblage is at work. Well known for working over subjects which disagree with it, it is too clever by half, refuses to shed symptoms, neither exhibiting nor soliciting shame or guilt. In general, a problematic charge whose account of its parentage is contaminated by horror flicks and incontinental theorising. CHAPSBRO™’s assemblage of readymade virtual part-objects offers up absolutely no ‘raw facts’ for psychoanalytical grilling. And since both constitute self-legitimating integral productions of their own reflexivelyprocessed delirium, unverifiable through any external referent,31 the artwork cannot be ‘judged’ by psychoanalysis, whose principles it has in any case long since absorbed and variously rectified. Terminating their interminable reciprocal deconstruction32 entails foregoing any therapeutic ‘working through’ in favour of a point-by-point heuristic parallelism operating through loose couplings between singular points of the two heterogeneous series. 4/7

CHAPSBRO™ clearly aligns itself in such ‘couplings’ with (1) librarian Bataille’s expulsion for shit–stirring the surrealists by refusing to anticipate any revelation/revolution (id has nothing to tell us) and collapsing Breton’s puerile oneiroscape into the horrors of base materialism (Big Boss’s attempted ‘cure’: you-think-you’ve-escaped-butthinking-belongs-to-Kuntrol) (2) Schizoanalysis33 of an heterogeneous unconscious that is no longer subjective, but machinic, libidinal, social, transhistorical, and in the process of being catastrophically decoded by Kapital. No less than Koons’ (1999–2000) Easyfun-Ethereal assemblages of Hair with Cheese (themselves channelling Ernst’s inconscience-fictional collages prophesying that les images s’abaisseront jusqu’au sol),34 CHAPSBRO™’s marauding mutant hordes generously assemble and offer up for guilt-free enjoyment aspects of the bourgeois imaginary usually simultaneously satisfied and disavowed. Where Koons unwraps kitsch from its prophylactic wrapper of irony, CHAPSBRO™ offer a playground of ultra-violence without didactic value, modelled on subcultural products (horror film, death metal, fantasy wargames) distinguished mostly by their zero cultural cachet, tastelessness and relish for violence. But despite CHAPSBRO™’s conviction that the kind of images that adorn the covers of schoolboys’ exercise books and metal albums also inhabit the Lurid Dreams of my Bank Manager (1999), they offer no redemption, no solution but only an intensification of the problem. No utopian reconciliation with our disavowed dreams (Koons unashamedly Cheerios™-venerating future aristocracy). For CHAPSBRO™’s invitation, not content with ushering in banality, more problematically exposes and espouses the cohabitation of banality with our precious moral touchstones. A crime against morality: CHAPSBRO™-Goya’s first merger, 1993’s diminutive Disasters of War, along with its death-size counterpart Great Deeds Against the Dead, indicated this path, one which diverges significantly from Insult to Injury’s (2003) masked intensifications. In the 1993 Disasters Goya is belittled and inertialised, the obscene imagery broken out of its reverential art-historical frame and reduced to a miniature technicolor diorama. The orgiastic representation lavished on these minutely-detailed setpieces ‘suggests’ nothing, determination down to the last millimetre creating a brittle carapace of intensity wrapped around a rotted-out core. The commander and wounded crewman are […] beautifully sculptured […] note the extra tears added to the trousers by the author.35 As moral force is asphyxiated under the weight of detail, prurience is at once exposed and frustrated, leaving you asking what it was that you wanted more of, and reaching for shock to comfort yourself. The macroform of Fucking Hell perfectly encapsulates the dynamic: The swastika, which runs through the cultural unconscious like writing through a stick of seaside rock, a shorthand emblem for the holocaust – itself a token that permits rapid concord,36 a cipher for the compact that binds us in moral solidarity, standing for the common knowledge that we have all ‘learnt our lessons’ (as if mass death were a morality play).37 It engenders an anticipation of something agreeably salutary, a further prop for the cult of self-satisfied memorialisation. But no – there is nothing, or too much, to see. We have such sights to show you.38 Rather than using the rubrics of historical singularity and incomparability to block perception,39 Fucking Hell overloads it with an excessive yet vacuous slaughter. Something vaguer, diffuse and portentous, would have been more welcome. But rather than monumental mausolea and palaces of remembrance, CHAPSBRO™’s mourning is modelled on that of the child survivors of year zero drone violence who, after the fall of Khmer, turned the notorious Tuol Sleng prison into a hot tourist spot, bricolaging gaudy souvenirs out of collected human skulls, cheerful reminders of genocidal absurdity more apt than any number of starchitected, tastefully-conceptual holocaust edutainment centres. 5/7

Supplying enough to whet the appetite for a good compassion-workout in other people’s misery (but, as it continues to ask, how much would not be enough?), CHAPSBRO™ refuses to follow through either with elevating conceptual gestures that would serve as conduits for token exchange of ‘deeply–felt compassion’, or deliciously suggestive chiaroscuro that would allow us to indulge our fantasies. (You could try photocopying the catalogue photos again and again until, lost in inky blackness, you could almost believe the bodies were real … You get a bit of what you wanted). But no matter how neurotically inert the presentation, or how unreal the landscape upon which we are invited to exercise the imagination, its reception, so it seems, only repeatedly attests to the überbrands’ power to hair-trigger the moral reflexes. Ultimately CHAPSBRO™’s invitation is one we cannot take up: As concord crashes and burns, our autopilot turns kamikaze, the promise of liberation is converted into a convulsion, moral identity exposed as problematic tension by the ensuing laughter. Geology of morals: The molten core beneath the physiologically-encrusted character-armour of civilized consensus boils up in seismic waves, ejaculating lava that immediately cools into uncomfortable scabs that we can’t help scratching and scratching and scratching until they bleed again. VAN DRIESSEN: y’know, this could be a really positive experience for you guys. There’s a wonderful and exciting world out there waiting out there when you discover that we don’t need TV to entertain us BUTTHEAD: huhuhurrr … he said ‘anus’ BEAVIS: he, heheheh … entertain us, anus. VAN DRIESSEN: have you guys heard a word I said? BUTTHEAD: uuuhhh … yeah: anus. – Beavis and Butthead do America.40 PROFESSOR: Name two pronouns STUDENT: Who, me? PROFESSOR: According to the market, you are right. – Economist’s joke A crime against critique: As Picarseholé’s 1937 strip Dreams and Lies vied with the Spanish civil war reprise of Goya‘s Disasters, Turing was busy tinkering with his little machines, infinite ticker-tape nightmares whose ‘states of mind’ are recorded by a ‘computer’ = ‘person working in a desultory manner’, a tireless idiot juggling zeros and ones, the warp and weft that in its fateful collision with the abstract general equivalent would accelerate the Locke-in of a ‘second nature’ for which too much is never enough, the unhooking of markets from utility. There Will Be Blood, count on it. 010101 recarpets the tungsten-carbide stomach,41 making for a surface more conducive to slipups and bad jokes than to a firm footing. Dare you to enjoy the jokes, refuse to learn your lessons or grow up … Adhering to the letter of the masochistic contract whereby the artist repeatedly nails its pinhead audience by assaulting them with more and more shit, on the understanding that they will have been improved and edified by licking it up, CHAPSBRO™ leaves us to fabricate our own legitimations (or to consume them readymade from the Tate’s white labels). But it leaves open another choice: Refuse the supposedly predestined process through which disgust […] shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals42 ensure the economic subordination of the infantile to organic adult destiny, as reproductivehistorical end-pleasure transcends the enjoyment of what is now retroduced as fore-pleasure, an incentive bonus43 orienting us towards the demands of perpetuity. If the reasonable demands of everyday neurosis, endemic depression and culturally-sanctioned habitual child-abuse must necessarily cast perversion retrospectively as a 6/7

peculiarly archaic44 throwback to a primaeval period45 or prehistoric epoch46 (see CHAPSBRO™ playset Hell SixtyFive Million Years BC [2004-5]), conversely every good pervert must betray history and finality, fail critique, and relapse, playing with his toys in debasement of Geist, continually bringing things down whilst refusing to help with the foundations. Just as two-faced kunt Karl found his better half – old bearded prosecutor Marx – unable to finish his case against Kapitalism, unable to achieve the critical coupling with excitable little-girl Marx, unable to put to death the polymorphous perversity of capital in order to give birth to child-socialism:47 He pursued the prosecution interminably, endlessly playing with himself and toying with the defendant. Finally, to resist or ‘critique’ the absurd theatre of the art-world itself would be just more risible vanity. No need to do a critique of metaphysics (or of political economy, which is the same thing), since critique presupposes and ceaselessly creates this very same theatricality; rather be inside and forget it, that’s the position of the death drive.48 No question of ‘testing the limits’ or sneaking near enough the engine of redemption to piss in its fuel tank. If there is only outside=inside, then it is a question neither of averting nor assuring recuperation. Nor of entryism, since the institution is a perfect host body, with a tungsten-carbide stomach, always hungry, never afflicted by indigestion. Legitimation by the progressively–minded trustees of culture=neurosis is only ever a matter of time, and the shock– absorbing metabolic memory–core always has time on its side. Sad forebodings of what is to come: Fucking Hell will Frieze over. As collectable, it conforms to the criteria it systematically exposes as neurotic dissimulations of the cruel, dismembering virtuality of childs play, prehistoric delirium of hyperkapital. Desperately clinging to any excuse to carry on playing the game whilst protesting that it’s all educashunal, the lobsters squeal to the broth: Tell us what to think next. And CHAPSBRO™, on new orders from the organic body, organized with survival as its goal against what excites it to death,49 retools the factory of the unconscious to churn out a million high-quality 1:87 scale fullyposable action-packed varieties of feculent hellspawn. 7/7

readthis.wtf /writing/unfolding-the-middle-east-kristen-alvansons-nonad/ Unfolding the Middle East: Kristen Alvanson’s Nonad - 2008 In his 1998 book on Leibniz, philosopher Gilles Deleuze proposed the figure of ‘The Fold’ as a way in which a philosophy of immanence might measure the multiplicity of the universe. If Being speaks in one voice, if we invoke no transcendent plane of organisation, then how can difference be articulated? Deleuze’s vision of folds-within-folds, which he discovers to be the reigning principle of the baroque, extends to labyrinthine structures enfolding infinite complexity (or implexity) without yielding to any form of transcendence. Kristen Alvanson, an American artist working in Iran, suggests that we read the Middle East, in all its obscurity, inscrutability and hybridity, in terms of such a topological model, as a fabric folded and refolded into a baffling surface where disparate elements abut 1/4

unexpectedly and overlap each other in paradoxical fashion. Inversely, her recent work demonstrates how the multiple cultural codes at work in the region can be manifested through the folds of its fabrics. Alvanson must have been prepared, as her show Nonad opened in Tehran’s Azad Gallery, for it to be misread as a further move in an already hackneyed political ‘debate’. For nothing brings out the neurotic nature of the West’s relationship with the Middle East in the twenty-first century (beginning, let us say, on September 11th 2001) better than those garments that notorious legislation in France attempted to outlaw under the description ‘conspicuously religious’. With the debate on the hijab and the chador, the reassertion of secularism as non-negotiable principle of enlightenment clashes with the liberal commitment to tolerance; and the confused credo of multiculturalism vies with the neo-feminist exigency of ‘liberating’ Middle-Eastern woman into the alternative cruelties of consumerist subjection. Writing in Le Monde on the controversy over the banning of ‘the veil’ in schools, French philosopher Alain Badiou suggested the French protect their schoolchildren instead against those far more pernicious semiotic triggers of social antagonism, ostentatiously-displayed global consumer brands. And yet, comfortably addicted to those ciphers of abstracted desire, the West continues to find something chilling and disturbing in the sight of women uniformed in mute, black coverings whose significance and relation to their wearers’ individual and collective desire is obscure. The conflicted allegiances of feminism – do the dark folds create a protected, autonomous space, its blank surface baffling the male gaze; or are they walking prison cells, sinister instruments of ‘islamofascism’? – attest to the essential point: The West is only able to confront Islamic dress as a sign of absence, or an absence of signs. It is this tendency which Alvanson’s project challenges, by engaging instead with overlooked features of their material and manufacture. Discovering that this supposedly traditional garb envelops more than its state-approved image would like to admit, Alvanson has refabricated it, making these disavowed complications explicit in a work which unfolds between the materiality of the clothing and the cultural formations that seek to capture and overcode it. Some visitors to Nonad did inevitably misinterpret as a feminist or post-colonialist gesture Alvanson’s employment of the chador (the traditional Islamic female garb—usually black—which covers the whole head and body). However the work was concerned above all with encouraging a more subtle and attentive relation to these garments. It is Alvanson’s attunement to the language and the construction of textiles (in the eighties, she ran HOUSE, a New York fashion label popular with nightclubbers), that enables her to avoid the obvious pitfalls facing an artist who attempts to interrogate an alien culture – The false naïvety that promotes artists’ ‘personal response’ to experiences, often no more than an alibi for reproducing exoticism; and the equal danger of an overcautious respect for ‘otherness’. By adopting a hands-on relation with the fabric and patterns of the chador, rather than approaching it through alreadycoded political discourses or as part of a personal odyssey, Alvanson makes possible a fresh look at the sociopolitical relations in play in the Middle East. Rejecting the artists ‘responsibility’ to relevantly address hot topics, she chooses instead to experiment with the matter which underlies them. Described by the artist as part of an investigation into the ‘threefold’ relation of women, the Middle-East, and fabric, the main component of Nonad consists of a number of chadors which, suspended from the ceiling, form a kind of soft, diaphanous architecture through which visitors wander. Liberated from their inhabitants, draped from above, hanging like sleeping bats, the garments open up, exposing that inhabited inner space which the West invests with such anxiety. Indeed, exploring the installation, or seated within its confines (the Azad gallery is also a meeting-place where artists and friends meet to talk and debate, during Alvanson’s show doing so inside a ramified textile cocoon), it is no longer clear whether one is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ any one of the chadors. The viewer becomes a participant, embraced by materials which have ceased to be ‘conspicuously religious’, and instead unfold to reveal hidden possibilities. 2/4

The most important of these hidden dimensions concerns not the relation between woman and Islam, but that between nomads and the state: a relation which Alvanson highlights through a re-engineering of the traditional chador. Banned by Reza Shah in 1936, but reinstated at the time of the revolution, the standard-issue chador favoured by the current Iranian regime, with its affection for Khomeini doctrine, is made in regulation black material. By contrast, the clothing of the nomad people of the region is characterised by highly-coloured, patterned, sequined or diaphanous fabrics. In Iranian towns, the bazaar remains, true to Persian tradition, something of an interzone between these cultures, a station or intersection where women from both cultures browse at their leisure, surveying the fabrics on offer for hours at a time. Particularly in Shiraz, where Alvanson lives with her Iranian husband, the bazaar is a place where the nomadic and the sedentary converge momentarily, only to go their own ways once again. Alvanson’s chadors, which incorporate the lively nomadic fabrics, and which adapt the regulation four-piece half-circle pattern of the Chador to incorporate elements of nomad tradition, seek to prolong this moment of commingling. But furthermore, they seek to make tangible the twisting, convoluted fabric of Iranian culure itself. Nomad and state are never exactly opposed; in fact they have an episodic history of informal co-dependency, their relation of mutual suspicion often giving way to mutual convenience. It is nomads, for instance, who stand guard around the state-run desert oil complexes. Modern Iranian culture comprises an inextricable mixture of nomad and Islamic influences. The presumption (of either the Iranian state or its Western critics) that the chador can be subtracted from such syncretism and re-presented as a sign of religious purification, is therefore nothing more than a contemporary artifice. Whilst thus laying out the implicit (in-folded) dimensions of this society, Alvanson’s creations also constitute a kind of speculative fiction, projecting forward a vision of a mongrelised culture whose dress would express rather than suppress these inherent hybridities. Rather than making an orientalist exhibition of the strangeness of the chador or the nomadic garb, therefore, Alvanson uses them to make a direct intervention into the socio-political fabric in which they are mutually imbricated. The more obscure elements in this intervention are the ABJAD diagrams which Alvanson showed together with the chadors. ABJAD is an apocryphal and syncretic numerical system not unlike hebrew gematria. A popular, vernacular numerology surviving on the peripheries of official religion, ABJAD has been used for centuries for spell-casting, charms, protection, fortune-telling and koranic interpretation. According to Alvanson, in Middle-Eastern occultism, nine is the number of ‘unceasing collectivity’: it is the number which, in ABJAD, acts as a base element to which other numbers can be transformed, thus acting as a conduit between otherwise unrelated texts. This element of the show gives the ‘nine’ of the title (‘Nonad’ being a neologism composed ‘of nines and nomads’), and can be seen reflected in the chador installation: the half-circles of Alvanson’s re-engineered chadors are composed of nine textile panels sewn together, rather than the four which make up state chadors. Three outer panels employ the black fabric of the state chador, framing the selections of nomadic fabrics in the remaining panels: the nomadic elements, ironically, finding themselves inside the frameworks and the boundary of the state; whilst the state simultaneously embraces an internal heterogeneity. Meanwhile, in the ABJAD diagrams, the nine-panel pattern of the chadors is echoed, repeated and multiplied, in a sort of dance or other social interaction, with a number of whirling and sweeping garments seen as if from above. The drawn chadors are filled with markings which from a distance seem to be arabic writings, but close-up reveal themselves to be a mixture of arabic, numerical ciphers, and incantations in English repeated across several drawings (‘speed’, ‘inside’, ‘fire’). The collectivity of chadors, the drawings suggest, is not that of a rigid, victimised mass, but harbours stranger connections and potentials, its undulating black waves carrying information in encrypted form. 3/4

The drawings are freely adapted from the elaborate spell-casting diagrams of ABJAD. Alvanson takes up the calligraphic pen, as she did her dressmaker’s scissors, without any compunction with regard to ‘authenticity’. Since ABJAD is already a syncretic, mongrelised system, she allows herself a free hand in its contemporary re-creation. Returning from these mystifying and charged diagrams, one appreciates how Alvanson’s nomadic chadors themselves act as ‘diagrams’ or political maps, where state and different nomad groups meet in strange alliances. The inevitable difficulties of sewing together the various materials involved means that each chador displays idiosyncrasies and ‘flaws’, effectively emphasising the materiality of what is usually a heavily coded and standardised garment: the formerly quiescent materiality of the thing reasserts itself against the abstract (uni)form, and where the black of the state is married with nomad influences, the seams and sutures show and tell. Yet as Alvanson argues, the same applies as soon as any chador is worn, transformed from a standard-issue garment into a living, social form: the chador cannot therefore be reduced to the empty, blank cipher of subjugation. Neither curtain nor shield, the internal logic of these textile entities, the artist demonstrates, deserves to be properly explicated. Amirali Ghasemi, one of the originators of a ‘Tehran Roaming Biennial’ designed to counteract the isolation of the Islamic Republic from the international art scene, has declared that, in order to take this touring show designed to promote Iranian artists worldwide, the organisers together with their suitcases of artworks ‘will travel like nomads’ – making Alvanson’s participation in the upcoming event highly appropriate. But how much more strange and compelling would it be if the political pariah and ‘rogue state’ she has made her home were to return to the fold of the art world, from which it absented itself after Ahmedenijad’s rise to power, by sending to the next Venice Biennale this American artist, with her passionate demonstration that the reviled chador cannot be understood in the terms of readymade political ‘debates’ that serve only to reconfirm comfortable dogma…. Such a possibility is only one of the baroque twists suggested by Alvanson’s work, in its involved examination of the complex spaces of the Middle East. 4/4

readthis.wtf /writing/the-adventure-of-nihilism-ray-brassier-nihil-unbound/ The Adventure of Nihilism: Ray Brassier, ‘Nihil Unbound’ - 2008 Perhaps familiarity has rendered ‘nihilism’ a toothless philosopheme, but philosophers themselves have lent a hand in its defanging; acknowledging the ‘hackneyed quality’1 associated with the term, in his first monograph Nihil Unbound Ray Brassier sets out to undo this philosophical domestication. Nihilism looms up from the chasm between intelligibility and meaning, as the ramifications of scientific reason exceed their instrumentality for pragmatic human ends: the more intelligible the universe becomes, by virtue of the mediation of an increasingly complex conceptual apparatus, the more distant seems the prospect of its yielding any meaningful message for us. But Brassier insists that the yearning for meaning and integrity still endemic to modern philosophy can only occlude the true philosophical significance of this evacuation of sense. Depicting his project as nothing less than a continuation of the core project of enlightenment, Brassier insists that the various battles waged by philosophers against nihilism be understood not as struggles to wrest back enlightenment from the threat of a vicious subjectivism, but as episodes of an ‘anti-Enlightenment revisionism’ which risks depriving us of the ‘invigorating vector of intellectual discovery’ offered by nihilism2. The ‘speculative kernel’ of enlightenment thinking, he argues, consists in the scientific-realist positing of a reality which is intelligible yet wholly autonomous from and indifferent to our thinking. Enlightenment is therefore powered by an engine of negation—for the claim that rational thought indexes a universe in which we are not, represents nothing less than the cognitive anticipation of our own extinction. Nihil Unbound is best understood as an analysis of the various ways in which this ‘core vector’ of nihilism has been alloyed with extraneous concerns. Brassier patiently strips away these residual philosophemes, exposing the circuitous ruses through which normative philosophical reason has obfuscated the challenge of scientific realism. In the process, the speculative excesses, latent and not-so-latent idealism and anthropomorphism of continental philosophy receive at least as much of a battering as the spontaneous metaphysics grafted onto the workings of science by the Anglo-American tradition. Freed of these encrustations, nihilism becomes a compass for philosophical inquiry, a philosophical logic unto itself. Examining Wilfred Sellars’s proposal that philosophy attempt to integrate the ‘scientific image’ of the world and of ourselves as complex physical systems with the ‘manifest image’—the spontaneous framework in which we habitually experience the world and each other—Brassier demonstrates how this practicotheoretical management of nihilism can only entail an instrumentalisation of science and a refusal of the ontological vocation it inherently lays claim to Sellars’s ex-student Paul Churchland shatters this pragmatic compact, along with the ‘quasi-sacrosanct status’ (p.9) that long custom lends to the manifest image, but the explanatory power of his neuroscientific viewpoint is undermined by a further equivocation: Churchland commits himself to defining the ‘excellence’ of a theory, not directly in terms of its purchase on reality, but in terms of an evolutionary naturalism which presupposes illegitimately that the increased adaptational ‘success’ of the scientific theory correlates with an increased congruence between its representations and reality. Brassier insists that realism be decoupled not only from Sellars’s ‘alliance with 1/4

pragmatism’3, but also from this naturalist metaphysics. The ‘subtractive modus operandi’4 of science is radically independent not only of any received folk-psychological model of the world that would claim to underlie it, but also of any model of ‘nature’ that would transcendentally guarantee its superiority to the latter. Moving on to a very different attempt to localize scientific reason as an episode in the unfolding of a more originary logic, Brassier addresses Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim (in Dialectic of Enlightenment) that the ‘sacrificing’ of myth on the altar of scientific rationalism itself remains symptomatic of a mythical pattern of thought. Brassier deftly subverts Dialectic of Enlightenment’s ‘conceptual core’5 of ‘mimicry, mimesis, and sacrifice’6, recasting scientific rationality as a ‘psychasthenic dispossession by space’7, in which reason slides uncontrollably towards an immanence which dispossesses it of its temporal and reflexive self-differentiation. If the scientific image promises to appease the death drive and to defuse the conflict between the transcendence of the subject and the external world, this promise, says Brassier, is no pathological projection of a fractured consciousness, but indexes a ‘voiding’ potency immanent to the object, which triggers a ‘thanatropic mimicry’8 on the part of thought. Far from thought reaching maturity only in reconciling itself with the ‘natural history’ of myth as transcendental condition for scientific rationalism, therefore, the latter arrives from outside the compass of human myth, and compels us to think a natural history whose ‘irreflexive immanence’9 renders it radically unamenable to the ‘reflective commemoration’ recommended by Adorno and Horkheimer. Following young French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2007) Brassier continues by suggesting that the time of science is anathematic to any (‘correlationist’) position for which objective reality is constituted through some originary condition of manifestation. For scientists who study black holes or light from long-deceased stars, experience, life and consciousness, are themselves minor spatiotemporal occurrences— thought is a ‘thing’ with a beginning and an end and so cannot possibly condition such objects. Aside from this unveiling of the ‘diachronicity’ of thought and being, however, Brassier ultimately finds Meillassoux’s own rationalist escape-route from correlationism unsatisfactory, arguing that it reiterates the absolute difference between thought and being and the philosophical privileging of time. It is perhaps inevitable that Brassier should mobilize Badiou’s endorsement of the mathematical disenchantment of nature. His account notably distinguishes itself from the recent burgeoning reception of Badiou’s work, in concentrating entirely on the latter’s subtractive ontology to the exclusion of the theory of the event. Seeking, like Meillassoux, to overcome the Kantian alternative between dogmatic rationalist metaphysics and agnostic critique, Badiou offers an account of ontology which neither subsumes being under any concept, nor absolutizes our presentative access to it. But having ‘disenchanted ontology’ and showed how ‘being […] means, quite literally, nothing’10, like Meillassoux, Badiou does not sufficiently cleave to ‘the prohibitive consequences of the logic of subtraction’11. The apparent necessity of a mathematical marking of the void in order that inconsistent multiplicity be structured compromises the latter’s autonomy, making the void of being dependent upon its mathematical inscription. It is the work of François Laruelle which, according to Brassier, finally fulfills the requirements of a ‘transcendental realism’12 robust enough to withstand the anti-realist assaults of post-Kantian philosophy and able to uphold the autonomy of the object from thought. For Laruelle, thought no longer reaches out (whether through correlation or via intellectual intuition) directly to the object; rather the object imposes itself upon a thought which must accord with it: ‘The object thinks through the subject’13 and ‘the reality of the object’ is ‘the ultimate determinant for philosophical 2/4

thought’14. Brassier subjects Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’, supposedly a kind of objective science of the ‘decisional’ logic of philosophy, to some major surgery: Disregarding Laruelle’s all-too-Heideggerian predilection for finding in this decisional structure as the trans-historical identity of philosophy, he understands Laruelle’s true innovation to be a ‘non-dialectical logic of philosophical negation’15 that makes it possible to abjure correlationism without a Meillassouxian return to intellectual intuition or a Badiousian dependence upon inscription. Only Laruelle’s adoption of a ‘non-decisional’ posture which guarantees access to a real which precedes decision, argues Brassier, is able to deploy the unilaterality of the object against the transcendentally-sealed circuits concocted by philosophy in order to forestall thought’s precipitation into the void. A confrontation ensues with some of the giants of modern philosophy, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze, during which Brassier pushes home his deposition of the most cherished orthodoxies of continental philosophy, the privileging of time, the meaningfulness of death as horizon for human experience, and (in Nietzsche) the transvaluatory epiphany which brings nihilism over onto the side of life. Against the philosophical privileging of time, Brassier sets the Einsteinian objectification of spacetime, neither correlated with nor dependent upon thought, and affording no privilege to existential ‘temporalization’. Against any transcendentalization of its anthropological meaning, he insists on Death as an ‘originary purposelessness that compels all purposefulness’ an unlife which seizes life, but ‘cannot be seized by it’ haunting it as a unilaterally-inflicted trauma necessarily incommensurate with any lived experience and thus utterly meaningless16. Just as the return to the inorganic state played out in the pathological repetition of Freud’s death-drive cannot be understood as teleological, since death cannot be said to be ‘of’ the living, so the immanent death which subtractive ontology entails for the thinker can by no means be said to belong to the latter. The scientific will to know is the equivalent of repetition in traumatic neurosis, a continued attempt to ‘bind’ the void, or being qua ‘un-bound disturbance of phenomenal consciousness’.17 Although Brassier’s characterisation solely in terms of its ‘subtraction’ from human meaning radically underdetermines ‘science’—and the paucity of discussion of actual scientific work in the book means that we learn little about the procedures through which such ‘subtraction’ operates—his defence of scientific realism and unfolding of its speculative consequences is gripping. He tracks the intricate conceptual convolutions of contemporary continental philosophy without ever indulging in the unfortunate penchant for portentous, gnomic undertones, throwaway references and wordplay which often plague it. Those for whom the style and content of Nihil Unbound proves ‘unsatisfying’ as a result will nevertheless find themselves compelled, in all intellectual conscience, to reflect upon whether such ‘satisfaction’ is an acceptable criterion for reception of a philosophical work: Indeed, this is one dimension of Brassier’s maxim that ‘thinking has interests which do not coincide with those of life’18, and suggests the ironic possibility that his book may itself come to constitute a sort of ‘selective procedure’ à la Nietzsche—that, faced with the uncompromising tenor of Brassier’s assault, some readers might opt for the gentler half-truths and accommodations that make life and, one might say, the enjoyment of philosophy, possible. And indeed, one can always choose life; but Brassier makes it very difficult to twist free of the accusation that in doing so, one chooses against philosophical probity. The other side of this coin, however, is that one cannot help feeling that some of the most pressing consequences of his project are occluded by such a rigid delimitation of philosophy. Granted that nihilism has a ‘fundamental philosophical importance’19 beyond the existential and cultural ramifications over which so much ink has been spilled, it does not necessarily follow, as Brassier seems to insist, that philosophy ought to be purified of any reflections upon the cultural consequences of scientific ontology. A refusal by philosophy to take ownership of such questions surely risks abandoning history to the vicissitudes of Capital’s exploitative deployment of both manifest 3/4

and scientific images. Frustratingly, despite various intimations, in this volume Brassier has little to say on the connection between capitalism and nihilism, or on any cultural ramifications the logic of nihilism may have. However, it is evident that, absent any defence of the manifest image, possibilities for radical transformation of human culture loom large: At his most speculative, Churchland himself contemplates the possibility of a cultural shift towards a self-understanding in terms of the scientific image. This ‘cognitive catastrophe’20 could be realised only through a widespread cultural transformation that itself realised the ‘plasticity of mind’ discussed by Churchland. Yet in those cultural arenas which might engineer such a shift, we find plenty of nostalgia but few signs of anyone precipitating us headlong into the adventure of nihilism. Maybe Brassier has the dynamite, but who will light the fuse? Adopting Badiou’s terminology, we could say that, qua treatise on ontology, Nihil Unbound still demands a philosophy that will ‘compossibilize’ it with other procedures. In its absence, Brassier risks advocating a cultural sequestration of philosophy, a vision of gnostic enlightenment: Refusing the practico-theoretical compromise à la Sellars, Brassier’s ‘subtractive ascesis’21 seems to countenance a resignation to the perennial impossibility of cultural flesh becoming equal to the rigor-mortis of nihilist thought. Warning us (and Badiou) against sacrificing the stringency of the latter to our impatience for political intervention, he consigns us to being walking embodiments of the irresolution of the cultural problem of nihilism—enlightened—that is to say, already-dead—philosophers listlessly shopping our way to extinction alongside our fellow zombies. These observations, however, should only go to emphasize how consequential a philosophical project Nihil Unbound announces: it is a powerfully original work which determinedly sets in motion profound and searching questions about philosophy in its relation to the universe described by scientific thought, and to human ends. ‘Philosophy,’ challenges Brassier, ‘should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem’22. And indeed, a part of the intellectual demand this book makes on its readers lies in its relentless defiance of everything liable to make the practice of philosophy a comfortably ponderous and self-satisfied affair. Forcibly disabusing us of the assumption that we have somehow dealt with the problem of nihilism, this book reawakens, and even intensifies, the troubling, disruptive power for thought that it once heralded: As Brassier persuades us, as far as nihilism is concerned, we ain’t seen nothing yet. 4/4

readthis.wtf /writing/nemo/ Nemo - 2008 Over several minutes, we witness the gradually altered behaviours (unexpectedly subtle, as repeated viewings will confirm) of a fish as water is drained from its tank, to the point where death seems inevitable. It is speed that transforms what could otherwise have been an (unusually aggressive) environmentalist admonition into a sequence that uncovers new complexities within the already somewhat jaded certainties of environmental auto-destruction. In its meticulously-paced manipulation of empathic horror, Nemo constitutes an extended psychological suspense sequence, an involving piece of cruel theatre. Although, as they say in the movies, ‘no animal was harmed during the making of this film’, it is Mackenzie’s timing that ensures that the work administers repeated, piquant jolts both to our culturally-conditioned squeamishness and to our fascination with such a grim spectacle. We can’t (not) watch – all the more so if, as is inevitable, the narrative reads as a forewarning to our own doomed species. Nemo was originally shown as an installation of two separate sequences: along with the fish, a second projection comprises a slow pan around the interior of an evacuated swimming-pool, its flaking aqua-blue paintwork forming a parched landscape parodying former glories: the end of luxury and the revenge of the elements. Recalling above all J.G.Ballard’s post-apocalyptic science-fictional scenarios, of which the abandoned pool is a favoured emblem, the juxtaposition recalls the Ballardian thesis (the most rigorous statement of which can be found in the astonishinglyprescient fable of environmental catastrophe, 1962’s The Drowned World) according to which the human being is a somatic archive, with previous stages of organic life liable to be reactivated under the influence of climatic change. Nemo, however, inverts this ‘neuronics’, replacing reversion with a sequence of systematic and catastrophic maladaption under environmental pressure. The distinct stages through which we watch our aquatic friend suffer irresistibly invite identification: Blissful unawareness; brief, concerned forays to the surface, as if unable to resist a taste of the impending doom; then an industrious but ineffectual agitation, shading into panic; and finally the torturous finale (fading out just in time, but not before the viewer too has suffered) where the entire physiognomy and somatic function of the creature are rendered dysfunctional, its very physical axis is upset and it is immobilised, its final, futile moments attesting only to the tragicomic optimism of organic life. Traversing this series of thresholds, which pitilessly communicate their building tension to the viewer, certainly emphasises the creature’s indissoluble bond with their environment. But it does so entirely without sentimentality or romanticism, in the manner of a laboratory experiment: indexing a quantitative environmental metric to a series of shifts in the psychic life of the inhabitant, as exhibited directly in its behaviour. Might we similarly diagnose human culture with an eye to how, beyond their surface significance, their apparent complexities and subtleties, its artifacts are ultimately symptoms of terrestrial-scale physical processes just as implacable, and just as brutal in their consequences? Then we would have to ask the Ballardian question: what will culture look like as the evacuation speeds up, as we find ourselves out of water…something like this, perhaps? 1/1

readthis.wtf /writing/how-to-live-with-nature-paul-chaneys-dark-ecology/ How to Live With Nature: Paul Chaney’s Dark Ecology - 2009 What the English and Germans call Still Life and Stilleben, the French and Spanish know as Nature Morte and Naturaleza Muerta. Such cultural differences regarding a venerable artform suggest important questions about the artistic depiction of nature: Is it a mortification, a kind of embalming; or is it a vehicle for some more profound vital process—does art ‘give back’ to nature? Maybe the ‘stilling’ of life is an anglo-germanic euphemism for a crime referenced more directly in the French and Spanish…or was nature already dead before the artist got there, and if so, by whose hand…? Such troubling questions always arise when considering the cultural parameters within which art frames nature. British artist Paul Chaney’s work thematises and disrupts this ‘framing’ in several ways, some subtle, some more confrontational. His work is above all concerned with an effort to coexist with other living beings; but the seriousness with which he takes this problem is matched by a keen awareness that it is never solved, but only deepens as it is pursued. 1/5

To become close to nature, for Chaney, is at the very least to repudiate the notion that the natural world is something unreservedly worthy of our admiration, something from which we can draw some comforting meaning. How to maintain a pious ‘respect’ for a nature whose finer details include necrophiliac duck gangbangs [Duck Fuck (2005)]? Chaney certainly does not shrink from the less ‘presentable’ aspects of life and death in the wild. But in an apparent effort to ameliorate such unpleasant encounters, in many works he lavishes exorbitant attentions upon certain unlikely specimens, carrying out his own selective framing in works whose surface combination of the reverential and the parodic harbours a sophisticated thinking of man’s relation to nature. Carefully-constructed shrines for domestic insect casualties [Windowsill Victims of Burrow Bridge (2000)], last rites and burials for roadside fatalities [Roadkill Rituals (2000)], assiduously compiled reports of bee mortality [Falmouth Bee Report (2005)], and documentation of inexplicable rodent deaths [The Shrew Mysteries (2006-7)]—the temptation is to read such works 2/5

as gestures of defiance against nature’s senseless waste. It is as if the artist hoped for redemption through these small symbolic acts of solidarity: Animal cohabitants are respected, their lives are celebrated, their deaths recorded, their bodies interred. Indeed, Chaney speaks of a ‘universal morality’ opposed to human morality. However, the more profound effect of this posthumous respect is that the privileged specimens become an analogy for the ‘unnatural’ selective privileging of the human animal: The disproportionate meaning we invest in human death is all the more starkly revealed when echoed in the pharoanic pomp of an insect funeral. In many of Chaney’s works nonhumans are very deliberately individualised and facialised, and some works are explicit experiments in anthropomorphism: In Cerambyx Cerdo (2008), a beetle beautifully cast in silver has a tiny, troubled human face irresistibly recalling Kafka’s Gregor; in Bee Unit (2007), the bodies of real insects are endowed with rudimentary sculpted faces, and preserved in what look like diminutive science-fictional cryogenic chambers; in Falmouth Bee Report (2005) and Fall 07 (2007) found dead insects are preserved in tiny, numbered lead coffins. Such works emphasise the fantasy of individualisation that is invariably at work beneath the demand for empathy with the denizens of nature: Chaney makes ‘units’ of the anonymous masses [Units (2003)], buries unfortunate creatures in marked graves [Roadkill Graveyard (2004), Field Graveyard (2007)], gives them miniature shrines in holy places [Bee Shrine Placements (2000)]. But this extension of individual care to the ranks of the nonhuman only serves to remind us that, since prolific death and suffering are the rule rather than the exception in nature, since the planet feasts on an endlesslyrenewed humus of ‘Chaney readymades’, such empathic acts are also incalculably cruel, drastically selective. The programme for a ‘universal morality’ leads to this dispiriting conclusion: no matter how many bees you bury, ‘someone’ will always get left out. But at this point, the artist’s practice continues apace, diverging into a variety of hysterical operations of mapping, reporting, narrating – negotiating the unlimited terabytes of data that must be processed in order to afford every single moribund pigeon the same level of emotional investment as Bambi’s mother. In these futile dispatches Chaney suggests a more profound and disturbing delirium, hints of a parallel culture in which we would wander the halls of art galleries admiring busts of great rats and finely-painted family portraits of stag beetles, returning home to the monotony of Bee TV, CSI: Hedgerow, and Coleoptera Crimewatch…. A macabre twenty-four hour news feed from Mother Nature: RECONSTRUCTION OF MAGPIE’S FINAL FLIGHT [One for Sorrow (2007)] … BLUETIT FOUND IN VICINITY OF MCSHAKE CONTAINER [Roadkill Graveyard (2007)] … NO EVIDENCE OF A STRUGGLE … DEAD BUMBLEBEE TO STAR IN POSTHUMOUS ROAD MOVIE [Bee Adventure (2003)] … LAST SUPPER TO BE RE-ENACTED BY BEETLES [The Last Supper (1998)] … SHREW MYSTERIES LATEST … Coexistence becomes a pandemoniac discord, and the nature-lover becomes implicated in something criminal and/or farcical. Chaney is a professed monist—for him, the strong hypothesis that ‘all matter is from one source’ implies a rescinding of any special privilege granted to the human. But his monism inherits an ironic edge from his interest in ‘cognitive dissonance’—our ability to maintain, against all the evidence, our conceit that humans are the unmoving centre of the universe. It is only the persistence of this prejudice, of course, which in turn enables us to paint the grand panorama of ‘nature’ gushing around us in all its beauty. Chaney knows, therefore, that there is no acceptable ‘solution’ to the problems he poses. His irony, however, is not the cynical resignation of the city-dweller. For at the cutting edge of his practice, he battles with unaestheticised nature as few of us do. His central, ongoing work FIELDCLUB (2004-present) consists in his own attempt to live ‘off-grid’ in a remote field in the southwest of the UK. He grows his own food, disconnected from public utilities and drawing as little on outside resources as possible. Much of his recent work continues to document incidents in the day-to-day course of this experiment in living, small occurrences which never fail to blacken the name of Eden. This close personal involvement empowers Chaney to challenge the credo according to which just a little love and goodwill (a few more landscape paintings, perhaps?) 3/5

could enable humans to temper their depradations in favour of a more gentle and wholesome coexistence with nature. In a recent solo show The Lonely Now (at Goldfish Contemporary Fine Art, Penzance, UK), pedestrians passing the gallery were caught unawares by the video work One for Sorrow (2007): The camera operator—presumably the artist himself—‘re-enacts’ a dead magpie’s final flight by affixing it to a stick and propelling it gracefully around a field. This uneasy combination of the grotesque and the tender is typical of Chaney, who leaves it to the viewer to unfold its complex proposition about man and nature. Probing the faultlines in our relationship to the environment, this work warns us against exalting an imaginary untouched nature whilst exempting ourselves from the reality of an interconnected ecology. Nothing expresses this more poignantly than the small sculpture Memorial to Roadkill Foxes, in which a skulk of foxes peer gloomily at a comrade laid out by a passing car. The scene takes a terrible turn when we learn that the animals are made from reprocessed car wheel balancing weights. The subversion of content by material is of course a commonplace in contemporary art, but Chaney’s vacillating sensitivity to both sides of the thought is palpable, maintaining the work’s irony on a knife-edge. Mourning and guilt are forged of the same stuff; What makes it possible to conceive of ‘nature’ also makes it inevitable that we have already betrayed it. But if this is The Fall, then Eden was never anything but a retroactive myth of origin, a fantasy of self-effacement. In the video Vole-No Pulse (2007), a small rodent accidentally killed by a lawnmower turns out to be pregnant, giving rise to the kind of horrifying and irresolvable moral dilemma common to any agricultural endeavour, but small change compared to the quotidian outrages perpetrated by Mother Nature herself. What would Jesus do? Install incubators? Open an orphanage…? The vole is gently interred in a deep hole, her belly still pullulating with the unborn. Here Chaney’s persistent pursuit of reverence in the face of adversity dramatises the incongruence of moral and aesthetic discourse in such a setting. Likewise, in Slug’o’metric (How Many Slugs Maketh the Man?) (2007), an ingenious gadget is constructed to simultaneously effectuate and tabulate slug elimination in the vegetable plot, upsetting the green fantasy of a non-aggressive ‘living with the land’. One of the most complex and striking works in the show, The Library at St Kilda (2008), deploys the same problematising spirals, but in a more ramified and complex manner. St Kilda is a tiny Scottish island whose last inhabitants were evacuated in the 1930s after their indigeneous culture, isolated for centuries, had been blighted by missionaries and diseases from the mainland. A dessicated puffin recovered from the nearby coast reclines on a plinth, its back yawning open to reveal a perfectly-sculpted miniature library. Everybody loves a Puffin, the work’s subtitle tells us, but our relation to nature presupposes a conceptual treasury, a literary legacy, a cultural history. St Kilda, with its intensified interplay between human culture and animal life, is emblematic of the interconnectedness Chaney seeks to interrogate, but its own virtual ‘library’ of cultural knowledge is now irretrievably lost, and the puffins, threatened by extinction, represent a further potential loss in the planet’s genetic-informational diversity. Whereas this polysemic piece sees Chaney’s talent for the poetic assemblage reaching out beyond his own field of experience, another room houses a monument to his base-camp: 24 Hour FIELDCLUB Museum (2008) consists of a large wine-chiller cabinet repurposed as a museum case, powered by a solar-charged truck battery and containing classified and inventoried artefacts discovered during FIELDCLUB activities. The gentle glow from the cabinet evokes the early morning light of a lonely dawn, and indeed an accompanying lightbox photograph shows the museum in situ, supplementing sunrise in Chaney’s field with the radiant remnants of yesterday’s solar-power, and exhibiting to the land its own history – as if its illuminated interior constituted the memory register and the burgeoning self-consciousness of the field itself as it becomes cultivated and humanised. 4/5

Admitting that the logos of ‘ecology’ is always already recoded, messed up, and unnatural, Chaney enhances it with a dark ecology of uncomfortable co-existence and intervention. A bracing antidote to all that is sentimental, deluded and terminally bourgeois in discourses of the rural and ‘environmental’, Chaney proposes more profound and twisted philosophical roots for these discourses, plunging the viewer into strange situations, emotions and perceptions that expose the urgency and complexity, not to mention the humour and the irony, of the problem at hand. Perhaps it is the Czech word Zátiší that offers the most telling definition of how art can still life: The word can be read as implying a movement beyond silence, into retreat and seclusion. We may seek to retire into secluded images of life and of nature, into a placid, strifeless union that is our own deluded creation. In Chaney‘s work as in his unconventional life, an uncomfortable and messy reality continues to wreak its noisome revenge on this project. 5/5

readthis.wtf /writing/climate-of-bass-hunter/ Climate of Bass Hunter - 2009 1/7

‘OF’ AND ‘OF’. What is a sound ‘of’? We can pose this question by way of a further reprise of Art and Language’s development1 of David Kaplan’s suggestive analogy between two distinct uses of names – descriptive and genetic2 – and two ways of understanding the ‘ofness’ of a painting. (In any case, it is a question that Florian Hecker’s work already provokes, whether in the form of a philosophical problem or in the immediacy of a spontaneous exclamation – ‘WTF?!’). Like a painting, a sound can be ‘of’ x either in the sense that it resembles or represents x, or in the sense that it retains a genetic or causal link to x – even if, no doubt, these two types of ‘ofness’ are often intertwined and mutually complicated. As A+L argue, representative ofness – the connection between image and world – is never simply given, but depends upon the competences of the audience, who not only, as Duchamp pointed out, complete the work, but also play their part in configuring the image-world relation, partitioning the iconic and expressive aspects of the image according to their varying background knowledge and inherited techniques of seeing or hearing. With this insight, the normative myth of the ‘adequately sensitive, adequately informed spectator’3 able to read a work of art ‘correctly’ is exploded into a multiplicity of different historically-situated image-world relations. Does this prevent us from setting the boundary conditions for a ‘competent’ reading, consigning us to relativity and the impossibility of any critical discourse on what a picture or a sound is ‘of’?4 Not, suggest A+L, if we admit that representational ofness is parasitic upon genetic ofness. For then criticism would be re-grounded in the ability to detect and analyse the genetic bases of the work, and realism in techniques that clearly circumscribe the relation of the work to its genesis. Accordingly, against the notion that the ‘meaning’ of a work can be read off from its iconic content, the suppression of information about the generation of a work would only block access to a full sense of what it is ‘of’, in what A+L argue is ultimately an ideological obfuscation. Again, Hecker’s work already demands this type of analysis, being indubitably ‘modern’ in A+L’s sense that it eludes the address of a criticism that limits consideration of the problems of aesthetic perception to the question of conformity or deviation from a mimetic ideal. It is against the empiricist prejudice governed by this ideal that his work must be heard; against the prejudice that the ofness of a work can be deduced between the terms of a supposedly ‘normal’ observer and the work’s supposedly ‘observer-independent’ representational content, disregarding all 2/7

‘questions of genesis’;5 a prejudice that the hypersemantics of semiological interpretation merely exacerbates, by hallucinating a web of meanings unanchored to any real mechanism of production.6 Perhaps the most stringent philosophical statement of such a ‘realist’ exigency is the early Althusser’s insistence, after Bachelard, that the scientifi c task (the task, ultimately, of a science of historical materialism) consists in hacking away the superfluous ideological images through which practitioners represent to themselves what their work is ‘of’ (what it represents) from the real conditions that allow it to produce a rigorous symbolic differentiation from the raw materials in which it fi nds itself obliged to operate (what it produces).7 In line with this demystifi catory imperative, A+L write that ‘realism’ may be conceived as consisting in the production of a ‘partially closed system […] whose termini are that picture and that which it is of [in the genetic sense]’.8 Following Althusser, (the early) Alain Badiou describes such a ‘realism’ as a process through which a practice of inscription produces nothing but stratifi ed cuts in its own symbolic flesh, repeatedly transforming itself through a series of delimiting formal breaks and foreclosures which must be distinguished from the ideological narratives through which we may try to ‘make sense’ of them: A process of production which is of (represents, means) nothing.9 Understanding production as ‘stratified and differentiated’ avoids the twin snares of naïve picture-to-object truth correspondence and mere structural coherence, enabling us to preserve the ‘dialectical problems of genesis’.10 This is the genetic imperative that drives poststructuralism: The ‘coherentist’ analysis of structure must be supplemented by an investigation of those crisis points where the symbolic opens onto the real, where the intrastratal dynamics of the symbolic system are pressurized by the forces of real production, with the imaginary seeping out as a noxious gaseous by-product. Thus, ‘full of intuitive fi ssures’ as it may be, the principle that ‘irrespective of what it is iconically connected to, a picture is of what it is genetically connected to’ constitutes a ‘very powerful […] instrument for keeping your eye on the material character of pictures as produced’,11 since it ‘directs our attention to the world, to the problem of material causation and not to the patrician intricacies of an idealized cultural coherence’.12 The genetic ‘of’ discloses ‘a functional relation between a picture and some part of the world’,13 attesting to the fact that image and meaning are produced through the conflict and synthesis of real material forces: ‘The world of the “aesthetic” is not given, except in the self-serving fantasies of those who would prescribe it. It decays and is renewed in and as history, and the materials of its renewal are wrought from the world of the “unaesthetic”’.14 GUNSHIPS AND 303S. The technical genesis of Hecker’s Acid in the Style of David Tudor adds further dimensions to the ofness question. For the analog synthesizer is first and foremost an instrument, precisely, of analogy. Its origins lie in the early part of the twentieth century when, following experiments such as Kirchhoff’s 1845 demonstration of an analogy between fluid flow and electrical fields, electricity came to be harnessed as a modelling medium, a controllable physical embodiment of mathematical problems, making possible the construction of ‘electrical analogy methods’, ‘electrical analogies’, or ‘electrical analogs’, in which ‘lines of electrical flux […] represent flow’.15 Although preceded by comparable mechanical devices such as the planimeter and integrator – physical embodiments of mathematical techniques simulating a system governed by a differential equation, and designed to interact directly with continuouslyvarying physical quantities16 – postwar analog computing emerged from the development of military control mechanisms. The incomparable success of electrical flux as a physical analog of the continuously-varying quantities of calculus, and analog systems’ consequent facility in solving differential equations and so simulating dynamical systems at a time when digital computers were taking their first baby-steps toward 3/7

simple arithmetic, were swiftly seized upon by a nascent military-industrial complex. In the early twentieth century, tactical dominance had become less a matter of brute force than one of ‘information technologies’ in the broad sense. And just as, even in default of any satisfactory mathematical foundation, early differential calculus had immediately been put to work in directing cannonfire, early analog computers would be eagerly deployed in the preparation of ballistics tables, in aeronautical and missile design, and in conducting ‘virtual laboratory experiments’ where real-world fi eld trials would have been prohibitively expensive or dangerous. From the 1920s, with the evolution of these ‘electrical analogies’ into programmable devices such as Vannevar Bush’s differential analyser – a ‘generalised programmable equation solver’17 – such systems gradually developed into ‘computers’ in something like the now-familiar sense: General-purpose machines able to simulate any real-world system governed by differential equations. The programmable patch-panel interface of the classic mid-1950s analog computer is already recognisable as the basis of the analog synthesisers that pioneers such as Moog and Buchla assembled in the 1960s, which in effect endow such modular signal-processing devices with a sonic ‘realiser’, putting the virtual laboratory of the analog computer in the service of sound production. As Dan Slater writes, anachronistically: ‘[t]he electronic analog computer is in many ways the aerospace equivalent of the analog modular music synthesizer’.18 The true representation of continuous variation was and continues to be19 the great virtue of analog electronics. But it was also the feature that allowed analog synths to escape analogy altogether. Moog and Buchla realised that a modular synthesizer would complement the working methods of electronic composers,20 allowing them to expand and refine their programme of sonic exploration, and becoming a ‘black box for composing’ or ‘portable electronic studio’.21 Their synths would enable musicians to discover a universe of sound which was not ‘of’ anything in the representational sense, at the same time as they discovered, through the analogy of the electrical voltages they manipulated, what sound was really ‘of’ in the genetic sense: They would be able to sculpt sound – nothing but superposed waveforms, pulses of energy, modulating and modulated. Oscillations, oscillations, electronic evocations of sound… However, as electronic instruments developed during the latter half of the twentieth century and entered the mainstream consumer market, the analogical impulse was never far away. And by the eighties, the capacity of analog machines to synthesise sound from the ground up was threatened by digital computers’ rapidly-evolving ability to code and reproduce recorded samples of acoustic instruments. Indeed, the market made its will known against the intransigent analog bias of a man like Roland president Ikutaro Kakehashin. Completing the transfer of military-industrial technology to the burgeoning media-entertainment complex, Kakehashin oversaw the production of Roland’s 303, a bass guitar simulator which, famously, failed miserably in the marketplace, and found belated success only years after being discontinued, when producers misused the controls intended to fi ne-tune the simulated bass guitar, instead tweaking the 303’s voltage control filters to explore an abstract sonic space. The 303 inadvertently released, as a kind of ‘machinic surplus value’, the possibility of a variation-in-motion: The parameters that were meant to be adjusted judiciously to achieve a serviceable representation were instead tweaked ‘in-flight’ to create outrageous sounds abstracted from all resemblance to any earthly musical instrument. LANDSCAPE AND CLIMATE. In realising this machinic surplus value, rather than analogizing real processes these pioneers explored the entire sonic space laid open by the device. They became bass hunters in a virtual smooth space, where the hypnotic patterns of acid house formed refrains, repeating paths, filters sweeping them across the terrain of continuous variation. 4/7

But the progressive refi nements achieved by 303 bass science, still vital to the bass phylum of dance music today, remained bounded by certain conditions: Pharmacological effects and crowd response, the rave interface, ‘a deployment of technologies – musical, chemical and computer – to deliver altered states of consciousness’.22 This ensemble installed its own differential features in the continuous, fl at parameter space of the device, producing a ‘landscape’ inclining it to certain paths, inviting the human hand and ear to identify and revisit more intensely sensitive zones and refrains, and fi nally locking the device into a recognizable genre. Hecker’s experiments, automating the sonic probe-head of the analog synth, not only widen the possibilities beyond the 303’s singular but relatively restricted sonic territory; they also release the analog synth from this habitual retreading of hunting-grounds governed by human proclivities. Instead, they reveal to us the weather-patterns native to this space. Climatic systems are the paradigmatic example of chaotic systems: Sensitivity to initial conditions, nonlinearity, massive complexity, emergent properties, deterministic but formally unpredictable turbulence. But equally, every chaotic system develops a climate within the mathematical space over which it operates. It is such climates of continuous mathematical space that Hecker exhibits to us – climate as the differential of weather, or the mobile differential tendency of tendencies. Returning analog synthesis to its roots in the simulation of differential equations, Hecker hystericises a Buchla synth by patching it to a Comdyna analog computer, using cross-coupled modules sensitive to the input signal’s gain and capable of producing frequencies not present at the filter input. This crosscoupling induces positive feedback paths, yielding a volatile, nonlinear climate in which we hear the material of sound yawing, rolling, and folding in on itself. As with the experiments in Auditory Scene Analysis23 interleaved with Hecker’s acid trax, these sounds vacillate on the edge of objectality, enigmatically quasi-cyclical, integrated and yet protoplasmic…. What is a sound ‘of’? What is a sound? The landscape is subjected to a mobile differentiation; weatherfronts approach and pass, meteorological catastrophes play out in a turbulent atmosphere. ACID AND TUDOR. If ‘acid house bypassed verbals altogether and proceeded to what felt like direct possession of the nervous system via the bass-biology interface’,24 Hecker undertakes to scour away the residual fi gure of the human, brutally deterritorialising the landscape with his inclement climate changes. Acid and rave culture had operated an escape from physical analogy but only to become lodged in a more profound complicity with a pharmacologically-morphed image of the human (dance and bi-lateral symmetry, the mutual catalysis of electrocortical stimulation and the effects of amplifi ed sound). Whereas on the other side of the dilemma, David Tudor’s Neural Synthesis – perhaps the piece closest to Hecker’s Acid…, and which allowed us to hear the slurping and screaming of neurons – still used its advanced (digital) technologies to operate an analogy. Representational ‘ofness’ demands further incapacitation, a further effort. The titular joke, of course, is that the turbulent adventures of these chaotic patterns seem to ape the metallic, nasal yelps of a 303 gone psychotic, the irresistible associations of its elastic, corrosive analog squawk giving rise to ‘an ironic stylistic détente between supposedly incompatible aesthetic and ideological worlds’25 of the sort that A+L proposed with their ‘Portraits of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock’. So that although, in line with Hecker’s abrasive hypermodernist agenda, Acid in the Style of David Tudor is governed by an absolute ‘genetic realism’, it simultaneously brings into play an ironic ‘resemblance’: In returning to the virtual laboratory environment of the analog synth, Hecker discovers the ‘single and synchronous surface’ upon which ‘incommensurable mythologies’ – those of rave culture and high musical modernism – can be ‘forced into momentary coexistence.’26 Nothing could be more apt for an artist such as Hecker, as steeped in the chill air of Darmstadt as he is passionate about the affective power of the bass rig (as anyone attending his live performances will know). 5/7

And in fact, upon retrospective examination, don’t the baroque, psychedelic visualisations of mandelbrot sets that graced many a rave flyer seem to augur this ‘monstrous détente’,27 indicating before the fact the strange conjunction to which Hecker introduces us? Their image-exploitation is suggestive in regard to the ecstasy experience, ‘infused with an intensity of meaning’,28 operating within an imaginary of spontaneous, tribal unity, and its production of a collective representational ‘ofness’ that obscured more profound genetic continuities: Possibly as few ravers suspected their phuture sounds were descended from military hardware as appreciated the mathematical significance of the paisley-patterned fractals that stimulated their visuals. SENSE AND NONSENSE. The audible continuum may be operationalised as a continuous mathematical space. But at the same time it is also the aeonic plane where infi nitives dwell: to cackle, to rush, to gasp, to whirr, to click, each one describes a vague but defi nable set of routes upon the virtual surface of sound. With exponentially-accelerating digital technology finally able to produce ‘digital analogies’ such as the BassStation and Rebirth, over the last decade basshunting has been taken up with renewed enthusiasm, and new territories have proliferated: Dread bass, rude bass, sick bass … language struggling to catch up, and sometimes lapsing into proper names, like fl ags planted in the sonic soil: Basses ‘signed’ Doc Scott, Ray Keith, Ed Rush. With regard to this indexical adhesion of infi nitives to itineraries in sonic space, in the present case we can only follow Lewis Carroll in speaking of gyring and gimbling. For Hecker’s chaotic climates belong to the virtual reserve of nonsense from which sounds that make sense are selected. His experiments cut across these biologically- and culturally-determined territories, producing nonsensical sound-images. Now, as A+L write: ‘Alike, the unironic arthistorical theorization of the artistic image and the unironic psychoanalytical theorization of the joke lead to that dark wood where Alice stared, outfaced and solemn, at a catless grin’.29 That is, aetiological investigation – the primacy of genetic ‘ofness’ – might seem to run the risk of ending up dissolving every face, every image, into vacuous nonsense, vapourising it in the act of analysis. But in practice nonsense is always richer than this would suggest. For ‘the ambition to produce an “unaesthetic art”’30 backfires in a strange way. A+L had premised their experiment on the principles that the modern audience is required to be competent in ‘second-order’ discourses,31 and that the supposedly spontaneous fi rst-order experience of art is never as simple and unmediated as might be supposed. But the experimental suppression of aesthetic criteria ended up producing a ‘new aesthetic’:32 In the process of impassively manufacturing the Lenin/Pollock ‘portraits’, A+L ‘discovered that some were better than others’ and found themselves engaged in some kind of fi rst-order practice after all.33 It seems that however effi ciently evacuated, ‘content’ can still enter by the backdoor. Second-order conceptuality leaks out into fi rst-order content, transforming it, crystallizing into ‘a transformed aesthetic practice’.34 Similarly, do not doubt that Hecker has meticulously selected, edited, and spliced the results of his chaotic experiments in order to present us with the dramatis personae of Acid in the Style of David Tudor. But far from invalidating the genetic approach to ‘ofness’, the novelty of this continual supplementary production – the end products of an austere break from first-order ofness becoming once again ‘first-order productions of a kind’35 (but of what kind?) – demonstrates the break’s productive, stratifying or differentiating power. This unanticipated experimental outcome can be considered in terms of the famous Bergsonian dichotomy between space and duration, between the analytical mind’s spatialisation or mathematicisation of phenomena and the lived aesthetic experience of duration whose dense coagulation donates sense or meaning; between the interior ‘ofness’ of lived experience that conditions judgments of representation, and the genetic ‘ofness’ of the physical causality of 6/7

sound. Against the psychophysics of his contemporaries such as Helmholtz and Fechner, Bergson denied the adequacy of the waveforms described by science to the lived experience of sound, of which they could, he insisted, only ever be an external and abstract index.36 Not coincidentally, it was against the legacy of Bergsonism that Bachelard directed his analysis of science as a series of ‘epistemological breaks’ from the self-sufficiency of the ‘immediate givens of consciousness’, an analysis to be radicalised by Althusser into the militant struggle of science against the obfuscatory mire of ‘spontaneous’ ideology. But, as we learn from A+L’s Lenin/Pollock experience, such second-order scientific breaks, with their associated techniques, obdurately and stealthily (‘[…] sneaked up on us […]’)37 give rise to new aesthetic experiences poised on the borders of sense. In discussing the dilemma of the ‘two realisms’ which the Lenin/Pollock détente set out to dramatise – that of the ideological delusions of post-painterly purity (the painting is ‘of’ the internal energy of the heroic artist) and socialist realism (the painting is ‘of’ an objective social reality) – A+L indicate that the turn toward genetic ofness offers no simple synthesis or resolution of this polarity, but instead furnishes the programme for an experimental ‘collision’38 that forces open the problem, simultaneously releasing a new bloc of aesthetic energy: ‘Action in the face of dilemma involves commitment to a more-or-less unpredictable outcome’:39 A clinical cut into the body of sound at the site of an impossible conjuncture, a sensory experience ‘wrought from the world of the “unaesthetic”’ to unleash new adventures in the bass-biology interface, it is such an ‘action’ that this recording is ‘of’. 7/7

readthis.wtf /writing/on-the-problem-of-mr-impossible/ The Problem of Mr Impossible - 2009 Preface No doubt opinion among readers upon those weighty matters to be pondered in the present work shall be not a whit less strictly divided than upon any like topic. For it is an established precept of the wise, that in all matters philosophic the current of common opinion cleaves into two channels whose courses run antithetical one to the other. I say advisedly common opinion, for may it not fairly be asked what advantage the philosopher may boast over such vulgar say-so, and whether he may not gather into their proper unity once again these divergent currents? As dignified as such an aspiration may be, I shall remark that the chief advantage accruing to a mind tutored in philosophical thinking is that, having studied and reflected at length upon the disputations of ages past, it is apt no longer to entertain the notion that the many and varied attitudes thus discovered could ever be subject to final resolution. Such a spirit ends rather in adopting as its chief and only principle the following: Never has there been a position held in philosophic discourse so robust and so well-defended against siege, that it has not found on some 1/6

occasion its ramparts overrun by some cavil or objection, this latter only to be found in some later period to be equally surmountable. Only through this unaccustomedly broad optic may the philosopher tell a stonemouse from a mouse plain, i.e. distinguish, in the great discordant clamour of suit and counter-suit, the consequent from the inconsequent, conning the subtle composition of the dialectic. It would be hasty to conclude that said dialectic, running now one way and now another, is a thing of mere caprice. It is a burn which, destined for and drawn onward in its course by the attraction of the great sea of truth, nevertheless feeds a great many tributaries, some of which betimes run dry, and never does (so far as our inadequate eyes may see) reach its destination. Nevertheless, one well-versed in its nature may read in its course indications of the great tides affecting that great unseen body. Considering thus the dialectic and the practice of philosophy, we may appreciate all the more keenly the reason for which Amot Tomamota chose to present his inestimable wisdom in the form of an amicable dialogue between friends. For in this way is conserved the dynamical nature of such a body in its grand procession toward that ocean, that the finest details of its movements rendered manifest – just as the gossamer threads of the windworm uncover to the eye the secretmost movements of the air. If the form of a conversation be, I say, the most fitting form in which to exercise the philosophical mind, then how much nicer an occasion could be fancied than – as is the case with the present pamphlet – when the fruits of philosophical thought, on a matter of no little importance, do indeed find their historical origin in conversation freely occurring between thinkers at their leisure? In such a happy event, the more divergent these interlocutors’ opinions may be, the more we may be sure of discerning in their ensemble those invisible currents whose twisting ways are our only compass for truth. *** Heidless Magregor’s, Wednesday afternoon. Charles Avery, Untitled (Heidless MacGregors Bar), 2006 2/6

Mandy: Do you recall, Toby, that on Friday last we were disputing about the nature of possibility? Toby: I do indeed, and a fat lot of good it did us. We tied ourselves up in knots that the blunt instruments of our reason proved ineffectual to cut. Mandy: Well, it happens that early on Saturday afternoon, three philosophers were discussing the very same topic before me, and with no little intensity. I was behind the bar leafing through a magazine, but I soon became absorbed by their lively conversation, and made sure to remember its cardinal points. They were, to be sure, in their cups; but their reasoning was, so it seems, unimpaired. Toby: And are you able to recount the circumstances of this conversation, and to recall its details for those of us present here tonight? Mandy: Indeed I am, for it made quite an impression upon me. Toby: Pray do so, then. Mandy: Very well. There were three of them present: Boobs, that haughty and imperious spirit; Penweather – keen as ever to quell his youthful thirst with a draught of truth; and of course Ioroe, a regular in these parts, who never did hear a speculative balloon launched without pulling out a pin so’s to rapidly deflate it. Also present was that most peculiar creature Mr Impossible who, although not a participant, was to become the very object of reflection. Toby: Please do continue, Mandy. *** Boobs: Really, is it possible that three great minds such as we should be consigned to discourse in the midst of such a dreary establishment? Ioroe: Since ‘tis manifestly the case, it must be possible; for what are facts but those possibilities which have succeeded in negotiating that narrowest defile, manifestation? Penweather: But is it no the case, nonetheless, that even baffled by the fine sieve of existence, the possible lingers, casting its shadow upon facts and lending them their vitality? Ioroe: Only in our fancy, boy, for what has demurred to take its place in this world, is by that token possible no more, and is no more than an imaginary spectre conjured by the mind. Boobs: [Sighing] To what purpose is it to dilate upon this matter? All is but a footnote to the great Tomomata, who demonstrated, on the contrary, that it is the facts that are mere shadows. Penweather: Nevertheless, do ye no mark the great number of things that are, despite their seeming most highly improbable? Does the universe no have need of a light sprinkling of improbability, lest it wind down to a mean gruel of sure-and-likely? Boobs: In present company, one might be tempted to venture that it already has. Ioroe: A silverbob on your heid, boy, ‘tis a nonsense fit to embarrass the most jejune ponderer. What is, is probable, and what’s improbable, isnay, and let’s have an end to it. 3/6

Boobs: Must it be either one or the other? Are there not degrees of probability? And if so, by what compass are they to be measured? Penweather: Take that hideous creature by the fruit machine there. Can any man own that such a hideous conglomeration is probable, simply because we see it here before us? Ioroe: ‘Tis, one must admit, a most repugnant and bewildering spectacle, that one. An example does focus the mind, right enough. Boobs: Are we so infirm? Examples are to philosophers as the walking-frame to Old Jack: an extraneous appendage whose only function is to compensate for a frailty and an exhaustion which themselves ought disqualify one from pursuing the finer arts of argumentation. Ioroe: Yet Old Jack walks to this day, and will do so long after we’re away. Grant us leave to employ that bewildering gallimaufry as a locus for our disputation, Boobs; that we may shape our ideas here on earth afore we raise them to the nicer degree of abstraction you crave. Let us consider this frightful fellow, then. (Mandy, three more of the same – ‘One may drink, or one may philosophise and drink’.)1 What say you, then, Penweather? Penweather: Can there be a less probable entity in this universe than he? It strains the bounds of sense to imagine how such a thing deign come to exist. To draw nigher the problem: Might such a combination have come about simply through the play of chance? What are the chances of the atoms aligning in such a way that this aberration of nature should appear even for the blink of an eye, let alone that they should persist in doing so … You! Birdog! How old are ye? Mr Impossible: Thirty-three. Penweather: There. The original miracle of his existence, thus multiplied by a power of itself, renders a figure so beyond comprehension as to render it impossible. Boobs: Not impossible, but merely highly improbable. If we really must speak of such things, at least let us introduce a fitting degree of precision. Ioroe: Och, dinnae come with the mathematic, love. Boobs: Very well, if we must stoop to examples, then take the very machine of chance itself: We know full well that, though we see cherries alone, they are but one of eight symbols inscribed upon the circumference of a rotating drum secreted within the bowels of that infernal chump-milking contraption. The probability of those cherries appearing being thus equal to one in eight. May it not be, then, that this abhorrent beaked dandy, too, is composed of a number of like figures emblazoned upon great cartwheels in some higher dimension I know not what? Then in principle the probability of his composite existence could be determined through an iteration of like reckonings. Penweather: Insupportable, too dreich to bear! This image of the universe as a panorama of interminable merry-gorounds is a torture to the spirit. And yet I cannae find a fault in your reasoning as yet. Ioroe: Then you are no philosopher, boy… Penweather: [Breathlessly] Nay, hold up, it comes to me … does not Tomamata’s interlocutor ‘The If’enish Stranger’ proclaim as follows: ‘In a universe of all things, all things are – and not only that, but more’ – For our universe is no game of chance circumscribed by rotating cherry-drums, but a continual tumultuous recombination which exceeds 4/6

itself in its striving. And – extrapolating – in a such universe of all things and more, there is nae measure o’ the probability of one entity against the whole, for, not ever stooping to make a whole of itself, the entirety of its glory cannae be counted. Ioroe: Extravagant suppositions, to be sure! Ye’ll soon run into absurdities, boy. We live no in the universe of all things: Just look about ye. Boobs: The philosopher, nevertheless, must speak not only of this world and of the detritus comprised therein. Such an assortment is paltry pickings compared with the riches the philosopher has at her disposal. For she must consider all combinations that could logically exist were they minded to, as well as those that happen to obtain. To limit the scope of discourse to the latter would be a vain conceit, worthy only of one who believes the limits of the universe to be determined by the walls of this bar. Ioroe: [Under his breath] Is’t not more conceited to affect to propel oneself, by means of words alone, and in one leap, from a barstool into the firmament of essences …? Penweather: Nay, I am convinced, this notion exhilarates me. Who cares a whit for the probability of that vile ponce relative to the other, equally vile things in Existence? What is capital is to consider his relation to the more-thaninfinite possible configurations of Being. Since these configurations are, properly speaking, numberless, and can never be spoken of as a completed whole, then all relative probability is neutralised, and the least likely as well as the most likely thing is no just probable, but essential. Thus, he must exist, and there no longer remains anything to puzzle over. Ioroe: If we neglect the ground beneath our feet in favour of the stars set above us by this idealiser’s fantastical pearlbobs, my boy, mark me we’ll end up falling into a pit. Imagine the consequences of lending that pompous ass the aura of the essential! Boobs: That’s nothing to the purpose. You may charge it with the most absurd of consequences, but no man can gainsay the deliverances of logical thinking, however monstrous they may be to his lousy habitudes. Penweather: On this we agree. What can be alleged in defence? Ioroe: That there is no such thing as this domain of Being, but only the existence we know. Bah, such odious emanations on the part of Reason embarrass the mind and confuse the spirit. Boobs: Nevertheless… Penweather: Can even the most acute of philosophers divine the nature of Being, and the mechanism by which its numberless possibilities enter the narrow channel of time which it must sometime pass through? For [t]he If’en, among themselves, possessed an order; and this order was the form that made the universe If’enish. Here did the higher beings see the imprint of the Eternal, which is the end to which this order I have mentioned tends. But beyond the Place of the Rout, every nature has its bent, 5/6

according to a different station, nearer or less near to its origin. Therefore, these natures move to different ports across the mighty sea of being, each given the impulse that will bear it on. The continuous and immeasurable plenitude of Being must also be routed so as to found the Onomatopeia of Existence. Yet its divine multiplicity rumbles on beneath the temporal settlement. This little critter marks well for us the place of the rout, where Being, funneled into existence, demonstrates its more-than-infinite capacity to multiply essences. […] Ioroe: [Grumbling] Let him walk the plane. 6/6

readthis.wtf /writing/quest-ce-que-aphex-%c2%a7-hecker-paris-9-7-09/ Qu’est-ce que Aphex § Hecker? Paris 9.7.09 - 2009 Aphex and Hecker: but what sort of ‘and’? The performances themselves are nothing other than the dramatization of this problem, which is codified in the enigmatic sigil § with which their conjugation is now denoted: Aphex § Hecker. What is certain is that it is not a case of complementarity or seamless integration. Because what is most remarkable about the coupling is both party’s indifference to integrating with the other: While Aphex spins a deftly selected set of acid and techno, Hecker appropriates elements of it and unleashes them in multidimensional sprays of sound which disseminate themselves through the performance space with absolute lack of politesse, with no regard to rhythmic or melodic congruence. Aphex fights back with more brutal beats. Hecker smothers them with a blanket of microsound. It’s more of a battle than a collaboration: a soundclash. No doubt for some (most?) members of the audience, unprepared for this sonic argument, the easiest option will be to reject one half of the equation. For Aphex fans starved of live performances no doubt the question becomes: What is Hecker doing here, ruining what could be a perfectly good DJ set? Although the same could be asked by devotees of contemporary electronic experimentation: What is Hecker doing courting vulgar rave populism… ? In either case, the only answer is: Interfering. Aphex § Hecker is the name of an interference pattern. Since the integration of ‘Aphex and Hecker’ cannot be completed at any rhythmic or harmonic level, the audience is forced to carry it out at a conceptual level; compelling them to consider what sound is, what it is that they are enjoying, what they are not, and what the difference is. Although sometimes Hecker’s contributions erupt abruptly, or arrive like a billowing sonic cloud embracing Aphex’s tunes without disrupting them, in the most interesting cases the phenomenon is akin to the situation where one is listening to music at home and an unexpected or unfamiliar sound interrupts: after the fifth or sixth repetition, one suddenly becomes retrospectively aware that the intrusive sounds are not part of the music. But what is it that precipitates this singular moment, when one sonic phenomenon is expelled from another recognized as an integrated group? Here we find a direct link to Hecker’s interest in Auditory Scene Analysis. Then at times Hecker gets the upper hand and drags us irresistibly into his world, while the prominent martial beats that had been the centre of attention wait shrinkingly in the wings. Any regularity on the immediately-perceptible level is defeated. But Hecker also mischievously détournes his own abrasive mathematical universe with tropes drawn from the art of rave and techno, winding the sounds up higher and higher until it the audience is trapped inside a giant cyclotron whose curve of intensity shows no sign of decelerating. 1/1

readthis.wtf /writing/manufacture-and-ideality/ Manufacture and Ideality - 2009 Crafts such as weaving and rope-making, with their repetitious nature, naturally echo the perception of time appropriate to their ancient origins: a cyclical, nonmetric time governed by man’s close cohabitation with nature, and which in turn inspires the mythic temporalities of recurrence and return. Within this same context, however, such practices also innocently mobilise mathematics and physics to extend and augment human work. Craft techniques, along with the counting, rhythms, songs and games that have always accompanied them, stand at the crossroads of the observation of domestic ritual and the unveiling of universal structure. They inhabit singular locales where the round of daily life, and our endeavours to improve it, intersect in a distinct and explicit way with important mathematical structures, allowing them to be isolated and physically manifested. If we understand mathematics as a generalized ‘science of structures’, we must admit that only very few of the latter are instantiated in material reality. Nevertheless, since modern mathematics owes many insights to weaving, knitting, knots, etc., we might conceive of craft as a portal through which the necessities of human life abut onto this vast field of potential knowledge. Of course, the craftsperson’s heuristic investigation of qualitative properties and gradual refinement of processes prepares for the uniform quantitative regulation of these properties and processes in industrial production (selection and preparation of fibre, combing out, spinning, twisting and laying). Here, they will be diagrammed, mathematical models and physical constraints made progressively more explicit and codified, and subtracted from their craft origins. Nevertheless – as is evident from the consistency of ropemaking technique over thousands of years and many generations of technology – however rationalised production becomes, it continues to honour the tactile 1/3

percepts that attended its historical birth. Before humans mastered structure, they were already industriously implicated within it. This observation might suggest a reconciliation of the cyclical conception of time, founded on a perception of qualitative resemblances without necessitating their equalization and measure, and a linear time, founded upon a quantitative ordering of equal units. These two canonical forms relate respectively to two kinds of repetition, that of the observation of nature and that of the obedience to law (or: tradition and standardization, ritual and rationality). It is often held that the linear model consists in a sort of calcification, a subordination of repetition to conceptualized sameness, with time being inflexibly assimilated to isomorphic space. Against this dualism, the helical form of the rope perfectly reflects the mutual coexistence of rationally-governed linear-industrial repetition (identical, juxtaposed metric units) and the periodic qualitative differentiations of ecological time (smoothly differentiated repeating cycles). Each infinitesimally thin slice of rope might be thought of as revealing a momentary constellation of strands, frozen at a point in their winding dance, with similar configurations recurring at regular intervals. But at the same time, the continuous form expresses the proclivities of the human frame and the capabilities of the early-technological mind. The problematic nature of human time persists, without resolution, at the heart of the ropemaking machine. But what kind of machine is it? Halfway between craft and industry, we come across a human form tethered to a wheel and pacing backward blindly. This is the rope walk, where the spinner, tied by the waist to the spinning wheel, walks miles each day, drawing out the cord produced by the machine. According to a contemporary account, ‘the whole effect of the spinner moving slowly backwards in the dim light of the rope walk is that of a spider weaving a web in its lair’.1 Perhaps this worker is a close relative of the arachnoid philosopher who, in Nietzsche’s metaphor, casts the world in his own image, and then proceeds to ‘feed off his own substance, which he then unspools in concepts like the spider making its web’.2 Observing modern rationality creeping across Europe, Nietzsche sees its intellectual apotheosis in a blind devotion to science and conceptual thought, which the philosopher wrongly believes will transport him beyond the earthly into the realm of Platonic Ideality. On the contrary, for Nietzsche the concept is the secondary product of a life betrayed by anthropomorphism, a life whose proud self-regard only further degrades it. Finally, what does Enlightenment Man spin out (Nietzsche, punning on Spinne [Spider] and Spinoza, mocks the geometrical systematization of philosophy) but the ultimate yarns, God and Reason, with which he re-binds himself? In our all-too-human will to turn away from the earthly, transfixed by the artefacts of our intellect, we turn our back on life. So that Nietzsche accuses modern man of choosing his own longevity over the fatal becoming that is the essence of life. He spins his days out in a protracted anaemia, which Nietzsche refuses with the words: ‘Verily, I do not want to be like the rope-makers: they spin out their yarn, and as a result continually go backwards themselves.’3 But this metaphor undoes the too-strict vitalist alternative between an immediate earthly experience and an overrational idealism whose manufactured transcendence betrays it. In considering the ropemaker’s work, and the transhistorical thread of living, making, working and thinking to which it draws our attention, such a dichotomy unravels. It is precisely here that Conrad Shawcross’s practice intervenes, with a re-articulation of the Ideal and the tactile that bears gently but insistently upon the strident denunciations of Nietzsche and many who have followed him. Far from exhibiting a laborious conceptual aridity, these machines—defiantly physical, pointedly non-instrumental— assert that we penetrate something of the darkness that lies outside our immediate (natural and cultural) milieu only 2/3

through a lengthy and non-negligible passage through it. Their uncanny movements may speak of the disturbing autonomy of modern technology; but their open, diagrammatic character and their contextualization as singular art objects gives them not to production but to contemplation. If their meticulous construction invokes the abstract Idealities that fascinate us all, their materiality speaks to the enigma of how and where human consciousness ever encountered these gleaming jewels of thought. All technology and artistry, even in its most sophisticated and abstract guises, continues to draw out the consequences and the circumstances of that encounter. This subtle contemplation of this diagram of the encounter between manufacture and Ideality may help save us from being caught in our own technological web: The ropemakers move backward into a void, but in observing the strands they lay before them, a collective history comes to light. 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/the-horror-in-the-library/ The Horror in the Library - 2010 Whether exaggerated suspicions are paranoiac or true to reality, a faint private echo or the turmoil of history, can only be decided retrospectively. Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons, even death may die. H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. He who worries away at the impenetrable connections of alienated elements lays himself open to knowledge which no individual human mind can bear—knowledge too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep—those tormented hours, drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to forget time’s empty passing. In the ticking of the cheap mantel-clock, whose sound has come to seem like a thunder of artillery, I hear the mockery of light-years for the span of my existence. The hours that are past as seconds before the inner sense has registered them, and sweep it away in their cataract, proclaim that like all memory, our inner experience is doomed to oblivion in cosmic night. It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I am forced into speech—forced, because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. Having mistakenly attempted to bring my studies in line with official scientific principles, I soon came to realize that those with whom this path associated me would stop at nothing to insidiously attack and despoil the last retreats of resistance to their timorous and conformist probings. The type of culture I brought with me appeared to them to be unjustified arrogance. My reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which they tried to gild their domineering competence with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. In turn, my nebulous and abstruse scribblings were attacked for their ‘factual errors’ and ‘colored opinions’, slandered as irresponsible and barbaric. And yet, if there is an unbarbaric side of philosophy, it is its tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of thought, which forever escapes what it judges. Such license is resented by the zealous positivistic spirit and put down to mental disorder. It was this misalliance, and the sneering empiricist sabotage loosed on me by those bearing the distasteful title of ‘colleagues’, that led to my being ejected from the Institute and landing in a low-rent bungalow in a small university town in the West, destitute of all influence and with scarcely enough resources to continue with my life-work. But this reduced condition is of no matter to me. He who offers for sale something unique that no-one wants to buy, represents, even against his will, freedom from exchange. My existence can only be justified by upholding the constant responsibility of writing, which has become my last refuge against the brooding, festering horror to which my morbid interests have laid me prone. The necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly—here is the only surety against creeping intoxication. There is no remedy but steadfast diagnosis of oneself; the attempt, through 1/5

awareness, if not to escape this stark, morbid hatefulness exceeding the foulest nightmares, at least to rob it of its dreadful violence, that of blindness. Possibly I ought not to have studied so hard. Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams, I do not know. What I can tell is that my sickness was instigated by that machine whose frantic, tinny cackle still echoes behind the walls of this dismal chamber with its brown hangings and maddening rows of antique tomes. Almost imperceptibly, as I drifted fitfully into sleep, the abstract horror of news and rumour spewed forth daily by the radiogram, and to which I had become passively accustomed, underwent a ghastly transmogrification into something altogether more distinct and unmistakably directed towards my own person, with a malignity whose eldritch proportions ruled out any merely personal malice. Indeed, I had the peculiar impression that the significance of the transmission belonged to the very atomic structure of the radio phenomena itself, rather than to the message it conveyed. The latter consisted only in the administration of a peculiar kind of questionnaire, sinister in its banality and conducted in a hectoring and unspeakably abhorrent, quasi-ritualistic tone, like the collective drone of some loathsome gigantic insect hive ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an alien species: Has your wife a bodily ailment? Of what does your daily nourishment chiefly consist? Do you like jazz? Would it have been better to talk it over instead of beating up Curley? Who are the known associates of the subject ‘Alright’? What are the principal causes of armchair cancer? Then, dismal and shrill, like the piping of some amorphous idiot flute-player, there followed what any vaguely anthropoid being would hesitate to call ‘music’: Full of malignant cheer, as if an ingratiating commercial broadcast were serving as material for some elaborate psycho-technical experiment, its ghastly arias, imbued with deadly precision and deliberation, full of the mocking admonition to be happy, were swept aloft on great orchestrated swells obscenely distended with the gay promise of illusory gratification, their nauseating incantations violently devoid of all sense: The cutlets are playing a dog’s game, a dog’s game; the cutlets are playing a dog’s game, a dog’s game; the cutlets are playing a dog’s game, a dog’s game, all the livelong day. I cannot say for how many nights these ‘dream broadcasts’ tormented me. No relief was to be had by severing the apparatus from its electrical source—for this was not where its power lay—nor even by attempting, as I once did in a fit of rage against the relentless imbecility of this odious racket, to pulverize the machine itself by means of a powerful chainsaw. As I tossed nightly in a state of agonized half-sleep, the transmissions would mount to a climax of unbearable intensity. The inhuman prating became increasingly atomized, its turbid sequences subjected to a progressive statistical liquidation, and reaching their apex in a blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony, a satanic concert like six jazz platters revolving at the same time. In that shrieking, the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion. Stark, utter horror burst over me and weighed my spirit with a black clutching panic from which it can never shake free. I awoke to red madness and the mockery of diabolism, as farther and farther down inconceivable vistas that phobic and crystalline anguish retreated and reverberated. Upon sequestering myself in the library, for a time the loathsome tittering of those infinitely appalling communications from beyond abated. Here I was able to continue my research, although the idea—somehow implanted by those demoniacal alien interrogations—of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance, was oddly persistent. I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings over the city and through the regions around it. Certain brief, glimmering visions in these dreams—vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out—now became connected irresistibly with the nature of the ominous ‘transmissions’. 2/5

After a day marked by wild hope and deepest depression, I found myself in the open air, beneath an indescribable black sky full of scurrying clouds. It seemed to threaten imminent catastrophe. I glimpsed the entire panorama of the city stretched out before me, but compressed into a miniature space. It looked like a giant, old-fashioned set of fortifications, with a few large industrial complexes (including two matching ones) in the middle. From afar I saw them protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. There were almost endless leagues of buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide. These units, developed horizontally in fathomless vistas, were organized around the repetition of variously bizarrelyangled shapes. Once, I saw tremendous tessellated pools, reflecting the sun’s rays onto the underside of colossal horizontal concrete canopies cantilevered immeasurable distances beyond their exterior columns. In the shrunken and gibbous sky three huge, menacing stars could be seen; they formed an isosceles triangle. Always, the whole scene was shot through with the same hopeless feeling of sorrow. For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer. In the course of some months, however, the element of terror figured with accumulating force when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract disturbances—the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions regarding time, the sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person. In the depths of my worst depression since the winter months, I had these same dreams again, or, rather, I had dreams in which I remembered fragments of the first dreams. I have now again forgotten most of them, but I want to retain the pitiful vestiges I can remember in the hope that one day I shall perhaps remember more. I was in a small room with a very high ceiling, a function room which was joined to the hall through connecting doors; a sort of foyer, with silvery tamarisks along the recessed walls at the rear and mesquite shade along the front walls. The folded structure covering this area resulted from the intersection of two gable roofs of problematical depth, their surface here and there vexed with anomalous spoutings. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with a flame-girt monolith as a centre, eight concentric rings, monstrous constructions of black iridescent stone, each the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly-tapering arms, shielded the tenebrous interior space from the light. I was present at a large, unusually lavish banquet. The rooms and tables were lit only by candles that burned with a disturbingly livid incandescence, and this made it difficult to find one’s way to the main table. I struck out in search of my place on my own, pacing through Cyclopean corridors, black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered, up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry, and through chambers full of curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and vast shelves of marble, bearing odious oblong boxes of disturbing size. Eventually I found myself on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace about a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, like the battlemented lookout platform of a tower above which the spire rises up still higher. It was with a grim sense of foreboding that I began to climb the spire. It was very steep, difficult and dangerous, something halfway between a spiral staircase and an Alpine chimney, the air thick with the stifling odor of nether gulfs. After an infinity of awesome, sightless crawling, I found that there was scarcely any room for me inside the spire. I was now gripped by panic. From this perspective, on the plain below I saw groups of people with apparatuses, some kind of surveyors perhaps, functionaries whose entire mien was heavy with the pall of some unspeakable disaster. Grey, twisted, and brittle, a mixture of riff-raff and monstrosities, dwarflike figures with bald heads and tentacles, awakening veiled suggestions 3/5

of a monstrous plasticity—these countless hordes were, as it seemed, doomed to labour endlessly beneath the vaulted heights of these Olympian edifices in a kind of post-existence, like cancerous appendages dragged along by the monotonous, obtuse voracity of their blind mechanical striving. Their measured gait, the hideous equivalence of their impeccably-calibrated actions, the implacable way in which they carried out their ominous errands, was belied by an overwhelming sense of some ancient, dread ritual whose gestures their fixed and empty motions unknowingly mimed. Even where these dismal beings gathered to indulge in some kind of festive rite, their manipulated intoxication, their torchlight processions, their drum-beating, were arid and joyless as the eldritch scurrying of fiend-born rats across carrion-black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls. Yet in the petrified otherness of these non-entities, there was something unmistakeably venal: as neutralized and impotent as ignominious ballast whilst engaged in their futile ministrations, during these impious pageants their eyes took on a manic yet cold look of grasping, devouring, commandeering, like the laughing placard of a toothpaste beauty in whose flashlight grin one discerns the grimace of torture. As the jarring cadences of their wailing imprecations were carried up to me on the black wind gusting foully from that distant plain, I realized with a jolt of grotesque disbelief that these impotent labourers must be the source of my nightly dream-broadcasts. Almost immediately I also became aware, with a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze and annihilate me, that the antediluvian source of their petrified habitudes, a starkly horrific thing incommensurable with the horizons of any individual experience and having long since disappeared, for them, into the merciful abyss of forgetfulness, was itself present among them. There, sprawling repulsively across the earth, tended by the countless viscous masses of these self-oblivious drones, I saw It. I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is repellent, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. A mostly liquescent horror, thick with the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide; something blind and mutilated, endlessly calling to itself with a terrible moan that reverberated throughout untold chasms of unknown space; a renunciatory cry which, in that abysmally unexpected moment, I knew as also being my own—the ventriloquized tongue of a vile heredity that slavered poisonously at me from beyond all humanly-thinkable time. In my panic, I tried feebly to croak some kind of warning to the sacrificial hordes below, as if my words could somehow undo their enigmatic readiness to fall under the sway of the unnamable Thing’s absolute domination. But my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast. An unspeakable melancholy, drawing me irresistibly into the abyss, awakened this old, impotently yearning sound in its depths. Language sent back to me like an echo the humiliation which my immeasurable dread had inflicted on me in forgetting what I was. The scene melted away, and I was swept by a black wind through gulfs of fathomless grey with the needle-like pinnacles of unknown mountains miles below me. After a while there was utter blackness, and then the light of myriad stars forming strange, alien constellations. These events seemed so vivid to me that I found it hard to decide whether I had really experienced them. That is precisely the pattern that operates when one is gripped by madness. The implacable malignity of that vast abomination pursues me still, and I cannot shake off the conviction that in contemplating these appalling parched vistas of the unbroken reign of glacial death, I had become irretrievably aware of something forgotten: The lingering 4/5

awareness of an ancient wound, belonging to some other plane or phase of entity from which it once fell, vintigillions of aeons ago. With this certainty, the sway of reason is irrefutably shaken. Nothing will protect me from the black sickness. The centre of intellectual self-discipline as such is in the process of decomposition. Faced by a terrible cataract of memory—the awakening of thought to the nightmare of those unplumbed strata of extra-cosmic history—faced with the memory of a forgetting that had better have been left in place, the commemoration of that Thing whose internment in the deepest recesses of desuetude was once the very guarantee of my sanity, has become my only imperative. A consciousness that wishes to withstand the unspeakable finds itself again and again thrown back on the attempt to understand, if it is not to succumb subjectively to the madness that prevails objectively. He who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely succumbs to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to perceive, together with the specific difference between the newest and that preceding it, the true identity of the whole, of terror without end. Paralyzed by fear of the truth, mankind deigns not to raise the stone under which the monster lies brooding; to release to stark consciousness the whole process they have undertaken to suppress—yet unconsciously advance. In willing not to know that we serve Them still, that They shall awake and once again claim Their own, we condemn the spirit to increasing darkness. The world is systematized horror, its essence is abomination. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. To repress, in the face of this state of affairs, the full awareness of what has happened and what is behind it, may itself contribute to the recurrence of the unspeakable at any place on earth. Still I dream. Once again, I am falling from those Cyclopean towers through deep, foetid shafts of reticulated ebonyblack space, rushing past constellations whose form I cannot make out. Crashing down, I am pursued by the mocking laughter of the insidious object that disempowered me, liquidating intellect and pulverizing individuality. Some day a new constellation will form, and as this constellation sheds its deathly-livid light on the most distant past, we may finally decipher the black knowledge that festers in the chasms of chthonic subconsciousness, molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare—the diabolical unknown. 5/5

readthis.wtf /writing/geophilosophy-after-venice/ Geophilosophy After Venice - 2010 How is philosophical thought related to the planet upon which it takes place, to its territories, its topographies, its climates? Such is the question invited by the term ‘geophilosophy’. It could be argued that the essence of philosophical thought is precisely to escape its earthly condition, to counteract the limitations on thought imposed by our terrestrial home and the biological heredity that binds our cognition to it; that the highest power of thought, following the logic of saintly mortification, consists precisely in becoming indifferent to its vehicle. According to the title of the volume of Collapse which preceded this volume on ‘Geo/philosophy’, we might call this the ‘Copernican Imperative’: that thought must hold to the deliverances of rational thought, even and especially when they contradict our most immediate intuitions . For these apparently immediate intuitions – like the belief that the sun turns around the earth – are in fact mediated by the contingencies of our earthbound existence. Yet we did feel impelled to follow this previous volume on the ‘Copernican Imperative’ with a return to Earth, with a volume entitled ‘Geo/philosophy’ and which treats this question of thought’s relation to the earth in all its multiple dimensions. The multiple nature of this question, bringing philosophy into contact with geography, geology, cartography, ecology, etc, is certainly suited to a journal whose primary purpose is to take philosophical thought outside the bounds of its academic and scholarly solitude. A journal usually begins by circumscribing its subject area in advance, so as to define the space into which all of its contributors must fall. This reflects a hierarchical model of the concept, and of the space of the concept. Collapse, instead, understands the concept as a chain in which contributions from multiple disciplines partially overlap, creating a connective tissue of thought which, for each reader, will lead them outside their own knowledge and interests. The hope is that this connectivity is reproduced in the broad audience which Collapse brings together; that the ‘forced collaborations’ operated within its pages should find their counterpart in readers who, drawn in by one or two contributions appropriate to their interests, find themselves involuntarily introduced to writers and thinkers from entirely different perspectives. This in turn suggests a model of the concept according to which the latter resides, not in an hierarchical structure of progressive hierarchical generalisation, but in the transversal connections discovered, or produced, in the making, in the practice of the curation or editing of each volume. The concept of ‘Geo/philosophy’ proved to be precisely suitable for this approach. It not only addresses the fact that philosophers have long used the geographical and cartographical metaphors to orient their thought; and that a philosopher such as Nietzsche suggested that thought must remain ‘true to the earth’, that thought too has its territories and its terroir; but also the fact that the practices through which the earth is carved up, organised, and divided – architecture, politics, warfare, communications – also produce philosophical concepts and come up against philosophical problems. It’s evident also that many contemporary artists are engaged in this ‘thinking through‘ the earth, in very diverse ways. And finally, there is a timely element to this question of geophilosophy. Right now the 1/7

relation between thought and the earth could not be more stark: it is a question of the extinction of thought, and consequently a challenge to thinking to think its own contingency and its own potential absence. From all this it should be evident that this show of Pamela Rosenkranz’s could easily form a further link of this conceptual chain, expanding the network-concept of ‘Geo/philosophy’ this volume proposes. Our Sun uncovers the most universal implications of a philosophy of the earth through an engagement with one singular geographical location, Venice. So we should begin by asking in what consists the geophilosophical figure of Venice? Venice and Octavia: The Ecological Abyss Octavia is one of the apocryphal cities that a fictional Marco Polo describes to Kubla Khan In Italo Calvino’s infinitely fanciful book Invisible Cities: the spiderweb city. Octavia’s only foundation is a network of ropes strung across a chasm between two mountains, the whole city and its inhabitants being suspended from this tenuous support. Thus ‘suspended over the abyss’, Calvino writes, ‘the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long’. Like Marco Polo’s other ‘invisible cities’, of course, Octavia is Venice: as he tells the Khan, ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice’. Calvino thus rehearses the mythical geophilosophical image of Venice: a city in which the artificial life-support system of human civilisation is revealed in all its hubris and fragility; in which the quotidian joys, the passions of life and the intensity of commercial transaction, are played out within plain sight of their eventual extinction and submersion in forgetfulness: a city where human reality inhabits an infinite image-bank of its own contingency. As venetophile Josef Brodsky summed it up in his Watermark, for this Venice, ‘water is the image of time’. Today Calvino’s fable of Octavia takes on a more universal significance, as the image of the inundated city becomes a commonplace in global consciousness. Rising water is the image of an innocent era of prosperity threatened by the inexorability of time and nature; the waters of the earth are at once a vital sign and a memento mori. It is as if Venice fulfills in thought the role that Gilles Deleuze allots to islands: Humans cannot live, nor live in security, unless they believe the struggle between earth and water is over, or at least contained […] In one way or another, the very existence of islands is the negation of this point of view, of this effort, this conviction […] humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents. Islands are either from before or for after humankind.1 But a lagoon is not an island – perhaps not even an inverse island. Lagoon, of course, is a geophilosophically interesting word, where a singular location – the Venitian laguna – has given its name to a general topographical feature. The etymology of the word sets it out as a lapse of oceanic memory: a laguna is a lacuna. But only a memory can be forgotten – it is a memory of the outside, of the sea. In fact, like Deleuze’s island, lagoon life is only viable on condition of a forgetting, a repression, psychic and physical, of the main source from which it is drawn, and with which it still maintains a constrained communication. The MOSE system, protecting the lagoon against the ingress of the tides, is only the latest technological manifestation of this necessity to continually, militantly forget what it is a memory of, to suspend its return to the outside. Understood as a figure of this necessity, the taut, finely-webbed skein upon which Octavia’s inhabitants go about their lives indicates a first sense in which, as Salvatore Lacagnina writes, Our Sun is ‘an exhibition of the surface … 2/7

the surface being merely a thin film separating us from an abyss’. The anticipation of ecological catastrophe is, unavoidably, one of the horizons of Rosenkranz’s work in Venice. Our Sun consists of an articulation of the duality of surface and abyss with the Venetian couplet of water and sun. For, if the acqua alta now preys on global consciousness beyond the Venetian laguna, the sun that glitters dazzlingly upon it is also charged with an unaccustomed menace. At the same time as the water rises, our protection against the sun’s fury is peeling away; the solar source of all life is revealed as a potentially annihilatory power. Speculative Realist Geophilosophy This awareness that ‘the net will only last so long’ need not imply that we subscribe to the most severe predictions of ecological scientists, or their amplifications by a media hooked on apocalyptic hysteria. Nevertheless, the very cultural presence of these possibilities, the faltering of this necessary repression, has irrevocably turned thought towards its material support, towards that tenuous network that temporarily suspends it above its object and stalls its descent into the abyss of indifferentiation. In the words of a popular book by Alan Weisman, describing in great detail how long it will take for each of the products of human civilisation to be absorbed back into the earth, we are forced to consider The World Without Us.2 There is surely some link between the historical fact of this uneasy consciousness and the return, in contemporary philosophy, to realism, particularly what has become known as ‘speculative realism’. The latter consists in a will to counteract the tendency in philosophy to concentrate on the human relation to reality, through the mediation of language, culture, or phenomenality, and the concomitant insistence that the world is only ever a human-mediated world. The ‘speculative realists’ instead ask how philosophical thought can access an utterly indifferent reality which owes nothing to the human thought, a real which precedes thought and will survive it – a world without us. Pamela Rosenkranz’s interrogation of sun and water, I think, drew her toward this position. What is geophilosophical in Our Sun is that it addresses the way in which the earth – and the sun – exceed the roles to which our cultural traditions and our economic system have constrained them. It is, then, a speculative-realist geophilosophy that has developed in-between Rosenkranz and the philosophers with whom she has been involved, in a kind of catalytic reaction which is very much the type of process we are trying to create between philosophy, science and contemporary art in Collapse. Such a speculative-realist geophilosophy tells us: we can no longer trust domesticated models of our planet and the sun to orient philosophical thought: for we are only too aware that it is not our earth, not our sun. The Solar Economy of Philosophy This trajectory of thought begins with the return of an ancient duality, reflected in many religions, that of the sun as animator of all life, and as terminal, fatal destination. Plato’s employment of the emergence from the bowels of the earth into the sunlight as a metaphor for the pursuit of wisdom implies that the crowning achievement of the philosopher would be to look directly into the heart of the sun: to ‘look upon the sun itself and see its true nature … and conclude that this it is that provides the seasons and the courses of the year and presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some sort the cause of all these things that they had seen’.3 But we know that the sun which illuminates the earth, and is venerated by the philosopher as standard of all life and all truth, is also to be feared as that which will eventually consume us. Thus, in the solar economy of philosophy, the 3/7

absolute destination of thought is also its extinction. Like the denizens of Octavia, crawling our spiderweb – as Nietzsche said of man, he ‘feeds off his own substance, which he then unspools in concepts like the spider making its web’ – we are suspended over an abyss; but this abyss is also our origin, our sustenance, and our enlightenment; the abyss is the sun itself. The Solar Economy of Life It is George Bataille who first proposes that we think a ‘solar economy’, according to which the most basic economic problem is not scarcity but the exorbitant excess of solar energy; all movements on this planet, from the basest physical processes through to the highest sophistications of life and culture, consist only in labyrinthine detours, calle e calleti, of one and the same vector – the profligate expenditure of energy by the sun. The secret of all apparently stable and economically conservative being, then, is that it is already pledged to solar abolition, it already belongs to the sun and its radical horizon of death. For Bataille, whereas sacrificial and potlatch cultures understood and ritually enacted their participation in this fundamental truth, western capitalist culture, in one sense the most profound celebration of this headlong rush into abolition through consumption, also disavows it through its ideal enterprise of endless accumulation. Reza Negarestani’s essay, in the book which accompanies Our Sun, correctly aligns Bataille’s notion of the Solar Economy with Freud’s speculative thesis concerning the nature of organic life: In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud argues that the preservation of a lifeform in relation to the excessive energy source it draws upon, demands the sacrifice of a part of that lifeform: the creation of a mortified outer surface or crust – ‘a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli’ – that protects it from its exorbitant source of energy. Thus, the survival and individuality of an organic lifeform, biological, psychic or cultural, is based on the repression of an originary trauma in which it encountered, in all its naked power, the source of energy that would also be its death. Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting, temporarily protecting themselves against the outside that created them and will destroy them. Thus we can say that all forms of life are solutions to the same problem; all their multiform characteristics are but methods of managing the excoriating excess of solar energy which will eventually consume them in death. As modes of life become more complex and more numerous, their dependence upon the excessive power source only grows stronger; as Negarestani argues, there is a mutually-reinforcing symmetry between the plurality of life and the monism of death. Another way to put this is that, from the point of view of the securitised individuated lifeform closed up against its traumatic encounter with solar excess, the sun inevitably becomes the single and absolute horizon or vanishing point for all life. The Solar Economy of Capitalism Now, this development of what Negarestani calls the ‘monogamous model’ of the relation between terrestrial life and the sun, is relayed in the cultural and economic forms of capitalism. Capitalism appears as a crazed thanatropic machine, unlocking the earth’s resources – in particular, the fossil fuels that were, in more optimistic times, referred to as ‘buried sunlight’ – to release them to their destiny of dissolution, and thus accelerating the consumption of the earth by the sun. As Weisman tells us in The World Without Us, in an image that would have pleased Bataille, ‘by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s’;4 mankind is the first lifeform to contemporaneously communicate with geologic time; a gigantic volcano, a holocaust of consumption. 4/7

Yet this unbridled consumption also manifests itself culturally in an ever-increasing complexification and elaboration of multiple ‘ways of life’ and supposedly infinite possibilities and differentiation. A figure of this capitalist doubledelirium, which runs through the book published to accompany Our Sun, is the electrical sunbed: considering the massively complex processes involved in the design, manufacture and operation of such a device, all in order to concentrate and reproduce artificially the energy thus consumed. Capitalism, therefore, relays into the cultural sphere the ‘monogamous’ model according to which there are multiple forms of life but all are pledged to the singular fate of the solar abyss. As Negarestani suggests, all the diversity of life-under-capital, like the diversity of organic life, only corresponds to the fact that the monogamous relation between earth and sun has restricted life and thought to a single economic model. Now, in regard to both life and capitalism, water acts as a kind of relay; it is the sun’s representative on earth, the angelic secondary medium through which the solar economics of life is manifested. Although ideally-speaking everything and everyone may as well be launched directly into the sun, trapped on the planetary surface, the circuitous extravagances of life and capitalism are determined by following where the water is. It is to this affinity with water that capitalism owes its quasi-natural status and its potency as a new ‘force of nature’ churning and reterritorialising the planet. Water is that which allows the creation of the great human settlements, but it is also that which allows the commodity to travel, and thus accrue value in differentiation. The purest form being, of course, tourism, in which wealth is created through movement alone. Sun/Water Rosenkranz’s interrogation in Our Sun knits together, under the sign of Venice, the dialectic of sun and water, their complicity and their connection with life, capital and thought. For the celebrated aesthetic phenomenon of sunlight and water now appears as a kind of seductive sensory propaganda for this planetary conspiracy between capital, water, and the solar empire. The ‘life support’ of Venice is constituted more than ever by the tourist industry, and this is a tourism of water, either directly, in spectacle, or indirectly, in taking in the decaying legacy of thallassocratic wealth and splendor. But what would this be without the sun, whose splendor makes the spectacle possible. Let’s suppose that the ultimate significance of our visual fascination for the sun lies in the rediscovery of an originary trauma; the sun is the abyss towards which we are impelled to return, but which threatens our existence. What better thing, then, than to see it reflected, in water … As in Plato, where one of the intermediate steps leading to the fatal communion with the sun is to contemplate ‘likenesses or reflections in water … ’5 The ingenuity of Rosenkranz’s use of emergency blanket foil in Bow Human and Stretch Nothing is that it renders these reflective, dazzling surfaces, and the whole aesthetic tradition dedicated to them, inextricable from the fundamental ambivalence of life towards the sun: the return of light to the eye, beyond its shimmering sensory appeal, speaks of a protective role – protection against an immense energy that cannot be afforded by any form of life; at the same time, the material suggests the accumulation through which capitalism desperately tries to forestall the inevitable, to harness and store a tiny part of this excess energy, to bury sunlight in gold – from the scintillating gold of the Basilica with its threefold glorification of the Christian god, the sun god and the money god, to its millions of cheap imitators hawked by the surrounding tourist stalls; or, on the other side, so to speak, the silver placards in the streets of Venice dedicated to the public display of political propaganda. 5/7

In the Stretch Nothing series, vaguely human forms are reduced to a thin layer of skin smeared across this reflective foil, and trapped under glass, as in a greenhouse. Like these paintings, Bow Human can be understood as positing the human form in relation to this solar economy, whether we understand it as the victim of some geographical catastrophe, one of the female beggars who bow over their collection tins by the Venice canals, or a devotee of some ancient cult prostrating themselves before the sun. The relaying of the solar economic model from the biological to the capitalistic is then poetically distilled in the unsettling correspondence Rosenkranz sets up between what is apparently the most triumphant demonstration of the infinite absurdity of commodity-logic – branded, bottled water – and the human diversity and individualism celebrated by capitalist culture. Impeccably-packaged but viscerally unsettling, Firm Being recalls George Orwell’s reminder, at once ghoulish and irrefutable, that ‘a human being is primarily a bag for putting food in’. Food and water … The organism – let’s repeat the banal fact that our bodies, far from ‘firm being’, are in fact seventy percent water – uncannily anticipates the commodity, and the commodity perfects the trauma-driven encapsulation of sunlight in a bio-degradable membrane, with a sell-by date – ‘the surface [quoting Lacagnina again] being merely a thin film separating from an abyss’. After the Sun But Negarestani’s text does not rest with describing the solar economy of life and thought, it sets a tremendous task for geophilosophy: to break thought out of its capture by the monogamous model, even though, as we have seen, the propaganda of the solar empire runs through the entirety of biological life and human culture! To rescind the status of the sun as sole ‘image of exteriority’, as ultimate singular horizon for all life. For in fact, as Negarestani argues, the sun is not the absolute or the abyss, but only a local blockage, a restriction, a blind spot that obscures the opening of the earth onto a more general cosmic economy which produced it and which will consume it, along with the sun. In 3.5 billion years, the core of the aging sun grows hotter, causing a severe greenhouse effect that sterilises the entire biosphere; its outer surface cools, expanding to engulf the inner planets. In 7 billion years, the earth slips out of orbit but, outside the small chance that it could be flung out into the ‘icy desolation of deep space’, is dragged into the core of the Sun to be evaporated, its only legacy a small amount of fuel for the red giant’s farewell glow. The sun becomes a ‘small block of hydrogen ice’; 100 trillion years into the future, all the stars go out, followed by an era populated only by the ‘degenerate remnants’ that survive the end of stellar evolution. 10[40] years, the cosmic catastrophe of proton decay ushers in the era of black holes, where the only stellar objects left are black holes ‘convert their mass into radiation and evaporate at a glacial pace’, and then the scarcely-conceivable ‘dark era’ populated by atomic waste products entering into desultory, increasingly rare and fruitless chance encounters.6 The cosmic abyss is deeper than the solar furnace. Earth’s monogamous relationship with the sun is just one chapter in a weird epic narrative that does not find its climax in annihilatory conflagration. To contemplate these icy, inevitable vistas of cosmic time is in a sense already to go ‘beyond geophilosophy’ – to evacuate the anthropic and terrestrial point of view. The viewpoint of an ecology radical enough to take in these extra-solar eschatologies not only breaks through terrestrial concerns, but also through the ‘solar horizon’ that has governed our thought on and of the earth. As Negarestani says ‘to be truly terrestrial is not the same as being superficial’ – to be truly terrestrial is to embrace the physicality and perishability of the earth, and its implication in the universe, outside the local economics of the 6/7

relation between the sun and the surface; to replace the monogamous relation between a contingent earth and the necessary and absolute sun around which its planetary path winds, with a relation of multiplicity between this planetary body and the cosmic contingencies which led to its formation, and which form its dissolute destiny beyond the sun. The web which suspends us – temporarily – over the cosmic abyss, consists not just our own natural and technological environment, but of the knitting together of a history of cosmic contingencies; not only the earth, but the sun too, is a part of this temporary web of circumstances. Opening the Collapse ‘Geo/philosophy’ volume, mediaevalist scholar and philosopher Nicola Masciandaro recalls Dante’s discovery that the way to wisdom lies, not in an upward, heavenly flight – Ulysses’ folle volo – but in a way that returns, that passes through the earth. Here, the Copernican Imperative to evacuate the immediate evidences of terrestrially-domesticated sense meets with geophilosophy, in a continual interrogation of the history and future of the earth: The revolutionary image bequeathed us by Copernicus, it turns out, only threatens to in a new, solar, parochialism. In Loop Revolution, the video work which presides over Our Sun, it is earth that sheds its light on the individualised and encapsulated forms below; in its artificial revolutions, its surface churns, splits open, falls apart, as it searches itself. Such is the reflection on the earth that is geophilosophy: To get beyond the sun, one has to pass through Earth, but it is a world without us, no longer recognisable as our earth. 7/7

readthis.wtf /writing/body-count-with-amanda-beech/ Body Count (with Amanda Beech) - 2010 The dossier documents some provisional conclusions gathered from fact-finding, interpretation, hearsay and rumour: Its contents concern misguided attempts to critique and transcend normative hierarchies of image-power, and the failure of these critiques to acknowledge the idealisms they reinvigorate. How can any understanding of the image cope with a politics of the replaceable? The formal responses to the question of image-power witnessed and evidenced here, in reproducing images that represent instability – whether in a life that suffers towards death or a life that is dynamically propelled through nature as force – fail to respond to this problem adequately. 1/9

– Unnaturally red blood, lambent nasal membranes – these are two key indicators of hydrocyanic poisoning. This lesion on the neck is how the poison was introduced into the bloodstream, percutaneously. – This painting appeals to you? – I like the look of agony. – Why? – Because I know it is true. Upstairs in the off-white classical domestic-institutional walls of the Berlin Altes Nationalgalerie there is a wooden bench upon which two men sit and speak to the metaphor of an organised schema of knowledge and power. One is a grey shifty-looking IBBC exec elderly; the bank’s ‘recon guru’ who gathers secret intel on prospective clients, enemies, and the other – ‘the consultant’ – the assassin who recently authored the death of Agent Sallinger’s friend. In front of them is a painting. The painting is an image of suffering, a pieta. This setting; the museum, the bench, the interlocutors, the painting is scene and prop for the conversation. Tom Tykwer’s 2009 movie The International injects the 90s’ defining fable of rotten capitalism – the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International – with all the prerequisites of the political thriller: Lone protagonist Sallinger grapples with the tentacles of international commerce in an attempt to penetrate the black heart of a corrupt global powerbase (in the words of a Belgian police report on the BCCI, a ‘nebula’ that had reached ‘the fourth stage of money laundering, absolute power’). I could tell you what you want to know, but I must worry about my wife and family — they could be killed. – a former top BCCI officer We’d better not talk about this over the phone. We’ve found some bugs in offices that haven’t been put there by law enforcement – a Manhattan investigator probing BCCI A routine investigation, generic even: oriented towards an infinite power located in the dark recesses of political corruption, economic interests and fraudulent deals. As Agent Sallinger’s own personal motives and shadows of the past begin to cloud his judgment, the trail leads to Bank executive Jonas Skarssen. Skarssen becomes the ultimate target of Sallinger’s by now rogue operation, the face of the conspiracy. The last Russian doll, the centre of the 2/9

unnamable operations of power, Skarssen figures the immobility of a resemblance which has nothing to resemble (Blanchot). FLASHBACK Watching unfolds the action … A friend assassinated in broad daylight. This lesion on the neck is how the poison was introduced into the bloodstream, percutaneously. The invisible needle out there in public. Outside the airport mixing with people traffic. Wet roads, grim skies, dark clothes. Procedural mystery. We know the rules: Cop without trust, badly scarred by semi-undisclosed past. No associations, no real connections. The job. Late night cop show junkies, the usual patterns, quick turnarounds, we know the form. Slush funds, black networks, intelligence on side with evil clandestine ops, accounts maintained through faceless transactions. Bugs, clicks, wires, missed opportunities, closed doors. The job: to take down Skarssen, piecing the portrait together, stopping at nothing cos you know what you want: to disclose the deals, to reveal the truth. Skarssen dies, it all comes down. HEADLINE: BCCI: THE OPERA Pete Montgomery, Common Cause Magazine, January 1, 1992 Welcome to the world premiere of La Farce del Destino, an opera of our times and for our times. In the almost-trueto-life tradition of the opera Nixon Goes to China, La Farce brings to the stage the rise and fall of BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. In this ambitious work, characters appear and disappear into a shadowy world of intrigue that spans the globe from Washington D.C. to tiny gulf sheikdoms, from Panama to Pakistan, from Lima to London. Its villains are modern-day anti-heroes – drug dealers and the bankers who launder their money, dictators, arms dealers, terrorists, and political leaders and insiders who embrace wealth and power without asking questions. The setting is modern, but the tragic fall of the once-mighty transcends time and place. MEMORANDUM Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) investigation: hearing … (United States Congress House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, 1992). The BCCI affair: hearings before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics … (United States Congress Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, 1992). J. Beaty, S. C. Gwynne Beaty, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993). CLOSE-UP ON THE PIÈTA Scanning the Pièta, the old paths of power are rehearsed. The image speaks of extinction and apotheosis (return to abject material reality, and becoming one’s ultimate image). Since, like Christ, it is and is not what it is, the pièta ramifies the power of the corpse-image: It is the most essential image, an image of what the image is. The entry of the eternal into history relayed by/as image-power. A resolution of mind and flesh in the ultimate irresolution. The image has privileged access to another place, and here it can organise the meaning of mortality: death is a choice. It figures a new ideal of uncertainty and absence that, in being hypostatized as contradiction, condemns us eternally to fail before power, whilst maintaining power in 3/9

place. ‘The immobility of resemblance which has nothing to resemble’ clings to the constraints of resemblance, routinising both image and power. The image is ritualized further. Power is mysterious and intimately familiar, touchable and untouchable. And we know it. THE BEST COPY OBTAINABLE IS INCLUDED IN THE REPRODUCTON OF THESE DOCUMENTS. THE PAGES THAT ARE INCLUDED THAT ARE PALE, LIGHT, OR DIFFICULT TO READ ARE THE RESULT OF THE CONDITION OF THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT. NO BETTER COPY CAN BE REPRODUCED. Here, before the scene of suffering, the Blanchotian formalism supplies the awful logic of the image and its consequences: delimiting what power can be, whilst in fact unconstraining what existing power can do. Enthralled by the corpse … The constitutive default of the image binds us into the vacuous routine of the mystery, proffering an ultimate intimacy with power whilst deferring it unto death. DOCUMENT INSERT No. 1 BROKEN ARROW Eyes Only: re. Subject known as ‘Headgear’. Subject’s intensive operations in the field, his ‘concernful engagement’, left no time to ‘grasp entities thematically’; his gaze excluded the ‘theoretical’ – a ‘mere looking’ or ‘staring’ at outward appearance (Aussehen) that would jeopardize the implication of himself and his equipment in the network – in favour of ‘seizing hold of’: Tool always ready-to-hand, routines of a typical hard case: ‘the less we stare at the Hammer-thing, the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become’; ‘no matter how sharply we just look at the “outward appearance” of things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand’. Subject insists however that this operational engagement ‘is not blind’, not ‘sightless’ (sichtlosigkeit): He claims his MO ‘has its own kind of sight’, that of ‘circumspection’, whereas looking ‘with method’, ‘theoretical behaviour’, is ‘just looking, without circumspection’. Subject’s activities became conspicuous only ‘when an assignment had been disturbed’; a contingent equipment failure. Suddenly the whole picture became clear (The damaged tool ‘becomes its image’ and ‘no longer disappearing into its use, appears.’ [Blanchot]). The whole operation compromised, the network began to unravel, revealing deep background of projects in which the subject was implicated, but whose full significance was never disclosed to him. Subject therefore unable fully to grasp the gravity of his situation though it was ‘constantly sighted beforehand’ in a circumspect manner; speaks of a “vague sense that something bigger was going on”. Handled with care, his failure could expose the ultimate power-base; but he’s weak. All we have are the images. Offer subject the chance of redemption, tell him we can deliver him definitively from his bonds, join us on the outside, blow the whole game, lead us to the kingpin. We need this. Coming face-to-face with Skarssen will change everything. THE IMAGE TALKS For Sallinger, the end of the chase, the termination of Skarssen, offers no redemption: Skarssen’s corpse, broken tool of international capital, is simply cast off like a snake’s skin by the administrative mechanisms it has served, which in turn are revealed to be part of a system in which Sallinger himself is a participant: 4/9

– Executing me won’t change anything. There will be a hundred other bankers to take my place. Everything will continue – Justice … is not possible … Because, Agent SalIinger, your idea of justice is an illusion. Understand the very system that you serve and protect will never allow anything to happen to Skarssen or the bank. On the contrary. The system guarantees the IBBC’s safety, because everyone is involved: Hezbollah. CIA. The Columbian drug cartels. Russian organized crime. Governments of Iran, Germany, China, your government. Every multinational corporation, every one. They all need banks like the IBBC so that they can operate within the black and gray latitudes. And this is why your investigative efforts have either been ignored or undermined, and why you and I will be quietly disposed of before any case against the bank ever reaches a court of law. – So, what are we all supposed to do? We just supposed to give up and accept that this is the way of the world? MEMORANDUM At this point we encounter the impossible double-bind of either continuing with the futile mission to unveil the face of power, or resigning ourselves entirely. Response: Moral indignation (there’s nothing complex about cold-blooded murder) / Resignation (We just supposed to give up and accept that this is the way of the world?) Transcript phone conversation VERBATIM Unknown source US Justice Dept. 12.08.90 19.43H There is a feeling that somebody in Washington is trying to cut a deal on BCCI; they really don’t want to use the US Attorney’s offices to actually return indictments because that would compromise their ability to do some kind of overall package deal. ZOOM OUT ASKEW – FIXED GEOMETRY IN PLAN VIEW Equal-opportunity smuggler, global racketeering, a smorgasbord of services, young beauties from Lahore, missiles, secrets, the chilling effectiveness of targeting the corruptible – and bribing the rest. No-one talks, extreme purposive disarray, an elaborate corporate spider-web, a bank that could move money anywhere and hide it without a trace, a corrupt core of middle management with the latitude to do what they pleased. $1 billion loan to Nigeria secret accounts in the Cayman Islands clandestine control in three American banks building lobbies are graveyards for small-timers bought virtual control of customs officials investigative reports Skarssen: Cassian, what does one do when there’s no way out of a situation? Cassian: If there’s no way out, the best thing is to find a way further in. ACTION DEFINES SPACE Sallinger’s world is transformed, as he perseveres with this mission through this now more complex world. The fantasy of the centre of power is no longer possible. The fantasy of transcendence is taken down by the 5/9

omnipotence of ruthless capital. No constructing an outside now. Everyone is involved becomes the framework for any decision. RECOUNT THE SCENE – OBSERVED PHENOMENA Picture: The consultant and the recon guru. Location: Guggenheim Museum, Upper East Side, Manhattan, NY, USA, view of the park, pretzels, rain, white sky. Power is rearticulated and so is the image. A multi-screen video work stretches the Guggenheim’s disorientating architecture. Images of people moving through sci-fi style industrial workspaces, artists’ studio style domestic scenes, ethnic cultures, cacti, flowers; more screen montages in small video monitors stacked together on plinths, other video screens in portrait format hung over the central atrium with bodies spinning in a fake centrifuge. The spiral of the Guggenheim ramp is echoed and extended in the architecture of video. The two men sit in front of a split-screen video work: Assassin: You don’t look well today. Recon Guru: We all begin better than we end. Assassin: What would you prefer your ending to be? Recon: More purposeful, and certainly more climactic. Assassin: Finale. Recon: A Finale. Assassin: Circumstances can always be arranged. Recon: As much as the thought appeals to me, I’m afraid your consideration is needed elsewhere. Assassin: Who’s this? Recon: Sallinger. The method and manner is entirely up to you. Your principal would simply like him to vanish without a trace. Assassin: Any other provisions? Recon: No mistakes. DOCUMENT INSERT No. 2 COLLATED REPORTS 12.06.01 – 15.09.02 ENGINEERING MEANING 6/9

Life is being towards death, the experience of mortality as the fact of life that lacks meaning and purpose. The Agent of Death constructs the meaning of life through the image of spectacular finitude. To vanish would be meaningless. Identity-as-death is paramount. MULTIPLE AS WHOLE As we move through the scene, the tensions between the fact of death without image and the choice of death with it are wiped out by the circumstances of the characters: what they know and don’t know, how they act and the location they act within. The architect and voyeur of death—the assassin—now faces his own death. Shot through his bulletproof vest. Where is the ambiguity ‘between death as understanding’s possibility and the death as the horror of impossibility’ (Blanchot), between the fact of death and its fiction? The neutrality of the image, between absence and presence, had been identified as the catalyst for choice; a ‘primal double meaning’. But in the dynamics of the image-action of the here and now in the assassin’s demise, all of this is eradicated. Witness: 1) The hit mentality: Organized murder that ties the spectacle of death’s mastery to the mastery of its image, coagulating the categories of image/suffering—suffering/image. Only when we give it a face can such ambiguity be administered to the image. This image is tragic. Transference to: 2) Death as action in the delirium of participatory phenomena. Confronting death in action: There is no ‘face’ of death, because the possibility of choice simply isn’t available. Rather, this suffering is written as a struggle to survive, without resemblance, without reflection, without a theory of its image, and without the consciousness as to what this may mean to him or us. The thirst for survival that values life itself has no time to waste on such reflections. ART/ACTION Rewind slightly: They split, the assassin walks away, one of the videos breaks before looping – and in the empty frame, he sees Sallinger’s reflection. The gallery shoot-em-up begins, and intensifies as Sallinger and the assassin, in the name of survival, fight a set of bad-ass euro-villains. Figures move with guns at the same pace as the figures in the video work, staking out the spiralling ramps and recesses of the Guggenheim. The image no longer figures the universal-singular power; the components of power are replaceable, power is unfixed, and the conditions of the image also move to embody this fact. It is live and alive. Action moves from the image of suffering to the destruction of art and architecture, as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim and the art in it are spectacular participants in the frenetic pumped-up bloodbath shoot-em-up. Kinetic replaces static. Narrative takes a back seat as the spectacle ramps up into annihilation and pure violence. A barrage of machine gun fire assaults the 7/9

streamlined curves of the Guggenheim’s interior, deep gunfire pockmarks hollow out the skin. Sallinger, our moral obsessive, wins out in a mixture of skill and luck. DOCUMENT INSERT no. 3 20.12.09 STANDARD REPORT (PROVISIONAL) ART’S PRIVILEGED ACCESS TO THE REAL IS ALWAYS BANAL WHERE THE WORLD IS MADE IN A MONOLITHIC DYNAMISM, OUR OWN PRIVATE DYNAMISM. THE IMAGE IS SECURITIZED IN ITS PRODUCTION OF THIS ONTOLOGY. NOTE ON THE MOVIE AND SET CONSTRUCTION The Guggenheim was constructed for such freedoms: A theatrical model for the scene, complete with fake art work, the manufacturing of a discrete space by movie special FX teams to host the action (the exterior of the Guggenheim, under renovation during shooting, digitally recreated). This theatre harbours a mobile world of fragments and disorientation. This construction of ‘world’ presents the ideal correspondence between art, politics and subjectivity. The reproduction of this dynamic architectural space speaks beyond this fiction to the Guggenheim as real space. The art world invests in similar fantasies and inspires such mimesis. Art, in both cases (Pièta/delirious architecture) as manifest subjectivity struggling against the image’s illusory potential – or surrendering to it as the only reality it knows. NO LONGER IS THE IMAGE THE SPACE OF DEATH—THE IMAGE IS SPATIAL VIOLENCE THAT CONSTRAINS WITHIN ITS BORDERS. ART INDICATES NOTHING—LEAST OF ALL ITS OWN FREEDOM FROM REPRESENTATION. ITS UNTENABLE FANTASY IS THAT OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE. THE MACHINATIONS OF NEO-LIBERAL CAPITAL DEMONSTRATE THE FALLIBILITY OF THESE TWO THEORIES OF IMAGE-POWER A WORLD UNTOUCHED Conceiving the image as participatory phenomenon leaves the question of its politics suspended. The ‘way of the world’ is maintained by the system that seeks to out-manoeuvre it: Made stronger and more consistent through dialectic opposition, or through avoidance of the issue altogether. In apparently breaking with the tradition embodied in the Pièta, in supposedly ‘critiquing’ its static nature, the ‘dynamic’ use of media in fact only reiterates the fantasy that art is a mediator to power. But, as Sallinger discovers, this indefinitely-replaceable, non-subject-oriented Power cannot be accounted for in a politics nor an art that thinks death is always ‘mine’ and irreplaceable; for it is not subject-orientated, is not ‘mine’ (or 8/9

anybody’s) … The image is not a mediator to power in either a positive or negative sense. OFFCUTS-CUTOUTS An informant who has produced reliable information in the past advised that the black network was a natural outgrowth of BCCI’s dubious and criminal associations. The bank was in a unique position to operate an intelligencegathering unit because it dealt with such figures as Noriega, Saddam, Marcos, Peruvian President Alan Garcia, Daniel Ortega, contra leader Adolfo Calero and arms dealers like Adnan Khashoggi. Its original purpose was to pay bribes, intimidate authorities and quash investigations. But according to a former operative, sometime in the early 1980s the black network began running its own drugs, weapons and currency deals. The informant further advised that they not only financed arms deals that one government or another wanted to keep secret, they shipped the goods in their own ships, insured them with their own agency and provided manpower and security. They worked with intelligence agencies from all the Western countries and did a lot of business with East bloc countries. HEADLINE: BCCI: THE DIRTIEST BANK OF ALL Time Magazine, July 29 1991 AUTHORS J. BEATY AND S. C. GWYNNE NEW YORK; CATHY BOOTH/MIAMI, JAY BRANEGAN/HONG KONG AND HELEN GIBSON/LONDON Article details the investigation and ongoing international inquiries into the illegal activities of the now shut down BCCI bank. Article further indicates that investigations are progressing slowly possibly owing to internal government cover-ups at a global level. MAURICE BLANCHOT The Space of Literature, 1955. MARTIN HEIDEGGER Being and Time, 1927. 9/9

readthis.wtf /writing/showdown-at-mantalinis/ Showdown at Mantalini’s - 2010 It is […] difficult to know what friend signifies, even and especially among the Greeks […] The basic point about friendship is that the two friends are like claimant and rival (but who could tell them apart?) […] Friendship must reconcile the integrity of the essence with the rivalry of claimants. Is this not too great a task? There is indeed [a modern] catastrophe […] it consists in the society of brothers or friends having undergone such an ordeal that brothers and friends can no longer look at each other, or each at himself, without a ‘weariness’, perhaps a ‘mistrust’, which does not suppress friendship but gives it its modern colour and replaces the simple ‘rivalry’ of the Greeks. We are no longer Greeks, and friendship is no longer the same.1 As writer-director Michael Mann has insisted, the apparent symmetry between the personal predicaments of Heat’s protagonists belies a deeper asymmetry. This is already suggested by the staging of its consummation in the central diner scene, shot as an alternation between two ‘overs’ (if the protagonists look into each other’s eyes, our shifted camera viewpoints on them are never quite complementary, each being constrained to leave the other out of frame). This asymmetry is further dramatised in their dreams: Pacino’s Hanna––whose dream substantiates the dissatisfaction of Justice, his wife, that he ‘live[s] among the remains of dead people’––remains deeply invested in the defence of the polis, to the point of maniacal dedication (even if his compulsion is accompanied by the creeping realisation that it cannot be held together). Whereas the dreams of De Niro’s McCauley, sociopath loner (‘I’m alone, I am not lonely’), are haunted only by the fear of not having ‘enough time to do what you wanna do’––it is the brutal and lawless maximisation of finite resources, even when taken to counterproductively compulsive levels, that underlies his principle never to stray more than thirty seconds away from a total disappearance from the social. Yet this asymmetry itself, between the defender of the city and the Hobbesian outlaw, implies an integral convergence of the two characters’ uncompromising determination to ‘do what I do’ even as it destroys the ‘I’. It is in this convergence that friendship becomes possible. In advance of their arrival at the neutral space of the diner where they enjoy a brief truce, they already occupy the same intimate, sequestered outside––that parallel world, with its icy, alien dynamics, whose momentary intersection with our own Eady will peer through, immobilised and excluded, as in a dream, as the two men sprint towards their final showdown. Despite appearances, it is not that the relaxed, anonymous setting of Mantalini’s provides a convivial space for personal friendship, based on mutual recognition, briefly to blossom. Friendship––as implacably opposed to politesse, mutual comfort, and social glue as Heat is to a buddy movie––only happens on the outside; between those depths of persons that lurk below the waterline of the social, on the other side of law-as-order. The only destiny for modern (post-political, post-catastrophic) friendship is that it should name a necessary sociopathy, an outside that may be harnessed to the inside, but which does not belong to it, and which exposes this asymmetrical reciprocity. After the drastic disinvestment of the commons, to pursue ‘the integrity of the essence’ is already to move beyond mutual recognition and rivalry between equals. The integrity of the law and that of the infractor converge outside the city, in an intimate duel. The climactic annihilation of a particular person, whether cop or robber, is merely temporal. 1/2

For there is ultimately nothing personal about Hanna and McCauley’s friendship; it instances an ideal bond between ‘conceptual personae’ whose subject-positions express a political problematic. In the final scene, even as Hanna comforts the dying McCauley, the survivor gazes into the distance, scanning the city lights for his next quarry, his next friend. 2/2

readthis.wtf /writing/infinite-freedom-exercise/ Infinite Freedom Exercise - 2010 In a computer-generated version of a landscape found in southern Iran, a simulated figure dressed in nonnationalized army fatigues performs a series of gestures, day and night, without ever leaving his post, for a full calendar year during which the simulated sun, moon and stars traverse their actual paths in real time. In setting and subject, Infinite Freedom Exercise takes its inspiration from a photograph by French photographer Henri Bureau depicting an Iranian soldier during the first Iran-Iraq war (1980), watching a fire at an oil refinery in 1/3

Abadan, south-western Iran. The soldier’s vocabulary of gestures was developed in collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor, based on the protective stances taken up by soldiers during ‘live fire’ exercises. In its original form as a public installation in Manchester, UK, Infinite Freedom Exercise provocatively opened up a window within the urban fabric onto maneuvers which may seem distant and abstract, yet which are inextricably entangled with Western economies. The infinite tireless grace of the soldier-dancer-actor, with his algorithmically concatenated movements, both evokes and displaces human finitude. The piece introduces a central theme of the Exercise series: the contemporary operation of violence, through the denaturalisation, optimisation, technologisation and traumatisation of the human body as it is integrated into global networks of power and control. In his account of the architecture of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Eyal Weizman recounts that in the late seventies, Ariel Sharon’s partner in developing the crypto-militarised spatial logic of West Bank settlements was Avraham Wachman, co-inventor of the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation, a system for ‘writing dance’ which realises literally the notion of a choreo-graphy. In Weizman’s observation that ‘Sharon’s plan for the colonization of the depth of the West Bank emerged out of the meeting of the architect of dance notation with the architect of manoeuvre-warfare’1—and Wachman’s subsequent protestation that political violence can be unproblematically separated from the spatial and material practices through which it is exercised2—we can already read some of the stakes of Infinite Freedom Exercise. As soon as a graphism provides the function of notation or recording, it produces a virtual space of infinite exercise; writing is continuous with the creation of an inexhaustible virtuality. As Alain Badiou has pointed out,3 in the Turing Machine—Alan Turing’s theoretical prototype of every computing machine extant today—the infinite potential of carrying out any operation whatever is grounded on a real infinite: the availability of limitless length of the tape used to record and read data. Our spontaneous attitude, faced with today’s virtual spaces and their extension into reality, is to collude with this supposition of infinite availability. This seduction of the spaces of procedural graphism, whether literary or electronic, tends to occult their relation to the outside. A realism of the virtual would address, on one hand, an energetics or economics of virtuality, accepting that every virtuality dependent on a source of energy; on the other, the metaphorical transport that makes the abstract space of graphism a real agent in the world it sought to notate (and—as with Wachman—in entirely different worlds). Such a realism would refuse the representationalism that claims that virtual worlds are mere models, whether descriptive or prescriptive: exercises, practices, games, simulations. Now, literary notation becomes obsolete when digital technology can meticulously ‘motion capture’ every significant aspect and movement of a body. In Infinite Freedom Exercise, the ‘performer’, like the ‘landscape’, follows a text assembled, frankenstein-like but seamlessly, out of the data trails of anonymous sources. In an early version of the piece, an oil refinery, burning uncontrolledly, as inexhaustible as the technology that allows its depiction, belches smoke in the distance. The uncanny perdurance of this scene and its tirelessly graceful inhabitant suggests the originary violence of virtuality, in a world where its exercise has become inextricable from reality, where its ‘infinite freedom’ has become political model and casus belli. 2/3

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readthis.wtf /writing/these-broken-impressions/ These Broken Impressions - 2010 As recent research in psychoacoustics demonstrates, auditory experience vexes the basic notion of the ‘object’. Whilst detaining psychoacoustics in the suspended state of a ‘potential science’ – a problematic complex of physics, physiology, biology, neurology and psychology – the unresolved nature of the ‘object of hearing’ also lends it both a peculiar philosophical pertinence, and the potential to inform radical aesthetic experiment. Florian Hecker’s work inhabits this problematic zone: a zone where the coherence of experience is breached; where objects can exist in multiple places at the same time, where events are smeared across space, where streams of experience diverge, coalesce, and fracture; a world where the conditions of objecthood are tested in a manner that is best qualified as hallucinatory. Eric Alliez has recently made hallucination the central concept of his ‘new histories of modern painting’,1 which document the ‘extreme deformation of classical organisation’2 operated by Delacroix, Manet, Seurat, Gauguin and Cezanne. In their researches and practices Alliez discerns a thread of ‘non-discursive thinking’ that emerges out of a confluence of aesthetic experiment, scientific research and philosophical reflection significantly similar to that informing Hecker’s interventions. Histories of Hallucination Colour ceases to support the stablility of image forms; the intense sensations engendered by differences in colour are instead deployed as active forces that render the canvas a site of dynamic production. The painter seeks to intensify visual experience by mobilising the dynamics of visual physiology, rather than representing the seen object formally or symbolically. As painters begin to experience their practice in terms of a psychophysiological connection between the eye and the brain, the work of painting becomes one of intercepting and interrogating ‘pure visual sensation’ in advance of its capture by ‘meaning and its “visual atlas”’; and, therefore, beyond the supposed difference in kind between the real and the painted.3 Exploring and intensifying the mechanisms of the ‘eye-brain’ through the manipulation of intensity and contrast, the modern painter thus ‘paints the phenomenon of vision itself’, engendering a creation in which the viewer will also participate. One of the conditions of possibility for this ‘hallucinatory’ mode of painterly vision are the logics of sensation developed at the dawn of scientific psychology by figures such as Helmholtz, Fechner and Weber. In their work the structure of sensation, the thresholds, relation and interaction between sensory stimuli, were for the first time decoupled from any consideration of the source of sensation, divested by experimental design and mathematical analysis of all semantic content. Converging with this experimental isolation of sensation from its external source, contemporary developments in psychiatry are reappraising the relation between inner objects and their outer sources, and that between sanity and pathology, in a renewal of the notion of hallucination. Having been in use since the sixteenth century to describe visionaries or those who saw ghosts, the modern meaning of ‘hallucination’ was fully elaborated in Jean Etienne Esquirol’s Aliénation mentale (1832) and Des maladies mentales (1838),4 with Brierre de Boismont’s pioneering full-length study Des Hallucinations, ou Histoire 1/11

raisonnée des apparitions, des visions, des songes, de l’extase, du magnétisme et du somnambulisme following in 1845.5 Esquirol and Boismont are involved in a crucial shift in the conception of insanity, from a paradigm of physical infection to one of internal pathology: Mental illness is not an invader from outside, an ‘alienating’ infection, but an extravagant and unusual efflorescence of the normal mechanisms that exist in the sane mind. Thus Boismont insists (against charges of ‘introducing philosophy into medicine’)6 that hallucination be depathologised and historicised, arguing that it is ‘a normal state consistent with reason’, that historical circumstances influence its individual or collective production and determine its social meaning, and that ultimately only ‘experience may distinguish the differences’ between hallucinations proper and the ‘normal hallucinatory’ aspect of much sensory experience: Without doubt, there may be hallucination in a fact; but the mirage, the square tower which appears round, the stick which, when plunged into water appears broken, are also facts, and yet would any one dare to call those who see and believe in these phenomena, madmen? […] Who can say: “There reason ends and madness begins?” […] So it is with hallucinations.’7 Alliez’s suggestion that this reconceptualisation is parallelled in the ‘non-discursive thought’ of the modern painters’ programme of experimental hallucination rests crucially on the work of philosopher Hyppolite Taine. Inspired in his struggle against idealism by the psychophysicist project of a naturalised logic of sensation, and with reference to Boismont’s researches in hallucination, in his 1870 De L’Intelligence8 Taine develops the notion of hallucination into the first principle of a philosophical theory of perception and knowledge: Surpassing Esquirol and Boismont in audacity, Taine sees hallucination as the basic fact of mental life, and mental morbidity as consisting only in the failure of a certain limiting mechanism that retains hallucinatory perception in the service of coherent experience. For Taine, hallucination proper – in Esquirol’s definition, ‘the intimate conviction of an actually perceived sensation, when no external object apt to excite this sensation is [present] to [the] senses’9 – only exposes the truth that sensation per se is hallucination, and ought to alert us to the fact that the apparent simplicity and transparency of the act of external perception obscures a hidden synthetic art. We must not confuse the internal event of sensation with external ‘things’, we must not see the perception of externals as a ‘simple naked act of mind’,10 but should explore its active character. Not surprisingly, Taine sees as the root of artistic genius the ability to harness this synthetic, hallucinatory nature of perception, embodied in ‘representative ideas’, a sort of beings interposed between mind and object, having a resemblance with objects, presenting their image to the mind, and furnishing to the mind, which cannot exit from itself or perceive objects directly and in themselves, the means to perceive them indirectly … Taine thus concludes, in lines Alliez will adopt as the credo of the new revolution in painting, that ‘external perception is a true hallucination’; ‘external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling hallucination a false external perception, we must call external perception a true hallucination’.11 Empiricism and Delirium This remarkable hallucinatory theory of perception can be seen as drawing the ultimate conclusions from the work of British empiricist philosopher David Hume. Concluding that neither experience nor the rational intellect can provide a 2/11

warrant for our assumption of some constant reality underpinning our fleeting impressions, Hume had postulated a ‘faculty of imagination’ that combines and orders these impressions, and set out to determine the regular principles according to which it carried out this synthesis: As all simple ideas may be separated by the imagination, and may be united again in what form it pleases, nothing wou’d be more unaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided by some universal principles, which render it, in some measure, uniform with itself in all times and places.12 However, no sooner does Hume discover the principle of the imagination to be the association of impressions on the basis of resemblance, contiguity, or past conjunction, than he notes the extravagant tendencies of this faculty to which we owe our coherent experience of the world: The mechanisms whereby sensation is gathered into a unified and consistent account of reality are in fact no different to those which make it that, in fables and imaginings, ‘nature […] is totally confounded, and nothing mention’d but winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants’;13 for the imagination, when set into any train of thinking, is apt to continue, even when its object fails it, and like a galley put in motion by the oars, carries on its course without any new impulse. Hume’s galley finds an echo in Taine’s rather more grotesque metaphor for the obtuse momentum of imaginative energy which, if unchecked, leads to delirium: He likens it to the irrepressible vital processes whereby, if we place the skinned paw of a rat under the skin on the side of another rat, it begins to grow as if still attached to its former owner.14 As Gilles Deleuze remarks of Hume, ‘for the traditional concept of error he substitutes the concept of illusion or delirium […] We’re not threatened by error. It’s much worse: we’re swimming in delirium.’15 The delirious consequences of decoupling synthesis from representation are already lurking in one of the great vignettes of modern philosophy, where Hume a tentative thinker is all too aware that only the feeble sanction of habit allows him to claw together a meaningful world from the impressions presently available to his senses: I am here seated in my chamber with my face to the fire; and all the objects that strike my senses are contain’d in a few yards around me. My memory, indeed, informs me of the existence of many objects; but then this information extends not beyond their past existence, nor do either my senses or memory give any testimony to the continuance of their being. When therefore I am thus seated, and revolve over these thoughts, I hear on a sudden a noise as of a door turning upon its hinges; and a little after see a porter, who advances towards me. This gives occasion to many new reflections and reasonings. First, I never have observ’d, that this noise cou’d proceed from any thing but the motion of a door; and therefore conclude, that the present phaenomenon is a contradiction to all past experience, unless the door, which I remember on t’other side of the chamber be still in being. Again, I have always found, that a human body was possest of a quality, which I call gravity, and which hinders it from mounting in the air, as this porter must have done to arrive in my chamber, unless the stairs I remember be not annihilated by my absence. Confidence grows as Hume reasons that only by grace of the principles of imagination, rationally unjustified as they are, can he continually reconstruct a coherent world: I am accustom’d to hear such a sound, and see such an object in motion at the same time. I have not receiv’d in this particular instance both these perceptions. These observations are contrary, unless I suppose that the door still remains, and that it was open’d without my perceiving it: And this supposition, which was at first entirely arbitrary and hypothetical, acquires a force and evidence by its being the only one, upon which I can reconcile these 3/11

contradictions. There is scarce a moment of my life, wherein there is not a similar instance presented to me, and I have not occasion to suppose the continu’d existence of objects, in order to connect their past and present appearances, and give them such an union with each other, as I have found by experience to be suitable to their particular natures and circumstances. Here then I am naturally led to regard the world, as something real and durable, and as preserving its existence, even when it is no longer present to my perception. Ultimately it is the coherence and possible unification of the imagination’s unwarranted hypotheses that comforts the sceptic.16 Hume’s account of the imagination’s continuous global reconstruction provides us with an suitable philosophical basis for the contemporary problems of psychoacoustics, in so far as it is concerned precisely with the problem of how complex, intermittent and inseparate sensory data are recombined to yield a coherent, independent and continuous world of sound sources. Event, Stream, Object ‘What is heard’ cannot satisfactorily be described by a solely physical account of mechanical vibrations. Such physical analysis must be supplemented with an account of the selectivity and non-linear response of the human ear, which carries out complex transformations of these compression waves, which are then converted to neural stimulus. Yet further subsequent levels of processing must parse this undifferentiated sensory information into perceptions of discrete elements; finally, the latter must be assembled into a mental reconstruction of some external source, whose meaning for the hearer will, finally, be determined. It is in these transformations from sensory stimulus to the positing of a semantically-charged source in the world, that significant controversies in contemporary psychoacoustics begin. Central to these controversies is the disputed existence and nature of an elusive intermediary between sensation and the recognition of an external sound source – the auditory stream, event or object. Albert Bregman’s ‘Auditory Scene Analysis’ provides the most detailed account of this space between (perceptual) stream and (physical) acoustic event,17 amassing a range of experimental data to describe how the brain segregates frequency data into discrete series, each perceived as belonging to a separate ‘auditory stream’.18 By determining where the adjustment of experimental parameters effects shifts in this perceptual allocation, Bregman maps out the limit conditions of this transformation of an undifferentiated spectrum into a number of ‘perceptual unit[s]’; the most important factors being separation in time, separation in frequency, and similarity of timbre.19 Bregman’s treatment of the problem of continuity20 – of the conditions under which we perceive a series of interrupted sounds to belong to the same ‘stream’ – in effect seeks precise experimental determination (with the promissory note of a neuroscientific basis) for Hume’s introspective observation: […] we disguise, as much as possible, the interruption, or rather remove it entirely, by supposing that these interrupted perceptions are connected by a real existence, of which we are insensible. This supposition, or idea of continu’d existence, acquires a force and vivacity from the memory of these broken impressions, and from that propensity, which they give us, to suppose them the same […] As Hume discerns, the problem of continuity is a synecdoche for the postulation of independent objects per se: the two questions concerning the continu’d and distinct existence of body are intimately connected together. For if the objects of our senses continue to exist, even when they are not perceiv’d, their existence is of course independent of and distinct from the perception; and vice versa. 4/11

The auditory scene is ‘imaginary’, a synthetic product; we invariably hear more than reaches our ears. Thus, as Jens Blauert points out, auditory events are not determined solely by physical parameters relating to (physical vibratory) sound events. In a striking echo of Humean scepticism, Blauert cautions against assuming that any necessary causal link holds between the two; with scrupulous agnosticism, he speaks only of physical phenomena ‘for which a correlation to the position of auditory events has been proven or hypothesized’.21 It is Blauert’s work on ‘spatial hearing’ or the ‘“locatedness” of auditory events’22 that leads him to invoke this distinction between the physical factors occasioning hearing and ‘what is heard’. For Blauert, ‘auditory space’, differentiated gradually during ontogenetic development, never attains the fine discrimination of visual space, for which it remains at best an inexact and elastic index. It becomes a sort of phantom space overlaid onto primary, visual co-ordinates: auditory events ‘may occur at positions where nothing is visible: in connection with sounds inside one’s own body or another opaque object, behind walls, beyond the horizon, in the dark …’23 Michael Kubovy and David Van Valkenburg suggesting that sensory information is grouped according to interacting gestalt principles into potential perceptual objects, one or more of which are then elected into figures against an undifferentiated ground.24 They then seek to identify indispensable attributes that will determine which auditory objects from a given candidate group emerge as a prominent figure. Their argument is that spatial separation is such an differentiating attribute for visual objects, but not for auditory objects, where pitch separation is more important: Auditory objects are formed in pitch-time rather than space-time.25 Kubovy and Van Valkenburg therefore challenge Blauert’s focus on auditory spatiality, arguing that space is not one of the fundamental attributes of auditory objects. Seeking the liberation of the auditory from visuocentric models, they suggest that we eliminate the assumption that space/time co-ordinates are axial for the auditory as they are for the visual. Auditory objects, they insist, are formed prior to their localisation, and the latter simply brings fully-formed auditory objects under the domination of spatial visual judgments.26 Again, Hume anticipates the way in which, in the interests of ‘completion and coherence’, the dominant visual sense brings less determinate sensory objects under its sway: an object may exist, and yet be no where […] this is evidently the case with all our perceptions and objects, except those of the sight and feeling […] The same propensity to completion and coherence that leads us to postulate causal links, also leads us to locate non-spatial qualities in space, following the evidence of the spatial senses of vision and touch. Whether in the case of Bregman’s distinction between stream and event, Blauert’s auditory and sound events, or Kubovy’s auditory sources and objects, we recognise Hume’s threefold distinction between the sensory given, the unit of perception (whether object, stream, or event) synthesised from it, and the external source that is subsequently ‘recognised’ and locates the object/stream/event within a unified experience of the world – an experience, we are reminded, that is the product of a heterosensory coordination. It is precisely because this coordination customarily operates so seamlessly, that the sceptical distinction between auditory object/event/stream and sound source meets with a formidable resistance from folk-theoretical common sense, which at times even overwhelms psychoacousticians themselves: Where Kubovy and Van Valkenburg find it meaningful to describe ‘an auditory illusion in which the ‘what’ of a stimulus is perceived correctly, but the ‘where’ is perceived incorrectly’, Blauert staunchly insists that ‘if [the] positions [of the sound source and the auditory object] differ, it is an idle question to ask which is false’, since ‘[t]he sound source and the auditory event are both sensory objects’.27 5/11

Blauert’s point is that the ‘physical sound source’ is not (as one is perhaps apt to assume) a Real standing above or against merely sensory objects; it is itself a synthetic sensory construction, probably of visual provenance either directly or indirectly (i.e. through scientific instruments). We must uphold the independent reality of the auditory object against the temptation to understand it in terms of a more or less erroneous index of a visual standard. De/Naturalising the Ear-Brain In such research, nevertheless, it is often the case that ‘effects’ or ‘illusions’ – reproducible, engineered disagreements between a experimentally controlled sound source and what is heard – testify most eloquently to the specific characteristics of auditory object/stream/event-construction. For instance, Bregman’s ‘continuity illusion’ specifies conditions under which a sound is ‘heard’ to continue ‘behind‘ a louder interrupting sound when it is not present;28 Blauert’s notion of ‘localisation blur’ highlights the inexact indexing of physical space by auditory space, by making an auditory object appear to be ‘blurred’ across several locations;29 Kubovy and Van Valkenburg discuss how the mechanism of figure/ground selection of candidate auditory objects can be manipulated consciously by attention.30 Following Hume’s scepticism, Taine’s hallucinatory logic, and Blauert’s prudence with regard to source-object causality, we must insist that such effects unmask the essentially synthetic and hallucinatory nature of all auditory objects. The effects Hecker’s work employs to block the transition from synthesis to recognition to heterosensory unification, therefore, are far from being tromp l’oreille ‘tricks’, in the derisory sense that would contrast them to some spurious sense of transparency. They must instead be considered points of leverage against our overwhelming tendency to accept as transparent and spontaneous a ‘world’ whose anticipation of integrated meaning effaces the incompleteness and open potential of its sensory vehicles. Like Taine’s rodent graft, such engineered effects do not so much lack integrity; they positively, monstrously disrupt it. It is in fact the spontaneous integration of experience and its apparent transparency that is the ‘box of tricks’: Prising open the gap between auditory object and recognised source, Hecker’s work unleashes a bombardment of oncosensory effects, creating environments of ‘uneasy listening’ in which we encounter the failure of semantic globalisation. The ear is forced to relinquish its function as reconnaissance for recognition; Deprived of their ‘visual calling cards’,31 and corresponding to no known source, sounds become strange interlopers, no longer corroborating evidence for the Office of Recognition and Integration. In the same movement, therefore, in which the operations of hearing are naturalised – becoming tractable to procedural, experimental analysis – our spontaneous image of the world becomes denaturalised – its intuitive legitimacy challenged by constructed aesthetic experience. Similarly Alliez describes how the naturalisation of the mechanisms of colour-perception yielded a concomitant denaturalisation of the image and of the eye that participates in its making: No longer dedicated to its organic function of representation, the eye becomes instead implicated in a loop of experimentation and hallucination. This emergence of eye-brain and ear-brain operationalise the key Humean insight that the senses are not wedded to representation; that the potential for extravagant delirium is constitutive of the basic mechanisms of cognitive synthesis. The mental and sensory ‘faculties’ are not exhausted by the role that they are constrained to play under the determination of a particular organic goal; they are susceptible to a ‘transcendent usage’32 that raises them to their own power rather than subjecting them to the interests of the whole. 6/11

Asynchretic Storm Unlike Alliez’s eye-brain circuit, then, Hecker’s war on integration must confront not only the normative tendencies of the auditory scene itself, but also the capture of the ear-brain by the hegemony of the visual. Michel Chion has named the irresistible mental fusion between sound and vision synchresis, describing it, in terms that recall the Humean imagination and Taine’s runaway ‘mental vitality’, as ‘spontaneous and irresistible’ and as operating ‘[independent] of any rational logic’.33 Drawing our attention to the startlingly powerful effect of synchronised sound – artificial synchresis – on early cinema audiences, Chion compellingly demonstrates how cinema becomes an art form dedicated to the deliberate manipulation of the drive to experiential integration – what he calls the ‘audiovisual contract’ – harnessing its ‘irresistable’ energy to make fictional worlds coherent and compelling. Reversing this procedure, Hecker’s asynchretic storm of effects breaks the contract, creating what can only be described as ‘nonintegrable experience’. In particular, the sculptural form of Event, Stream, Object dramatises its resistance to the audiovisual contract by mocking the disymmetry of visual and auditory with mirrors that reflect crisply both sound and light. In visual processing wave-sources are suppressed, since visual objects are defined by their reflection rather than their emission of light; whereas in auditory processing, reflective surfaces are suppressed in favour of the identification of wave-sources. Transmission is primary for the visual but secondary for the auditory; Sources are occluded in the visual but are crucial for the auditory.34 Thus, we don’t usually think of sound as ‘revealing’ to us the surfaces that deflect or transmit it to our ears: Although we undoubtedly garner valuable information from the ‘acoustic signature’ of an inhabited space, no sound, however shrouded in reverberation, is regarded as having its source in the walls; instead we use the reverberation as a cue to identify an original source. The equivalent ‘visual signature’ – the reflections of light cast by the surfaces of a space – simply is the room qua visual object, although inversely, we can pick up cues from it if we wish for some reason to determine the original source of light. The mirror is an interesting exception: its highly-polished surface disappears beneath the visual ‘echoes’ it transmits; it is a limit-case where visual objectality disappears into its own perfection: Image is no longer object. In Event, Stream, Object, the disappearance of visual transmitting surface into deflected image brings about a convergence between the conditions of visual and auditory objects: Both are revealed as being secondary transmissions whose originals have become difficult to place, in a confusing and complex play of reflection and deflection. This engineered convergence of object-conditions disrupts the normative mechanisms by which visual and auditory objects are brought to agree on a common source. Hecker’s hall of mirrors does not intensify and redouble reflection, but deflects the integration of experience from its ‘proper’ path. Telecommunication and transmission This question of transmission or deflection recalls Taine’s theory of ‘antecedents’: In another of his morbid examples, Taine discusses a man who ‘sees, with eyes closed or open, a perfectly distinct skull three paces in front of him’ when in fact there is only an armchair. Usually, he continues, this sensation has as its antecedents a certain molecular motion of the optic nerves, a certain impingement of luminous rays, lastly, the presence of the real skull. But it is usually only that these antecedents precede the sensation. If the sensation is produced in their absence, the affirmative perception will arise in their absence, and the 7/11

man will see a corpse’s head which is not actually there […] the presence of the last intermediary is sufficient to cause the perception to arise; it matters little whether the antecedents exist or not […] their intermediary replaces them; it is equivalent to them.35 Confirming Alliez’s thesis, this ‘equivalence’ anticipates the operative insight of Taine’s painter contemporaries, who sought for the first time to produce and reproduce impressions rather than to depict forms. The canvas was to be inserted into the chain of perception, not as a reproduction of a recognised form, but as a direct intervention into the production of object from sensation, inducing the viewer to reconstruct the source in the same way that they hallucinate reality, thus drawing them into the eye-brain circuit, according to a contagious principle of hallucination.36 Of course, we could say that the entire history of electronic music answers to an auditory equivalent of this operation. As soon as we have loudspeakers, we have a dislocation of sound from its source – something we are so used to this that it cannot seem remarkable. As Blauert indicates, the aim of the ‘telecommunications engineer’ is precisely to use ‘sound sources (e.g. loudspeakers)’ to make ‘auditory events occur at positions other than those of the loudspeakers’.37 But whereas electronic music, particularly through the collective laboratory of dance music, has thoroughly explored these phantasmagorical auditory objects-without-sources, Hecker’s practice refuses even the metastable, shifting, fluid objectalities of electronica. This is demonstrated perfectly by the abrasively non-complementary nature of his live performances with Aphex Twin, more battles than collaborations: While Aphex spins his deftly-selected techno, Hecker appropriates fractured elements of it and unleashes them in multidimensional sprays of sound that disseminate themselves through the performance space with no regard to rhythmic or melodic congruence. Black Box Recorder Needless to say, contemporary psychoacoustic discussion moves far beyond philosophers’ purely introspective experiments and rational argument – not only owing to its carefully-controlled technologically-enabled experiments, but also in respect of the evolutionary framework that underlies them. If the cognitive mechanisms of objectconstruction are understood to be evolutionary artefacts, this only exacerbates the denaturalisation of the relation between object and source, and indicates further philosophical stakes. Evolutionary theory offers no guarantor for the representational bond between thought and being, perception and reality. Instead it confronts us with a disquieting continuity – cognition, and thus object-formation, is spawned from the same Nature that produces the reality which it objectifies – and an equally troubling discontinuity – our apparently immediate and transparent relation to the world is in fact the product of massively complex mediation; it is merely a special, deceptive type of opacity, a black box sealed by the interests of the organism. Not only is our access to reality, our recognition of the world, mediated by mechanisms of synthesis; those mechanisms are themselves the product of deeper, evolutionary processes. If these processes naturally favour a coherent indexing of reality (thus accounting for ‘true hallucinations’), this only makes it easy for us deceptively to mistake their mediation for immediacy. The black box is not tamperproof. Through its dis-integration, its deregulation of the senses, Hecker’s work insistently incoheres, refuses to allow us to capitulate to that false transparency. In this resistance, his continuing research into the ear-brain reminds us that we don’t yet know what the auditory imagination can do, what objects it might create, once it is freed from representation, from the dictates of rational integrity and the exigencies of nature, and unleashed into the delirium which is its proper element. 8/11

Hecker’s experiments in object/stream/eventhood do not advocate any of the psychoacoustic theses outlined above. The experiences his work offers, even when they employ the ‘effects’ discovered by these models, cannot by fully accounted for as event, stream or object. It is the ‘phenomenological gap’ between the experience of this work and our best efforts at understanding how experience is constructed, that leads us back to the fundamental philosophical questions underlying the psychoacoustical research programme. Such is the ‘Hecker Effect’: An experimental programme in hallucinatory aesthetics, guided by the naturalistic discipline of science, and awakening philosophical problematics whose ramifications are far-reaching and profound. 1. E. Alliez, L’Oeil-Cerveau: Nouvelles Histoires de la Peinture Moderne (Paris: Vrin, 2007). 2. Alliez, 129. 3. Ibid., 209. 4. Paris: Baillière; English translation ‘Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity’ trans. E. K. Hunt (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845). 5. English Translation, A History Of Dreams, Visions, Apparitions, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1855). 6. Boismont, vi. 7. Ibid., 354. 8. English translation On Intelligence, trans. T. D. Haye (London: L. Reeve, 1871). 9. From Esquirol’s entry on ‘Hallucination’ in the Dictionnaire des sciences medicales of 1817. 10. Taine, 224. 11. Taine, On Intelligence, 224. 12. Hume, D. (1740) Treatise of Human Nature. Unless noted, all quotations are from Book I Part IV Sect II: Scepticism with Regard to the Senses. 13. Hume, Treatise Book 1 Part III Section III. Of the Ideas of the Memory and Imagination. 14. Taine, On Intelligence, 222. 15. G. Deleuze, Desert Islands and other Texts (Semiotext(e), 2003), 165. 16. Hume’s insights were to be further systematised by Immanuel Kant, whose theory of judgment reaffirms that cognition is characterised by a synthetic going beyond what is given; that cognition comprises three syntheses – the reception of sensory data in intuition; its assembling according to rule in the imagination, and its recognition in the understanding; and every such cognition involves the subject in a global reconstruction of the connected elements of a world: there can be no objects without global objectality. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason secures the distinction between hallucination and reality through a translation of Hume’s problem into a ‘transcendental’ register. For Kant, there can be no judging of objects against an external standard: Objectality as such is constituted by the forms of intuition (time and space) and logical syntheses (categories) which enable us to take up the raw data of sensation, and can only be legitimated by immanent criteria. In a direct echo of Hume’s troubling vignette, Kant writes: If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, if a man changed into this and sometimes into that animal form, if the country on the longest day were sometimes covered in fruit, sometimes with ice and snow, my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red color to bring to mind heavy cinnabar. In effect, Kant argues that the de facto existence of a coherent realm of interconnected experience (‘the world’), constitutes a de jure ‘transcendental’ justification for the imagination’s associative mechanism: the very existence of coherent experience proves that the imagination is adapted to an external reality we cannot 9/11

know. As postkantian philosophers objected, Kant thereby only secures the legitimacy of experience by exalting its empirical coherence into a ‘transcendental’ necessity. (For a key contemporary critical account of Kant’s resolution of Hume’s problem, see Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude (NY/London: Continuum, 2008). Kant does however continue to grapple with the cognitive faculties’ tendency to extravagance. Hume had introduced the notion of faculties which must unite in the common goal of unifying experience, but found himself powerless to legitimate the principles by which they achieve this. Kant indeed famously admitted that Hume thus alerted him to the pressing need to resecure the legitimacy of knowledge – who ‘awoke him from his dogmatic slumbers’; But he was equally provoked by the spiritualist Swedenborg, against whom he wrote his 1766 ‘Dreams of a Spirit-Seer’, which opens with the warning: ‘The realm of shades is the paradise of fantastical visionaries …’. Kant’s caution of vigilance against the tendencies of the faculties to project their energetic strivings into real objects is continuous from this text to his major critical works, and perhaps the movement between the dreams of a spirit seer and the vigilance of critical philosophy is the bridge between the traditional and modern valences of ‘hallucination’; from a battle against phantasmagorical spectres, Kant moves to the attempt to supply corrective mechanisms to prevent the mind from taking its own ‘foci imaginarii’ as real. There would then be a sense in which the transformation of the notion of hallucination reflects the way in which the enlightenment’s driving out of all ghosts and illusions from objective reality only drove them into the mind, making the latter a dangerous site of illusion, and giving rise to the modern fear of madness, along with the link between insanity and visionary artistic genius. 17. Bregman, A. S., Auditory Scene Analysis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 10. 18. Ibid. 19. Hecker’s Auditory Scene (5 fold) [2010] offers a precise dramatisation of Bregman’s work, in effect allowing us to explore the ‘map’ of the parametric conditions of stream segregation, and its thresholds, in physical space; as the listener changes position, auditory components streamed from five separate speakers assemble themselves into different groupings. 20. Bregman, 134. 21. Blauert, J. Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1997), 12-3. 22. Ibid., 3 23. Ibid., 4 24. Kubovy, M. and Van Valkenburg, D. ‘Auditory and Visual Objects’, in Cognition 80 (2001), 97-126: 102. 25. Ibid., 108. 26. Ibid., 97–8. 27. Blauert, 4. 28. Bregman, 344. 29. An effect employed by Hecker in No Night No Day (2009). 30. Hecker explores this in 2×3 Channel [2010] where, depending on the focus of our attention, we are able to shift the priority of a two constantly-transforming sets of auditory objects. 31. Chion, M., Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. trans. C. Gorbman (NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 32. 32. On the transcendent usage of the faculties, see G. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 33. Chion, 63/ 34. Kubovy and Van Valkenburg, 98-9; Bregman, 36-8. 35. Taine, On Intelligence, 220. 36. Boismont, 390. 10/11

37. Blauert, 5. 11/11

readthis.wtf /writing/whither-the-field-club-field-club-revivalism-today-with-fieldclub/ Whither the Field Club? Field Club Revivalism Today (with FIELDCLUB) - 2010 In his fine history of the Field Club movement, Fields of Vision: The Hidden Legacy of the Victorian Field Club (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1928), Alexander Furnidge records that during the second half of the nineteenth century the southwest counties, heartland of the movement, still boasted twenty or so clubs. Although legal proscription meant that their activities had become clandestine, their existence remained common knowledge amongst locals. By the time of the Second World War, as French intellectuals and artists fleeing the capital regrouped in rural Brittany to continue their artistic experiments in the safety of what were fashioned, in homage, Associations du Champ, it seemed that in England itself the tradition was all but dead. The flame of what had once been a fiercely ambitious and influential cultural force, frequented by the foremost explorers and scientists, the most radical philosophers and artists of the day, had, so it seemed, been extinguished by prejudice and fear. However the astonishing prescience of the farmer-philosophers (or, as they preferred, ‘agrosophists’) of the early Field Clubs has led to an increasing contemporary interest in the model. Combining fearless intellectual and artistic exploration with experiments in autonomous living, pioneering Clubs such as The Gweek Confederacy and Druth Klan Alpha seem to have anticipated many of the urgent problems and concerns of the twenty-first century, proposing original and challenging programmes that outstrip today’s ‘eco’ movements in the radicality and complexity of their understanding (See E. Barber, ‘Avant-Eco: What the Field Clubs can tell us about the Oil Crisis’, Neo-Agrosophical Transactions 2:3, Dec. 2007) Happily, along with the famous photographic record of the great 1849 Agrosophical Seminars of Field Club BetaKappa-Phi, a small documentary legacy, scattered across various private libraries in the UK, survives the great finde-siècle state suppression of the Field Clubs and their subsequent descent into obscurity: Precious original Field Club rulebooks, journals, and sometimes even research papers. Careful collation and study of these materials has made it possible for a small group of serious, dedicated enthusiasts to revive the Field Club model according to the original regulations of its venerable founders Sir Hugh Janus-Deville and Baroness Denise van Beansprouten. Funding from various anonymous patrons with an interest in reviving the discipline and order of the Field Club movement – including some of the descendents of the original Clubbenführers—has enabled us to found, at a secret location in the Field Club heartland, the first active FC cell of the dawning millenium. A millenium which, so we believe, as did our ‘Fieldfathers’, must belong to the Field Club…or perish. 1/1

readthis.wtf /writing/what-did-the-fieldfathers-believe-with-fieldclub/ What did the Fieldfathers Believe? (with FIELDCLUB) - 2010 Most of what has been discussed and written about Field Clubs in recent years emphasises the exoteric practices that were the most visible expression of the Field Club ethos. It is without doubt owing to their apparent proximity to current concerns (not to say obsessions) with the ‘environment’ that these practices (of agricultural cultivation, rural living, etc.) have come under the spotlight, and it is to be welcomed that the history and heritage of the Field Clubs are once more being studied. However, Field Club practice would not have been what it was without the underpinning of a unique and complex philosophical system, laid down at the very beginning of the movement and adapted and disputed throughout its history. If we understand how the principles of this philosophical (or agrosophical) system informed the Field Club ethos at the most fundamental level, Field Clubs will cease to appear to us as a strange amalgam of what we would today call ‘environmentalism’, rather abrasive political principles, and bizarre and unjustified belief systems. It becomes clear that, under the unifying aegis of the Field Clubs’ founding philosophical principles, all of these elements can be seen as part of a logical development, in theory and practice, of certain basic axioms. Indeed, this is how the first Fieldfathers and mothers explicitly situated their philosophical system: inspired, no doubt, by Euclid, they put forward what was to become known as the Principal Axiomatic, enshrined in the constitution (‘enfielding declaration’) of every Club. In the following, we shall examine some of the most important articles in this system, and examine how they developed and were expressed in the activities of the Field Clubs. As we shall see, agrosophy in many ways recalls earlier religious and philosophical positions, perhaps above all Gnosticism; however it also anticipates in quite startling fashion philosophies which were not to emerge until many decades after the suppression of the Field Clubs, and indeed, in the opinion of the present author, surpasses them in conceptual radicality. The philosophy of the original Field Clubs is essentially a nature philosophy, in the sense of the German naturphilosophen such as Schelling and Oken, from whom, indeed, Fieldfather Janus drew some of his inspiration. This is to say, it is a philosophy of the absolute que infinite productive power, in principle rationally comprehensible. For the agrosophist, therefore, ‘Nature’ does not refer merely to organic nature, flora and fauna, but equally to mountains and stars, to sea and cloud, and even to mind (although this subject was, and is, fraught with manifold problems, which we cannot detail here—see my ‘Mind Under Matter: Agrosophical Theories of Mind’, in Neo-agro. Trans 1:1, 27–39). Field Club philosophy thus understands ‘nature’ in the Greek sense of phusis (whence ‘physics’), as comprising all systems subject to physical law, of which the biological is a subset. This phusis lies at the origin of the peculiar name agrosophist doctrine gives to nature understood allegorically as female divinity: ‘Mother Nature’ becomes, in the founding propositions of agrosophism, in the very first article of the Principle Axiomatic, Maphusis or Mafusis. It is important to remark here that we have no reason to suppose that Field Club members at any time held a properly religious belief in this myth, or were required to. This does not mean, of course, that they did not take the underlying philosophical proposition very seriously. As we shall see, a part of Field Club practice lay precisely in creating works of written or plastic art that expressed the spirit of the Principal Axiomatic. Equally, although we know that ‘field study groups’ were widespread and encouraged, there is no reason to believe that all initiated members 1/4

took an interest in the esoteric lore of the Principle Axiomatic. Nevertheless, for those of us engaged in serious study of the Field Club phenomenon, a proper understanding of the latter is the key to decoding the political and social regulation of Field Clubs, even if the finer details of agrosophy were not always appreciated or wholly understood by ‘units’ themselves. This said, the founding article of the Principal Axiomatic is essentially a myth of creation: Maphusis gives birth to creation, to the world. However, the creation emerged, we are told, ‘without doubt, not from her womb but from her arse’. This resoundingly heretical affirmation of course recalls the gnostic execration of the created world, and indeed the reasoning behind it follows similar lines: The created world, as ignoble, absurd, and irresolvable as it is, so the Field Club founders reasoned, must needs have as its originary locus the most ignoble of passages, the anus mundi. We do not have space here to detail later disputes as to why Maphusis gave ‘birth’ to the creation. Of more direct interest to the scholar is an 1870s debate which very nearly led to a scission in the movement. The orthodoxy was that Maphusis gave birth to the creation in all its infinite productivity in one originary act. Thus, once ejected, the world had to continue in its cycles of production and reproduction without further divine intervention, through the autonomous movement of decay and rebirth. This doctrine, however, was challenged in an 1871 pamphlet which put forward the view that the universe was in a state of constant flux because it was being continually discharged by Maphusis in an unbroken stream. Debate between the compostolic and diarrhoaeic schools continued unabated until the time of the great suppression, scholars on both sides appealing both to the Fieldfathers and to other philosophical sources. By the time of the suppression, however, the only remaining stubborn outpost of diarrhoaeism was the Brotherhood of Mabe, the other Clubs having subscribed unanimously to H. Janus Jr.’s 1877 General Anathematisation of the Diarrhoaeic Heresy. From our point of view today, it appears as if the Clubs, already in an attitude of decline, were inclined to moderate their position by opting for what appears to us as the more conservative interpretation of Axiom One. Today’s Field Club revivalists would be hard-pushed to justify compostolic doctrine to a contemporary audience. A fascinating study on ‘the diarrhoaeic question’, signed by one ‘Compostle of the onley and originall axiomatic’, demonstrates how agrosophist scholars drew widely on the history of philosophy as well as on the Principal Axiomatic. ‘Compostle’ makes reference to the scholastic doctrine of decay (revived by Leibniz) according to which all matter was said to be inhabited by infinitesimal, invisible worms, so that a state of actual rotting was only a manifestation of the inherent nature of all matter, actualising its indwelling vermicular life. The pamphlet’s author also dissents from Thomas Aquinas’ response to a student who asked whether hell contained actual worms. No, Aquinas replied, only the gnawing of conscience. Our agrosophical student takes this opportunity to demonstrate the solidarity of compostolicism with other accepted Field Club doctrine: ‘here lies the Thomist mistake, for as we know hell is earth, and just so, we know our worms are real (even if infinitesimal). Observe, though, how even as their appearance does make us to cringe and to vomit, yet they do fertilise our fields with the manifold knots of their excrement. Hence the worm is the angel of Maphusis, agent of Her eternal irony.’ The important Axiom Seven in the Principal Axiomatic, on reproduction and children, is supplemented by a long and convoluted scholium discussing the matter (which, so we understand from various Club journals, was ever a topic of hot debate in Field Club seminars). This question and the ensuing discussion sheds much light on agrosophical thought. If the creation is, according to the first Axiom, shit, then by what right do we participate in its reproduction, why encourage its persistence? This, of course, was a key Gnostic question also. Its agrosophical resolution, however, was—as we would expect—not to preach abstinence and the end of the human race. The seventh axiom instead counsels an acceptance of our part in the absurd spectacle of creation, but emphasises that each generation 2/4

must demonstrate sympathy with the unfortunate beings they have condemned to come into the world once more to discover its ignoble confusion. Therefore Field Club members are advised that, when small infants cry, they should cry with them, in sympathy, until such time as they become quiet. This ‘Wailing in’ of the young, as we know from contemporary reports, was, at the height of Field Club activity in the UK, the source of much consternation. Indeed it was the Field Club practice most apt to generate conflict and litigation between Clubs and their near neighbours. ‘Wailing in’ was often described by outsiders as a kind of collective hysteria, in which the sorrowful howls often turned spontaneously into harrowing, maniacal laughter. It was to become one of the principal reasons why Field Clubs tended to seek out more and more secluded rural locations. The philosophical import of the Axiom on reproduction, however, is as follows: Since ‘the excreta of Maphusis’ is the sole matter of the universe and thus constitutes the absolute principle of Reason itself, the wailing infant cannot be considered ‘irrational’ and in need of discipline or education. Rather, as a child grows up they must become educated in irrationality—that is, they must be initiated into the need for what the Principal Axiomatic calls ‘discord’, and describes in terms which anticipate significantly what Leon Festinger, in his seminal 1957 work, would name ‘cognitive dissonance’. Consequently there could be no justification for treating a baby’s crying as if it were an unreasonable response to the world. Reproof and consolation would be equally inappropriate responses. It will be noted that there is no divine ‘father figure’ in agrosophical philosophy. This is because Field Club requires each member to undergo a ‘second birth’ or initiation in which, effectively, they become their own father. For it is understood that one can give the law only to oneself—there is no divine lawgiver; Maphusis’ defacation is governed by sheer physical necessity, and Her excreta is opaque and irreflective. Each ‘unit’ (as Field Club initiates are known in the Principal Axiomatic) must therefore be ‘born again’ into an explicit awareness of their position in the universe, and this ‘rebirthing’—which in face (Axiom Five, Corollary Ten) amounts to ‘the initiate’s becoming the shit of Maphusis in itself, for itself’—is a process which continues until the end of the Field Club member’s life, or until they are expelled from the Club (as we know, a not uncommon occurrence). The above observations bring us close to the core message of Agrosophical teaching: Agrosophy is neither moralistic nor nihilistic. Its core concept, which we have already heard mention of above, is what is known as ‘the eternal irony of Maphusis’. The cumulative effect of the first nine axioms of the Principal Axiomatic is to emphasise the fact that humans are but a minor part of an execrable, senseless creation which certainly does not favour them. With the notorious tenth axiom, which begins ‘But Maphusis is a mere fancy of humankind’ the student is forced to recognise that all the tragic pathos that has been projected onto Nature is nothing but the fevered imaginings of a desperate fool. However, as the eleventh axiom wryly counsels, ‘Not even Maphusis Herself can extinguish such fancy’. No need, given this reasoning, to explain why the self-devouring worm Ourobouros was a favourite sacred figure for the agrosophists. Thus, in reflecting the absolute system of nature, the axioms describe a discordant self-relation. The programme of Field Club is then to respond to this revelation by hearkening to this discord and attuning oneself to it. It is to study and to intensify this irony, not with a view to resolving it (for this seemed patently impossible to Janus and his fellow founders), but rather—as the famous agrosophical credo of Axiom Thirteen urges us—so as to ‘Aggravate The Problem’. This greatly aids our comprehension of the unity of Field Club practice, for the latter can be understood in its entirety under this head: The apparent isolationism and the strange social organisational principles of Field Clubs derive from the fact that members are expected each to experience, for themselves, to the most intense degree, the ‘eternal irony of Maphusis’: dissociation from public utilities and personal involvement in agriculture was not exalted for its own sake, but because it counteracted what the Principal Axiomatic calls (Axiom Eighteen) ‘diffusion of the Problem’, that is, the tendency of civilisation to employ social and technical mechanisms to diffuse, hold at bay, or 3/4

partition-out the inherent contradictions of human life (in this sense—if in no other—one could say that agrosophy echoes marxism). The art objects that Field Clubs produced, now the source of much interest and fascination, were likewise created as objects of meditation, designed to induce a heightened state of awareness of the irresolvably problematic relation between human and nature, in which we ceaselessly create the imaginary Maphusis, who in turn discharges us as a mess of cosmic guano. Finally, strange practices such as the interring of insects and animals, which in the declining years of Field Clubs were, so it seems, carried out with no understanding of their deeper meaning, in fact reflected the ongoing quest of the agrosophist to force home his own absurd position as ethically-bound ‘caretaker’ of the natural realm he himself, a mere excremental fragment, had imagined into existence. In this light, those who have jokingly misquoted Janus’s latin motto Vivo est aggero as Vivo est aggro are not so far from the mark: the Field Club model of agriculture was valid not for its own sake, but only as a means to ‘Aggravate The Problem’; indeed, at certain points in the primary manuscript of the Principal Axiomatic, Janus himself (whether consciously or not is difficult to say) writes of ‘aggroculture’ as if portmanteauing the two words together. Quite evidently, this deeper point is not understood by those neo-agrosophists who seek superficially to affine Field Club practice with contemporary ‘ecological’ thinking. Although we have spoken of only a fraction of what is contained in the Principal Axiomatic (and have almost entirely disregarded a whole tradition of commentary, some of which has thankfully been preserved), we can begin to appreciate that Field Club doctrine constitutes a genuine philosophical system. It can indeed be said not only to echo Gnosticism in certain respects, but also to be something of a forgotten precursor to Existentialism, with its notion that human existence precedes essence, and its insistence on an authentic encounter with the human’s inherent alienation. However, as we have seen, Field Club philosophy was oriented less towards any such supposed authenticity than towards an unstinting, even masochistic, dedication to cultivating a living, visceral relation to ‘The Problem’; and again, unlike the gnostics, this did not take the form of asceticism and withdrawal from the world. As we know, central to Field Clubs was the insistence upon elaborating their philosophical doctrine within a new cultural milieu and through forms of life and art which, they hoped, would spread throughout the planet, eliminating ‘the foul diffusionism’ and reproblematising the creation, to the glory of Maphusis. Scanned PDF of original article. 4/4

readthis.wtf /writing/speculative-literealism/ Synthetic Liter[e]alism - 2011 The subjects of John Gerrard’s ‘portraits’ – isolated, enigmatic structures whose interiors remain hidden – are real sites, their surface captured by Gerrard in thousands of digital photographs, which are then employed in a painstaking virtual reconstruction.1 The mastery of this medium that Gerrard and his production team have developed has enabled him to distance the work from any conspicuous emphasis on its ‘new media’ credentials and their cultural associations. While utilising software designed for intensively interactive gaming environments, the works revoke the gamer’s freedom of movement to explore virtual space. Their immaculately rendered environments refuse to deliver the vertiginous flythroughs, descents and dizzying perspectives movies have taught us to associate with CGI, leading us instead on slow orbital paths around isolated structures which offer a minimum of ‘action’. Nevertheless much of the significance of Gerrard’s work pivots on the technical nature of its medium. The digital computer and its generalized capacity to model any system whatsoever is the crucial enabler, not only of the hyperrealistic rendering of his subjects, but also of the globally co-ordinated networks of production and distribution they invite us to consider. Accordingly, these ‘portraits’ embody a tension between a realism that is pictorial, illusionistic, offering us a precise image of a reality remote-controlled by virtualities; and a realism that would liquidate the artwork’s autonomy, reminding us that the work, too, is of that same reality.2 1/11

In this sense the work can be seen to span two moments – precisionist and literalist – of a specifically American realism. That is, a realism allowing the artist the subtraction from (European) artistic tradition necessary to address the new realities – themselves quintessentially American – of a world dominated by objects and environments that appear as uncanny, alien presences; a realism for those realities of a new world whose aesthetic and social meaning has not yet crystallised. Charles Sheeler: Precision and Power Charles Sheeler [1883-1965] records that his exposure to European avant-garde painting at the 1913 Armory Show provoked a realization ‘that a picture could be as arbitrarily conceived as the artist wished’.3 Sheeler abandoned painterly experimentation, however, instead developing a rigorous realism in his recording of the industrialisation of the American landscape. This is the style that would become known as ‘precisionism’, characterized by its exaggerated sensitivity to machined forms and their sharply delineated, geometrical, unmodulated surfaces. The pursuit of precision was also determined by Sheeler’s professional involvement in photography. The formal qualities accentuated by photography, diverging from those emphasised by pictorial tradition, hasten the conclusion that, rather than exploring the essential elements of the pictorial through painterly experiment, one might instead discover the articulations of the real by ‘remov[ing] the method of painting as far as possible from being an obstacle in the way of considering the content of the picture’.4 Working as a commercial photographer, Sheeler was commissioned in 1927 by an advertising agency to document Albert Kahn’s eleven-hundred-acre Ford Red River Plant in Michigan, then the largest industrial complex in the world. The plant was the product of a new, heavily-planned functional ‘architecture of production’ devised by Ford engineers for increased efficiency. Kahn’s single-storey, steel-framed, glass-walled structures, free of all superfluous adornment, ensured that ‘the imperatives of management … were conveyed, not merely by foremen, but by the architecture of the workplace.’5 Sheeler’s passion for his subject (‘incomparably the most thrilling I have had to work with’) is reflected in the heroic cast of the images, which would be a determining moment in the development of his painting. Contemporary critics shared Sheeler’s own understanding of his style as essentially American, its ‘ultimate literalness,’ its ‘extremely simplified realism’6 seen as echoing the ‘clear-cut fineness, the cool austerity, the complete distrust of superfluities’ of the Shaker furniture Sheeler admired7 as much as the industrial might of Red River. In the former as in the latter Sheeler divines a ‘classicism’ that he associates with Greek sculpture’s ‘façade of 2/11

realism’, behind which is ‘skilfully concealed’ an ideal structure. So that, despite Sheeler’s claim that ‘my things don’t go beyond the boundaries of the actual’,8 precisionism ultimately is an idealism. Its crystalline semi-abstractions argue that the corn silos, factories and machines generated through the sole concern for function and efficiency participate in the same ‘spirit’ as the early products of American handcraft. Sheeler requires that ‘every picture should have a steel structure’, but equally that the steel structures of his subjects are extensions of a nobler armature. The high point of precisionism is 1940’s Power, Sheeler’s series of paintings commissioned for a Fortune magazine feature that breathlessly vaunts the marvels of technology to a still largely rural American public. Fortune was cautious enough about Sheeler’s work – by then attracting criticism for its affectless representations – not only to head the article with the one painting that features pre-twentieth-century technology (a waterwheel entitled Primitive Power) but also to equip the reader in advance with a reassuring interpretation of the remainder: [Sheeler] shows them for what they truly are: not strange, inhuman masses of material, but … forms that are … deeply human … they trace the firm pattern of the human mind as it seeks to use co-operatively the limitless power of nature … In the text alongside Sheeler’s Yankee Clipper, Sheeler’s cropped portrait of an airplane propeller becomes a symbol of identity and popular freedom: The people of the US have achieved their latest and greatest freedom through the use of power … the internal combustion engine has given them a new and highly personal mobility … it allows a man to go as he pleases. Hills are no longer hills up which he must labor, his muscles tiring. He presses his foot on the accelerator and wheels over them. Forests and lakes are no longer barriers. He pulls back on the stick and floats over them. He loses old realities and gains new ones. The internal combustion engine has suddenly expanded his adventure in space. Sheeler has expressed the new portent in this poised and infinitely precise propeller … At the same time, the propeller can be read as threatening the usurpation of the artist by the engineer: The airplane is the highest art of the engineer … His, like all great art, is an art that largely conceals itself. Sheeler believes that the pursuit of function reveals principles of beauty that will retrospectively absorb those of the restricted practices of art; and yet this is paradoxically conjoined with an attempt to redeem functional beauty through an art that measures itself for the task by erasing all trace of its mediation. Doesn’t this uneasy alliance 3/11

merely hold at bay the more fundamental shift in the relation between art and the real that such ‘infinitely precise’ creations call for? Thierry de Duve recounts that in 1912 Duchamp, who … had not yet ‘invented’ the readymade … went … to the Salon de la locomotion aérienne and, to Leger and Brancusi, who were accompanying him, he offered this verdict: “Painting’s washed up. Who’ll do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?”9 This ‘designa[tion], ready-made,’ of ‘Blériot’s airplane and propeller’ as ‘worthy of supplanting painting under the title of art’ of course anticipates Duchamp’s ambiguous declaration that ‘The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges’.10 Duchamp seconds Fortune’s recognition of what de Duve describes as ‘the immanent and involuntary beauty of the modern machine adapted to its function’;11 but Sheeler’s representation of this new art still retains a certain autonomy of means, beyond mere selection and nomination. Re-presentation is still necessary, even as it strives to negate its mediation so as to reveal the underlying structure of the new aesthetic. Sheeler’s dogged pursuit of this goal renders his work at once urgent and opaque: the subtraction of all facture and ornament presses the viewer against the real as if willing it to secrete some clue as to its inner structure, but its faithfullyreproduced, cryptic surfaces offer no satisfaction. The Theatre of Literalism In his 1965 essay ‘Specific Objects’, Donald Judd sets out the motivations and criteria for an art that would escape the constraints of both painting and sculpture. Recent work having consigned these ‘given forms’ to a determinate ‘life span’, Judd looks to works which, no longer generating autonomous illusionistic space, now inhabit ‘three dimensions … real space’; whose materials are ‘simply materials … used directly … aren’t obviously art’; and whose qualities are no longer determined by the relation of their parts, since they tend towards ‘singleness’, being ‘an entity, one thing’.12 Judd contends that this ‘new three-dimensional work’ moves toward the possibility of artworks that are nothing more than themselves qua ‘specific objects’. In his famous critique of this position,13 Michael Fried finds the most important clue to the stakes of Judd’s ‘literalism’ in Tony Smith’s anecdote of driving the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike: It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first, I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art. The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it.14 Judd insists on liberating art from its painterly and sculptural circumscription through a confrontation with the literal object and the use of repetition; Robert Morris argues that the inexhaustible number of possible relationships between viewer and object becomes a part of the work in the minimalist ‘situation’; Fried squarely aligns these claims with Smith’s ‘non-art’ experience of driving the turnpike, claiming that the former merely encrypt the latter; that what Judd and Morris invoke is the same experience ‘of endlessness, of inexhaustibility, of being able to go on and letting … the material itself confront one in all its literalness, its “objectivity”, its absence of anything beyond itself.’15 4/11

According to Fried, the literalist work is a compaction of the deracinating but somehow exhilarating experience of inhabiting a system of objects whose forceful but meaningless presence seems to obtrude on experience from ‘elsewhere’; an object-reality without semantic or social correlation, and therefore ‘hollow’. Precision-engineered to be nothing but what it is, ‘permut[ing] the facts of Modern Reality’,16 we might say that the ‘specific object’ invites the hypnotic fascination enjoyed by that ‘man in a car, driving on a concrete highway to an unknown destination’ nominated by J.G.Ballard as the key image of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps a more appropriate twenty-first century image would be that of a teenager rapt before the screen as a console unfolds from its memory chip tracts of virtual highway, producing in a state of total immobility the endless and vacuous ‘interest’ that Fried derides in Judd’s objects. As Fried anticipates, the form of experience he identifies has become so common as to be banal. The best indicator of this might be the uncontested hegemony of various derivatives of techno, that music originating in the ‘motor-city’ Detroit and which, abandoning form and development, consists apparently of laminar repetitive continua that the listener enters and leaves arbitrarily. Thinking of Smith’s turnpike experience, this is perhaps best exemplified by British duo Orbital, who, in homage to Kraftwerk’s seminal electronic highway hymn Autobahn, named themselves after the M25 motorway that circles the city of London. For the inexhaustibility of the literalist object is precisely of the orbital type: According to Fried, the intensity of the encounter it embodies, the speed of the turnpike cruise, engenders a hallucinatory sensation of progression and repletion; whereas in fact, the literal is inexhaustible only ‘because there is nothing there to exhaust … It is endless the way a road might be: if it were circular, for example.’17 Which is why it must be polemically opposed by the work of art, whose value lies precisely in its ability to ‘defeat or suspend’18 its objecthood by generating autonomous spaces. Smith’s turnpike experience is conditioned by the reorganization of the environment through the mass-production of modular, repetitive forms. Entry into them is marked by new modes of experience: those which, according to Fried, ‘most deeply excite literalist sensibility, and that literalist artists seek to objectify in their work … by the repetition of identical units’.19 Unlike in Sheeler’s quest for ideal classical form, this order ‘is not rationalistic and underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another’.20 What Fried calls literalism’s ‘theatricality’ then consists precisely in its relaying modernity unreflectively (since it is already ‘corrupted or perverted’ by it),21 and in submitting to its seductive, cryptic threat (or promise) of inundation by alien objects, in a way that Sheeler could not yet do. Crystals, Aliens, Monoliths In his 1966 account of a car trip with Judd, The Crystal Land, Robert Smithson replays Tony Smith’s epiphany, reimagining the production of these forms as a glacial, inorganic terrestrial process. Smithson further develops the link between the machined, industrial environment, and the nature of the literalist object, whose creation he reimagines as an unnatural ‘crystallisation’ ‘put[ting] space down in the form of deposits’.22 Following a Glaciologist’s statement that Ice is the medium most alien to organic life; a considerable accumulation of it completely disrupts the normal course of processes in the biosphere. Smithson observes how [t]he highways crisscross through the towns and become man-made geological networks of concrete. In fact, the entire landscape has a mineral presence. From the shiny chrome diners to glass windows of shopping centers, a 5/11

sense of the crystalline prevails.23 At this point, where mankind is besieged, like the hero of Ballard’s contemporaneous Crystal World, by some uncontrolled inorganic infestation, it is no longer a question of tethering this ‘adventure in space’ in which man ‘loses old realities and gains new ones’ to a social project. Beyond Sheeler’s complicity with the symbolic domestication of the machine, and Duchamp’s nomination of it as art, the literalist object now indexes something ‘mapped out’ in advance but which is no longer ‘for us’: an alien regulation and reorganization of space. This sentiment is attested to not only by Smithson’s candid associational reading of Judd’s works (‘The first time I saw Don Judd’s ‘pink-plexiglas box,’ it suggested a giant crystal from another planet’);24 but also by John McCracken, whose account of his own works slides easily from their existing ‘between the two worlds’ of illusionist painting and three-dimensionality, to being alien life-forms from another dimension (or from the future) channelled by the artist;25 not to mention the impenetrable, cosmically-cryptic ‘monolith’ and Morris-like spacestation of Kubrick’s 2001. The New New Three-Dimensional Work It is in the context of Smithson’s journey, where he finds A gray factory in the midst of it all, [that] looked like architecture designed by Robert Morris.26 that we can offer an interpretation of Gerrard’s method of selection. In particular, the facility that features in Grow Finish Unit (Near Elkhart, Kansas) was spotted soon after Gerrard had visited the artillery sheds at Judd’s Chinati Foundation at Marfa, Texas. This contingent double-encounter of Judd’s permanently-installed serial forms and those deposited in the landscape by agro-industry gives a supplementary dimension to Gerrard’s selection. The isolated, silently operating production site may function as a synechdoche for a system that resynthesizes the planet’s resources and reconfigures space according to its own functional criteria. But the site is not merely an allegory or symbol of the type found in Sheeler’s Power series; it is simultaneously a literalist ‘readymade’. This duality corresponds to a splitting within the work that obviates, or at least complicates, its ‘theatrical’ nature. The reconstructed model itself no less than virtualizes the literalist situation, fastforwarded through its evolution into ‘monumental’ land art. The recurring camera path, orbiting the building at walking pace, automates the viewer’s inexhaustible surveying of the permanent installation; the impenetrability in principle of the superficiallyreconstructed building and the durational nature of the virtual environment re-emphasise this inexhaustibility. But this proxy experience is complicated by the physical form of the work that constitutes both its (technical) support and an installation into which it is embedded. In the installation of Cuban School (Community 5th of October) at 6/11

Simon Preston Gallery in New York, a Morris-esque slab is suspended parallel to the wall, of a thickness that makes it a volume rather than a mere screen. The digital projection is precisely congruent with the face of this white monolith, so that the projected image vacillates between portal (a ‘view into another world’) and superficial covering. The ‘theatrical’ situation of literalism, including its beholder (in the form of the virtual camera viewpoint) is set at a distance; and the archetypal minimalist hollow volume becomes a host-body, a vehicle freighted with the illusionist space that literalism wants to liquidate. The doubling of the real 3-d presence of the screen-volume and the virtual 3d presence of the school is further echoed by the similar dimensions of the space itself, which, for the purpose of designing of the installation, was itself modeled using the same software. Black Box / White Box Tony Smith’s (1962) work ‘Black Box’ implies a relation between the enigmatic hollowness of the minimalist object and the cybernetic conception of a modular processing unit whose mechanism, accessible through input and output ports, is sealed and closed off from view. This hint indicates the shortcomings of Judd’s conceiving of objectivity in terms limited to physical and spatial presence. In order to participate in reality, an object must be considered not just as a spatial unit, but in its productive interactions with its environment. Furthermore, any contemporary conception of space must take into account the non-physical but effectively real electronic spaces that increasingly organize and reformat physical space. This expanded notion of ‘objecthood’ is insisted upon most strongly in the other form in which Gerrard’s work is presented: The physical presence and gravity of his ‘artboxes’ – formerly floor-standing tables fabricated in the featureless, abstract white industrial material Corian, more recently wall-mounted forms in rolled steel – decisively prevent the work’s being read as merely ‘virtual’. At the same time, the on-screen virtual environment makes it inevitable that the hollowness of the white box is filled-out with circuitries, hooked up to the grid, becoming a black box. Fittingly for works that are the result of a collaboration across many disciplines (industrial design, software engineering, CGI modelling), a piece like Lufkin (Near Hugo, Colorado) conspicuously exposes its complicity in the same network of production, and the same contingent history of geosynthesis, as the industrial facilities it depicts. This draws attention to the pervasive technological illusion of freedom from time and contingency that is the essence of the heightened literalist experience of its virtual mise-en-scène. While the virtual scene uses the digital medium to accentuate the implacable, apparently limitless cycles of industrial technology, the installation reveals it, along with the digital ‘black box’ and the art ‘object’ itself, as synthetic, finite, and resource-consuming. From the silent 7/11

‘processing’ that happens in the 7-month interim between the delivery of the piglets and their pickup to the slowmotion plutonic vampirism of the oil pump, Gerrard recognizes that to properly consummate the ‘literalist’ encounter with the alien requires that this synthetic aspect, also, be brought ‘to the surface’. Remote-Control Architecture The Cuban Schools share with earlier work the aspect of entities ‘from outside’: space-invader-like, the buildings crouch on concrete feet that give the impression that they have just ‘landed’. From which ‘alien dimension’? The Schools belong to a period in the island’s history when the optimism of early revolutionary socialist models of housing provision gave way to large-scale mass housing models. This phase began with the US Embargo and the consequent pressing need for high-tech solutions to see through the revolutionary project. A decisive moment came with the Soviet Union’s donation, after 1963’s Hurricane Flora, of a large-panel concrete prefabrication factory in Santiago. Over the following decade, a growing network of prefabrication facilities throughout the country slowly locked in a commitment to the technology; the socialist project became virtually synonymous with state-centralised prefabrication.27 But the huge investments brought at best mixed results: The exterior finish on the buildings was often poor because of the uneven surfaces of the panels, especially at joints. Because the designs were simple and relatively low in cost, the buildings turned out monotonous and unattractive.28 The infatuation with these capital-intensive prefabrication methods owed less to their results than to the notion that only industrialisation would help Cuba escape underdevelopment (‘industrial development as a cornerstone of the socialist revolution’) – as reflected in Castro’s production goal of 100,000 housing units a year by 1970 to accompany the famous ‘10 Million Ton Sugar Harvest’. But the stimulation of this situation, and the exportation of architecture and planning, were also part of a deliberate transformation of the post-colonial South or ‘third world’, defined in relation to the socialist/capitalist alternative, into a battleground in which technology transfer and knowledge distribution were ideological vehicles.29 8/11

The export of planning and architecture as instruments of cold war politics is exemplified by the case of Constantinos Doxiadis, whose rationalist vision of ‘Ekistics, the ‘science of human settlements’ was promoted by the US government and the Ford Foundation. Doxiadis’s system describes a ramified hierarchy in which the smallest scale unit of ‘anthropos’ is embedded into ‘ecumenopolis’, a ‘world-encompassing city’; a ‘machine for emancipation, decentralisation and individualism’. In the belief that the organization of space and of dwelling could determine the political destiny of territories in the balance, while US aid was mobilised for Doxiadis to exert his influence on Iran, Lebanon, and various African capitals, Warsaw architects funded by the UN, planned Skopje, Chimbote, and Libya; and exported prefab to Cuba. El Bloqueo and Generation Y It is no wonder, then, that in ‘El Bloqueo’, shown at the Third Havana Biennial in 1989, the material used by Cuban artist Antonio Eligio Fernández (Tonel) to spell out the work’s title (‘The Blockade/Embargo’), and to construct a rudimentary, squared-off map of Cuba, are concrete blocks. Made in the year the Berlin Wall fell, Tonel’s work anticipates the problematic legacy of the imported Soviet model, whose forms left their impression on the lives of a generation in Cuba. It was Girón-style reinforced panel prefabrication that permitted the mass construction, during the late 60s and early 70s, of the ESBECs or ‘schools in the countryside’ [Escuelas Secundarias Basicas en el Campo], establishments which are an abidingly painful memory for Cuba’s ‘Generation Y’. Of course the brutal 9/11

reality of life within these alien shells bore little relation to the principles supposedly embodied in their concrete slabs. When Soviet funding dried up the shortcomings of the model were all too evident: Large expanses of green areas and the impersonal nature of prefabricated structures are so far removed from the dynamism and gay spirit of Cubans … The end result was a style of construction and housing that was far removed from what a “real” socialism was capable of producing.30 The question of ‘actually-existing’ vs ‘real’ socialism is perhaps subsidiary to that of the sacrifice of the contingency of place and history to the prefabrication of ideological alternatives. In aligning the incongruous presence of the Cuban Schools – appropriate emblems for this attempted political remote-control – with the equally remotecontrolled industrial facilities of his previous works, Gerrard reflects on the universality of the functionalist legacy of modernism. To Build the Real We live amongst the ruins of the belief that, in the fascinating formal possibilities that emerge from new technology, there is a latent possibility of twisting free of tradition and creating forms of life that, since they directly confront reality, are universal. Of course, the ‘Fordist’ principles of utility and efficiency embodied hyperbolically in industrial facilities such as the Grow Finish Unit, belong to the same Fordism that exported Doxiadis’ virtual ‘structures for living’, and that employed precisionist painting to promote its efficiencies. But we should also recall the close relation between literalism and constructivism’s transformation of art into production through the extirpation of ideology. Its effects are as manifest in the Cuban Schools as in the literalist object. Furthermore, the depersonalised and deideologised productions of constructivism – informed by the precepts of tectonics (exploitation of the newest materials and techniques), facture (the non-bourgeois use of materials) and construction (the efficient and functional fabrication) – aimed to produce in their proletarian audience precisely the type of excitement described by Fried as ‘theatrical’. Like Smith and his students on the turnpike, this audience was supposed to come face to face with a real that was beyond anything that ‘art’ had to offer, to enter directly, participatively, into it rather than contemplating and reflecting on its meaning. From this point of view it is instructive that immediately after the recounting of his turnpike experience, Smith moves from Ballardian wastelands (‘abandoned airstrips … artificial landscapes … created worlds without tradition’) to the architecture of Le Corbusier, praising it as a similarly ‘accessible’ experience of a reality that breaks the circumscribed bounds of art.31 – Le Corbusier who, like Sheeler, discerned a classical beauty in ‘the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent first-fruits of the new age.’;32 and whose call for ‘Standardisation; Industrialisation; Taylorisation’ as ‘the most urgent program of town planning’33 echoed from East to West during the Twentieth Century. The dream of an art equal to the real itself always addresses itself to a type that it hopes to engender – either a rational observer who discerns an ideal order, or a pragmatist who ‘sees … works of art as nothing more than objects’34 and acts on material facts. What Fried identifies as that which excites literalism, cannot be reduced to merely ‘a matter of … experience, conviction, sensibility’;35 for it also provided the stimulus, the fascinated compulsion, that drove nations to participate enthusiastically in the construction of crystal lands, monoliths. 10/11

Fried’s question is apt: ‘if the turnpike, airstrips, and drill ground are not works of art, what are they?’36 – what is the nature of this reality that compels art to respond, that ‘seems to run of its own accord, without human intervention’37 and of the depiction of which Sheeler says (perhaps only half-jokingly) ‘it’s my illustration of what a beautiful world it would be if there were no people in it’?38 They are the ruins of something whose cryptic promise seduced the human race into assisting in its emergence, but which conspicuously failed to engender a new human to inhabit it. The caretakers of the Cuban Schools and the industrious painter of Oil Stick Work alike tend to the enigmatic remainders of this hope, in works whose realism, this time, announces itself as temporal and synthetic. 11/11

readthis.wtf /writing/the-egoist-interview-with-charles-avery/ The Egoist - 2011 RM: One of the things that interests me about The Islanders as a project is its dual nature: on the one hand, there is an abstract, structural, point of view on it, according to which the whole project would be a conceptual work that asks questions about the work of art (no one drawing or sculpture any longer exists as a work in its own right; they are all part of the constellation of The Islanders), about closure (the project as a never-complete entity), about parts and wholes (the Island as more than the sum of its parts), and so on. And, from this point of view, all of your wonderful draughtsmanship and witty ideas would be of no essential import, except as a way to explore those conceptual problems. On the other hand, I venture to suggest that what most people appreciate first of all about your work (even those who might claim to be taking a more sophisticated view) are precisely those somewhat traditional qualities of the particular content of the works: they love the depiction of this imaginary world. The two points of view seem inextricable, however. The successful creation of “a world”—and thus the posing of those conceptual problems mentioned above—depends upon your imagination and skill in rendering all the details of the world consistent and compelling. How do you see the relation between these two ways of looking at the work – the relation, that is, between structure and storytelling?1 CA: When I embarked on this project, I did so somewhat recklessly. I envisaged it as a vehicle for the imagination, for drawing, and for thinking without conclusion. I pictured myself in endless days and years rambling on, amassing this body of drawings and texts, no end in sight, none needed. As I had noted even before this project, the unique 1/13

privilege of the artist is solitude and the opportunity to think, and given this privilege, all species of idea should be expected. Naturally, this thinking time led to reflections on the project itself, and I rapidly became embroiled in issues of structure, to which I had hitherto been more or less oblivious. RM: So after the freedom you’d given yourself, the project began to solicit some sort of systematic constraint? CA: Yes, I became dissatisfied with the programme of gratuitous invention, and felt the need for the fiction to have a form. I didn’t want it to be a romp from A to Z, and I understood that its structure was analogous to its essential meaning. So then I went right the other way, and became very concerned with structure. No more was this a quaint encyclopedia, but I became all about creating a systematic whole. Blunt logic was the name of the game, as I sought to establish this world on a set of axioms. For example, and most importantly, the perceiver is introduced to this fiction by the figure of the Hunter, an ambitious if slightly effete young “man” who comes to the Island “with a view to being its discoverer”. However, the Hunter has come to these shores, not by a blind leap of faith, setting out towards the horizon in the hope that he will hit land, but confident in his logical deduction that there must be something beyond that horizon. He infers its existence. This coming of the Hunter posed the logical problem of where he came from, and indeed from where all of the other travellers, day-trippers and inhabitants of the Island originated. I had to make a decision about whether this other country, the “old country”, was to be represented at all within the systematic whole or not. I was aware that this idea of coming to the Island represented the coming of the perceiver into the fiction, that the system stood for the realm of all ideas, and that the idea of the outside or “real” world needed to be symbolized within. Therefore, I brought about the alternative state of Triangleland, which is alluded to only in name.2 RM: Trianglelanders are presented as being rather bourgeois and unimaginative, representative, perhaps, of a life lived “without ideas”, or in which ideas are regarded as something like obligatory tourist attractions, perused in desultory manner before catching the boat back home. Is it his somewhat arrogant and colonial attitude alone that differentiates the Hunter from the Trianglelanders? CA: That would be a good generalization of their character. Trianglelanders know the names of ideas but do not understand them, or perhaps I should say feel them. This is what differentiates them from the Islanders, who have a feeling for ideas. This is a contradiction to a Trianglelander, for whom ideas are concrete, and to know is to possess them. And they are complacent about their claims to knowledge: constantly on the verge of a unifying theory of everything, they would seek to capture the Noumenon and do so by attrition, by covering every square mile of territory leaving no habitat for it. They have no tolerance for enigma. This is not to say that the Islanders are totally intuitive in their understanding of phenomena; they are, after all, a Creole race, born of the early Triangleland colonists, but whose culture has been influenced as much by the indigenous If’en. They retain to some degree many of the traits of the colonists: the need to reckon, to characterize, to possess. There are pure forms of Islander: for instance, the tribes called the Riders of the Invisible Reigns,3 a nomadic people, seemingly without morals, who subsist by hunting and gathering in the remotest plains of the Island. They are rarely encountered, except by types such as our Hunter who have ventured up there in search of the Noumenon.4 The character of the Hunter is somewhere in between. He comes in the name of, and for the glory of, Triangleland, determined and inspired to succeed where previous generations have failed. The Hunter, although spending his life 2/13

on the Island, in its most esoteric regions, is somehow insulated from the magic of the place by his colonial sense of entitlement, and his Quixotic belief in the justness of his order. He will always see the Riders of the Invisible Reigns as savages. The Hunters testify that these nomads claim to see the Noumenon often and close up – that it has been known to wander through their encampments. But they will not describe its form, or the texture of its skin, or its patterns of movement, because it is a changeling – no two accounts are the same. This is perhaps where the Hunters go wrong, with their residual obsession with continuity. RM: Although (or perhaps because) they have made a profession of systematically exploring and charting the Island, they can’t know it as a native does; the indigenous Islanders, on the other hand, do not thematise their spontaneous and immanent relation to the Island. It’s this tension, I guess, that, for the Hunter, makes exotic, challenging and confusing what for “insiders” is quite mundane and handled with nonchalance. All the frustration and despair of the neurotic colonialist trying to find and/or instill order can be found in the Hunter’s fruitless dream of “settling” with finality, of mapping, all of the questions raised by the sophisticated but non-pedantic circulation of concepts in the Islanders’ culture, which is essentially a culture of “nonsense” (in the sense of Lewis Carroll, with the special relation to logic that implies). Speaking psychoanalytically, it is perhaps a neurotic misunderstanding of the nature of the Noumenon, the empty space whose continual pursuit re-motivates and re-configures desire (even the desire to know), as being itself a quarry that can be captured. The Trianglelander, meanwhile, has renounced the earnestness of the Hunter, and is content with picking over the exotica and then going home for tea. Although the story of The Islanders is told by the Hunter, your identification with him is ambivalent, as he is gently lampooned throughout. And in your continuing construction of the Island and its culture, you certainly side with the Islanders’ disinclination to resolve its paradoxes. CA: After Triangleland I started to think about the symbiosis of Inside and Outside, Real and Unreal. Rather than outside encompassing inside, the real being transcendentally superior to the unreal, I wanted to assert the interdependence of these dualities. This led to the idea of the world having two identical sides. The first real postulate of the project is: “The world does or does not have two sides”. Each side of the world would be the outside to the other’s inside, one moment and the next, etc. RM: Does the same also apply to the question of the two sides of the project we were discussing – structure vs. storytelling? CA: I would go further than saying these two sides to the project are inextricable; I would say they are implicit in one another. As for the drawings, my strategy is to do what comes naturally, and what seems most natural is to try one’s hardest. I don’t see any other option. One could develop a shorthand, with symbols for people, but people without expression aren’t really people. And then, if one were to choose a style, a manner in which to acquit these drawings, that required maybe less guile than I invest, what style would that be? One would be posed with a choice, and it would be impossible to justify one way above another. I think if the drawings are compelling, it is because of the sheer effort I go to and my earnest attempt to portray a place to the best of my abilities. It’s as though I have an intense conviction about how this place and its people look. 3/13

RM: This comes down to consistency. And I see no problem in reconciling the “death of the author” with the importance of concentrated individual work of this kind, because, without needing to endow it with any romantic genius, the individual mind is undoubtedly a singular nexus of influences and forces which have come to consistently cohabit with each other through a slow, long process. This complex multiplicity, with sufficient effort, can be slowly unfolded, externalized, and will bear all the marks of a consistent reality. For me, this is at least part of the definition of what an artist (in an appropriately wide sense of the word) does. One of my favourite stories is the one David Lynch tells of how, taking a coffee break in a car park, he touched the hot roof of a car and suddenly had the idea, a complete and comprehensive idea, for the Red Room in Twin Peaks.5 Then he describes a process of self-questioning: the room must have a floor, what kind of a floor must it be? Once the floor is in place, it suggests the curtains. And so on. The point being that it was all already there, in that one moment, complete and consistent, but it takes a special kind of dedication to draw it out, without falling back on some cliché to complete the image too easily. So, whereas the structural elements are not “yours” but are universals discovered in a somewhat analytical way, the narrative and the look and feel of the work belong to this slow excavation of the compacted strata of the artist’s individual memory and experience. CA: For me, the combination of structure and storytelling are embodied by the character of the Hunter. In his pure form he is the narrative voice, the thread that leads you into the cluster of entities that amount to the Island, but his structural role is heavily disguised by the fact that his character is one of a hapless and affable buffoon. Those entities which comprise the Island have no order and are non-linear except when experienced; so, the Hunter represents both the author and the viewer, simultaneously inventing and discovering the world, giving it a sense. The idea of authorship, of ownership of ideas, is constantly called into question. Ideas are like beautiful shells lying on a shore: somebody happens to wander by and pick them up, but they didn’t create them, they simply found them. This idea fascinates me. I have long sought a meaningful definition for the term “artist”, or rather sought to define what I do, in terms not related to “creation” or “genesis”. I thought about what the defining characteristics of the artist could be and came to the conclusion that they were three: 1. Agency: the belief that one acts upon the world and that those actions are meaningful. 2. Subjectivity: the unerring (Quixotic) belief in the righteousness of one’s cause, that the value of one’s output is essential, self-evident, and that you may self-assert as an artist, without any anointment from an authority. 3. Professionalism: that from this Subjective immaterial realm the artist brings into the Objective realm (Triangleland) bounty and souvenirs precisely with a view to selling them, to fund the next adventure. The reason I concocted this was that I wanted to understand what I did, not at the margins of “art history” but central to a new and different order more akin to philosophy, but not philosophy in its archest sense, with its aspiration to knowledge. This seems to me an issue central to your cause, and I would like to know your response to this definition. How well do you feel these describe the attributes of the philosopher. How would you refine them, or add to them? I am particularly interested in your response to the third point regarding professionalism and the market. RM: As a philosopher the moment I respond to with instant recognition is the moment when the Hunter, having landed on the Island and, believing he is alone, claimed it as his own discovery, comes across Miss Miss,6 who 4/13

casually disabuses him of any notion that he is treading on virgin soil. Because, since Hegel at least, philosophy has been constrained to include its own history in its subject matter; so that to become a philosopher is, most of all, to locate oneself within a pre-existing constellation of thought. And this inevitably means that you discover that your thoughts are not your own, that your mind is pre-populated. This is what Deleuze says in relation to Francis Bacon’s painting—that the artist never faces an empty canvas, rather he faces the dreadful prospect of a canvas that is absolutely full of clichés waiting to capture him.7 It is only in the process of this co-ordination with what comes before one that it is even possible, I suspect, to “find oneself” as a philosopher, as a singular voice, and to begin that unfolding of one’s own consistency. As you say, one also doesn’t—unless one has a superlative teacher—encounter these pre-existing entities of thought in perfect order (whether the “order of reasons” or the “order of history”). Ideas are picked up in a contingent and fortuitous manner, and thus the world of ideas is different for each explorer. But a part of the task is to understand how they fit together, or how they might be fitted together; and I suspect that every important philosopher has done this in a slightly different, more or less idiosyncratic way. (Deleuze, again, describes it as a “collage”, and in his case it often involves the most wonderfully audacious anachronisms and slippages). This piecing-together allows them to redefine an all-over picture of what philosophy might be. Therefore, taking ownership of ideas for oneself demands a lengthy and onerous apprenticeship, in fact an apprenticeship which never ends—except in rare, exalted moments when you at least sense that your “masters” were themselves only ever fellow apprentices. This raises the question of the escape route you constructed for yourself out of a similar predicament as an artist. I take you to be saying that you didn’t want to exclusively dedicate your time to locating yourself within the officially sanctioned narratives of art history. I wonder whether it’s really possible to make good this escape. The danger is that of becoming what Hegel called a “beautiful soul”—that is, of believing oneself to be a spontaneous and original mind before, outside, or despite, the distributed background of language, society and history.8 The beautiful soul is the most dangerous and deluded character of all —truly, a kind of sociopath!9 However, your claim is clearly not that you are some kind of exceptional solitary creative genius, but, in effect, that you see what you do as being located in a different constellation to that of art history. And it’s true that one need not choose to be either a philosophical apprentice, or an art-historical apprentice, or some other kind, unless one constrains oneself to a disciplinary canon, ignoring the lateral pathways that lead from one discipline to another and, ultimately, make them indiscernible from each other. CA: It seems to me that there is a great hierarchy of fictions that divide and subdivide into various disciplines. I would hate to attempt a taxonomy of this hierarchy; however, I could say that an orthodox reckoning would have Reality, (being the account of what is the case) as the arch-set, and what is not real, Unreality, being a real thing itself, would be a vast subordinate member of this set, its contents the totality of propositions that are not members of all the real fictions, such as history, which is another occupant. Battles are always being fought at the margins of these fictions. RM: One has to be somewhat bloody-minded to disregard the borders, but something rather special happens when you do: what you are reaching for in your “professional” life becomes life itself; you become a professional “apprentice in everything”, which is to say that you take on as a professional task the very condition of being a human being! That’s a heady route to take, when you could have satisfied yourself with belonging to one school or other, one discipline or other. Ultimately, this is what makes truly great philosophers—they locate themselves within 5/13

the co-ordinates of philosophy in order to go elsewhere (again, Deleuze: “sortir de la philosophie par la philosophie”, to escape from philosophy through philosophy). CA: Firstly, I admit one cannot exist outside of the Canon, any more than one can exist outside of the World. As for being a patient and diligent apprentice, I cannot make that claim. That in itself is a risky course, requiring a great deal of commitment, with no guarantee of finding a place to hang your hat. Whereas one will inevitably be allotted a position within the Canon (or not), I don’t think that one can determine this position oneself. So, there seems little point in this course of action. RM: Given this fact, it has been suggested to me that we shouldn’t trust, or even be interested in, what artists say about themselves and their work. If their place in the scheme of things can only be determined retrospectively—at a time when their work begins to make sense in the context of a historical perspective—then their own reading of themselves is incidental and irrelevant. CA : I certainly don’t think an artist’s opinion about his or her work should be accorded any particular authority; nevertheless, the artist is a variable so cannot be totally discounted. On further reflection I would also say this: that although one cannot escape the Canon, the substance of one’s attempt at escape can be regarded as part of it. Even so-called Outsider Art made by the insane or otherwise culturally isolated has been allotted a ghetto within its walls. It is no bad thing to walk the paths that others have trodden, albeit unwittingly, as it gives one an understanding of the anatomy of ideas. How many people do you encounter who are more concerned about knowing the names of the great thinkers and the names of their ideas, but have no insight whatsoever? I think one may be deterred from this thoroughness, discouraged, if one were to obtain too much education. What one can do, though, is make a declaration of independence. This is not tantamount to an autonomy, for there is still trade. But one can create a system whereby familiar objects, signs, etc., are given a new meaning relevant to that system. So, a hare on the Island means something different from what it does to Joseph Beuys, a hunter, or a fifteenth-century witch. All may visit the Island and bring their own belief systems with them, but on the Island they are tourists. There is no actual escape being attempted, but the creation of, and adherence to, a new system that exists within the world. I cannot tolerate the hegemony of Art History, which is built on principles that are illogical to me; nevertheless, that is the state into which I appear to have been born, and a defection to the canon of philosophy seemed unlikely given the predilection for proof. I can see just as much dogma there too. The infrastructure of the Art World, however, is a sympathetic and tolerant one, and provides the means, spatial and financial, to bring about projects. RM: In order to distinguish what you are saying here from the claim that one can take figures and images and make them mean whatever you want them to (Humpty Dumpty as beautiful soul?), I would like to make a more definite link with the notion of the axiomatic. An axiomatic system makes no claims to truth or authenticity, only to consistency. An axiomatic system does not even have to have application to anything, although part of what makes an axiomatic interesting is its application, as a model, to one or more realities. CA: An Islander would say that consistency is local truth, that authenticity is a place, an old ruin, somewhere off the old road out of town. I also don’t think a system needs to be pure. The axioms at its centre (I prefer to say centre rather than base) are essentially pure, but towards its margins the system is indistinct, as it mingles with other systems. I am for a revolution that puts Reality and Fiction as two equal sets which are both members of one other. 6/13

RM: But you were asking whether a philosopher answers to the several attributes you have isolated as characteristic of the artist. I confess I like to call myself “a philosopher” for more frivolous reasons, and without feeling I have any particular authority to do so—firstly because I think it’s amusing when people ask what you do, secondly because I have no official position (philosophy lecturer, professor, CEO), and thirdly, to demonstrate to others that in fact there is no authority to appeal to here, and that if I want to call myself a philosopher, I damn well will! So, aside from a few of the aforementioned exalted moments, I don’t make any great claims for myself. But I do believe that you are right, that I and the people I choose to work with are on the search for “a new and different order”, a new way of thinking where thinking creates dialogues across disciplines, and where “thinking” isn’t defined in distinction to “doing” or “making”—some things can only be thought by making or doing. And by this I mean not only that the artist’s exploratory process of working through an idea is irreducible to a purely mental process, but also that philosophy itself is a material practice. In the end, whether philosophers want to ignore the fact or not, we are involved in shuffling words about on pages (If you want to be pedantic: most of us are involved with shuffling electrical charges on hard disks, but we present them to ourselves as words!), producing books, which are then distributed in trucks and vans on motorways, getting on planes to attend conferences in buildings made of brick and concrete, and so on. Part of what I’ve tried to do with the journal Collapse,10 and with other projects I’m involved in, is not to ignore all of these supposedly “extraneous” material parts of the process. Depending on your opinion, they may devalue or they may deepen the abstract thoughts whose vehicle they are, but in any case I want the products to insist on this: that the form, the design, the mode of communication, the presentation, are all part of the thinking. Thinking is material, and it is distributed—it happens in-between people, other people, and objects, not in an individual’s head. An individual can be a focus, like a camera lens, but there needs to be something complex which comes in and is transformed and passed on. Going back to your earlier point about the art world, there is indeed a sense that, on whatever basis it does so, the radical openness of contemporary art offers an opportunity for thinking. All the artists I know seem to use it as a “perfect excuse” that gives them the leisure slowly to unfold the non-disciplinary and “useless” thought processes that obsess them. CA: True, although unless you are state sponsored—and those who are good at ticking boxes are not necessarily the most interesting or charismatic artists—you need some tangible product that is deemed to fulfill the function of being art. There do seem, however, to be a small group of interesting individuals who are able to operate without any visible means of support, internationally, relying on their intelligence, charm, purity and friends to subsist. I have had a couple of these wander through my life, whom I have happily tolerated like holy men. But I am sympathetic with your approach to the materials of thought. So much thinking in art history has been predicated on a very casual quotidian definition of “object” as a tangible lump of matter, and in philosophy on the duality of mind and matter. The conceptual artists of the 1960s were working on ideas based on the axiom that the essence of art or “artness” was an idea, and could exist independently of morphological characteristics. Even if you were to sustain this duality —which I vehemently refute—you still have the problem of which ideas you regard as “Art”. This is still based on the Essentialist ideas of form, a corollary of which is Aesthetics. I do not deal in form; I deal in ideas, which, as you suggest, inevitably have form. The only workable definition of “object”, as far as I can see, is as the opposite of “subject”. There is no escape from the material world in this or any discussion. Any idea we know of has been communicated via the physical (outside) 7/13

world, and has form. No idea can be communicated independently of these inscriptions, utterances, or other gestures. I will say this: there is the World, and there is the World of all ideas, of which the World is one. RM: Ouroboros11 looms large here! CA: I invented the One-armed snake12 to circumvent that! Incidentally, did you see that about a year after the Onearmed snake made his debut at the Baltic and then at the Hayward, a similar specimen—alleged to be real—showed up in China! Bit of a coincidence. Could this be a case of the fiction actually informing reality? As a professional I guess I missed a trick not marketing my creation in China. RM: To answer in a roundabout way your original question: the old model of the philosopher is of an academic, a public servant (or in former days, a favourite of the King) who is given a salary in order that they can be free from material worries and can devote themselves to pure thinking. In the current economic situation we should be more aware than ever—with the slow dismantling of the humanities in the universities, and the demand that they must accountably measure their “impact” on the world—that this separation was always a fiction, an artefact of particular economic circumstances. The question right now is not to bemoan and protest and wail about education cuts, but to look for ways in which thinking can happen and thrive in the new situation. So, yes, it involves “professionalism”, in the sense that you defined before; it involves (as in the problematic case of the music industry and mp3s) disabusing people of the idea that philosophical thought and practice is some pure, ethereal stuff that they can expect to always exist and to be free to access. Everyone is implicated in the market. Maybe ideas can change that—but for the time being, ideas, too, are implicated in the market! But those illusions are pervasive. For example, there is a burgeoning “open access” movement where texts are placed online, free, by people who can afford to do so because they are salaried academics. Those people can then guilt-trip others about selling books, and set themselves up as gatekeepers, effectively censors, of this new “open” realm. There is always trade; it is just convenient for some to conduct it under the counter. CA: Well, that sounds like command economics13 to me, and I’m sure that corruption is rife. This is where you feel one needs to invest in the ideas, the physicality of expression that makes an intimate encounter with them essential, in the same way that live music has become so important again in the face of internet publishing. Perhaps this is an argument for the hybrid discipline we are talking around. I don’t use the word “market” pejoratively. The market is a place of exchange; money is simply the medium. The art market has no will—although I will admit that, because of its size, it is susceptible to manipulation by individual high rollers. But it’s only wealth, so let them have their games. The thinkers will still carry on thinking regardless. It is the artists who have the choice not to churn out formulaic work simply because it is demanded. They won’t get their heads chopped off. Everyone is implicated, even the guy who signs a document to say he will never make another “work of art”; for this idea, in whatever form of expression it takes, becomes an article to reckon. RM: In The Islanders we often visit the market; it’s in many ways the real centre of activity on the Island. But your new work, The Port, centered on Penrose Trading Company and the giant vessel Utility, addresses all the elements of an economic system.14 CA: Not all, but I plan to expand the work into a triptych which will be more encompassing. The ideas I have been conjuring with, in no logical order, are Utility, Labour, Natural Resources, Homogeneity, Control, Currency (as 8/13

medium of exchange), Duty, Trade (Import/Export), Subsistence, Distribution, Retail, and the dreaded Secondary Market. This is a good example of using the project as a way of thinking my way through what an economic system amounts to, considering it at an elemental level, and understanding it in a spatial way. Of course, thinking about these ideas takes one dangerously close to ideas of government, which I’ve hitherto avoided. Returning to the third characteristic in my definition of an artist, maybe the notion of Professionalism would be better expressed like this: that from this Subjective immaterial realm the artist brings into the Objective realm (Triangleland) bounty and souvenirs precisely with a view to exchanging them in the marketplace, in order to find the means to make the next, more intrepid, foray into the Subjective realm. RM: As for your first characteristic—“Agency: the belief that one acts upon the world, and that those actions are meaningful”—I don’t necessarily think the philosopher has a conviction that his or her ideas are meaningful. I think the philosopher has a conviction of the reality of the problem he or she is pursuing: that it’s not a mere mental chimera, but is a part, perhaps as yet incompletely apprehended, of that resistant underlying meshwork that makes up reality. This conviction is what makes the Hunter an absurd figure. If we go back to the mathematical sense of the word “problem”, we see that the philosopher is basically a detective. In a problem, one is presented with several variables that somehow can be related to each other, perhaps in one unique way, perhaps in several, without remainder, just as a detective has to tie up all the “loose ends”, and hopes to find one solution that accounts for all of the scattered clues. A philosopher gets hold of several of these “clues”, tests them, turns them around, looks at them from different angles, until he or she is satisfied that they are real, substantial clues, not just unrelated parts of the contingency of everyday life; the conviction follows that these clues fit together somehow, and this is where talent in philosophy lies. I believe it is a talent in multi-dimensional conceptual rotation, in finding ways in which apparently incongruent clues can be consistently fitted together. It’s not necessarily “meaningful”, though. It may be that one solves the crime, but that the crime was a completely senseless one, with no edifying conclusion to be drawn from it. In such a case, one’s professional life as a philosopher, solving the problems that reality presents, and one’s life as a human being, obliged to search for meaning, diverge once more—as we see in the perennial figure of the troubled detective unable to reconcile work and personal life. Finally, then, with regard to no. 2—Subjectivity—personally I have a considerable problem in maintaining any subjective confidence in the importance of my “output”. But I’m still here, aren’t I?—and I do think that the loose ends I have hold of are attached to something real and important even if, in my lifetime, I will never be capable of following Ariadne’s thread to the centre of the labyrinth. I am no great fan of human finitude as a theme for philosophy, but I do think that philosophers have to accommodate themselves to this fact: you are essentially working in an area where you’ll never have the satisfaction of having definitively completed anything. Perhaps this makes it similar to The Islanders: you have to take satisfaction in each small addition to the consistency of the whole, without ever dreaming that the whole will ever be whole. CA: Okay, but the first part of the proposition is that one “acts” voluntarily (surely that is implicit in the idea of agency) and meaningfulness must be in mind. The intention is to mean. You don’t write all of the above without attempting meaning. 9/13

I think the word “belief” exonerates the Hunter from the conceit that he will prevail. The archetype of the Hunter in The Islanders has conviction in the existence of the Noumenon, but he is an arch-empiricist and will not rest until he brings it back, DEAD OR ALIVE. There are other members in the order, though, who believe in the idea of the Noumenon but know it is impossible to experience it, yet they will still go about their business in the name of the Noumenon. On a journey, in movement, one has a destination in mind, even the rambling man, however incremental. Let’s say Truth is local. RM: Incidentally, I’m planning a book with the artist Amanda Beech about this relation between philosophy, problems, and detectives. We are both huge fans of Sherlock Holmes, Columbo, and CSI: Miami! The premise is: if philosophy can be understood as a sort of detective work, then, inversely, the detective novel should be read as a very particular type of philosophy book. And if philosophy is above all the art of posing problems, or of distinguishing true from false problems, each fictional detective as a “philosophical persona”, along with his or her native milieu, implies both a conception of what a problem is and a characteristic method for negotiating its elements. (This would be true of the Hunter: he represents a particular detective persona.) As I described, a problem consists of a multiplicity of elements whose common articulation remains to be determined, as in an equation, without remainder. Each type of detective presents us with a method of traversing these elements, teasing out their connections, and rejecting solutions which do not fully resolve them. However, the detective story also demands and assumes a specific model of the problem as such. The common context and regular features in the serial “cases” of the detective supplies, within a given range of variation across generic episodes, certain prerequisites that guarantee the traction of their method (“Humanity only poses problems which it can solve”—Marx). The culprit, in turn, becomes an actor in this drama, providing alternative solutions, introducing extraneous elements and concealing others, collaborating in the solution whilst trying to inflect it away from themselves by creating false problems. At the same time, in the twentieth-century genre of detective fiction, TV and film, the detective figures the shifting articulation between the individual and the state, dramatizing the conflicts and resolutions between law as institution and personal imperatives and morals. The thrill of the genre lies in the knowledge that the prescribed boundaries of law, discipline and procedure must be violated, for this is what a true fidelity to the problem—to freedom from contingent, unaccounted-for elements—demands. Just as the personal proclivities and motives of the detective alternate between being an instrument of and a frustration to the law— sometimes he has to kick against the penpushers down at city hall! The philosopher can ally himself with the state, with the market, with mathematicians, with artists, and so on (who are the Hunter’s allies?), but the primary relationship is with the problem; and the element to which the problem belongs is not owned by any discipline or system. CA: Nice plug. RM: Typically of the professionalism of philosophers, a plug for an entirely hypothetical product. CA: You have actually given me some insights into your earnest definition of the philosopher that differs from your earlier more prankish stance. I think the analogue of the private detective is very effective. Incidentally, have you happened upon Bored to Death yet? It’s an HBO series starring Ted Danson and Jason Schwarzman. Danson plays a NY magazine editor in the throes of a midlife crisis, and Schwarzman is a writer who 10/13

is struggling to write his second novel, who decides to make ends meet by moonlighting as an unlicensed private detective. It’s hilarious. RM: Yes, Schwarzman as the “accidental detective”. He stumbles into the job after drunkenly placing an ad, and finds that he’s actually good at it. CA: But, whereas the philosopher/private dick is looking to tie up the loose ends, there is always a professional detachment from the blood and guts and stench of the murder scene (and it is invariably murder we are talking about). For me, the facts are inseparable from the viscera—I want to depict them as one. RM: As we see on CSI, a thorough understanding of visceral texture is a tremendous advantage in detective work! On the other hand, though, CSI presents a contemporary fantasy of the ubiquity and omnipotence of information technology, extending Conan Doyle’s fantasy of the detective who can distinguish all the different types of cigar ash and recognize the mud from every street in London. It’s pure procedure—we see the crime solved by crossreferencing the facts across a huge interlocking set of databases. The “multi-dimensional conceptual rotation” I spoke of has been entirely automated, and the detectives just tend impassively to the machines that carry it out. Perhaps that’s the future of philosophy, too! An apparent attention to visceral matter can reverse-out into a kind of idealism. The Hunter, on the other hand, is the advocate of another form of idealism. He is like the obsessive detective on the trail of the arch-villain who holds all of the puppet strings, convinced that he is edging closer to the centre around which everything turns, despite everyone around him telling him that it’s futile to try and pursue the Noumenal kingpin. And they’re probably right: the centre, the ultimate resolution, is illusory, a fleeting shadow cast by the complex interaction of countless contingencies. From the point of view of his conception of the problem, the Hunter is an absurd anachronism, whose bumbling presence emphasizes, by contrast, the thoroughly contemporary “heterotopic”15 nature of the Island. Nevertheless, his quest creates the momentum that continually reconfigures our view of the Island, bringing us (and him) back for the next episode (We shouldn’t forget that all we have so far of The Islanders is merely ‘An Introduction’!). 1. The Islanders is the name of the ongoing project that Charles Avery has been working on since 2004. The Islanders: An Introduction (London: Parasol Unit/ Koenig Books, 2008) is the first publication by Avery about his project and was produced to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Parasol Unit, London, in autumn 2008, which later toured to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 2. There are two states in Avery’s world: Triangleland and the Island. Triangleland is the “old country” and the colonial power; the Island is the colonized country and the central focus of the project. “The term Triangleland refers to the character of the tourist, their apparent desire to label and classify everything and their complacency in their ability to do so. The first thing they will ask is, ‘What is the name of the island?’ This appears an absurd and irrelevant question, for it is akin to asking, ‘What is the name of everything?’ Or, ‘What is Tom’s name?’ Being the continent from which all the other islands in the archipelago are isolated it is the archetype and as such does not require a name.” Avery, The Islanders: An Introduction, 103. 3. The Riders of the Invisible Reigns are the riders of the Ridables. They “have no interest in the Noumenon. Although if you talk to them, they claim to see it often.” Avery, The Islanders: An Introduction, 119. 4. For Kant, a noumenon is the thing-in-itself as opposed to the phenomenon, the thing as it appears. On the Island, the Noumenon is a being that “has never been witnessed” and there is ongoing debate over whether there is more than one: “There is a great enthusiasm for the idea of it, which accounts for the hero/idiot status of the Hunters who launch their expeditions with the express purpose of bringing it back. [. . .] There is a 11/13

vague form of the beast in the popular imagination based on representations from art and literature which in turn are based on the testimonies of various explorers.” Avery, The Islanders: An Introduction, 49-50. 5. Twin Peaks was an American TV series (1990–1991) created by Mark Frost and David Lynch. It tells the story of an FBI agent who comes to the fictional town of Twin Peaks in Washington State to investigate the murder of a young woman. The Red Room is a space that appears in the dreams of the FBI agent. 6. Miss Miss is the young woman that the Hunter meets upon his arrival on the Island: “It was a contrast of emotions I experienced when, in the form of that girl on the shore, my ambitions to discover a terra incognita were dashed. Yet simultaneously I fell in Love. [. . .] Miss Miss was to become my close companion and sponsor on the Island”. Avery, The Islanders: An Introduction, 11. 7. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (London, New York: Continuum, 2003). Originally published in French as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1981). 8. “You, having exited this world, are good. Over there is the evil object, which you shun or seek to eliminate. Over here is the good subject, who feels good precisely insofar as she or he has separated from the evil world. I am now describing Hegel’s beautiful soul, who claims precisely to have exited the evil world. Now the twist that Hegel applies here is so beautiful that it’s worth pausing over, and perhaps adding a remark or two on torture, and possibly on Dick Cheney, who seems to be preoccupying us all at present. Hegel does not claim that the world may or may not be evil—he doesn’t claim that what is wrong with the beautiful soul is that it is prejudiced and rigid in its thinking. The world is not some object that we can have different opinions about. No: the problem is far subtler than that. The problem is that the gaze that constitutes the world as a thing ‘over there’, is evil as such. This is so brilliant that it’s worth repeating. Evil is not in the eye of the beholder. Evil is the eye of the beholder.” Timothy Morton, “Beautiful Soul Syndrome” (lecture, UCLA, 2009), 14, 9. “The ‘beautiful soul’, lacking an actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an actual existence, and dwelling in the immediacy of this firmly held antithesis—an immediacy which alone is the middle term reconciling the antithesis, which has been intensified to its pure abstraction, and is pure being or empty nothingness—this ‘beautiful soul’, then, being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is disordered to the point of madness, wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consumption.” Georg W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (London: Clarendon Press, 1977): 406-407. 10. Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development is edited by this issue’s Egoist, Robin Mackay, and published by Urbanomic. Volume VI (January 2010) dedicates a chapter, written by Mackay, to philosophers’ islands and, more particularly, to Charles Avery. It also includes a text by Avery entitled “The Islanders: Epilogue”, originally commissioned for and published as “The Fancy of the Hunter” in To Hell with Journals D: Inside, eds. Charles Arsène-Henry and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: To Hell with Publishing, 2010). 11. The prototypical symbol for a paradox is a serpent or a dragon that forms a vicious circle by continuously eating its own tail. 12. The One-Armed Snake, 2009, taxidermy, has appeared in A Duck for Mr. Darwin (The Baltic, Gateshead, 2009) and Walking In My Mind (Hayward Gallery, London, 2009), and is currently part of the installation Miss Miss Finally gives in by the tree where Aeaen sought to bamboozle the One-Armed Snake by attaching himself to the tree to make himself a larger thing at the British Art Show 7, (Nottingham, October 2010 to January 2011, then touring to London, Glasgow and Plymouth in 2011). 12/13

13. Command economy is a type of economy where prices and supply are not regulated by the market but by the government. 14. Onomatopoeia is the name of the port on the Island, and is depicted in Untitled (View of the Port at Onomatopoeia), 2010, pencil/ink on paper, 240 x 510 cm., Tate, London. Seeing this drawing at Pilar Corrias Gallery in London in early 2010 confirmed our wish, as editors, to have Charles Avery inaugurate this journal. Onomatopoeia, part I is also the name of a solo exhibition of Avery’s work that toured to Le Plateau, Paris, the Kunstverein, Hannover, and Ex3, Florence, in autumn/winter 2010. The three venues have jointly produced an accompanying publication with Koenig Books, London. 15. “There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces (1967)—Heterotopias”, trans. Jay Miskowiec (paper given at an architectural conference in Tunisia in March 1967, and later published as “Des espaces autres” in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5, October 1984, 46-49] 13/13

readthis.wtf /writing/this-is-this/ This is This - 2011 One It is possible to maintain a distinction between the ‘order of ideas’ and the ‘order of history’, whilst admitting that one unfolds within the other in an entirely contingent manner. The objects or situations that occasion or facilitate a certain meditation at a given historical conjuncture operate a selective pressure on thought: Certain turns in thinking can only take place in the company of certain objects, which thereby become instruments of philosophy, and the worldly indices of transformations in the conception of reason itself, the ‘image of thought’. From Pythagoras hearkening to the sounds of the blacksmith’s workshop, to Descartes palpating his lump of wax, the persistence of vignettes recounting such catalyses – both those told by philosophers themselves, and those told 1/8

of them by others (even those most likely apocryphal) – testifies to our recognition that thought is always provoked by encounters with something outside itself; and our belief that, in passing them on, the imagination will play its part in allowing the thought-experiments of the past to be rehearsed and repeated. This suggests that these catalytic objects are prosthetics for the ‘spiritual exercises’ of which the Stoics spoke. In the Stoic conception of philosophy as technical – ‘an art or craft (techne) concerned with one’s life (Bios)’ a central place is given to ‘the role played by some form of training or exercise (ascesis – training, exercise, practice)’[Sellars]. A philosophical thought must not only be understood but brought into life; thus reason is no stranger to the plasticity of the imagination. Today the notion of ‘ascesis’ is more often invoked to denote a submission to the conclusions of reason against the grain of the imagination and despite its incapacity to join with them. Alas, unlike the Stoics, we find ourselves burdened with scientific and philosophical conclusions that we may certainly ‘accept’; but whose alignment with intuition we have given up the struggle to bring about. As late as the mid-twentieth century, it was possible to maintain that ‘Intuition … is an elastic faculty’, and hope that our children will probably have no difficulty in accepting as intuitively obvious the paradoxes of relativity …[Nagel and Newman] And a philosopher as little given to flights of the imagination as Bertrand Russell could affirm that: When a theory has been apprehended logically, there is often a long and serious labour still required in order to feel it: it is necessary to dwell upon it, to thrust out from the mind, one by one, the misleading suggestions of false but more familiar theories, to acquire the kind of intimacy which, in the case of a foreign language, would enable us to think and dream in it … The Stoic Galen described the two stages of this philosophical ascesis as ‘habituation’ and ‘digestion’ – a sort of conceptual metabolisation. Marcus Aurelius instead speaks of ‘accustoming’ through the use of repeated meditations: As are your repeated imaginations so will your mind be, for the soul is dyed by its imaginations. Dye it, then, in a succession of imaginations like these. [Meditations] While philosophers have not entirely ceased to bring forth provocative theses, they have largely renounced the effort to dream in them, and have little faith in the dye of the imagination. A certain colourlessness of thought, and the discomfort of constant indigestion, are accepted as inevitable.1 Would it not be worth the experiment, at least, of affirming the substantive importance of the instruments of thought, and reviving the Stoic conception, through the creation of a new memento cogito? This is surely a task for artists, those who can bring concepts into the register of intuition through a process of ‘dramatisation’. However, apart from the most simple of concepts (and the most simple of artists) this cannot be a case simply of illustrating or transposing some concept into a material medium. So the question becomes, not only that of reaffirming the participation of reason and the imagination in a common task, and of the works and objects that stimulate them into this task; but also that of understanding the twisted path that leads from one to the other: from the encounter to the concept – and back again, as imagination reacts with concept so as to ‘dye the soul’. Speculative Solution offers itself as a catalyst for the thinking of radical contingency, participating in a contemporary renewal of philosophy spearheaded by the work of Quentin Meillassoux. But this recent transformation in the image 2/8

of thought itself belongs to a sequence whose phases are indexed by a heterogeneous set of objects and encounters that have occasioned and reactivated philosophical thought. Two Imagine that you – a sharp-witted Scottish philosopher – have just arrived in seventeenth-century France, eager to immerse yourself in the shady demi-monde of Parisian gambling dens. Arriving at such an establishment, you loiter nearby whilst a game of dice is played. Unaccustomed to such intrigues, you take the opportunity, unnoticed, to secretly examine one of the dice. Observing its six equally-spaced and equally-sized sides, and concluding that there is no reason to believe it will fall on one side rather than another, decide to adopt as a rule of thumb that any of the six numbers are equally probable to turn up. Armed with this knowledge, you join the game confidently. Over a number of games, and to the apparent amusement of the more seasoned players at the table, your die seems to turn up ‘1’ almost every time. Do you (a) protest loudly that something untoward is at work here, and demand the die be cut open to establish how it has been so ‘loaded’; or (b) conclude that, since your hypothesis has proved useless, and one can evidently know nothing a priori about the outcome of such games, your only remaining options are either to abjectly learn by experience by noting down the results of every single dicethrow, or to just slink off with your pockets a great deal lighter? It is the fundamental thesis of (philosopher and bridge expert) Jean-René Vernes’ book Le principe Pascal-Hume et le fondement des sciences physiques that something like the events dramatized above are at the root of a misprision over the nature of reason that reigned for hundreds of years, and that bequeathed us all the problems of post-Kantian idealist doubt as to the very existence of matter. The primal scene of this rational catastrophe is a game of billiards, which serves to introduce the well-known ‘problem of induction’ announced in Hume’s Enquiry into Human Understanding: When I see, for instance, a billiard ball moving in a straight line towards another; even suppose motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me, as the result of their contact or impulse, may I not conceive, that a hundred different events might as well follow from the cause? May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we give the preference to one, which is no more consistent or conceivable than the rest? All our reasonings a priori will never be able to show us any foundation for this preference. There is no a priori way to deduce how one ball will react when impacted by another; since any number of outcomes seem equally conceivable, we find no rational basis for the principle of causality. According to Hume, we must then abandon the ontological quest to locate a principle of causality in things; and consider instead the psychological reason why we believe one to exist (according to Hume, because of our habituation to certain ‘constant conjunctions’ of phenomena). According to Vernes, Hume’s reasoning begins with a ‘classical’ model of reason, the essential characteristics of which are modeled on the certainties of geometry: just as one geometrical proposition necessitates another, so a present event necessitates a future event. Hume has demonstrated that, whereas geometrical reasoning may proceed a priori, the principle of causality can only ever be an hypothesis, a demand made by the Principle of Sufficient Reason (that ‘everything must have a 3/8

reason to be as it is rather than otherwise’). In doing so, he questions the authority of the latter principle, destroying the parity between geometrical reason and physical explanation that classical reason believed was exhibited in the predictability of the billiard ball’s angular course. Hume destroys the image of rational thought, and discovers a rationality that, untethered from sufficient reason, now wanders so deliriously that it must be supplanted by a more modest, psychological account. Vernes now introduces a second philosophical vignette, that of the birth of the philosophical thinking of probability. In 1654 Pascal was supposedly asked by his friend, the Chevalier de Méré, to advise him on tactics in a game of dice. Pascal formed the a priori conviction that each side had an equal probability of turning up; that what is equally thinkable is equally possible. According to Vernes, in this ‘a priori law of probability’ Pascal discovers a new, broadened image of reason: a probabilistic rather than a necessitating reason. So, if the catalyst for Hume’s philosophical reasoning had been a game of dice rather than a billiards match, he would discovered the a priori law of probability. Subsequently, in noticing that the balls always in fact seemed to interact in the same way, he would have suspected that reality was ‘loaded’ – that there was something hidden in things that accounted for the disparity between their behavior and this a priori principle. This ‘something’ is what we call matter. Dice-wise thinking (probability) leads to a rational materialism, where billiardian thinking (geometry) leads, through classical rationalism, to a wholesale renunciation of reason and a limitation of philosophy to thinking on the human, psychological side of things. So that, according to Vernes, if Hume had played dice, we could have avoided the great rupture between philosophy (unable to convince itself of the extra-phenomenal reality of matter, and falling back on an examination of mere phenomena) and science (continually cutting reality open to discover how it is ‘loaded’). Three Stimulated by Vernes’ thesis, Quentin Meillassoux spent many years stalking slowly around Hume’s billiard table, examining over and over that one moment when Hume freezes their dynamic interaction in its tracks, to enumerate all the imaginable outcomes. He pondered whether this moment could really be equated with the moment when the dice have just been rolled, when the roulette wheel is yet to settle. Then he considered – as had Vernes – Kant’s resolution of Hume’s argument, in an ad absurdum fantasy that takes to such extremes the inconstancy of natural laws, that it is beyond imagination: If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, if a man changed into this and sometimes into that animal form, if the country on the longest day were sometimes covered in fruit, sometimes with ice and snow, my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red color to bring to mind heavy cinnabar. Cinnabar versus billiards … Kant adumbrates this scene entirely with the aim of showing that it would be impossible to experience or even imagine. If there is experience, Kant argues, this in itself proves that natural laws are constant; for if they were not, in all probability they would change with absolutely discombobulating rapidity, and all coherent experience would be impossible. Meillassoux refuses Vernes’ conversion of Hume’s imaginative vignette – from that one moment when the impact of the balls could occasion any outcome (or none) – into a transition from multiple possibilities to single actuality, between the rolling of the die and its settling on one face. He refuses equally Kant’s amplification of its instability, its 4/8

depiction of the absurd impossibility of thinking the constancy of natural laws as a game of chance. For Meillassoux, reason is indeed the very same faculty as imagination, whose capacity to imagine different outcomes exceeds those that come to pass in reality; but for Meillassoux it also exceeds any probabilistic circumscription. We cannot imagine the universe as a die, whose many faces pre-exist its ‘fall’ into actuality. There are more things in the universe than probability theory can dream of, and this in a very precise sense if we think it according to the mathematical theory of the transfinite, according to which the subset of an uncountable infinity is itself an infinity, making probabilistic reasoning impossible. If we think contingency, we must think radical contingency rather than chance. There are no constant laws of nature, and anything could happen (or not) at every moment. No dice. In that case, what happens to the encounter with matter precipitated by Vernes’ conversion of billiards into dice? Doesn’t Meillassoux rob us once again of the materialist hypothesis? What have we left that is solid to hold on to? Precisely, suggests Meillassoux, that vanishing moment between the impact of the billiard balls and the innumerable different courses they might take. At this moment, it will be remembered, Hume conceded that, reason being unable to guarantee a priori any certain outcome, we must content ourselves with a psychological law, not a law of reality. It is in following Hume, but in contemplating this moment with an increased intensity of purpose, that Meillassoux grasps this moment positively. The ‘failure’ of reason to justify the thesis of constant laws of nature is a bona fide ‘intellectual intuition’ upon whose a priori basis alone we can hope to understand why the physical world is as it is rather than otherwise (which it now has every right – unconstrained even by probability – to be). The foundation of science, and its reunion with philosophy, will proceed, not through an empirical dissection of the ‘loaded dice’ of nature, but through a concentration of its principles around this one singular point, this expansive moment of intellectual intuition, the moment of radical contingency. This is Meillassoux’s ‘speculative solution’ to Hume’s problem. Fixing his mind immoveably upon this one necessity, rehearsing and permuting it repeatedly, maintain his obsessive vigilance over the billiards match whilst resisting both the pernicious ease of Hume’s concession, and Vernes’ conversion to gambler’s logic, Meillassoux sights this radical moment where laws are abolished pure and simple, where everything and anything can happen, for no reason whatsoever, at any moment. Hume’s discovery having been awarded its properly positive status, reason reveals the absolute necessity of this ‘hyperchaos’ which underlies all apparent constancy of natural laws. This necessity is not (as in classical rationalism) the absolute necessity of some (divine) entity that would guarantee all others, but a necessity-withoutentity that eternally dissolves all guarantees. This is something very difficult to think, and to draw the full consequences of. As Meillassoux points out, the attempt to carry out this task of reason is also as a task of the imagination; one that may proceed through the development of an ‘extro-science fiction’ imaginary, which is the task of imagining a world founded on radical contingency – our own. Four Elie Ayache has made this task of the inhabiting of radical contingency his own. And he claims to have discovered for this moment of radical contingency a worldly medium: the market of contingent claims. 5/8

Ayache argues that, whereas academic theories of valuation claim to calculate price as the output of a probabilistic function, in the reality of the trading floor price is affected at every moment precisely by such calculations and by their continual recalibration. Indeed, exchange as such, and thus pricing theory, only make sense in so far as one knows oneself plunged into a future that is written only through the very anticipation of the actual reality of its future contingency. Thus, as Ayache states, the disparity between these theories and the reality of the market stems from their importing an ill-fitting model from elsewhere – from the roulette wheel rather than from the strike of a call option. This model leaves no room for the very reality of the market, that reality without which price would not even be a problem. ‘Mistaking an XSF problem for a SF problem’, theories of the market exclude its contingency (its exposure to infinite other situations including its own representations of itself) from their account in order to make a ‘good story’. We should be careful not to reverse the priority here: it was the market that delivered Ayache to a meditation on what it means to inhabit contingency – an order of events indexed by price, which cannot be pre-encapsulated within any framework of multiple possible worlds (faces of the die) and in which one plunges oneself at every moment back into that vanishing moment, that space beyond possibility, between the impact of one billiard ball and the reaction of another, when ‘a hundred’ (Hume) or transinfinite (Meillassoux) ‘different events might as well follow’. The reconceptualisation of pricing software his team had embarked upon, in order to rectify the shortcomings of pricing theory’s SF imaginary, met coincidentally an apt philosophical thesis when Ayache happened upon Meillassoux’s work. A happy accident that has resulted in a promising philosophical project that discovers a startling superposition of the arcane lexicon of the derivative, strike, smiles and dynamic replication with some fundamental philosophical problematics; and which in turn lends to those problematics a certain real-world urgency. For here, the future is subtracted from the ‘morbidity’ of prediction and probability, which reduces the production of the future to a calculable selection from pre-existing states. And this subtraction is what opens our world onto the truly contingent, beyond our calculations of risk and reward; and it is this that we need to think. Five To return to our original inquiry, how might Hecker’s composition rejoin the weird cast of philosophical prostheses that have presided over this sequence in the recent history of philosophy? What kind of thinking can sound occasion, what kind of spiritual exercise can it enable? In hearing, we are constantly making an ‘additional effort’ to derive a ‘state’ from a raw material. This raw material ‘strikes’ us as nothing other than what it is – pure difference in intensity. This is its proper difference and its contingent character, something that is at once the very element of hearing, and that which can never be heard (what Deleuze would have called the audiendum). Hecker’s psychoacoustic experimentation focuses attention on the active role of the imagination in constructing objects from the raw material of sound according to what can easily be described as probabilistic calculations. These are calculations whose ‘priors’ are bequeathed to us by evolutionary imperatives and cultural conditioning. The image of what a sound object ‘is’ and what it can do, is conditioned by these prior contingencies, which introduce mechanisms of selection and ordering whereby sonic materials are double-articulated, different timescales disjoined and perpendicularised to designate a space within which a ‘content’ can be ranged, and significance extracted from the discrete objects that can be deduced from it. The technologies of the stave, the 6/8

sequencer timeline, or the sample waveform relay virtually articulations belonging to biology. Different modes of sound generation and composition effectively embody multiple spontaneous ‘metaphysics’ of sound, offering different ways of laminating time and different definitions of sound objects; the varying schemata of composition in general compound this stratification with cultural givens. In particular, even aleatory compositional frameworks developed as a way to escape musical ‘metaphysics’ merely erect another (probabilistic) framework (cage) that ‘lets happen’ only those operations it has made ‘possible’: As Cage often had to point out to his critics, his use of chance operations did not mean that he no longer took decisions, but rather that he took different ones. No longer called upon to decide upon the answers, he was to decide upon the questions, instead, no less difficult a task if the process was to work in the required manner.[Millar] In its utilization of heterogeneous ‘metaphysics’ and its limning of the extremities where their articulations of sonic material break down, Hecker’s work tends toward a minimalist or literalist presentation where objects yield and we stand on the threshold of the proper being of sonic sequences, confronted by what they are and nothing more. In such moments the stratified systems that allow us to ‘vertically’ differentiate different temporal scales and ‘horizontally’ operate protentions and retentions that ‘make sense’ of sound, melt down into a ‘pure chronics’ that parallels Meillassoux’s hyperchaotic theory of time. But of course a ‘sonification’ of hyperchaos – a description, within a finite work, of what it would be to live in a hyperchaotic world – is impossible. To mime an ‘extreme unpredictability’ would be totally to miss the point: which is not to plunge the listener into a state of chaotic change, or total flux. Nor to expose them to the operations of chance. Chance, like change and stasis, can only ever be an inifinitesimal quotation from hyperchaos, which, as Meillassoux is at pains to point out, can sustain apparently endless and stable periods of constancy as much as infinite periods of furious change. Hyperchaos cannot be a genre, style, state, or entity: it can only be an inhabiting of a moment neither quiet nor loud, harsh or gentle, chaotic nor calm, organic or inorganic, ordered or disordered. To live the moment of hyperchaos it is necessary no longer to think in terms of necessary entities, but to move towards a necessity-without-entity. If Hecker’s practice and the concept of hyperchaos – of a world where one can only hold on to ‘a chronics of things’ – appear ‘made for’ one another, the more superficial ways in which this seems to be the case must be peeled away to harbour more profound conceptual connections that require an additional effort of thought. The ambitious stakes of Speculative Solution involve an ironic performative use of Hume’s principle of habituation in order to Meillassoux’s undoing of the error that gives rise to this principle: a spiritual exercise that employs the mechanisms of the imagination in order to deliver them to their proper element, without image, which is also that of reason. The composition participates in a circuit in which it, the accompanying texts, and diverse other objects, enter into a perpetual catalysis that must annihilate all priority, representation, reference, and even entity. Around and around this circuit, like a merry-go-round, the image of thought will be exploded in a cyclotron of whirling images propelled by a sound-without-image. Dice, billiards, cinnabar, exotic smiles, roulette wheels, ergotic loaves … The heterogeneous thought experiment Speculative Solution – at once instruction manual and riddle, scripture and prescription, chronic psychotropic and spiritual exercise – would facilitate that ‘dying of the soul’, that ‘difficult and counter-intuitive […] conversion of the gaze … that … consists in seeing in the differential mark of being (“This is 7/8

this”) not a recognition or a reaffirmation of what being is, not reflexive thought finally enclosing being in the reciprocal play between thought and being, but the bare indication that this being could have been different.’ Thus ‘converted’ by repeated aural administrations, dyed by the colours of extro-scientific fantasy, such a gaze might even ‘read’ this text in a transformed manner: no longer as a didactic philosophical description (whose thematic nature would now be obsolete), but as a minimal encounter with marks on paper, truly ‘literalist’ marks which have no reason to be as they are, which could have been – and still could be, at every moment – otherwise; only this stripped-bare gaze can complete the whole assemblage, as a work whose future writing (as Duchamp ‘predicted’) will continue to exercise the viewer/listener. This is this. 8/8

readthis.wtf /writing/combusting-human-spontaneity/ Combusting Human Spontaneity - 2011 What I would like to speak about in Althusser is his political mobilization of Bachelard’s ‘epistemological break’ (a notion that, as an aside, belongs to an already-politically-charged historiography of science). Althusser transforms it into the principal instrument of an historical materialism: The scientificity of the latter – the actually-existing sciences standing for a Science to come – will consist in perpetually seeking points of rupture with the ideological ‘givens’ that constitute at once the raw materials which it must work, and ‘epistemological obstacles’ strewn in its path. The key terms of this discourse are rupture and cut (from Bachelard) or line of demarcation; production and taking a position (prise de position) (from Marx). The engaged prise de position that will sharpen the ‘scientificity of science’ will consist in rupturing with the representation of science, by differentiating what is given with a cut, this cutting being itself a productive gesture that materializes the rupture in a clear formal line of demarcation. Science is the production of cuts, and cutting is production. The excision of the ‘scientificity of science’ from the thickets of its selfrepresentation will be the productive task of philosophy. 1/5

Althusser qualified the ‘unconscious’ and ‘spontaneous’ nature of such self-representation, and advanced a programme for its correction, under the rubric of a course of ‘philosophical initiation’, later published as ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the scientists’. I will suggest that the ‘non-philosophical’ initiation to which Laruelle invites us at once extends and radically breaks with this programme. It was in 1967 that Althusser launched his ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’, whose aim was to wrest philosophy from its academic confinement and to make it accessible to ‘the masses’ through an ‘initiation’. The aim of this initiation was to induce the audience firstly to recognize their own unconscious implication in philosophy – everyone philosophises, not just philosophers, and philosophy qua circumscribed academic discipline only reinforces our ignorance of this ubiquity; and secondly, to draw a ‘line of demarcation’ between this ‘spontaneous philosophy’ and the taking up of a properly philosophical position – a prise de position – that would enable one to become vigilant against this ‘spontaneous’ ideological grip. Althusser aimed to reveal to his audience of scientists and would-be scientists that they were always already implicated in philosophy despite themselves: Scientists obscure the productive reality of their practice by ‘spontaneously’ producing philosophical interpretations of their practice and its results – with the all-important qualification that this ‘spontaneity’ is only (in Althusser’s words) ‘spontaneous because it is not’; the apparent immediacy of its artefacts belongs precisely to that most odious of ideological illusions, ‘the illusion of the “natural”’. Ultimately the spontaneity of scientists’ own representation of their practice ‘dissimulates [the] contradictions’ of the social ideological apparatus which in reality govern its apparently spontaneous terms: ‘what seems to pass before them in reality passes, in what is essential, behind their back’. We are always already within philosophy, qua subjects of social forces which cut up and demarcate the world in a way which precedes us and appears to us ‘spontaneous’. But Althusser now proposes that philosophy proper, as distinct from what we might call ‘pre-philosophical philosophy’ – is able to ‘trace lines of demarcation within the fact of tracing lines of demarcation’. Philosophical Initiation invites scientists to recognize the forces at work behind the pseudo-categories with which science is represented; to take up a position by rupturing with these ideological representations; and to make cuts in the fabric of scientific ideology – (itself a body of cuts) – in order to demarcate its self-representations from its effective materiality. This initiation rite to which Althusser invited ‘non-philosophers, in the species of scientists’ would consist in allowing them to understand that: there is indeed something that you do not know about philosophy – it is that it is not before you as you imagine, but behind you, in that element of the always-already upon which the veil of ignorance is usually drawn. The problem is thus not that of knowing enough philosophy, but, in a very particular sense of the word ‘know’ which comprises a relation with non-knowing, of knowing it already too well, in forms whose confusion needs to be unraveled, necessitating an intervention so as to trace within them their lines of demarcation. Althusser therefore brings into relation a kind of pre-conscious or un-conscious spontaneous-philosophical ‘nonknowing’ and a new kind of properly philosophical knowledge that would withdraw the veil and reveal this ‘spontaneous’ ‘non-knowing’ for what it really is, a dissimulation of production. But this task is not straightforward, it involves a kind of impossible twisting free – Althusser insists that ‘I cannot speak of philosophy in general except on the basis of a certain position in philosophy’: ‘There is always already philosophy’, and this itself is the problem of philosophy. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ of philosophy – ‘pre-philosophical philosophy’ and ‘philosophy’ proper – are in fact the same element. Philosophy proper consists firstly in the realization that ‘there is nothing behind the curtain’, and secondly in 2/5

the act of drawing lines of demarcation, in meticulously cutting through this element, itself fabricated of pre-existing cuts, rather than remaining the confused dupe of ‘spontaneity’. For Althusser, of course, what is important is the meshing of this enterprise of philosophical initiation with a historical-materialist task: The ongoing revolutionary task of ‘the cut between science and ideology’ consists in amputating ‘scientific ideology, or the ideology of scientists’ from the effective formal achievements of science; the compromised enterprise of ‘making sense’ of science’s output, from its effective materiality. And this even, or precisely because, the two are always found in de facto alloys. The cut also a refusal of the aspiration to a de-polemicised universality. To engage in philosophy proper is ‘To dissipate the fusional illusions of continuity’ of ‘the [philosophical] discourse of the universal’, ‘to have done with the attitudes of compromise which sacrifice all to the desire for unity’, and ‘to recognize the necessity of […] rupture’ in drawing ‘the full consequences of the fact that there are everywhere contradictions, tensions, struggle, conflict, and that no practice escapes them’. To summarise, Althusser’s position in two propositions: 1) A field of conflicting productive material forces is effectively at work, but is as it were congenitally and irreparably prone to a confused and false auto-representation (ideology is, as it were, ontological, since ‘being’, whether represented in the situation of the social or in the laboratory of the scientist, is always already the locus of a ‘pre-philosophical philosophy’, a series of ‘natural’ demarcations that precede its subject). 2) It is possible to asymptotically ‘decrypt’ being, to use the cutting tools of philosophical critique to hack science out of its ideological matrix. Now, I would say that Laruelle’s non-philosophy belongs to an explosive moment in French philosophy, inspired by this initiation, and that briefly flowered before the events of ’68 forced Althusser and his associates to reconsider the programme. It is as if the invigorating excitement and the immediate exigencies presented by 68 suffocated the more potent charge of this moment, in which (I would say) thinkers such as Derrida, Badiou, Lyotard, and others participated, before diverging in various ways. It is a moment to which belong for example the two papers ‘Mark and Lack’ and ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’ which can be properly considered to constitute, along with his first book The Concept of Model, a complete episode in Badiou’s philosophical development. Following Althusser’s ‘Course’, the ideology to be dissipated in Badiou’s papers is primarily the representation of science by scientists; and for Badiou, the epistemological break or cut is consummated in formalisation and inscription. Across these articles Badiou also develops the sense in which ‘Classical philosophical reason’ exploits representation or ‘spontaneous philosophy’ by integrating it, as Althusser had said, into ‘fusional illusions of continuity […]developed […] by the discourse of the universal’. Thus in ‘Mark and Lack’ Badiou will insist that we distinguish from the formalism of Frege’s logical derivation of number Frege’s representation of that operation, as well as Miller’s psychoanalytical exploitation of that representation; and in ‘Infinitesimal Subversion’ he will demonstrate that the ‘fusional illusion of [philosophical] continuity’ characterizing Hegel’s philosophy merely exploits the attempts, within mathematics, to represent mathematical continuity, in the terms inherited from ‘classical philosophical reason’. In ‘Mark and Lack’, on the basis that production per se consists in a cutting or separation, ‘being nothing other than the effective division of the materials being operated upon’, Badiou argues that since logic deals only with inscriptions, its production mechanism can be exhibited as a kind of industrial machine whose production of a stratified structure is, so it seems, merely ‘channeled’ through the history of human scientists. In the glorious steampunk logicism of these early works, Badiou escries the scientific as a virtual machine with cutting edges, 3/5

descending from elsewhere, obtruding into knowledge with the force of trauma, an automated nightmare deployed against the global illusions of philosophy. The weight of Badiou’s argument is that its operations, stratifications, pulsations and movements are radically indifferent to the self-differing movements with which philosophy – whether Hegelian or Lacanian – would try to encompass it. While we cannot enquire here as to how, and why, Badiou’s work changed course post-68, I would like to say that Laruelle, for his part, remains in some sense faithful both to this moment, and to what Althusser went on to call his ‘theoreticist error’ – indeed to exacerbate it. From the point of view of non-philosophy, Althusser’s repentance in this matter amounts to a capitulation – one grounded in the insufficiency of an all-too-philosophical resolution of the problem of spontaneous philosophy. And Badiou (who also submitted himself to merciless autocritique with regard to this moment) shares this renunciation and then goes on to selectively fetishise a local instance of science, namely mathematics. But what was glimpsed in this moment was science as a generic unilateral psychosis, consigning philosophy to death by a thousand cuts. Laruelle’s fidelity to this moment consists in subjecting, under the pressure of this blind force of science, even ‘philosophy proper’ to the critique of spontaneity and revealing it as, still, an impoverishedly ‘natural’ practice of decision. For Laruelle, Althusser’s struggle remains symptomatic of a spontaneous philosophy of the philosophers – the ‘oldest prejudice’. For, according to Laruelle, if philosophical production spans both spontaneous and ‘proper’ philosophy, it is not a matter of accepting one’s role in this production, so as to do one’s best to shed illusions. Instead one must refuse to cut, and denounce decision. Rather than fetishizing a particular, local, science, non-philosophy aims to follow the path indicated in this moment, distilling an essential science – clarifying the ‘scientificity of science’ far more than Badiou does. For Laruelle, the essence of science lies in this blind, deaf, flat, xeno-industrial process that proves implacably impervious to ideological, globalizing thought, so much so that it doesn’t even need to be cut out of it by philosophers! So that, rather than philosophy setting itself the task of presiding over the separation of the ‘ideological of ideology and the scientificity of science’, science impinges from without on philosophy, in the form of this psychotic, flattened or leveled thought impervious to its endless reimplications, differencings, and intrications. Once we learn to operate with the instruments of this essential science, as has been mentioned in the previous presentations, it can then take philosophy as its material. So that the task of escaping spontaneity is no longer a hopelessly twisted one. Non-philosophy declares, resoundingly, that philosophy is certainly a material to operate on, without any longer being at the same time the element in which we swim (the ‘swimming pool’ from which, as François told us, he is keen to exit). ‘Man no longer has a privileged or essential affinity with philosophy.’ – philosophical decision is a spontaneous snare for man but not constitutive of thought as such. So there is no reason, like Althusser, to accept philosophy’s status as a reflexive practice whose only object is itself, which ‘draws lines of demarcation that endlessly produce new philosophical questions.’. According to Laruelle, philosophy relies on the spontaneous ‘self evident’ fact that ‘all production consists in transforming a material while staying on the same level as it, remaining content with distending the general convertibility of the realms implicated in practice’. On the contrary, Non-philosophy aims to ‘exceed the world’. Non-philosophical initiation consists not in becoming a conscious master of decision, master of cutting, but in first of all refusing decision, in refusing to participate in production, demarcation. This is why one can qualify this initiation as ‘gnostic’, consisting in realizing – realizing – that ‘we must have “exited” from the world without first having had to 4/5

enter into it in order to leave it’. (the opposite of what Althusser suggests when he says ‘I entered the necessary circle deliberately’). Undoubtedly Laruelle refuses what now appears as Althusser’s philosophicalist error; he overturns the presumptuous idea that philosophers have the authority to ‘help’ others to escape spontaneity, can instruct them, against their spontaneous presuppositions, as to what they are ‘really doing’. His vision of science and of unilaterality simplifies what had seemed a nightmarishly knotted task. And the key question, I think, in regard to nonphilosophy, is how we evaluate this claim to simplification or suspension. But, even more than a practice of philosophy that circulates endlessly in its own element, one may perhaps lose patience with a ‘gnostic’ project whose rigor consigns it to an apparently endless preparation, to an ascesis more trying than the 36 chambers of Shaolin. For what has taken place? As the programme of initiation is transformed, so its political texture is also. As Laruelle himself has admitted: Non-philosophy invariably appear[s] in the form of a programme or a project, one that irritates people because it never seems to be realised. But our instinctive irritation here is perhaps a product precisely of the eager demands of ‘68, demands we are now far enough removed from, and whose effects we can now see clearly enough, to evaluate anew. Namely: From a political point of view, just because theory does not deliver as soon as we should like what we hope for politically … is not sufficient reason to abandon theory as an error and to reassert, in another key, the authority of philosophy. Perhaps we had not yet even begun to get a grip on the consequence that that blind pressure of science held for thought. What is truly ‘utopian’ in non-philososophy? That we do not yet know what theory can do, because theory, science, never belonged to us, it is not there for our use or for us to stitch together philosophically – it comes from elsewhere, it is imposed on us that we might become the patient of that which obtrudes upon thought … Althusser’s nightmare consisted in one’s finding oneself – as always happens in dreams, without knowing how one got there – held fast in a dense thicket, marked by the stigmata of its thorns, trying to find enough space to twist the blade, to cut oneself out of it … and suddenly realizing that its very fabric is entirely constituted of nothing but cuts. Non-philosophy at once intensifies and obviates this paranoiac nightmare of endless circumspection and vigilance. But now the relation between knowing and non-knowing is redistributed. Escape is no longer a matter of teasing apart cuts with cuts. It is a matter of patiently assisting this Thing from outside as it extracts us unilaterally from spontaneity and decision; in extirpating once and for all what we might call the original spontaneous philosophical illusion – that which consists in the philosopher’s belief – the ‘oldest prejudice’ – that the world of which he dreams feverishly, is reality. It is a matter of having the courage to give this thing with no unconscious, no history, no spontaneity, no reflective capacity, free rein to axiomatically dismember the world, to combust human spontaneity, to render us into Strangers. This is the true nightmare for philosophy, but it is no longer a nightmare of philosophy. 5/5

readthis.wtf /writing/beyond-the-pleasure-principle/ Beyond the Pleasure Principle - 2011 The art of dance has always been recognized as one of the most honest and necessary for the training of the body, and as providing it the most fundamental and natural disposition to all sorts of exercise, the bearing of arms included; and consequently one of the most advantageous and most useful to our noblility, and others, who have the honour of serving us, not only in armies in wartime, but also in peacetime in the amusements of our ballets. – Louis XIV, Founding letters patent of the Academie Royale de Danse, 1661. To survive and surmount years of disciplinary preparation and seasons of even more arduous performance requires rigid determination and almost mindless self-abnegation. – Lincoln Kirstein, Four Centuries of Ballet (NY: Dover, 1970) Wayne McGregor’s new work has been developed by the choreographer in collaboration with artist John Gerrard. Combining an innovative artform with equally radical choreography, Live Fire Exercise prompts some complex questions about power, theatricality and military force in contemporary society. Gerrard’s work uses sophisticated computer technology to create realtime ‘portraits’ of found structures in the landscape – vast, empty scenes in which stand oil pumps, intensive agricultural facilities, and most recently a Cuban school built using imported Soviet technology. Digitally reconstructed as 3D models, around which a virtual camera viewpoint slowly orbits, these eery, depopulated edifices speak of a violence that operates silently in distant nonplaces, beneath impassive, anonymous exteriors. What Gerrard’s works ultimately depict are modern and postmodern technologized ‘landscapes’ of power. McGregor had an immediate reaction to them: ‘This kind of bleak hyperrealism is something I hadn’t experienced before. It’s not film projection, nor video. There’s something eerily evocative about the medium and extremely provocative too: Where do these images come from, what are these places?’ 1/4

For their collaboration Gerrard used as reference material US Army photographs of military operations in a remote Dijbouti desert. The images document an exercise intended to prepare troops for the physical impact of mortar rounds or roadside bombs: We see two columns of soldiers deliberately subjected to the force of an explosive charge; captured at the moment of detonation, the soldiers’ bodies are distended by the blast, reshaped by the forcefield of war before the campaign has even begun. In the wake of World War I, Sigmund Freud worked with shellshocked soldiers, observing how in dreams and other symptoms they replayed or repeated traumatic experiences in manageable portions. Apparently striving to master the overwhelming events, their dreams functioned not as fantasised realisations of desire, but as episodic discharges of trauma. The exercise documented in these photographs seems to reverse this sequence, a calculated exposure to risk subjecting the troops to a staged ‘pre-shellshock’ in order to buffer the inevitable contingencies of action. Here, the symptoms precede the trauma. In other shots we see men frozen like toy soldiers, taking up formulaic poses of battle-readiness, or made up with movie prosthetics as casualties for battle simulations. Intrigued by this strange blurring of theatre, cinema and reality, which drills soldiers for the contingencies of war but also functions as a media spectacle, Gerrard asks what these bodies make legible about the nature of power today. The artist immediately saw their ‘shapes of readiness’ as ‘choreographed’ and ‘balletic’, so they naturally became the starting point for his dialogue with McGregor. Of course, ballet places extraordinary demands on dancers, and the very real risk of physical injury must be countered by the drills of daily technique class. Gerrard draws the parallel: ‘It’s as if, through this lifelong training, the dancers are preparing themselves for some ultimate, unknown 2/4

trauma …’ And McGregor suggests that the history of ballet confirms the artist’s intuition: ‘Ballet itself is not a natural language, it’s the very opposite; ballet itself emerged from a form of military exercise, and later the discipline and the artistry evolved into something else.’ Although the Ballet Comique de la Royne Louise (1581), generally recognized as the first authentic ballet, was devised to exult the queen in order to restore harmony and prosperity to a troubled state, the subsequent great flowering of dance under Louis XIII did indeed see it integrated with the military arts. Dancing masters also instructed in fencing and riding, and their art found its ostentatious apotheosis in minutely-plotted equestrian ballets or carousels, where ceremonial choreography was interspersed with mock battles. These great spectacles demonstrated and celebrated royal power, but also retained troops in a state of preparedness. The currency of the parallel between dance and warfare is summed up by a famous anecdote that tells of the Maréchal Françoise de Bassompierre rallying his troops to lay siege to a fort with the words: ‘The décor and the dancers are ready – let the ballet begin!’ But it was the Sun King who most explicitly employed ballet as a strategy of power: Louis XIV’s founding of the Académie Royal de Danse in 1661 codified and regulated dance under the strict surveillance of the Crown, establishing it as a body of knowledge and appointing masters to assure discipline and proper training. In its charter, the King explicitly reminds us that dance also serves to keep peacetime bodies prepared for bearing arms. Thus, however autonomous ballet may since have become, its has its early-modern roots in a kinship with the art of war and the maintenance of sovereign power. Today, Western powers are summoned to prepare for ‘unknown unknowns’, to engage in ‘asymmetric warfare’ – and a part of this preparation involves rendering their fitness legible for the media. In the transformation of the soldier’s body through this continuous, impossible, theatrical preparation for the unforeseeable, Gerrard sees an intriguing convergence with McGregor’s work: ‘In Wayne’s choreography, something is being disrupted. It’s a trauma for the body, and the body has to find a new way of being in order to do that, which takes a long time. It’s a form of preemptive violence – we talked about speed and asymmetries, and multiple co-ordinations as a way of traumatizing the body.’ Indeed, McGregor’s famously demanding choreography heightens the ‘unnaturalness’ of ballet: ‘Dancers have trained their bodies in this very particular codified language which concentrates on balance, symmetry, position, line and clarity,’ he explains. ‘And often what I’m doing is disturbing those symmetries, attempting to destroy this type of co-ordination, unsettling this equilibrium.’ McGregor sees this challenge as a part of the ‘shattering of a certain sort of realism’ the collaboration aims to achieve; ‘I think it’s very much connected to the language John brings to his work.’ This new alliance between the virtual landscape of military power and McGregor’s exploration of the virtualities of the body also called for a reappraisal of the classical theatrical apparatus – another arena in which theatre, warfare and power have been knotted together, notably during Da Vinci’s career under Sforza in Milan, where the polymath’s workshop turned out sets and innovative stage devices as well as military machines. As McGregor explains, for LFE, the stage has been ‘desertified’: ‘We’ve taken away the wings and the flats, so that the dance floor expands almost to the external walls. You are left with this massive space, with some of the structural armature of the theatre exposed. It changes the temperature of the stage rather significantly. You’re no longer trying to disguise anything or create a seamless theatricality. What’s there is there, on show and visible.’ Here McGregor references the strippeddown ascetic beauty of Frederick Ashton’s 1946 Symphonic Variations. Ashton’s first abstract piece produced by the Royal Ballet, Symphonic Variations removed all unnecessary detail, decoration and storytelling to focus attention 3/4

solely on the dancers themselves – an ‘exercise in physicality without obvious meaning or narrative’ that McGregor is happy to see as a precedent. LFE could equally be seen in the context of the minimalist legacy in art: In the 60s and 70s, artists such as Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt and Carl Andre strove to make art objects that stood alone, presenting the viewer with nothing other than their own literal presence. In LFE the monolithic physical presence of the projection screen is not effaced by the virtual scene that unfolds on it; nor does the latter illusionistically absorb the dancers. McGregor explains: ‘We are used to theatre being a form of cultural exercise where the action on stage evokes other worlds – an extended realism. But LFE presents a polyphony of worlds, where disparate versions of time – manufactured time, real-time, algorithmic time and the timing of the audience’s experiences – intersect and interrupt each other.’ Here, minimalist demystification dovetails with Antonin Artaud’s call for a ‘theatre of cruelty’ that overpowers representation to act on a more direct, visceral level – a theatre for which Artaud also coined the term ‘virtual reality’. But what will this experience be like for the audience? ‘Rather dislocating, perhaps,’ says McGregor. ‘The multiple realities may sit uncomfortably for some people. But I think this disquieting is part of the aspiration of the work – look at the subject matter. I think we are asking the audience to wrestle with ambiguity in the work.’ Given all of this, the choice of Tippett’s 1953 Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli for the score may surprise some. ‘Usually, in the hierarchy of collaboration in dance, music is most prized. But our point of departure for this project was John’s virtual portrait, and the rest of the creative decisions have emerged from that scene. Tippett’s pastoral score seemed ideal as a vivid portrait of the land, both the desolate Dijbouti desert and the flatlands of Suffolk; and it provoked an unlikely marriage between the militarism of the scene and the pacifist Tippett’s music. It seemed like a really interesting collision of forces.’ McGregor reflects that Tippett’s piece also operates its own disruption of the classical vocabulary: ‘In music, composers have always versioned and appropriated themes from other composers for their own ends, often pushing them into new territories. Tippett reinvents and reinterprets Bach and Corelli motifs, quickly channeling them into passages that aren’t bound by prior musical convention. They start out restricted by a certain syntax or logic – and then you have these flights of fancy. And this is what I’m interested in doing with the body and the composition of the choreography: starting with something that’s recognizable as a codified language or form, and then all of a sudden diverting it into something that’s like a sort of breakdown of sense.’ He is unrepentant about the demands that LFE will make on its audience: ‘It should be challenging. But I think this disruption of what is known, whether it be of the body, of the scene or of reality, creates a harrowing kind of beauty.’ 4/4

readthis.wtf /writing/correlation-contingency-trauma/ Correlation, Contingency, Trauma - 2011 Architecture is a de facto regional – that is, limited – field, or horizon of knowledge and practice which, however, here aspires to approach its project in a way that is not simply determined by the continual transformation of inherited forms and traditions but which draws on a universal account of matter – matter as information, an account enabled by computation. Such a practice would approach its sites in view of their contingent implication in the same material processes it seeks to mobilise in its technique. It therefore wishes to access a real beyond its regional ontology, a real within which its projects and procedures have always been implicated but which has hitherto been conceived and utilized myopically, in terms overdetermined its local exigencies and intentions. Whereas this new architecture, presumably, must continue to respond to these exigencies and intentions, its response would be expanded and augmented by exposure to its immanent outside. I would like to trace some parallels between the problems this raises for architecture and the question raised by a number of contemporary philosophers: How do we think a real that does not depend on thinking for its existence. A new generation of thinkers – known, for better or worse, as ‘speculative realists’, have proposed various strategies for overcoming the obstacles to a realism, obstacles that had formed the mainstay of philosophy in the twentieth century, and which were also present in the form of an institutional exhaustion, an ‘end of philosophy’, an end to speculative thought. This turn away from a speculative philosophy seeking to determine reality toward a critical philosophy that interrogated the conditions which thought imposes upon reality, finds its origin in Kant, the thinker who first posited that objectivity is a function of synthesis in thought. It is thought that forms objects, and objects cannot validly be said to exist in and of themselves. This re-centring in which the object revolves around the subject, Kant called the Copernican revolution in philosophy, but as we shall see this is a particularly flagrant misnomer since, arguably, Kant charts an inverse trajectory for thought to the progressive corrosion of human conceit which Copernicus initiated, and which Reza has already discussed. The Copernican trajectory consists in the revelation of a universe that is de-centred, in which the image of the world spontaneously manifested to man – his regional field of projects and procedures – is undermined by an account of the materiality of the universe as indifferent to man and as largely unmanifested to unmediated human experience. The Kantian critical trajectory, on the other hand, consists in an epistemological finitisation and focalization of the universe, now understood as mere phenomena, within experience. Classical rationalism held that thought has access to the being of things: a certain discipline of thought allows us to know something about being. Kant tells us that we only have access to phenomena. This is therefore a philosophy of finitude, it seeks to identify the limits of our thought. Reality as we know it is a synthesis, our consciousness takes up something from outside itself and synthesizes it in a certain way. It is thus also a philosophy of form and matter: the matter of sensation is subject to a synthetic formation that belongs to thought, namely, for Kant, the spatiotemporal forms of intuition. So something does impinge on our consciousness, but all that we can say of it for 1/8

certain is what form it will take – because this is the specific form of knowledge that we have. Knowledge of reality as conceived by classical philosophical rationalism is impossible, because we no longer have any knowledge of the relation between object as phenomena and possible object in itself. We critique the pretentions of knowledge, put it in its place, identify its limits. In rescinding the divine guarantee of the purchase of thought upon being, we admit that the objects we perceive are not separate from us but are formed by us, in relation to our forms of intuition, and ultimately to our grounding sense of ourselves: every object is correlated to a subject. This is what has been dubbed, by Quentin Meillassoux, ‘correlationism’. Disturbed by the threat of skepticism, Kant invented a new type of thought: the transcendental – a thought that asks questions, not of the reality of the objects we experience, but of the conditions under which they must appear to us. This tendency extends into a great deal of twentieth century thought, it simply being a matter of where one locates the principles of this focal synthesis, this shaping of reality by thought: language, social consensus, economic formation, or indeed the organization of space. The result is that the problems of the real, of matter and of nature become problems of access. This is particularly radicalized by phenomenology. Through relating them to the necessity of our spatial and temporal forms of experience Kant hoped to construct an a priori philosophical justification for natural science and its mathematical formulation. But phenomenology insists that before these conceptual articulations of phenomena there is the phenomena pure. We should examine what is delivered to us; remove these filters that we impose upon the data, and just look at the phenomena itself. And for phenomenology, our relation to the phenomena is intentional: we are not abstract seats of consciousness, who passively receive the experience of a cup of coffee as an abstracted temporo-spatial object; we first of all see a cup of coffee as something to drink, in order to wake us up so we can get on with the essay we have to write: what is primary is our life-world, our projects, our relation to our projects, which is related to our knowledge of our own temporality, the fact that we will die, in short the ‘world’ in which we live and which is strictly correlated to ourselves as a particular type of being-there (Dasein). Even the division between object and subject is not as primary as it seems, because all objects we experience, we experience within a world that is bound up with ourselves as subjects, and what we experience of ourselves as subject is bound up with the objects we use. So this really exacerbates correlationism: our knowledge is finite, and its limits are those of the bounds of a human world. Thus for Heidegger, the question is not, what can we say about being? This question already assumes too much. First we should ask: who is the type of being who asks about being? This ‘who’ comes before the abstract questioning typical of philosophy. We know very well how these stakes play out in architecture, as architecture is called to concern itself with ‘dwelling’ in a world that is primordially defined by a belonging-together of man and world. The contrast could not be stronger between this dwelling and the ungrounding effects of Copernican corrosion, for which there can be no stable and fixed home for man. Thus it is in parallel with the recent speculative philosophical projects which re-address the question of how we can think a reality outside correlation, which reassert the Copernican project proper over the Kantian ‘Copernican 2/8

revolution’, that architecture attempts to think its materiality in ways that do not owe to this primordial belonging between man and a world that is already shaped by man’s being-there. Pursuing this path, an architectural response to a site cannot any longer be circumscribed within the formal bounds of what we already know about the site and our intentions in relation to it; it will be informed by procedures and techniques that claim a speculative purchase on non-manifest material strata of its reality, and a technical manipulation of their potential in tandem with those of the materials with which we build. This is not only, therefore, a question of the technically-augmented formation of matter, but of material powers that computation can mobilise in ways that exceed our formal anticipations. Now, at the same time that Kant initiates correlationism, he is also compelled to leave space for such non-correlated powers. The two places this happens in Kant’s work are in his theory of the sublime and his theory of genius. The sublime as a kind of non-experience, when the matter of nature presented in the phenomena is so great in magnitude or complexity that it renders the apparatus of synthesis dysfunctional; and artistic genius as an irruption into experience that follows nothing that went before, but which sets a new course. In both cases, matter refuses, or overflows, the forms of experience. Whereas the experience of beauty, the production of the beautiful, for Kant, is connected with a harmony, an acute correlation, between the matter of nature and the forms of our experience, the sublime is something else entirely, an excess of the powers of nature over these forms. And likewise, the genius does not form matter with a view to producing beauty, but becomes the channel for something novel to affect experience. Both of these occurrences have the structure of a trauma, that is, an event that cannot itself be registered within experience, but which has ramifications in experience. You will remember that Freud’s theory of trauma holds that trauma is that real which does not show itself, which by definition cannot be encompassed in experience, except through traces, and which solicits a continual attempt to ‘bind’ the excessive event through symptomatic repetition. These places where Kant is compelled to suspend the correlationist prohibition on speculation are also sites of trauma: By ‘speculative’ we mean a theoretical position that goes beyond what is immediately given, that stitches what we know of reality together in a way that, whilst coherent, and whilst offering us opportunities to rethink our world, cannot be verified empirically. To speculate is to go beyond what is or what can be given. By ‘trauma’ we mean the incising of a regionally, formally closed field by an external matter, an event which is not given within that regional field, but whose traces nevertheless appear within it and are manifested in symptoms. Freud’s theory exhibits consciousness on the model of an organic being that must protect itself against its traumatically exorbitant source of energy and thus suicides an outer portion of itself in order to protect its integrity. Trauma is not merely an external attack upon regionally-closed; rather, universal trauma is the production mechanism and driver of the regional horizon from and into the universal field. As we can read in the Kantian theory of the sublime and of genius, trauma names the free expression of the universe whose relation to itself is never fully interrupted by any discrete individual; any discrete individual is always pregnant with this universality that cannot be erased – the reflexivity Reza talked about. No matter what kind of localisation it undergoes, the germ of reflexivity remains within the local field, and cannot be assimilated (bound) or escape. At the same time the reaction to it – its effect – drives a certain form of myopia. The image here is of a radically open continuum within which regional horizons are formed as a function of trauma, and which each, far from repelling it through their myopia, carry within themselves, as traces, as myopicallyfocalised reflections of the universal continuum, the traces of trauma. 3/8

This is the very meaning of the Copernican trajectory. Ultimately, our interiority is compromised not by the initial shock of being decentred, but when we realise that the organic compounds that subtend life and thought are synthesized from the same stardust as the sun and planets. Trauma is an inner labyrinth, not a shock from the outside. This is the path of a geophilosophy which, as demanded by Copernicus and Darwin, and following Nietzsche, does not stop at the latter’s demand for a genealogy of thought that roots it in the traumatic enculturation of a maladapted animal crawling on the surface of the earth, but follows through to the centre of the earth’s geotraumatic body, where it harbours its secret of burning immanence with the sun, and further, beyond the solar economy into the cosmic abyss with which we share our material being. This is a thought that, by being ‘true to the earth’ would be ‘true to the universe’. We can certainly question whether it would be desirable or even coherent for architecture to be ‘true-to-the-universe’ in this way. However it seems to me that several of the projects presented here share the ambition of introducing such a speculative trauma into the discipline of architecture, and of remaining faithful to the Copernican trajectory. The aspiration here is to harness a materiality that is no longer correlated to dwelling nor to beauty. To register the traumatic presence, within the dwelling of architecture, of a materiality that already connects it to a universal continuum … The conditions for this enterprise belong to the true Copernican legacy, an edifice of knowledge which itself constitutes a ‘narcissistic wound’ for the human manifest image; which is part of what we might call, after Freud, a great chain of humiliations. To articulate this movement under the banner of ‘ecology’ may well be an oxymoron, or worse. It cannot easily be contained within the ambit of any account of dwelling, or of mutually interacting niches. Because the ‘Copernican’ nature of such an ecology would consist in surpassing not only the exigencies of human ‘worlding’, but also the ordered realm of the terrestrial organic kingdom, and even its chemical basis: we are after all talking about a highly abstracted nature approached by , mathematical or algorithmic means, a nature freed from the contingencies of what happens to have occurred within the frame of terrestrial history, and which passes beyond the limited range of phenomena our evolutionary history has conditioned us to manifest. It is above all scientific method and computation that produces a new speculative image of matter that exceeds our spontaneous relation to nature. These systems reveal to us things that fall outside of any traditional concept of nature or matter. – matter as active agent, matter as information, matter without natural order. As an acute example – acute because it concerns our relationship to what we call ‘life’ – we could point to the contemporary relationship between biology and computation, which indicates a reconfiguration of our conception of ‘life’ (as a data structure rather than a substantial form) and a shift towards the experimental borrowing of theoretical models from chemistry, computation and physics in biology, rather than treating the biological as a special empirical science (a shift from the ‘wet-lab’ to virtual experimentation). The post-genomic biosciences, overwhelmed by masses of data, are seeking new perspectives from which to extract useful insights from it. Like economics, also, which has recently turned to paradigms drawn from physics (‘phynance’) (and these shifts in other disiplines must be brought into the conversation we are having here), perhaps architecture is involved in a similar borrowing and experimentation, as it tries to trace its way through the labyrinth that leads from its myopia as a regional practice, to universal conditions of materiality that could underpin new practices and possibilities. 4/8

The aspiration would be to create structure that incorporates the humiliating truth that the frames within which architecture, or biology, or any other regional practice, formerly took place – these forms of experience, and these forms of building – are, as much as the site upon which we build, contingencies deposited by the local history of matter that is called ‘earth’. Again, we need to ask whether the discourse of ecology is equal to this aspiration. It is important to acknowledge that the notion of ‘ecosystem’ is, in various ways, a compromise formation: in its various formulations it expresses both a materialist desire and the return of various obstacles to a thoroughgoing materialism. In the sense that it fundamentally expresses the philosophical problem of obtaining a purchase on matter that is not coloured by theological, cultural or psychological predeterminations, it joins with this project we have been describing – it positions its subject within a delocalized, decentred system. But in so far as it desires, in the service of local demands or aims, to make this system into a ‘whole’, it fails – whether it produces this ‘whole’ as a simulation, or cuts it out from the world as a set of constraints and parameters to which it should conform. It is important to acknowledge that the way in which the novel and surprising accounts of matter, complexity, and so on which we are discussing are driven by, and subject to interpretation through, pre-existing exigencies, and in many ways are still merely symptoms of the human confrontation with the Copernican universe. I would like to suggest that one need be very circumspect about the selective embrace we offer to matter – the way in which ecology always tends to return home. Even when it is a question of an ecology that consciously seeks to go beyond the innocent narrative of the stewardship of nature, to communicate with a world beyond the human-world relation, a nature beyond nature. British filmmaker Adam Curtis’s recent documentary ‘All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace’ charts how the late-twentieth century idea of the ecosystem, as a self-correcting system of independent agents, increasingly adopted as the model for a supposedly post-political society, emerged from early attempts at computational modelling in ecology; from models which conceded far too much to the need to render the interactions of organisms computationally tractable, under the prevailing technological conditions; which significantly omitted consideration of positive feedback; and which were governed by incorrect assumptions as to the central role of equilibrium. Curtis, quite rightly I think, aligns the popular 70s idea of Earth as closed ecosystem, in perfect balance – Buckminster Fuller’s ‘spaceship earth’ – with the emergence of a politics of systemic management of the ‘natural order of things’ – neo-liberal capitalism – and the strange affinity of this politics which claims to be post-political, with environmentalism. He skillfully narrates the connections between the rise of the personal computer and ‘network society’ and hippy experiments in cybernetic self-regulating communality housed in Fullerian geodesic domes. Against the idea that the complex network would level nations, classes, and hierarchies of power, resulting in a flat meshwork where equal members form a global, spontaneously equilibriated system, he calls for an awareness that these supposedly self-equilibriating systems are in fact both determined in advance by externalities and continually subject to control and intervention. But what is notable is that when Curtis critiques the contemporary ideological usage of this now-obsolesced concept of ecosystem, he merely confronts one compromise formation in the name of another – the reintroduction of human political agency qua separated from nature. That is, Curtis suggests that in order to counteract the unwarranted transfer of the cybernetic paradigm to human beings, and its deleterious social effects, its dissolution of human history into natural matter, to we have to move back to a notion of human political agency that can act in a 5/8

discontinuous and voluntaristic way against its implication in ‘nature’. Not a dissimilar position to the politics of Badiou, and in particular his critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s soixante-huitard cybernetic materialism. Curtis suggests that the cybernetic paradigm merely consists in an unwarranted metaphorical transport from machines to nature, which required a ‘distortion of the scientific method’ – a simplification, a forcing of the data – to bolster it. Unfortunately, he tends then to counter this simplification with a somewhat ineffable notion of the uncomputable ‘complexity of the natural world’, in the same move that human historical agency is reasserted. The transfer of this ‘balance of nature’ paradigm to human society – the ideology whereby networks of independent operators will spontaneously generate stability and transcend politics – is perhaps rightly discredited, but for the wrong reasons. Curtis sees this cybernetic paradigm as reneging on ‘the enlightenment idea that humans are separate from the rest of nature and master of their own destiny.’ ‘Instead,’ he says, once we lose sight of the ‘complexity of the natural world’ and begin to see ‘animals as robots’, we then begin ‘to see ourselves as components.’ We are no longer ‘human beings in charge of their own destiny , but […] components in systems … from its perspective there was no difference between human beings and machines … they were just nodes in networks, acting and reacting to information’ But this ends up merely fetishizing the complex and in a different, more ineffable way. The real point would not be to reassert history’s autonomy, and to exempt human beings from the application of what we know about the operation of complex systems; but to realise that the Copernican passage to a dehumanized universe – the passage to a thoroughgoing materialism – to an enlightenment that is, as philosopher Ray Brassier suggests, ultimately synonymous with extinction – is subject to local obstacles restrictions and delays. The path through the labyrinth involves many dead ends, many passages that lead back to the centre. Above all it can involve mistaking symptom for trauma – the effects of trauma falling back on the terms of the regional field to produce a sublime, dreamlike mastery of the universal. So the danger is that the negotiation between the agency and purposiveness of architecture as a regional practice, and the contingency of matter, is held in a compromise-formation in this notion of ‘ecology’ or ‘ecosystem’, which in various ways affords the practitioner a kind of modest colonization of the potencies of matter within a framework of an organization of space which, itself, remains governed by local constraints that belong wholly to the manifest image of man and his dwelling. The ‘eco’ remains tethered to the home and its management. Copernicanism, as a philosophy of assault, must go all the way with a relentless negativity that refuses not only the ‘big other’ of God whose divine providence allows for the formal purchase of thought upon matter, not only the transcendentalism that would have all matter correlated to thought, but also resists ‘the possibility of hypothesizing the return of a mellifluously orchestrated material universe, a unified natural world, through bottom-up dynamics and processes.’[Adrian Johnston]. We must be careful not to mistake the multifarious symptoms of our encounter with the contingencies of matter with a thoroughgoing and rigorous thinking (out) of our place in the universe. What especially needs to be guarded against, or at least acknowledged, is that this project often becomes artificially welded to other, local projects. This may be one of the immanent dangers of parametricism, for example. It proposes an unapologetically grand project in which architecture takes its place within a complex, multiversal ecosystem. But there is a slippage between its charting of the info-material possibilities opened up by computation and the perceived exigency of 6/8

becoming equal to the demands of a ‘post-fordist’ society. The danger here is that one ends up conflating the infinite possibilities of a multiply modulated matter (the concept of nature extended beyond human/terrestrial contingencies) with the servicing of a very local and particular social formation (a concept of human/terrestrial contingencies as nature, where a historical predicament – or its ideological self-representation – becomes naturalised). In fact these local exigencies themselves must be rigorously traced as localized expressions of that material continuum. The question is how to pick up the thread of that trauma while resisting the temptation to symptomatize, to weld together in a trivial, precipitate manner the first fruits of that enterprise with the spontaneous demands of the regional procedure from which one sets out. In this way one only succeeds in cloning the local horizon and its exigencies into the material universe, in discovering a real that is all-too-fitting, all-too-familiar. This is the question that Reza Negarestani has raised of procedures to bring into the design process a proper, nontrivial gluing of the local and the global, between regional myopia and the universal. The lesson from Adam Curtis’s film is that Ecology is always in danger of re-domesticating materiality within a holist narrative that, inevitably, takes its cues from the parochial human life-world – and in this welding of the local to the global, re-correlating the latter, retuning it to local contingencies as if they were transcendental necessities. At worst, we end up with a fragmented research programme that merely straps together various logics appropriated from various sciences and produces various kinds of Frankenstein that symptomatise trauma and claim transcendental legitimacy. At best, what is needed are principles or strategies, procedures of coherence, that would allow this research into materiality to avoid such compromise even if at the cost of producing partial, incomplete research outcomes, which nevertheless systematically explore different layers and implications of universal reflexivity. To connect and modulate with the universal potentialities of information that go beyond the contingent confines of the terrestrial natural frame, or the local frame of a particular site, also involves unlocking the informational structure of the contingent formations that exist within this local frame, and decoding their traumatic relation with the materialities that run through them. Here what seems invaluable as a complementary to any technique of evolutionary, parametric or generative design, is the approach taken by several of the practitioners here today which address local contingency in an immediate way. The work of Bow Wow which concerns itself with ‘no-good’ architectures that respond in an immediate way, entirely according to local conditions. Or Adrian Lahoud’s study of ‘post-traumatic urbanism’. Just as the equilibrium model of ecology was exploded as it was shown that after catastrophic change, plants and animals recombine in radically different ways, this close study of catastrophic urbanism may uncover the activity of unsuspected material agencies that could not be captured or simulated by any computational model. As we said, No matter what kind of localization it undergoes, the germ of reflexivity is never fully assimilated or bound, and it is in these kindso f extreme situations that unexpected expressions can occur. I would also recall Eyal Weizman’s account of the Israeli wall as a ‘seismometer’ registering the environment of power around it, which in turn was always implicated in geographical and topographical investments. Or his project with Allesandro Petti, ‘Decolonising architecture’, which seeks environmental contingencies that can discharge the political potency of abandoned or ruined buildings. 7/8

Somehow, in warding off the premature welding of the universal Copernican trajectory to regional myopia, and in paying close attention to real contingencies of environments, there might be a way for architecture not only to symptomatically register the impact of the Copernican universe upon its regional field, but to find within itself the traces and threads of that trauma, all the time without losing its specificity as a practice. 8/8

readthis.wtf /writing/notes-on-white-coal/ Notes on White Coal - 2011 Only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this ordering revealing happen. If man is challenged, ordered, to do this, then does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve?[…] The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand. Yet precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (1953) Heidegger’s resounding warning concerning the technological regime wherein ‘[a]griculture is now the mechanized food industry … [a]ir is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium …’ echoes antique maledictions upon mining – perhaps the original model of a ‘challenging-forth’ of resources from the earth. Thus we 1/9

can find in the words of such authorities such as Pliny and Xenophon an anticipation of contemporary ecology, of which Heidegger’s critique is one of the inspirations. According to these authorities, the depths of the earth are placed outside the compass of divine providence. We have been granted stewardship only over the surface, the locus of a sustainable relation to production. Excavating the hidden bounty of the forbidden depths of the earth brings forth as its fruit only avarice and war.1 The perennial nature of this suspicion – right up to contemporary guilt and anxiety over the explosive growth in human activity made possible by the exploitation of mineral resources – makes it all the more peculiar that the central figure of Heidegger’s text is not a coalmine but a hydroelectric dam. Of course, the waterpower that draws off potential energy from the hydrocycle is no less a tributary of the sun’s power than are the mineral fuels locked up beneath the surface. One might make the distinction between the product of an ongoing process (the hydrocycle) and the geological product of mineralization: A contemporary rereading of the transgressive nature of mining might be that, with the excavation of fossil fuels, man erupts out of his allotted place in seasonal time, into geological time: ‘by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s’.2 But this is not central to Heidegger’s account. For him, it is the ‘challenging-forth’ of energy, its ‘unlocking’ and ‘storing’ and ‘transmission’, that constitutes the decisive step toward a new economy. And this shift we find at work in the modern history of waterpower as much as in the mineral-fuelled machine economy. The symbol of the hydroelectric dam, for Heidegger, signifies that even those features of the world with which we originally dwell in a state of mutual belonging are turned, on the model of mining, into mere physical resources. With the hydroelectric dam, the river is alienated from that constellation of man and his work in which man might properly dwell with technology in its ‘poetical’ essence (notably treated in Knut Hamsun’s [1917] Markens Grøde [Growth of the Soil]). The river ceases to poetically ‘reveal’ the world with man; instead, both become slaves to its ‘standingreserve’. The case of waterpower is all the more interesting, therefore, in that it does not easily sit either side of a before-andafter narrative of modern technology. It belongs neither to a primal ‘techné’ nor to the modern regime of machine technology powered by fossil fuels. Waterpower is another path, which spans the abrupt change from ‘biological economy to machine economy’, and sometimes intersects with it, but without being a part of its material definition:3 The path towards economic modernization … did not cross the ancient and widely trodden one of mechanical water power. It was based on the combination of heat and mechanical work. Water and wind engines were not a real introduction into the new age of the machines.4 The historical journey of Norway from underdevelopment to industrial modernity is quite singular in the way in which these two paths interact. Hydroelectric power was the key to Norway’s growth in the years before the massive potential of fossil fuels was unlocked (and may well be the key to its future growth after the advent of ‘peak oil’). The ‘prism’ through which Norway refracted global economic expansion and growth5 was largely a product of its geography, and the resulting distribution of (what was, until the petrochemical discoveries of the 1960s) its chief natural resource. This geographical factor continued to exert an influence as industrialization got underway: as these hydroelectric installations tended to be located in outlying districts, Norway’s subsequent industrialization was rather unique in character.6 2/9

The development of industry at the point where electric power is produced … has caused a certain decentralization of population. Thus, one-third of the population is classified as urban and two-thirds as rural. Of course, most of the “rural” population is not agricultural, but is settled outside large metropolitan centers: around local industrial projects, in small towns, fishing villages, etc.7 This determination of human geography by physical geography held from mediaeval times, when small groups of Norwegian farmers would group together to ensure a local energy source for grinding flour, in the shape of a water wheel.8 The relatively few locations where the flow of water between mountainous peaks could be extracted became centres of population. The waterways not only provided power, but served as a means of transport, providing a ready-made distribution network, with logs floated down the waterways, stored in lakes, to be delivered to the mills, processed and shipped abroad. During the long unbroken tradition of using waterpower the use of water as power-source has invariably fixed man to the sites where ‘nature’ makes this power available. The use of waterpower limits location, and the energy produced must be consumed on the spot. But the very immovability of hydroelectric energy called for innovative thinking, and prompted some important early industrial developments in Norway. Both the electro-metallurgical and the electrochemical industries are based on hydro-electric power and trace their growth to the utilization of Norway’s waterfalls early in the twentieth century.9 Sam Eyde, founder of Norsk Hydro, would commercialize Birkeland’s discovery of the electric arc method of nitrogen-fixing, as a way to employ in situ the excess energy harnessed by the hydroelectric power station at Rjukan to produce artificial fertilizer. (The later successor to this mechanism, the Haber-Bosch process, would open up a far more intensive route for artificial fertilization, this time with the use of petrochemicals as a power source. Intriguingly, Haber-Bosch was a side-result of the military development of explosives, much as Birkeland’s discovery of the electric arc nitrogen-fixing mechanism had been an accident while engineering an electrical cannon. As a by-product of the Birkeland-Eyde process, the plant produced Deuterium – a Hydrogen isotope later used by the Germans in their nuclear programme, leading to the allies’ famous 1944 sabotage of Vermok). Early Norwegian pioneers such as Anders Sveeas fully realized the potential of waterpower and adapted the ancient technology of the waterwheel to industrial purposes, firstly under the regime of mechanical power transmission and then indirectly, through the use of turbines to generate electricity. Nevertheless, it is the later shift from the direct to the indirect that is decisive; it introduces a new, deterritorialised regime of storage and transmission of energy. New methods of power extraction, storage and transmission enabled by hydroelectric prompt the discovery of new natural resources; it becomes possible to utilize the most remote, secret reserves of nature. In line with Heidegger’s account, the ‘potential 15 million kilowatts of hydro-electric power’10 harboured by Norway’s inhospitable topography11 is progressively ‘unlocked’, and the waterfall, from being a natural spectacle, is revealed as power source amenable to ‘rational use’: The greater number of the most important waterfalls in Norway are situated either far inland or on the south-west and west coast fjords, or in the north, in thinly populated neighbourhoods. There was no appearance of being able to find any rational use for these waterfalls. Now, however, the difficulties may be said to have been practically overcome, as the electric energy can be transmitted to very great distances. From the moment that power can be economically conveyed to any place at which it can be advantageously employed, it becomes possible to utilize such large waterfalls.12 3/9

This new reserve of power brought about a re-evaluation of the country itself that echoed a more generalised shift in perception of the importance of ‘natural resources’. In 1919 one writer expects Norway to ‘become one of the greatest, if not the greatest, industrial center of Europe.’, declaring: ‘In possibilities it yields only to America’.13 Thus, before the explosion of industrial innovation brought about by the use of mineral fuels dwarfed any possible alternative, the natural resources of Norway were recognized, in precisely the context of a nascent global energy economy, as constituting the country’s primary ‘wealth’: Det hvite kullet: Through these valleys the rivers run down to the sea, and these rivers constitute a constant source of water-power of such magnitude that they may well be said to represent national wealth, in the same manner that coal does in countries in which it is abundant. The waterfalls have thus been aptly termed ‘White Coal,’ and the white coals have the very great advantage of being inexhaustible.14 Hansen, in 1911, records the role of the wood-pulp industry in the transition from the small-scale use of the waterways which (in an echo of Heidegger) lets these sites be, in their ‘purity’, to the modern economical estimation of the forests and waterways in terms of export-value and ‘productive energy’: Norway was long a poor country, whose most important articles of export were timber and fish. The rivers were therefore, up to the latter half of last century, only utilised for floating down timber, with here and there sawmills or other small mills driven by primitive water-wheels. Those were the days in which the Norwegian valleys lay in all their pristine purity, when the rivers teemed with salmon and trout, and the forests and moors with game, and the only foreigners who visited them were almost exclusively sons of Albion in search of sport and recreation. But soon the water-power began to be more and more made use of for the Wood-Pulp Industry, which, in the course of a comparatively short time, grew to be of such importance that now, in conjunction with cellulose and paper, exports represent the annual value of 56 million kroner. Turbines took the place of water-wheels, and gradually the electric dynamo in connection with the turbine commenced an evolution that has brought water-power into the foremost rank as a source of productive energy.15 Now, it is clear that according to Heidegger, this development belongs to the ‘monstrous’ reign of technology which removes technology as ‘standing reserve’ from the work of poiesis which it originally shares with the work of art, and according to which man can ‘dwell’ – as his famous lament concerning the Rhine suggests: The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears as something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, “The Rhine” as dammed up into the power works, and “The Rhine” as uttered out of the art work, in Holderlin’s hymn by that name.16 Compare this with an early twentieth-century, rather more celebratory account of the potential of Norway’s white coal: 4/9

From October to April or May the rainfall in the higher parts of the country takes the form of snow, and during the winter months it only rains along a strip of the coast and up the fjords. The rainfall cannot, therefore, be at once utilised, and from December to April or May the rivers bring down least water. In May a flood occurs, on the melting of the lower snows-the “home flood,” as it is called-while the biggest flood comes in June or July from the melting of the great masses of snows on the highest mountains. In order to make use of the water-power, it is therefore of primary importance to be able to store as much as possible of the supplies which, during the melting of the snows, would escape to sea. On looking at the map, it is obvious that the nature of the country is peculiarly adapted for such storage. The entire country is furnished with lakes of various size, which, owing to the depth and narrowness of the valleys, have frequently very contracted outlets. It is, therefore, easy to convert such lakes, and at comparatively little outlay, into most valuable reservoirs, in which to store in summer the water arising from the winter snows, and, by letting out these stored supplies as required to supplement the natural flow, to maintain the regular amount needed for the production of constant power.17 In Norway, as elsewhere in Europe, the nineteenth century saw a new compact between the artistic and the industrial. Industrial exploitation of the powers of nature was echoed by artists’ romantic fascination with them. In the ‘Nordic sublime’ (Norwegians Peder Balke, J.C. Dahl, the Danish painter of Norway Erik Pauelssen), and the related growth of tourism, in which the ‘wildness’ of nature was staged and presented, a new aesthetic appreciation that emerges in parallel with industrial expansion. The waterfall is now conceived on a terrestrial-geological scale – it is exhibited by the sublime painters alongside the classic symbols of ocean and volcano, reflected upon in light of the deep geological time that threatens to usurp the biblical chronicle of the earth. This is no longer the poeisis of the waterwheel that gently taps into energy on a human scale, and thus can be opposed to the transgressive extraction of petroleum. In line with the increasingly massive-scale exploitation of the power of water, this art now expresses a fascination with nature no longer as beautiful but as forbidding and overwhelming; a pure power to be marveled at, but also to be mastered. E. Pauelssen, Sarpfossen (1799) 5/9

J.C.Dahl, Rjukanfoss (1830) Theodor Kittelsen, Rjukanfosen (1908) 6/9

Theodor Kittelsen, Rjukanfosen (1908) Theodor Kittelsen, Rjukanfosen (1908) Theodor Kittelsen, Rjukanfosen (1908) This remarkable series of paintings of the falls at Rjukan, by Theodor Kittelsen (better known as an illustrator of folktales), were commissioned by Sam Eyde as he developed a gigantic power station at Svlegfoss, to be followed by Vermok, where the Rjukanfoss drops one hundred metres at Vermok.18 This latter would become the first hydroelectric plant of its kind, completed in 1934 – at the time a ‘gigantic work … incomparably the largest power station in Europe’.19 In the crucial early decades of the twentieth century, in parallel with such ambitious projects, water had become very self-consciously a symbol of national identity for Norway, and for its increasing anticipation of full modernization, 7/9

concurrent with the independent ‘rebirth’ of the nation in 1905. In 1906, a law was passed imposing a ban on foreign purchase of waterfalls, bringing them under public control, ensuring through a concession arrangement that these ‘assets’ would eventually revert to the state, and through other measures that the related industries would provide work for Norwegian workers. This prudent quasi-nationalization of natural resources, fuelling Norwegian economic take-off, was paralleled by an increasing sense of the national ‘aesthetic wealth’ these spectacular resources afford. Scott-Hansen reflects on Norway’s duty to reconcile aesthetic appreciation with industrial exploitation: […] in the same way as the charms of wild natural scenery appeal to the overwrought, busy people of to-day, there are also those who feel a call to utilise those great natural resources in order to improve the material prosperity of the country and the condition of the people. Surely there is room for both classes, and surely the land that is in a position amply to satisfy them both, must be considered to be fortunately situated, with wealth and prosperity as well as wealth of scenery.20 Vermok power station Contemporary developments suggest that on a rapidly-transforming planet, the age-old path of waterpower, and the highway of modernity – the human project of endless growth and energy consumption – are converging once again. In China, where the Three Gorges Dam has already been completed after vast expenditure and the displacement of millions of people, controversy now rages over the plans to build a 21.3GW dam in the Nu river, with conservation groups fighting to save the world heritage site’s biodiversity and endangered species. The ambitious Chinese hydroelectric programme addresses not just the growing demands of the new Chinese economy and the potential for cross-border energy sales, but international pressure for reduced fossil fuel emissions. Meanwhile, ongoing climate change finds energy companies prospecting at the melting ice caps, hoping to find minerals exposed by the retreating ice, and utilize hydroelectric power to process them – a ‘white gold rush’ for new sources to power the global information economy. REFERENCES 8/9

–– H. Dorffman, Labor Relations in Norway (Oslo: Norwegian Joint Committee on International Social Policy, 1966). –– E. Lo Cascio and P. Malanima, ‘Mechanical Energy and Water Power in Europe: A Long Stability?’ In E. Hermon (ed.), Vers une gestion intégrée de l’eau dans l’Empire Romain (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2008). 201-8. –– Howe, J. L. ‘Notes on Norwegian Industry’, The Popular Science Monthly, Jan. 1912, 36-50. –– Ljøgodt, K. ‘Sublime Nature’ –– Macalister, T. ‘Melting ice caps open up Arctic for “white gold rush”’ –– Moses, Jonathon W., Norwegian Catch-Up: Development and Globalization before World War II ( Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). –– Nynäs, H., ‘Water as a symbol of national identity in Norway’, in The Basis of Civilization – Water Science? (Proceedings of UNHSCO/IAI IS/IW1IA symposium held in Rome. December 2003). IAHS Publ. 286. 2004. –– Røiri, V., ‘Det hvite kullet’ –– Scott-Hansen A, and Swinburne, J., ‘Hydro-electric plants in Norway and their application to electrochemical industries’, Trans. Faraday Soc., 1911, 7, 78-91. –– Nina Sørlie (ed.), Johan Christian Dahl (Kistefos-Museet/Labyrinth Press, 2000) –– Weisman, A., The World Without Us (London: Virgin Books, 2007) 9/9

readthis.wtf /writing/response-to-laruelle-on-non-photography/ Response to Laruelle on Non-Photography - 2012 In the preface to The Concept of Non-Photography, you note that you did not update the essays in that book to reflect the new vocabulary that accompanied the shift from what you called ‘non-philosophy’ to what you now speak of as ‘non-standard philosophy’ and ‘philo-fiction’. It seems that, today, you have done so, and described in a new way the relationship between photography and philosophy. Yet the description of this relationship remains the same in its essential characteristics. Non-philosophy begins with the observation that philosophy always gives itself thought and the real as divided from each other, only so as to ceaselessly stage their ever-deferred adequation. It presupposes this difference between the conditioned and the unconditioned as, after all (or rather, before and as All) given in thought qua unconditioned. But it is given, precisely, only through what it conditions. Thus, we know the transcendental only through the empirical that it conditions, and yet this knowledge of the transcendental is meant to guide us in the distribution and knowledge of the empirical. A decision that is carried out in the name of thought as already being other than the real, and which therefore, despite itself, presupposes a moment when one is radically immanent to the other. Nonphilosophy attempts to grasp this non-thetic moment in which Oneness is given ‘without-givenness’, and to retain this moment as the primary axiomatic basis upon which to think philosophy without thinking in philosophy. Philosophy, in this sense, as you suggest in The Concept of Non-Photography, has always understood itself in a way that can be qualified as ‘photographic’. An originary ‘flash’ would produce the World – which is always the World of philosophy – a decisive flash that splits the One into a perennial duality of being and its image in thought, a duality whose unification philosophy will eternally desire, only succeeding in rephotographing it, in taking ever new ‘shots’ of it that ramify and extend its difference. This myth, as you suggest, comprises a fundamental misunderstanding of both philosophy and photography. As philosophical myth, emerging in advance of the empirical possibility of photography, it already miscognises photography by presenting in terms of philosophy’s originary presumptions. And this because of philosophy’s 1/5

characteristic tendency to imagine object and subject as already given and already divided; a tendency that will lead it not only to think of photography in terms of model and copy, but also to think of philosophy precisely as a ‘model’, in the Platonic sense, for the ‘copy’ that is photography: photography would merely reproduce the apparatus of adequation-reproduction that philosophy posits as originary. And photography, rethought by aesthetic theories that are tributaries of philosophy, would end up spontaneously thinking of itself in these same terms. What is the result? A philosophy based in this mythic miscognition of photography can never think photography without resulting in a vicious circle: A philosophy of photography will always be a philosophy of philosophical photography, a philosophy of the photography of philosophy. Thus, paradoxically, philosophy was primordially affected by a photographic thinking before the empirical possibility of photography had emerged. Inversely, it is perhaps the emergence of photography as technological fact, that makes it possible, in rigorously rethinking the photo, to extract from it a model in the second sense you mentioned – a model that instantiates under empirical conditions a certain axiomatic ‘stance’ of thought that no longer chases philosophically after the originary ‘flash’, but takes this moment as its primary material. Perhaps. And yet you insist, as ever, that the technological emergence of photography would only be an ‘occasional cause’: that is, photography may be a model or a simulation of a kind of thought that would exceed philosophy, but, in constructing our ‘photo-fictional camera’ we must acknowledge that this thought was already assembled and operative in advance of its construction: for, as you often remind us, we should not make the mistake of imagining that thought needs to ‘step outside’ of philosophy – into which, in fact, it never entered. It is a question of rediscovering in the relation between photograph and photographed, an empirical simulation of the relation between thought and the real, a unilateral relation that is dissimulated by philosophy when it posits this relation ‘under’ philosophical thought. Here I merely attempt to reinforce the efforts you made to fend off in advance the impression that it was a matter of metaphor or pedagogical simile. Photography, essentially – that is to say, beyond the occasional facts of its social, technological, aesthetic dimensions – opens up to us a way of thinking, of which it is a ‘scale model’. However, one question that remains intriguing is why this happens to be. Why photography? A question that must be answerable, if your contention is to be justified, and if we are to allay the suspicion that we are dealing here, once more, with philosophy’s predilection for the lumino-topological. Many traditional theories fall by the wayside in The Concept of Non-Photography, as you insist that the analyses of ‘philosophies of photography’ invariably make the mistake of considering the primary relation in photography to be that between an image, and the object that it is an image ‘of’ – a relation of adequation between an object and what is perceived of it ‘in-photo’, both given spontaneously to the gaze. Thus, a relation that supposes a prior correlation between photographed and photograph even as it posits limits on the latter’s purchase on the former. Looking beyond the relation of a photograph with what it is supposedly ‘of’, you suggest that what is seen in any photo is Identity, or the One – or, in the new vocabulary you have used today, that we must think these two ‘sides’ according to their superposition. Rather than a transcendent realism which, staying within the horizon of philosophy’s complementary dualisms, suggests that the photographic image adequates to a real that transcends it, you mobilise an immanent realism or a realism ‘in the last instance’. According to this ‘reduction’, the photograph and the photographed are ‘of’ the same One, they are superposed in a real phenomenon that is no longer objectified, but lived. 2/5

Photography itself produces new presentations of the real which on one hand you qualify as ‘scientific’, given the automatic, blind, irreflective nature of its process; and on the other hand, as pertaining to ‘fiction’, given its infinite capacity for the production of aleatory images (but this term ‘fiction’ is one that I would like you to clarify). It is in this sense that it suggests a type of thinking that is no longer philosophical, for it no longer immediately re-places its irreflective symbolisation within a reflexivity supposed to be the highest power of thought. But it is also a type of thinking that falls short of ‘science’ in the sense of a specific established science – for, as photograph pure and simple, its irreflective manipulation of symbols is not subordinated to any finality – hence the ability of this technical apparatus to give rise to art, or to fiction. Photographic thinking therefore has an immanent relation to the real; it ceaselessly writes symbols of the real without cleaving it and without presupposing an adequation with what it symbolizes. Here I would like to introduce another interlocutor. Vilém Flusser, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, proposes that we have to learn to read photographs: read, because photographs are not images but a type of writing. The reign of the photograph seems to belong to a resurgence of the image – images are everywhere. But (according to Flusser) photographs are not what they seem to be – faithful and accurate images of a world. In fact, he suggests, the photograph belongs to an historical dialectic between magical consciousness and historical consciousness, between imagination and conceptualization. In historical consciousness, we think the world through concepts. But the photographic image corresponds to a sort of automation of concepts: in the photographic apparatus we think the world through concepts pre-packed into an apparatus, through a sort of technical magic, without even realizing it. – He thus argues that ‘the function of technical images is to emancipate their receivers from the need to think conceptually, by substituting an imagination of the second degree for conceptualization.’ It seems that, availing ourselves of your photo-fictional apparatus, we could turn Flusser’s argument against him. He calls for reflective conceptualization to ward off automatism. But for you, it is philosophy that effects an insidious, silent, spontaneous mediation: philosophy claims to present us with reality, whereas it presents us with a ‘world’ that is always already philosophy’s conceptually-mediated image of the real – that is. So perhaps, inverting Flusser’s formula, it is through a thinking inspired by the automatism of the camera, pared down to its most essential gesture, that we might escape from philosophy’s ‘technical magic’. Now, photography has since its appearance been understood as heralding a new way of seeing – one that would depose painterly representation, one that was ‘scientific’ and unmediated, one that was ‘objective’, and so on. The very process of painting’s decoupling from expression and depiction is initiated when Seurat, at once thrilled and mortified by the shadow cast by photography upon painting, turns himself, his hand and his eye, into an automated, passive machine of reproduction, simulating with his pointillised grisaille the chemical grain of the photo. Which opens the way to the ‘phenomenological reduction’ of impressionism, the crucible of modern and contemporary realisms. In presenting the painting as nothing but an assemblage of colored paint from a tube, it also allows the thinking of the tube of paint as readymade – as minimally-mediated presentation of the real as art. (See the stimulating exchange between Thierry de Duve and Éric Alliez on this topic). So, it is true that art is confronted just as crucially as philosophy, if not more so, with the problems of representation and realism. Maybe you will agree that here a certain ‘modernity’ has been achieved in art which philosophy has yet to attain to. There have been many attempts to define and redefine what ‘realism’ would be in art: how to present, 3/5

rather than a depiction, the real itself? The readymade, and the minimalist object, attempt to do so, but ultimately immanentize the real and the artwork only to present their object, once again, ‘under’ art – objectified according to certain finalities specific to the artistic ‘world’. In this respect, as Baudrillard suggests, perhaps the true power of the photograph lies in its essential indifference to art: the fact that its affect is not that of artistic beauty or conceptual edification, but that of pure visual fascination, so that it loses its proper nature when appropriated by/as art. Nevertheless, artists have presented photographs as representational images, as documentation, but also as nonrepresentational records of process, as abstracts, as sculptural objects … In the British artist Simon Starling’s 2004 work ‘One Ton’, by placing a platinum-print photograph in the context of an investigation into the mining and extraction of platinum, he makes it oscillate between an image and a ‘receptacle for a certain quantity of metal’ – both a minimalist sculptural object and a representation. Now, just as, in non-standard philosophy, you seek not to negate philosophy but to retain it as material, so you describe the photograph as symbolic image of the World which, however, revokes the World’s governing philosophical structure of representation. However, the type of collapsing of representative realism into materialist realism in this work, does not seem to be what you intend. It is not the photograph as matter that you wish to invoke, but the photograph as materiel, the phenomenon of the photo as bloc of lived experience. This is the photograph seen according to the vision-in-One. This recalls a problematic presented by Art and Language, when they ask: what is a picture ‘of’? The question can solicit a descriptive or a genetic response; that is, a picture can be ‘of’ something in so far as it resembles that thing; or it can be ‘of’ something in so far as it retains a genetic or causal link to that thing. Sophisticated forms of realism eschew the former in favour of the latter; and at the limit of this thinking, we could say that any work, any image, is indeed ‘of’ the same thing – once we take the ‘photographic stance’, reducing the transcendence of the photographic image, its reaching from within itself to a world at once divided from and presupposed by it, once we treat it instead as pure phenomenon, then every photo is an ‘identity-photo’, a photo of identity or of the real. Photographs ‘superpose’ themselves on the real without doubling it – or, in Martin Creed’s idempotent equation (and excusing his ignorance of non-standard terminology): ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world’. In the same way, rather than philosophical concepts being concepts ‘of’ a real from which they are divided but which presupposes them as condition of this division, non-standard philosophy proposes to treat them, let’s say, as artist’s materials, with which to create new fictions that never double the real, but each time write it in new symbolic combinations, graphisms whose syntax is no longer transcendentally prescribed. The photograph’s implacable flattening of the World would indeed be a model of philo-fiction in its refusal to articulate itself according to philosophy’s planning and planing [planification] of the real. You describe the photo itself as non-worldly and as giving rise to a paradoxically realist fiction. But it is ultimately overdetermined by the World, by the relation of image to its represented. Whereas in its ‘theoretic universalisation’ or axiomatisation, which is photo-fiction, the concept-photo is ‘of’ Identity or the One, with the World acting merely as the occasion upon which each shot produces ever new images of the One. But then, what kind of knowledge is or could be produced by this writing, given that it is subtracted from philosophy but falls short of being an effective science? Freed from philosophical neurosis and its photographic avatar, wouldn’t it become a sort of psychotic writing, fabricating speculative concepts on the basis of snapshots of lived experience? Must we, after Seurat’s example, turn our minds into passive machines that merely register intensities, a kind of conceptual pointillism? Furthermore, in what way would they be, any longer, concepts, unless they were once more charged with a certain role of representation? 4/5

It is this transfinite multiplicity of shots, and the chaos we expect them to produce, that seems paradoxical: what is it that constitutes the productivity of photo-fiction, once the World is ‘out of shot’; is it purely sterile, or if not, what kind of texts could it produce? Or, if there can be no answer to this question, how should we proceed, following its construction, to power-up and put this machine to work? 5/5

readthis.wtf /writing/nick-land-an-experiment-in-inhumanism/ Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism - 2012 On the republishing of Nick Land’s work (Fanged Noumena, Falmouth/NY: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011) For anyone who knew the author of these texts, it is difficult to speak about them without recalling Nick Land ‘himself’ (taking into account the fact that, according to the present-day Nick Land, the person who wrote them no longer exists). Not because one wishes to promote a personality cult around Land (something he himself was accused of at the time), but to emphasize that these texts are the residuum of a series of experiments. ‘Thoughtexperiments,’ but not the sort that philosophers conduct from the comfort of their armchairs: For the Land who penned these texts was one of those few thinkers who was prepared to let thought take him beyond such contemplative comforts; to put himself at risk in the name of philosophy—even if, in the process, he would repudiate that ancient name, along with its traditions. As Iain Hamilton Grant (a former student of Land’s, now an important philosopher in his own right) says: ‘In the last half of the twentieth century, academics talked endlessly about the outside, but no-one went there. Land, by exemplary contrast, made experiments in the unknown unavoidable for a philosophy caught in the abstractive howl of post-political cybernetics.’ Land courted the ‘outside’ of philosophy, combining it with other disciplines—from nanotechnology to occultism, from computation to anthropology. But he sought the ‘outside’ in a more radical sense, for this interdisciplinary exploration was undertaken in view of one sole aim: to escape the anthropic conservatism of ‘philosophical thought,’ itself grafted from common sense, in turn the product of evolutionary processes whose contingencies were determined by the geological history of the planet. Land’s struggle against what he called the ‘Human Security System’—the net result of this crushing cosmic legacy of ‘stratification,’ normalizing and limiting what intelligence can do—made it necessary to tirelessly search for new perspectives. How else to prosecute such an impossible combat against the incarceration of potential intelligence in the cosmically-reactionary forms of the social, the institutional, the personal, and the philosophical? * When I arrived, in 1992, at Warwick University—a dour, concrete campus set in the UK’s grey and drizzling Midlands —I was a callow and nervous teenager, also filled with the hope that philosophy would afford me access to some kind of ‘outside’—or at the very least, some intellectual adventure. Almost entirely overcome with disappointment and horror at the reality of academic life within weeks, it was a relief to meet one lecturer who would, at last, say things that really made sense: Think of life as an open wound, which you poke with a stick to amuse yourself. Or: Philosophy is only about one thing: making trouble. Land was tolerant of my hanging out in his office smoking and drinking coffee, as he (habitually hyperexcited and quivering with stimulants) worked on his comically antiquated green-screen Amstrad computer, and eagerly relayed the latest insights he had garnered from molecular biology, nanotechnology or neuroscience. One could not help but be impressed by the sense of a man whose entire being was invested in his work; for whom philosophy was neither a nine-to-five affair nor a straightforwardly life-affirming labor; and who took seriously the ridiculously megalomaniacal aspiration of philosophy to synopsize everything that is known into a grand speculative framework. He was uniquely able to open up students’ minds to the conceptual 1/7

resources of the history of philosophy in a way that made philosophical thinking seem urgent and concrete: a cache of weapons for ‘making trouble,’ a toolkit for escaping from everything dismal, inhibiting, and tedious. Before I met Land, I already knew of him through the gossip of new undergraduates taken aback by what they had heard on the grapevine: Did Land really claim that he had come back from the dead? Did he really think he was an android sent from the future to terminate human security? In person he belied these outrageous claims (both of which he did indeed make in writing), being thoroughly polite and amiable and, above all, willing to engage in earnest conversation with anyone. He had paid his philosophical dues and could hold his own in a discussion with any professor; these discussions often turning vituperative, however, as Land railed against the institution and its conservatism. But he preferred to spend his time in the bar with undergraduates, always buying the drinks, smoking continually, and conversing animatedly (and where possible, vehemently) about any topic whatsoever. Land was perhaps not the greatest teacher from the point of view of obtaining a sober and solid grounding in one’s subject. But more importantly, his lectures had about them a genuine air of excitement—more like Deleuze at the Sorbonne in ’68 than the dreary courses in Epistemology one had to endure at a provincial British university in the 90s. Not only was the course he taught pointedly entitled ‘Current French Philosophy’ (a currency otherwise alien to our curriculum); more importantly, Land’s teaching was also a sharing of his own research-in-progress. This was unheard-of: philosophy actually being done, rather than being interpreted at second-hand?! He would sweep his audience into a speculative vortex of philosophy, economics, literature, biology, technology, and disciplines as-yet unnamed—before immobilizing them again with some startling claim or gnomic declaration. And as Land spoke, he prowled the classroom, sometimes clambering absentmindedly over the common-room chairs like an outlandish mountain goat, sometimes poised squatting on the seat of a chair like an overgrown mantis. For Land, everything began with Kant—whose ‘critique’ he read as a kind of unconscious dramatisation of the confrontation between social conservatism and the corrosive powers of Capital; and continued through the savage outgrowths of Kantian critique developed by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Bataille, who prioritised problematisation and troublemaking over order. He had been intensively schooled in Heidegger and deconstructive thinking, which he was liable to be dismissive of, although their basic ambitions continued to inhabit his work. But he would find his chief inspiration in Deleuze and Guattari’s ambitious ‘universal history of contingency,’ Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which he sought to extract from its French-philosophical, soixante-huitard political matrix. According to Land, this work packed a conceptual charge fit to blow apart its still too traditionally ‘political’ ambitions. His early work already displayed philosophical brilliance and an energetic sense of purpose (impatience, even) in relation to these philosophical sources. But at a certain point in the mid-90s, it was as if someone had thrown a switch, rerouting Land away from any known circuit of philosophical study, and sending a new energy coursing through his writing that changed its form, style and content—making the three virtually indistinguishable, in fact. Increasingly alien elements were amalgamated with his philosophical argumentation, which increasingly drew on the more extravagant exponents of post-structuralism (Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy), giving rise to an entirely new genre of ‘theory-fiction.’ Through this new form, Land effectively reignited what he saw as being the fundamental stakes of Heideggerianism, structuralism and poststructuralism: the staging of a ‘break-out’ from the history of Western thought. A renewed effort that was necessary since, despite themselves, those philosophical movements had delivered their nascent antihumanism back into the comfortable hands of an institutionallysanctioned priesthood—that precious, contemplative, delibidinized francophile cult of ‘Continental Philosophy’ that emerged triumphant in the Anglophone academy of the 1990s. 2/7

Land’s search for another way to think thus took the form of an experimentation with writing; but it also went beyond writing. The quest for some ‘signal’ that was not merely the repugnant narcissistic reflection of the Human Security System would demand a total disregard of normative method. Land sought channels of communication with the ‘outside’ not via an interminable and internal critique of philosophical texts, but in popular culture: in the sensibilities of the first generation (mine) to have grown up surrounded by technology; in the cyberpunk extrapolations made by authors such as William Gibson who observed that generation’s ‘reprogramming’; in the futureshock narratives of movies such as Terminator, Bladerunner, Predator, and Videodrome; and in the rhythmic re-formattings of the body in dance culture and the hybrid, cut-up antilanguage of the digitised sonics that fueled it (especially Jungle, just emerging in the mid-90s). In these practices Land saw thanatos—the death-drive, the unknown outside—insinuating its way into the human by way of eros. The unbridled production of new brands of erotic adventure within capitalism ushered in a transformation of the human, cutting its bonds with the (cultural, familial, and ultimately biological) past and opening it up to new, inorganic distributions of affect. Compared to the known—the strata of organic redundancy in which ‘the human’ was interred—such unknowns were to be unhesitatingly affirmed. And philosophical thought also had to hook up with eros if it sought to engage with these new possibilities. Consequently, rather than simply writing about these things, Land proposed to unlock the forces of dehumanisation they mobilised, and to distil them in the form of ‘experimental microcultures’: to intensify capitalism’s undoing of language through new practices of writing, speaking, and thinking, but also by reconnecting the body to its ‘molecular’ undercurrents, loosening-up the physical and vocal constitution that locked it into the regime of signification.1 In taking this approach, Land not only renounced the respect of his academic peers, but many times even lost the confidence of his supporters, as he sought by any means possible to drill through the sedimented layers of normative human comportment. Strange scenes ensued: A seminar on A Thousand Plateaus where a group of nonplussed graduates were encouraged to ‘read’ the chapter titles of the book by turning them into acronyms that were then plotted as vectors on a diagram of a QWERTY keyboard (‘qwertopology’); A three-week long experiment in refusing to speak in the first person, instead referring to the collective entity ‘Cur’ (comprising the hardcore participants in ‘Current French Philosophy,’ who extended the lectures into a continual movable seminar); and, most memorably, a presentation at the conference Virtual Futures in 1996: Rather than reading a paper, in this collaboration with artist collective Orphan Drift, under the name of ‘DogHead SurGeri,’2 and complete with jungle soundtrack, Land lay behind the stage, flat on the floor (a ‘snake-becoming’ forming the first stage of bodily destratification), croaking enigmatic invocations intercut with sections from Artaud’s asylum poems. In this delirious vocal telegraphy, meaning seemed to disintegrate into sheer phonetic matter, melting into the cut-up beats and acting directly on the subconscious. As Land began to speak in his strange, choked-off voice (perhaps that ‘absurdly high pitched … tone … ancient demonists described as “silvery”’ that he would later report being taunted by),3 the disconcerted audience began to giggle; the demon voice wavered slightly until Land’s sense of mission overcame his momentary self-consciousness; and as the ‘performance’ continued the audience fell silent, eyeing each other uncertainly as if they had walked into a funeral by mistake. Embarrassment was regarded by Land as just one of the rudimentary inhibitions that had to be broken down in order to explore the unknown—in contrast to the forces of academic domestication, which normalised by fostering a sense of inadequacy and shame before the Masters, before the edifice of what is yet to be learnt—thus reversing the libidinal charge of the ‘unknown’ and turning it into an endless duty, an infinite labour. * Perhaps as a result of this maximally broad conception of ‘philosophy,’ of my fellow students of the time only a few now hold academic positions (and mostly in precariously marginal positions, or at art schools rather than in 3/7

philosophy departments). On the other hand, I can count among them novelists (Hari Kunzru, James Flint), musicians (Kode9, one of the progenitors of dubstep), and writers such as Mark Fisher (blogger ‘K-Punk,’ author of Capitalist Realism).4 Others have sought out Land from afar, like Iranian writer Reza Negarestani, who tracked him down on the web and began a long-running online conversation which led to the writing of the extraordinary book Cyclonopedia.5 At the time, the happenings at Warwick also attracted interested parties from outside the student body: Russell Haswell, now a renowned sound artist and DJ, remembers being drawn in from the nearby city of Coventry by rumours of the strange ideas that were being aired by Land and others. Now-globally-acclaimed artists Jake and Dinos Chapman discovered Land’s work and in 1996 commissioned him to write a text for the catalogue of their first major show at the ICA in London.6 One of their prints, paying homage to Land’s influence, now (dis)graces the cover of Fanged Noumena. In 1995, with the arrival at Warwick of Sadie Plant (author of situationist history The Most Radical Gesture and cyberfeminist manual Zeros and Ones), Land’s experimental activities found a temporary institutional base in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a student-run research group of uncertain status, and which, upon Plant’s rather swift departure, the Philosophy department would deny had ever existed.7 Both within the university and elsewhere, the CCRU organised events and interventions—‘Virotechnics,’ ‘Swarmachines,’ ‘Afrofutures’—in which theory was used as an element alongside music, art and performance, but always with the backbone of an essentially ‘Landian’ combination of conceptual rigour and experimental method. They self-published an eclectic pamphlet series Abstract Culture—described in music magazine The Wire as ‘a flow of conceptual disturbance in which unforeseen recognitions flash up like alien snapshots of a familiar world.’ One of the Abstract Culture series (‘swarms’) included Land’s classic text ‘Meltdown,’ with its invocation of apocalyptic planetary techno-singularity—its dark anticipative delight a nihilistic riposte to the ascendant Californian cyber-optimism of Wired magazine. Things could only get weirder. Land, increasingly claiming that he was inhabited by various ‘entities’—Cur, Vauung, Can Sah—joined the CCRU in developing a number of quasi-Lovecraftian mythologies or ‘hyperstitions.’ These included a fictional personification of the CCRU collective itself, in the shape of cryptographer Professor Daniel Barker. Barker, a descendent of A Thousand Plateaus’ Professor Challenger (himself a ‘hyperstitional’ appropriation of a Conan Doyle character) was said to have developed the ‘Cosmic Theory of Geotrauma,’ which combines Freud’s theory of trauma with a syncretic perspective on the natural history of the planet.8 A sketch of a fictional speculative system, ‘geotraumatics’ draws on everything from geology and microbial evolution to human biology and vocalisation, reinterpreting Earth-history as a series of nested traumas of which human subjectivity is the symptom. ‘Barker’ sought to hybridize Nietzschean genealogy, DeleuzoGuattarian stratoanalysis and information theory in order to ‘decipher’ this cosmic pain: creating a schizoanalytic geocryptography to replace oedipal psychoanalysis. In works from this period, Land’s anti-humanist speculation is combined with an evident enjoyment of wordplay and a renewed appreciation for the anthropological, mythological and psychoanalytical sources of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. He delighted in ‘melting’ into the CCRU collective, and the latter undoubtedly succeeded as a ‘microculture’: Their unattributable, arcane writings, telling of strange inhuman entities, hyperstitional personages and syncretic pantheons, are uniquely disturbing and compelling: it is as if the group had collectively accessed hitherto undiscovered realms of bizarre archetypes. They successfully smeared the line between the real and what they called the ‘hyperstitional’: fictions that make themselves real through collective practice. 4/7

Eventually, however, Land would peel off from CCRU, as all of this intellectual hybridisation and microcultural activity found a concentrated, schematic form in a thinking and a practice of what Deleuze and Guattari had outlined, rather vaguely, in A Thousand Plateaus, as ‘nomad numbering.’ Currency and digital technology, according to Land, unveiled a side of numbers that subtracted them completely from the power-structures of meaning and signification that made language a prison-house for intelligence; it even removed numbers from the stratified realms of mathematics, into a pure, flat plane of immanent materiality inhabited only by ‘tics.’ Accelerating ‘in-silico’ Capital’s planetary experiment of ‘tacking’ human culture onto these tic-numbers so as to tear it apart, Land believed, would allow him to complete what deconstruction could only gesture at in its endless cycles of philosophical titillation: It would dismantle the power institutionalized in language and sense, and open up a reliable communication line with something unknown—a pure material dispersion not preprocessed by models derived from the past. Land would increasingly be found, having taken the very minimum amount of sleep possible (by this point he lived in his office) pursuing intense ‘mechanomical’ research involving shuffling symbols endlessly on the green screen of his obsolete machine into the depths of the night. From a romantic vision of escape through collective libidinized action, he had seemingly arrived at a cold and largely unproductive abstract practice, pursued in isolation. Or, one could say, he had (following the poetic interludes of his book on Bataille, The Thirst for Annihilation) returned to a kind of poetry, albeit one subtracted from all expression and meaning. And yet it is a token of what Mark Fisher has called Land’s ‘reckless integrity’ that, once he had whittled down his problematic to this minimal kernel, he gave himself up entirely to it. He would eagerly impart his latest numerical findings to those who still listened; but invariably they did not follow. Let’s get this out of the way: In any normative, clinical, or social sense of the word, very simply, Land did ‘go mad.’ Afterwards he did not shrink from meticulously documenting this process, as if writing up a failed (?) experiment.9 He regarded the degeneration of his ‘breakthrough’ into a ‘breakdown’ as ultimate and humiliating proof of the incapacity of the human to escape the ‘headcase,’ the prison of the personal self. Wretchedly, for Land, it was no longer possible to tell whether his speculative epiphanies had been (as he had believed at the height of his delirium) glimmers of access to the transcendental—or just the pathetic derangements of a psyche pushed to the derisory limits of its tolerance. The experiment was over. * When I contacted Land about the republication of his works, he did not protest, but had nothing to add: It’s another life; I have nothing to say about it—I don’t even remember writing half of those things … I don’t want to get into retrospectively condemning my ancient work—I think it’s best to gently back off. It belongs in the clawed embrace of the undead amphetamine god. Land had published one book during the brief career that ended when he was ‘retired’ from Warwick in the late 90s. In 1992 The Thirst for Annihilation had appeared,10 a book on Georges Bataille that, as Sadie Plant suggests, could better be described as a book with Bataille. Spending a good amount of the first chapter excoriating secondary scholarship for its timidity, Land goes on to chart his own ‘inner experience’ in communing with Bataille’s lacerating thought. Throughout the book, philosophical analysis disintegrates periodically into poetry, self-loathing and atheistic rants. Thirst remains well-regarded in certain circles, and is even talismanic for some who come across it in their search for fierce, transgressive literature. It is certainly a unique and powerful book. For many of us, however, it never captured the breadth and inventiveness of Land’s work during the mid- to late 90s. With Fanged Noumena the disparate works written during this period were at last brought together, and for the first time the trajectory of his thought could be charted and its philosophical import appreciated. Writing the introduction together with Ray 5/7

Brassier (also a former student of Land’s, a penetrating and original philosopher, and one who has never disowned the ‘embarrassing’ legacy of Land’s influence), I realized how much Land’s charisma and reputation—and his own tendency to dismiss philosophy tout court at every opportunity and to bait his enemies with hyperbole—had prevented any systematic philosophical appreciation of his work. As discussed above, his work may have exerted most of its influence in other spheres. But it should be recognized that this influence is ultimately rooted in the penetrating and original nature of his rethinking of how to ‘do philosophy’—or how to turn it into something else more probing, more damaging. Here was a young lecturer, working in arguably one of the most staid disciplines in the academy, who in the mid-90s energetically addressed issues that at the time were decidedly outré, but are now a staple of debate: biotechnology, radical Islam, the internet as an addictive drug, and the rise of China as an economic power all make appearances in Fanged Noumena, in texts penned while Land’s peers rattled on about (at best) poetry and painting, Presence and the history of metaphysics. Land opened up new possibilities at a time when ‘Continental Philosophy’ was beginning a sclerotic decline into institutional factions, each with their respective masters and their voluminous Bibles, their initiation rites and liturgies. He gave us another way to read the history of philosophy that made it fierce, communicative, connective and alive. Of course, his eventual collapse was occasion for the system to move in and heal the wound, in effect erasing all trace of this other path. But it is being rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers who, grown tired with philosophy’s incarceration within ‘the text,’ are returning to the question of ‘thinking (with) the outside.’ Land’s uncompromising work also had—and retains—the power to polarize. On the one hand, leftists find indigestible its reckless aspect—the celebration of capitalism for its power to indiscriminately dismantle tradition, hierarchy and organisation. But by the same token it presents a bracing alternative both to pious, benighted humanist ethics and to the voluntarist politics of the miraculous ‘event’ peddled in recent years by Badiou and others. On the other hand, moderate rightwingers equally deplore Land’s irresponsibility and his abandonment of the pretense that the vector of capitalism is linked constitutively to any positive human program. Now working as a journalist in Shanghai (‘neo-China,’ as he used to write, in the days when its futuristic skyline was but a fevered anticipation on his part), Land still occasionally issues online commentaries, forging a unique journalistic-speculative alloy.11 They still attest to his unique talent for addressing the surface of the contemporary globe in direct and informedly, without renouncing the philosophical ambition to construct a ‘universal history’ of this planetary insanity. * One of Land’s more memorable theses has it that, owing to the positive-feedback process of capitalism’s artificialisation of the Earth, this process doubles its intensity in ever-decreasing periods: Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756,1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 … Nothing human makes it out of the near-future. […] Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level 2?12 6/7

For Land, such theoretical propositions were also machines for excitation, devices to meld with and accelerate the planetary intensification that would finally allow the ‘body without organs’ to shed its human skin. If Philosophy thereby becomes a species of hype (or ‘hyperstition,’ according to the CCRU’s neologism), are Land’s detractors (now, as then) right to say that his outlook is ultimately indistinguishable from a passive acceptance of a ‘neoconservative’ agenda—that his theoretical advocacy of the ‘acceleration’ of the capitalist process, in practice simply endorses the maintenance of capitalist power structures rather than their dismantling (whether revolutionary or ameliorative)? It is indeed true that Land’s attempts to reach the intensive burncore of the planetary process, by hooking up conceptual thought to libidinising cultural energy, was always balanced between a romanticism of abolition and a dubious desire to identify with the ‘exciting’ and ‘intense’ phenomena presented by capitalism. Land gradually abandoned as too-conservative even Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘cautious’ division of capitalism into a ‘good’ destratifying or deterritorialising side and the ‘bad’ mechanisms of reterritorialisation. In the name of a nonnegotiable hatred for the fetters of the human, he may have risked wholesale capitulation to the new powers (all-toohuman) that take hold of the earth as soon as its old power structures are dismantled—and which make use of every base reflex of homo sapiens for their own, ultimately banal, ends. But to take this point of view is to avoid confronting the most potent aspects of Land’s writings. His heresy was twofold: it consisted not only in his attempt to ‘melt’ writing immanently into the processes it described, but also in his dedication to thinking the real process of Capital’s insidious takeover of the human (and the legacy of this process within philosophy)—and in admitting the laughable impotence of ‘man’ in the face of this process. In this respect he has not yet been ‘proved wrong,’ despite a recent upsurge in wishful thinking. His work still poses acutely—in a variety of forms—the challenge of thinking contemporary life on this planet: A planet piloted from the future by something that comes from outside personal or collective human intention, and which we can no longer pretend has anything to do with reason or progress. 7/7

readthis.wtf /writing/response-to-quentin-meillassoux/ Response to Quentin Meillassoux - 2012 1 I feel like we have come a long way since in 2007 Ray Brassier introduced me to Quentin’s work, and I translated and published ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’ in Collapse 2, the first of what were to be many translations I did of his work, continuing to this very day, since we are about to publish a translation of Quentin’s new book, which I will discuss a little in a moment. Collapse 2 was published under the title of ‘Speculative Realism’, two words that at the time meant nothing to almost everybody, and which I now often wish I had never heard! Quentin already said enough yesterday about the divergences between the projects of the four philosophers who have unfortunately been burdened with this brand, so I won’t dwell on it. Quentin finished by acknowledging that the derivation he has outlined for us is only a first step and does not represent a decisive completion of his project. As such it would make no sense to assess whether it succeeds or not. What I would like to do is to stage my own recapitulation or reconstruction of Quentin’s project, and then make some observations regarding how some of the strikingly strange outcomes of the project reflect the way in which the problem was posed in the first place; and thus to bring to light certain decisions that underly the project as a whole, decisions that do not necessarily agree with my own conception of what a contemporary speculative project could be. 2 First of all I would like to suggest a distinction between correlationism, and what I will call the problem of correlationism. That is, I suggest that, in principle and perhaps in fact, correlationism exists before there is a problem of correlationism that demands the philosopher’s attention. The problem of correlationism is born of the disparate, apparently irreconcilable results of two chains of reasoning. One is correlationism itself, the apparent incapacity of reason to get beyond itself. And the other is the statements made by modern science about existences without manifestation. It is this disparity, of course, that is dramatised in After Finitude by the device of the Arche-Fossil. 3 And what was always very striking about the argument of After Finitude was that it presented a sort of ultimatum—it made it impossible any longer to avoid the irreconciliability of these two positions. It brought out the implicit ontological claim of scientific statements, arguing that they made absolutely no sense unless they were understood as referring to the thinkability of non-correlated objects. Something with which the doxa of correlationism apparently could not be reconciled. The force of the arche-fossil was that the reader found himself forced into a decision: either abandon all the deliverances of science, or give up correlationism and begin once again the quest to rationally justify a thinking of the absolute. 1/8

You see what I am driving at with the distinction between correlationism and the problem of correlationism: it is conceivable that one could have continued to be a correlationist entirely untroubled; it is this forcing of a recognition and a decision that I call the advent of the problem of correlationism, or the problematization of correlationism. It is the apparent irreconciliability of two modes of access to the real—one that demands to be understood as irredeemably mediated, and one that, to be accepted as valid, must be understood as absolute. In this way we could say that modern scientific knowledge is the occasional cause of the problem of correlationism. It is what brings its problematic nature to our attention in a way we can no longer ignore. This was the force of the opening chapter of After Finitude. In demonstrating that scientific statements about the arche-fossil must be understood as pertaining to an absolute, Quentin showed us this disparity—he asked us how we could bridge the gap between a knowledge caught in the circle of correlation, and a knowledge that apparently leapt beyond it. And he alerted us to a certain enigma within scientific knowledge: given that correlationism seemed to be uncircumventable, how could we account for this type of knowledge? Would we have to simply renounce it, or would we have to betray its inherent ontological claim by forcing it into a correlationist account? 4 Of course, what happened next in After Finitude confounded our expectations—because Quentin showed that in fact correlationism itself contained a concealed absolute, namely the facticity of the correlation itself. But what is interesting is that this does not so much bridge the gap as displace it, transforming the structure of the problem. For now, we have factiality providing us with a minimal absolute with maximum range: it tells us absolutely that everything is necessarily contingent. And we have scientific statements with their specific propositions on absolute existences. Now the gap is between the absolutely wide net thrown by factial speculation, and the realm of the scientific statement. The realm of reason has been re-unified, but there is now a gap, a disparity or a blind spot within it. Now the problem becomes to seek the real unification of these two. To discover the point at which scientific thought anchors itself into this maximally broad realm of the factial. We were of the opinion already that mathematical science somehow accedes to the absolute, but we could not reconcile this with the implacable logic of correlationism. Now we know that the correlation itself is anchored also in the absolute, and we know how it is so anchored, the task is that of a derivation: How is mathematics grounded on facticity; on the same ground as correlation? To make mathematics pass through the same singular point of absolute knowledge that grounds correlation. The task is still the same—to reconcile the implacable logic of correlationism with the apparent absolutizing capacity of scientific thought. But the gap to be bridged has been transformed by the discovery of the single point of support that is the principle of factiality. Could it be that, when we ‘do science’, we are supported, without knowing it, on this same point of absoluteness? Of course, the bridging of this new gap is the job of what Quentin calls the figures of factiality, one of which he has explained to us today. As we have seen, it is the empty sign that appears to potentially allow the closure of this gap between the generic net of primo-factiality and the local deutero-facts that are somehow grasped within it. 5 2/8

Now, perhaps I read Quentin’s paper while still under the influence of his new book, The Number and the Siren, which I spent the early part of the year translating. In any case, I couldn’t help but find myself making connections between the two. In The Number and the Siren Quentin speaks of a parallel transformation: the transformation of the aporia of literary modernity—the realisation that it is chance alone that governs all things—into a positive programme. He asks what kind of acts, what kind of works could make up such a positive programme, escaping from the nostalgia and tragedy of the ‘shipwreck’. The question becomes that of the type of rites or practices that may go along with the understanding of divine inexistence, of absolute contingency as the divine (or non-divine, if you prefer). One such he finds in Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés. I won’t spoil the fun for anyone, but essentially the argument of the book is that, in Mallarmé’s poem, through a very particular device embedded within it, the divine inexistence, as it were, comes among us. Quentin draws here on Mallarmé’s desire for some kind of collective ceremonial that would replace the Catholic Mass, as a collective experience of the divine; but this time, of the divine qua pure hazard, absolute contingency. The upshot is that Mallarmé—not Mallarmé the man, but Mallarmé qua figure of the author of this enigmatic, undecidable poem, which has a performative dimension, becomes the Christ in relation to absolute contingency as divine inexistence. And it occurred to me that it is in terms of this structure, of the divine inexistence and its christic visitation of the world, the diffusion among us of the divine principle, that we can understand what we called the occasional cause of the problem of correlationism—namely, the arche-fossil. It does indeed seem that—if Quentin is right, if scientific statements are ultimately founded on the principle of factiality—then the arche-fossil, or the scientific thought of the non-correlated object, is the point at which the absolute touches our world, diffuses itself among us, makes us capable of an extraordinary communication with the beyond, without our knowing quite how this miracle took place. (For this we need Quentin’s christology of the Figures). Accordingly, yesterday when Quentin spoke about the way in which he separates his project of speculative materialism from that of any science of this world, and today when he made the distinction between the primoabsolutizing capacity of thought in acceding to the principle of factiality, and the deutero-absolutizing capacity of thought in identifying absolute facts in this world, the death and ressurrection of the scientist as he passes into the realm of death and returns to deliver his truths, I thought of the primo- father and the deutero-son…. When Quentin announces that, qua speculative materialist, he is not interested in what is, in what is in this particular world, I could not help but think of John 18:36: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’. And when, with apparent magnanimity, he grants unconstrained ‘freedom’ to all non-speculative disciplines, allowing that the speculative materialist doesn’t interfere with ‘what is’, so that these disciplines are free to go about their business, at the same time (although he will deny it) giving them a somewhat inconsequential status in relation to philosophy… I cannot help but paraphrase Mark 12:17: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to the divine inexistence the things that are the divine inexistence’s’! 6 And I find something really troubling in this noli me tangere attitude on the part of the philosopher. It seems to me that it may deprive us of some of the radical challenge that modern science proposes to philosophy. That is, it seems to me that the provocation of the arche-fossil holds something more for us than this miraculous visitation. 7 3/8

Let’s go back to the first point. In what way does the use Quentin makes of the provocative power of the arche-fossil fall short of its true potential? As we have said, the arche-fossil produces the problem of correlationism; it forces us into the recognition that correlationism as doxa cannot co-exist with scientific statements: either scientific statements must be freighted with a ‘correlationist coefficient’—which essentially deprives them of their inherent singular ontological claim (this is, as I understand it, the outcome of an analysis such as Latour’s and Harman’s); or, correlationism itself must be transformed, its apparent relativism made to yield an absolute that can be reconciled with the absolute of the scientific statement (this is Quentin’s speculative solution). Now, one aspect of modern science as occasioning cause for the problem of correlation does indeed consist in its capacity to tell us something about a reality that is indifferent to our thinking it, and to our existence. But at the same time I believe we should acknowledge that there is another provocation that is contained within modern science: for it also reveals the contingency of thought itself. That is, it reveals how thought itself is a natural product that appears at a certain point in time, or over a certain timescale. In fact, this is arguably its primary effect: before we are able to use mathematics to carbon date geological strata and give them an absolute (if revisable) status, we are faced with the dilemmas of deep time, of the contingency of the earth, and thus the natural provenance of thought, which the romantic generation struggled with. And I must say, perhaps along with Iain Hamilton Grant, my vision of Speculative Realism is more tinged by this romanticist speculative science than with an attempt to bring back a Cartesian vision of science. I don’t believe we can erase this important stage in the philosophical vision of science. And this other aspect of the impact of modern science is linked to what Freud called the humiliations of man. Freud remarked that modern man had undergone three deep ‘narcissistic wounds’: Copernicus had demonstrated that the Earth is not the centre of the universe; Darwin, that the human being is a product of natural selection, emerging through the same blind material processes as every other creature; Finally, psychoanalysis was to undermine our impression that we are master of our own consciousness and destiny, for unconscious processes beyond our perception and control steer our relation to the world and to ourselves. These are ‘humiliations’ in the sense that they violate the spontaneous human attitude, the ‘natural’ perspective from which the human subject can consider itself the central, necessary and founding fact of the universe in which it lives. (In other words, they also are a challenge to correlationism). The content of the entire series of these ‘narcissistic wounds’ is that the thinking subject’s self-image is not a transparent and originary given from which all thinking must proceed, and upon which all thinking can be solidly based. It is the product of other, unconscious processes and events: processes indifferent to the human and to thought; events crucial for the emergence and continued existence of the latter, but which are non-correlated and contingent. Now, this sense of contingency—let’s say worldly contingency, as opposed to absolute contingency—is entirely excluded from Quentin’s philosophy. The important outcome of modern science, for him, it seems, rather than being a humiliation, is an exaltation of thought. Such worldly facts of contingency are not the business of the philosopher, for him (he renders them unto Caesar). But I would like to point out a couple of things: 4/8

Firstly, even when scientific statements are expressed in meaningless signs, these signs only become a deuteroabsolutizing statements when taken in the context of a great deal of non-mathematical context. And ultimately, they refer to facts that, themselves, are not mathematical. True, general laws might be formulated in empty signs, but in order to actually refer to anything (thus, to be deuteroabsolutizing, in Quentin’s sense) they also need signifiers, references to those things, which pass by way of natural language and by way of the empirical. From this point of view, the distinction between deutero-absolutizable statements and ‘hyperphysical sciences’ is not necessarily so clear-cut. In short, I am not convinced that statements made purely of empty signs are capable of yielding the type of statements Quentin wants them to. Secondly, it is not even clear that we can separate worldly contingency from absolute contingency through the criteria of mathematicization, because the humiliations Freud described are becoming increasingly mathematicized. Is there any less mathematics involved in an MRI brain scan than in the identification of a paleontological specimen or the charting of the spectrum of a star that died ten million years ago? 8 So, let’s restate more precisely the twofold demand that modern science makes upon speculative philosophical thought. Not only is the latter required to account for the possibility of making absolute statements, also—and no less importantly—it is required to give an account of how a thought that is instantiated locally, that is to say within worldly contingency, comes to have the capacity to make such statements. So, I would say, philosophy cannot leap to the absolute; it is required to make its way out, to set forth a continuous path, taking account of its local conditions on its way to the universal. What is problematic here is that, if we do not take the care to conduct this careful continuity of thought, then we are liable to introduce gaps, unbridgeable gaps. We end up with a kind of shell, a carapace of universal thought, but one that contains vacuoles, or which contains areas that we cannot touch upon, sequestered from our universal account. We need an account of the universal evolution from the global to the local, to complement an account of how the local instance of cognition or a particular instance of thought can access the global horizon of the universal. In other words, we need to ask: How can cognition approach nature or the real, how can a local instance of universal navigation—namely, knowledge—gain traction on the global horizon of the universal? This is what i described, in Collapse 2, as being the ‘ouroborian’ task of SR. It is a circle, but it is a virtous circle, the only possible way to a universal knowledge. The crux of this is as follows: Just because correlationism’s other is thinkable does not make it a special fact, a arche-fact as opposed to a fact. To think so implies a prejudicial privileging of thought, in fact a sort of secondary correlationism. To overvalue our own local starting point. If I can think the possible otherness, the contingency, of the correlation, what is important about this is not just the fact that I can think it, but what the contingency of the correlation means for my thought qua fact. 9 5/8

A kind of schema of this dismissal of worldly contingency is found in Quentin’s argument against anthropic reasoning (in ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’). Quentin argues that anthropic reasoning makes use of the same probabilising reasoning as Kant’s: that we are solicited to be astonished that the improbable conditions obtain to allow experience to be possible. Thus, Quentin argues, anthropism ultimately deduces a hidden finality from a highly-ordered reality. But anthropism in its rigorous form is a determination of the local limits within which our thought of the universal can take place. It is a matter of taking account, within our thought, of the worldly (cosmic) contingencies under which that thought takes place. It is a mitigation of the contingency of thinking, which consists in acknowledging that the local nature of our thought imposes constraints upon its access to the absolute, but at the same time, also consists in researching the specific nature of those constraints and applying them as a coefficient of thought, so as to make possible an asymptotic approach to the absolute. And, in fact, this is the way in which all scientific thought works: it includes—implicity or explicitly—within its statements caveats, parameters, and conditions that render the statement universal and absolute by counteracting its particular and non-absolute conditions of enunciation. What Quentin denigrates as ‘astonishment’ is, for a rigorous anthropism, a precise datum. In the same way, I argue that any thought that would accede to an absolute must also be a geo-philosophy, in that it must take into account the terrestrial nature of thought, not so as to relativise that thought, but so as to bring it nearer to universality by plotting a continuous path from its particularity to that universality. 10 So for me, the question is always: How can we articulate the exalting fact that knowledge can (however potentially, revisably) access absolute knowledge, with the humiliating facts of worldly contingency? This is not to re-relativise or re-correlate the capacity of rational thought. What the provocation of the arche-fossil challenges us to do is to uphold the absolutizing capacity and the autonomy of rationality, whilst at the same time reconciling it with the empirical facts about the emergence and eventual extinction of beings capable of exercising this capacity. We must reinscribe these capacities within the reality that they grasp, because to do otherwise exposes us to new philosophical antinomies, brings back a deus ex machina in the form of the god of the gaps, even if this god is an inexistent one—as we see in Quentin’s advocacy of ‘dualisms everywhere’. We have to ask whether this is a price worth paying. Let’s suppose that we are indeed able, by means of several Figures, to account for the possibility of the formulation of mathematical statements on the basis of the principle of factiality. Where would this get us? It would make thought’s access to reality fully accountable in terms of rationality itself, but at the cost of leaving this capacity for rationality itself as an exception to reality—and what’s more would introduce all of these other gaps that Quentin talked about yesterday. 11 Now, let’s finally try to address this in terms of the empty sign, which Quentin used in his presentation. I would like to go back to Peirce’s philosophical project, which introduces the empty sign as a key figure. And I do so with caution, since I am no expert on Peirce. 6/8

For Peirce, the empty or free sign is not apprehendable immediately by the subject. The freeness of the free sign belongs to the twofold vector of Peirce’s project, which brings together what he calls tychism—which is very close to Quentin’s absolute contingency—and synechism, the postulate of universal continuity (all that is real is, insofar as it is real, continuous in some way or another). In this way Peirce defines a coherent speculative project that allows for an understanding of the absolute and its regionalisation, its localisations. Far from approaching directly the meaninglessness of sign and treating genericity as given in the sphere of the subject, Peirce’s aim is to allow for the subject to approach or navigate concept spaces conditioned by the free sign. For Peirce, we need contingency and continuity. We can approach the idea of the meaningless sign only through concept spaces that are, to start with, anchored in the regional instantiation of meaning. In this way Peirce asks the question: How can a local subject embark upon the synthetic project of a universal reason? We grant that the local instance can gain traction on the initial meaninglessness of the sign, but if you suppose it possible to approach the meaningless sign in its meaninglessness immediately, you come up with problems, the god of gaps, as we have discussed. To understand the meaningless sign, or the blank sheet of assertion as Peirce calls it, it must be approached step by step, asymptotically, through its local instantiations. For this navigation, all sorts of tools (not just mathematics) are necessary. They are necessary to track the way in which regionalised instances of the universal fall into non-trivial forms of continuity with the universal. To follow the thread of the universal through the continuity of the worldly, not to imagine it as having divine visitation in the worldly. The full modality of the meaningless sign, tychism or absolute contingency, is foreclosed to the subject. But since this contingency is coalesced with continuity, the meaningless sign is ramified into particular instances, in other words absolute contingency gives rise, thorough continuity, to a spectrum of worldly contingency through which it can be approached. This gives the possibility of a coherent epistemological project that operates, so to speak, on ‘both sides’ of the problem of the arche-fossil—humiliation and exaltation. Peirce’s project is speculative in this sense: the final goal of thought is indeed to reconcile the locality of our mediate knowledge of entities with the universally identical contingency of every entity (the ‘blank sheet of assertion’). However one cannot do so by making one example of contingency (that of the correlation) absolute. 12 To finish with, then, I will say the following: The task is indeed to attain a thought of the absolute, through an apprehension of the contingency of beings. In effect, we have to learn to intuit in every entity its contingency, just as Quentin described. Galileo told us that ‘the book of nature’ is written in the language of mathematics. As Quentin suggests, we need to learn that, in fact, it is written in a meaningless language, it is written with the sole mark of contingency. The ascesis of speculative materialism would be to learn to apprehend the world as such. But does this mean that qua speculative materialists we have to renounce all interest in the multiple narratives, plots, adventures, objects that this book is full of? No, because the book does not consist solely of these marks alone. It is something like an illuminated manuscript with endless, ramified commentaries. These are the accretive structures of worldly contingency that relate, in each case, groups of meaningless signs to the totality of which they are a part. And this book is also our biography, and thus 7/8

also an instruction manual on its own reading. Quentin presents us with only two options: To read the book as if it were a novel, so that through repetition each mark becomes pregnant with what we have already read, giving rise to a qualitative effect that is the product of our reading rather than of the meaningless marks (repetition); or, to read each mark as if it were divorced from the page, as if each mark came immediately and separately from an eternal beyond, like a christic visitation, like the stars of a Mallarméan constellation (iteration) allowing us to commune with the blank sheet upon which they are written. But there is another way to read, tracing paths by way of a continual pendular motion between the whole of the book grasped as absolute contingency, and the wordly compounding of local accretions of marks—like Peirce’s existential graphs. To approach the state of intuiting in every entity its eternal contingency by unfolding in every entity its worldly contingency (navigation). 8/8

readthis.wtf /writing/a-brief-history-of-geotrauma/ A Brief History of Geotrauma - 2012 See also accompanying video The Invention of Negarestani. Freud, Ferenczi, Lovecraft, Bodkin, Challenger, Cane, Barker, Land, Parsani. Unilkely characters. Crackpots, every one of them. Frauds, fakes, pseudoscientists at best. Indisciplined thinkers breeding speculative mongrels. Hysteria, neuronics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, geotraumatics. Through misinterpretations, imaginary convergences, forced coupings and other shady maneouvres lacking in the principled behaviour expected of a scholar, they claimed to have invented a new discipline referred to by various names at various times; but no-one clearly understood what the goals, methods or principles of this new discipline were. And yet, there was something important here; something on the verge of being forgotten. There would have been no trace, the Geo-cosmic Theory of Trauma would not even have been a memory, if it weren’t for the work of the Plutonics Committee. Not that it was easy. An indirect approach was necessary. A contemporary advocate, a new candidate. If he didn’t exist, he would have to be invented. And this time, something had to get through. 1/12

The committee had its eye on the widest possible target market. So the primary task was an understanding of how ideas travel – an epidemiology of the concept. It obviously couldn’t be an academic. Things have changed: freaks like Land and Parsani wouldn’t even get through the doors of a university these days. No, it would have to be an outsider—exotic, even. Some peculiar maverick, self-taught, no qualifications; a lone voice who comes out of nowhere. He or she must be credibly unreachable, hidden away. Somewhere on the Axis of Evil, maybe, to add some political intrigue: A persecuted dissident scouring the outer reaches of the web to find other sick-minded individuals, he comes across Land, retired from philosophy and now promulgating conspiracy theory and peddling neo-occultist speculations. Land passes on the last Barker manuscript to him. Then he discovers Parsani’s notebooks in Iran, realizes the Bodkin-Cane connection, and begins to piece it together. It could have happened that way. Then move him to the Far East. Someplace no-one ever goes. Not even China or Japan – Malaysia. Construct his writings in a kind of tortured, gnomic style that combines extreme etymological acuity with a sick imagination that comes of watching too many horror movies. Anyhow, he’s probably sick in some way. Insomniac, delirious, unable to function normally; sick with some kind of middle-eastern fever. That could be the case. Invisible, his character must exude a sort of enigmatic charisma, and an aura of exoticism. Since he comes from outside, almost anything would be credible. Keep him hidden for as long as possible, unseen but effective. Personal appearances made and cancelled. Visa problems, poor health, whatever it takes. If it gets to the stage where he does have to appear, it has to be done well – no expense spared. But above all, the ideas keep coming, exerting a subterranean influence. All that is necessary is that he exist long enough to effectuate inception. Once the ideas take, once the ideas are embedded, he can easily be retired. Anything could happen to a freak like that. It’s true, the Committee took risks. Carried away with their creation, they ventured a few unnecessarily baroque twists. A fictional quantity expounding the theory of its own hyperstitional inexistence? A puppet who tells us what is pulling our strings? In the end, no-one would be crazy enough to believe it wasn’t true. * Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish … The long stretches of waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances … We were wanderers on prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. – Tall trees. – When were you born? So you’re one of the dreamers now. You’ve beheld the fata morgana of the terminal lagoon. You look tired. Was it a deep one? Accessing files. 2/12

The psychical material in such cases of hysteria presents itself as a structure in several dimensions which is stratified in at least three different ways. (I hope I shall presently be able to justify this pictorial mode of expression.) To begin with there is a nucleus consisting in memories of events or trains of thought in which the traumatic factor has culminated or the pathogenic idea has found its purest manifestation. Round this nucleus we find what is often an incredibly profuse amount of other mnemic material which has to be worked through in the analysis and which is, as we have said, arranged in a threefold order. In the first place there is an unmistakable linear chronological order which obtains within each separate theme. […] [I]n Breuer’s analysis of Anna O, […] under each of [….] seven headings ten to over a hundred individual memories were collected in chronological series. It was as though we were examining a dossier that had been kept in good order. They make the work of analysis more difficult by the peculiarity that, in reproducing the memories, they reverse the order in which these originated. The freshest and newest experience in the file appears first, as an outer cover, and last of all comes the experience with which the series in fact began. Such groupings constitute ‘themes’. These themes exhibit a second kind of arrangement. Each of them is – I can not express it in any other way – stratified concentrically round the pathogenic nucleus. The contents of each particular stratum are characterized by an equal degree of resistance, and that degree increases in proportion as the strata are nearer to the nucleus. Thus there are zones within which there is all equal degree of modification of consciousness, and the different themes extend across these zones. The most peripheral strata contain the memories (or files), which, belonging to different themes, are easily remembered and have always been clearly conscious. The deeper we go the more difficult it becomes for the emerging memories to be recognized, till near the nucleus we come upon memories which the patient disavows even in reproducing them. A third kind of arrangement has still to be mentioned – the most important, but the one about which it is least easy to make any general statement. What I have in mind is an arrangement according to thought-content, the linkage made by a logical thread which reaches as far as the nucleus and tends to take an irregular and twisting path, different in every case. This arrangement has a dynamic character, in contrast to the morphological one of the two stratifications mentioned previously. While these two would be represented in a spatial diagram by a continuous line, curved or straight, the course of the logical chain would have to be indicated by a broken line which would pass along the most roundabout paths from the surface to the deepest layers and back, and yet would in general advance from the periphery to the central nucleus, touching at every intermediate halting-place – a line resembling the zig-zag line in the solution of a Knight’s Move problem, which cuts across the squares in the diagram of the chess-board. […] We have said that this material behaves like a foreign body, and that the treatment, too, works like the removal of a foreign body from the living tissue. We are now in a position to see where this comparison fails. A foreign body does not enter into any relation with the layers of tissue that surround it, although it modifies them and necessitates a reactive inflammation in them. Our pathogenic psychical group, on the other hand, does not admit of being cleanly extirpated from the ego. Its external strata pass over in every direction into portions of the normal ego; and, indeed, they belong to the latter just as much as to the pathogenic organization. In analysis the boundary between the two is fixed purely conventionally, now at one point, now at another, and in some places it cannot be laid down at all. The interior layers of the pathogenic organization are increasingly alien to the ego, but once more without there being any visible boundary at which the pathogenic material begins. In fact the pathogenic organization does not behave like a foreign body, but far more like an infiltrate.1 The theory of trauma was a crypto-geological hybrid from the very start. Darwin and the geologists had already established that the entire surface of the earth and everything that crawls upon it is a living fossil record, a memory bank rigorously laid down over unimaginable aeons and sealed against introspection; churned and reprocessed 3/12

through its own material, but a horrifying read when the encryption is broken, its tales would unfold in parallel with Freud’s, like two intertwining themes of humiliation. Abandoning the circumspection with which Freud handles what he still supposes to be ‘metaphorical’ stratal imagery, Dr Daniel Barker’s Cosmic Theory of Geotrauma, or Plutonics, flattens the theory of psychic trauma onto geophysics, with psychic experience becoming an encrypted geological report, the repercussion of a primal Hadean trauma in the material unconscious of Planet Earth. Further developing Professor Challenger’s model of ‘generalised stratification’, Barker ultra-radicalises Nietzschean genealogy into a materialist cryptoscience. Who does the Earth think it is? It’s a matter of consistency. Start with the scientific story, which goes like this: between four point five and four billion years ago – during the Hadean epoch – the earth was kept in a state of superheated molten slag, through the conversion of planetesimal and meteoritic impacts into temperature increase (kinetic to thermic energy). As the solar system condensed, the rate and magnitude of collisions steadily declined, and the terrestrial surface cooled, due to the radiation of heat into space, reinforced by the beginnings of the hydrocycle. During the ensuing – Archaen – epoch the molten core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogeneous trauma, the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation. And that’s it. That’s plutonics, or neoplutonism. It’s all there: anorganic memory, plutonic looping of external collisions into interior content, impersonal trauma as drive-mechanism. The descent into the body of the earth corresponds to a regression through geocosmic time. Trauma is a body. Ultimately – at its pole of maximum disequilibrium – it’s an iron thing. At MVU they call it Cthelll: the interior third of terrestrial mass, semifluid metallic ocean, megamolecule, and pressure-cooker beyond imagination. It’s hotter than the surface off the sun down there, three thousand clicks below the crust, and all that thermic energy is sheer impersonal nonsubjective memory of the outside, running the plate-tectonic machinery of the planet via the conductive and convective dynamics of silicate magma flux, bathing the whole system in electromagnetic fields as it tidally pulses to the orbit of the moon. Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare, nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth, cross-hatched by intensities, traversed by thermic waves and currents, deranged particles, ionic strippings and gluttings, gravitational deep-sensitivities transduced into nonlocal electromesh, and feeding vulcanism … that’s why plutonic science slides continuously into schizophrenic delirium.2 Let’s retell the story. At the birth of the solar system, deviating from the protoplan¬etary disk that is to become the central body, a tiny, uniform spher¬ical mass emerges from the solar nebula. Within 500 million years, a sudden sinking of matter into a dense metallic core – the ‘Iron Catastrophe’ – precipitates the formation of a differentiated, layered plan¬etary structure, its molten inner matter surrounded by a thin rocky mantle and cold crust. This brittle surface seals into the depths the repressed secret of Earth’s ‘burning immanence with the sun’. But the face of Earth does not remain still. The shifting visage of the planet results from the combination of external processes – climatic denudation and deposition – and internal processes – the movement of igneous or magmatic fluids. These two groups of processes transform the surface of the earth and shape the destiny of everything upon it. Their energy sources are, respectively, the sun, and its repressed runt sibling, the inner core of the earth. Thus, the thin crust destined to shield the inhabitants of Earth from its primal trauma, wears on its face the continually-shifting expression of the helio-plutonic bond. 4/12

Periodically, the pressure of magma in depth impels it to move in the direction of least resistance: repressed energy erupts onto the surface, forming igneous intrusions through the crustal rocks. The terrestrial symptoms that crystallise around these periodic outbreaks of plutonic catharsis are far-reaching and ramified. Resident Alien; The Insider. Trauma is at once a twisted plot, a geological complex, and a heavily-encrypted filesystem. The archives come to the surface only to be churned and folded back into the detritus of their own repression. The tendrils of the ‘pathogenic nucleus’ merge imperceptibly with ‘normal tissue’. And every living individual that ever existed is a playback copy, drawn from the recording vaults, trapped in a refrain that sings the glory of Cthelll. Beyond the restricted biocentric model outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Barker’s theory extends trauma to encompass the inorganic domain. The accretion of the earth is the aboriginal trauma whose scars are encrypted in/as terrestrial matter, instituting a register of unconscious pain coextensive with the domain of stratified materiality as such. It is not known whether Barker was ever in direct contact with Dr. Bodkin, although the latter developed his work while serving on the covert research mission that preceded ‘Project Scar’. In any case, among the features their theoretical works share is a reworking, through this radicalised Freudian theory of trauma, of the discredited biological notion that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. If the biological is but a tortured incantation of Cthelll’s seething inner core, genealogy, stratoanalysis and information theory promise a cryptography of this cosmic pain; and Haeckel’s recapitulation thesis provides a suggestion for how an hysterico-biological filing-system might be formatted. Cryptography has been my guiding thread, right through. What is geotraumatics about, even now? – A rigorous practice of decoding.3 How would such a cryptography proceed? It’s not as easy as opening files, unpacking cases. Freud knows the core can’t be reached by so direct a route. The reverse-file-system, continually encrypted by its own access log, cannot be unpacked directly, but only through an experimental engagement with the twisted, rhizomatic plotlines that emerge from it… not only […] a zig-zag, twisted line, but rather to a ramifying system of lines and more particularly to a converging one. It contains nodal points at which two or more threads meet and thereafter proceed as one; and as a rule several threads which run independently, or which are connected at various points by side-paths, debouch into the nucleus.4 Needless to say, trauma belongs to a time beyond personal memory – Evidently, Geotraumatics radicalizes Professor Challenger’s insistence that schizoanalysis should extend further than the terrain of familial drama, to invest the social and political realms; pushing beyond history and biology, it incorporates the geological and the cosmological within the purview of a transcendental unconscious. The root source of the disturbance which the organism identifies according to its parochial frame of reference – mummy-daddy – or which it construes in terms of the threat of individual death, is a more profound trauma rooted in physical reality itself. Trauma is not personal, and the time of the earth is recorded, accreted, knotted up inside us. All human experience is an encrypted message from Cthelll to the cosmos, the scream of the earth. 5/12

Fast forward seismology and you hear the earth scream. Geotrauma is an ongoing process, whose tension is continually expressed – partially frozen – in biological organization.5 Nietzsche suggested that the structure and usage of the human body is the root source of the system of neurotic afflictions co-extensive with human existence; but this is also a planetary neurosis. Geotraumatic cryptography must proceed as ultra-genealogy, accessing these memories deep-frozen and imprinted in the body and determining the planetary events which they index. Vertigo’s dramatization of hysteria may seem to linearise Freud’s topologically-twisted model, suggesting that the core may be reached, repetition escaped, through linear regression, through an accessing of personal memory, a peeling back of layers. Perhaps it is only the exigencies of visual entertainment that take it off the couch, outside the therapist’s office; but it intuits the kinship of the system of hysteria with non-human systems of memory; and (very possibly Hitchcock was reading Bodkin as well as Freud) it sees traumatic regression activated not through introspection but through return to a former environment, with the unconscious tacked onto geography in the form of affect-triggers. Tall trees. Hence we return to Haeckel’s recapitulation thesis. In his formulation of ‘neuronics’, Bodkin sought to understand the unconscious as a time-coded spinal memory, a series of evolutionary chemical-response triggers sensitive to climatic conditions. Neuronics sets out to empirically map the relation between psychic organization, biological phylogenesis, and environmental stimuli. Bodkin’s disconcertingly prescient theory discusses the prospect of an inundation of the planet, during a runaway climatic shift, causing tropical heat and oceanic expansion. His experiments chart the resulting modifications of the unconscious, as climate change triggers the shutting-down or reawakening of behaviours belonging to prior evolutionary stages of the human. Notwithstanding the ‘discredit’ of Haeckel’s thesis – that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that every individual being, in its development, reiterates the stages of evolution of its remote ancestors – like Barker, Bodkin discerns a theoretical potency beneath the linear simplicity that allows its easy dismissal. If major evolutionary changes are the result of catastrophic shifts in the planetary environment – the onset of ice ages, changes in the atmosphere, the parting of tectonic plates, significant rises in temperature – then the biological can be understood, in geotraumatic terms, as a map of geological time. Along these lines, the emergence of Barker’s theory of ‘spinal catastrophism’ makes the necessary corrections and provides a model for geotraumatic diagnostic procedure: I was increasingly aware that all my real problems were modalities of back-pain, or phylogenetic spinal injury, which took me back to the calamitous consequences of the precambrian explosion, roughly five hundred million years ago. […] Erect posture and perpendicularization of the skull is a frozen calamity, associated with a long list of pathological consequences, amongst which should be included most of the human psychoneuroses. […] The issue here – as always – is real and effective regression. It is not a matter of representational psychology. Haeckel’s […] Recapitulation Thesis […] is a theory compromised by its organicism, but its wholesale rejection was an overreaction. [Bodkin’s] response is more productive and balanced, treating DNA as a transorganic memory-bank and the spine as a fossil record, without rigid onto-phylogenic correspondence. The mapping of spinal-levels onto neuronic time is supple, episodic, and diagonalizing. It concerns plexion between blocks of machinic transition, not strict isomorphic – or stratic redundancy – between scales of chronological order. Mammal DNA contains latent fish-code (amongst many other things).6 6/12

On the basis of this ‘diagonal’ model, Bodkin’s experimental studies record the effectuation of archaeopsychic ‘regressions’ in his subjects through extreme environmental triggers, noting the extra-mental, trans-individual vector of such regression: What am I suggesting? That Homo sapiens is about to transform himself into Cro-Magnon and Java Man, and ultimately into Sinanthropus? No, a biological process is not completely reversible. The increased temperature and radiation are indeed alerting innate releasing mechanisms. But not in our minds. These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we’ve taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories–from the enzymes controlling the carbon dioxide cycle to the organisation of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so our subjects are being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that havebeen dormant for epochs. The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.[…] The further down the CNS you move, from the hind-brain through the medulla into the spinal cord, the further you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, between T-12 and L-1, is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the airbreathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages […] If you like, you could call this the Psychology of Total Equivalents – let’s say ‘Neuronics’ for short – and dismiss it as metabiological fantasy. However, I am convinced that as we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter the amnionic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna, as recognisable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total re-orientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as they re-appear we’ll be swept back helplessly in the flood-tide like pieces of flotsam.7 If infantilism were all the past had to offer, then psychoanalysis would be time-travel, and the future would be wellbalanced. Announcing themselves as hyper-Freudianism, Neuronics and the Cosmic theory of Geotrauma shift from the imaginary familial circuit to the lagoons of deep time. They introduce diagonalised matter-memory in order to study the twisted indexing of the Geo-Archaeo-Psychic. As to Land, perhaps what he found most valuable in Barker’s work was the extension of geotraumatic theory into human culture and to language in particular, via this keying of the geotraumatic body-map to environmental stimuli; and the potential for development of modes of decoding of cultural phenomena that escape the signifier. Bipedalism, erect posture, forward-facing vision, the cranial verticalization of the human face, the laryngeal constriction of the voice, are themselves all indices of a succession of geotraumatic catastrophes separating the material potencies of the body from its stratified actuality. Just as the bipedal head impedes ‘vertebro-perceptual linearity’, the human larynx inhibits ‘virtual speech’. One cannot dismantle the face without also evacuating the voice. Perhaps inspired by Parsani’s invocation of the Middle-Eastern vowel-less battle-cry against solar empire, Land affirms that, in geotraumatic terms, the human voice itself is – via the various accidents of hominid evolution – the enfeebled expression of geotrauma: 7/12

Due to erect posture the head has been twisted around, shattering vertebro-perceptual linearity and setting up the phylogenetic preconditions for the face. This right-angled pneumatic-oral arrangement produces the vocal apparatus as a crash-site, in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the mouth. The bipedal head becomes a virtual speech-impediment, a sub-cranial pneumatic pile-up, discharged as linguo-gestural development and cephalization take-off. Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue. Its a twin-axial system, howls and clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vowel-consonant phonetic palette, rigidly intersegmented to repress staccato-hiss continuous variation and its attendant becomings-animal. The anthropostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos …8 For Barker, therefore, as for Bodkin, the schizoanalytic ‘treatment’ of geotrauma, the discovery of the ‘innate releasing mechanisms’, is a matter of ‘real and effective regression’, which can only be carried out on an experimental and empirical basis, on the basis of a certain hypothesis concerning the relation between time, matter and trauma. A noteworthy outcome of this hypothesis is a certain deepening of pessimism: Ultimately, nothing short of the complete liquidation of biological order and the dissolution of physical structure can suffice to discharge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrial existence. A collective becoming-snake of human civilization would be only the first step. When, in the 1990s, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit – probably, it is thought, through the agency of the aged Anatole Alasca, once assistant to Professor Challenger – disinterred the by then all-but-hermetic Daniel Barker from his lab at MVU for that last CCRU interview, Nick Land embarked upon his shortlived revival of the Geocosmic Theory of Trauma through a series of experiments in microcultural destratification, documentation of which has recently been rediscovered. Land was a relay, keeping the signal alive, but of course he didn’t last long, he burnt out just like Barker before him. In 99-2000 Parsani joined us, but he was too far gone to be of any help. That’s why the Committee needed a new candidate. So where is ‘Negarestani’ supposed to go with this? He begins by elaborating on the story so far: the conspiracy to return Cthelll, the earth’s core, repressed runt sibling of the sun, to immanence with its solar mothership; the plotting of the return of the Tellurian insider; and the agency of oil as tellurian lube. All this we know and approve of. But what is important is this: Ultimately, a theory that locates the source of the ills of the human psyche in the accretion of the earth 4.5 billion years ago is – obviously – far too parochial for the purposes of the Committee. It owes its local inhibitions to Land’s fondness for Bataille and his disproportionate attention to Freud’s later, flawed model of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. According to Bataille’s ‘solar economy’, the most basic economic problem is not scarcity but the exorbitant excess of solar energy; all movements on this planet, from the basest physical processes through to the highest sophistications of life and culture, consist only in labyrinthine detours of one and the same vector – the profligate expenditure of energy by the sun. The secret of all apparently stable and economically conservative being is that it is already pledged to solar abolition, it already belongs to the sun and its radical horizon of death. 8/12

Negarestani recognizes the just alignment of Bataille’s notion of the Solar Economy with Freud’s speculative thesis concerning the nature of organic life: According to ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, the preservation of a lifeform in relation to the excessive energy source it draws upon, demands the sacrifice of a part of that lifeform: the creation of a mortified outer surface or crust – ‘a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli’ – that protects it from its exorbitant source of energy. Thus, the survival and individuality of an organic lifeform, biological, psychic or cultural, is based on the repression of an originary trauma in which it encountered, in all its naked power, the source of energy that would also be its death. Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting, temporarily protecting themselves against the outside that created them and will destroy them. Thus we can say that all forms of life are solutions to the same problem; managing the excoriating excess of solar energy which will eventually consume them in death. As modes of life become more complex and more numerous, their dependence upon the excessive power source only grows stronger; as Negarestani argues, there is a mutuallyreinforcing symmetry between the plurality of life and the monism of death. Another way to put this is that, from the point of view of the securitised individuated lifeform closed up against its traumatic encounter with solar excess, the sun inevitably becomes the single and absolute horizon or vanishing point for all life. This development of what Negarestani will call the ‘monogamous model’ of the relation between terrestrial life and the sun, is relayed in the cultural and economic forms of capitalism. Capitalism appears as a crazed thanatropic machine, unlocking the earth’s resources – in particular, the fossil fuels that were, in more optimistic times, referred to as ‘buried sunlight’ – to release them to their destiny of dissolution, and thus accelerating the consumption of the earth by the sun. by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s.9 Mankind is the first lifeform to contemporaneously communicate with geological time; a gigantic volcano, a holocaust of consumption, a fault in the file-system. Yet this unbridled consumption also manifests itself culturally in an everincreasing complexification and elaboration of multiple ‘ways of life’ and supposedly infinite possibilities and differentiation. To break thought out of its capture by the monogamous model, even though the propaganda of the solar empire runs through the entirety of biological life and human culture – including the flawed variants of geotrauma theory. This is Negarestani’s first mission – To broaden still further the theory in rescinding the status of the sun as sole ‘image of exteriority’, as ultimate singular horizon for all life. The sun is not the absolute or the abyss, but only a local blockage, a restriction, a blind spot that obscures the opening of the earth onto a more general cosmic economy which produced it and which will consume it, along with the sun. In 3.5 billion years, the core of the aging sun grows hotter, causing a severe greenhouse effect that sterilises the entire biosphere; its outer surface cools, expanding to engulf the inner planets. In 7 billion years, the earth slips out of orbit but, outside the small chance that it could be flung out into the ‘icy desolation of deep space’, is dragged into the core of the Sun to be evaporated, its only legacy a small amount of fuel for the red giant’s farewell glow. The sun becomes a ‘small block of hydrogen ice’; 100 trillion years into the future, all the stars go out, followed by an era populated only by the ‘degenerate remnants’ that survive the end of stellar evolution. 1040 years, the cosmic catastrophe of proton decay ushers in the era of black holes, where the only stellar objects left are black holes ‘convert their mass into radiation and evaporate at a glacial pace’, and then the scarcely-conceivable ‘dark era’ populated by atomic waste products entering into desultory, increasingly rare and fruitless chance encounters.10 9/12

The cosmic abyss is deeper than the solar furnace. Earth’s monogamous relationship with the sun is just one chapter in a weird epic narrative that does not find its climax in annihilatory conflagration. And therefore, the terrestrial plots that play out in the human psyche must be traced back beyond the paltry 4.5 million year lifespan of the planet. The trauma is deeper still, and more weird, than Challenger, Barker or Land had imagined. To contemplate these icy, inevitable vistas of cosmic time is in a certain sense already to go beyond geotrauma. The viewpoint of an ecology radical enough to take in these extra-solar eschatologies not only breaks through terrestrial concerns, but also through the ‘solar horizon’ that has governed our thought on and of the earth. As Negarestani will say, ‘to be truly terrestrial is not the same as being superficial’. To be truly terrestrial is to embrace the perishability of the earth, and its implication in the universe, beyond the local economics of the relation between the sun and the surface; to replace the monogamous relation between a contingent earth and the necessary and absolute sun around which its planetary path winds, with a relation of multiplicity between this planetary body and the cosmic contingencies which led to its formation, a cosmic chemical conspiracy that works through the earth, and which finds its dissolute destiny beyond the sun. Chemophilosophy; geotrauma unearthed. * So now you know. It was all a twisted plot. For years, they thought they were making all this up. But the Committee was telling them what to write… The ‘Speculative Realist’ racket provided a perfect opportunity; capitalizing on the vogue for imagining one can subtract theoretical thought from the human imaginary, from narrative and from sense, through Negarestani we are able to inject it, precisely, with the narrative element that is, as paradoxical as it may seem, an integral part of the procedure. Signification cannot be crushed without following plots that tell ever-new stories of the earth. It’s not a matter of using science or a new metaphysics to eradicate such tales, but of constructing a science of real plots, which is what Geotrauma – in Negarestani’s hands – becomes. The compulsive-repetitive symptoms that are human culture cannot be overcome simply by precipitately stripping them down to a reductive physical, metaphysical or relational states. The instigation of a collective schizoanalysis must proceed through the development of the experimental means for ‘real, effective regression’, for meticulous decryption. it is quite hopeless to try to penetrate directly to the nucleus of the pathogenic organization. […] We ourselves undertake the opening up of inner strata, advancing radially, whereas the patient looks after the peripheral extension of the work. We must get hold of a piece of the logical thread, by whose guidance alone we may hope to penetrate to the interior.11 Unpick the individual, travel down her spine, into the rocks, through the iron core, attaining a burning immanence with the sun, and exiting towards the unknown. Above all, Negarestani’s ‘universalist’ reconstruction of the theory of trauma, and his continual rethinking of ‘The Insider’ in yet more xeno-economical terms, must be understood in the wake of the committee’s recent reappropriation of Ferenczi’s work for the cause. For Ferenczi, trauma is not a hole punched into the organic by exteriority. This model would only reflect – all too-closely – the empirical occasioning cause of the theoretical recognition of trauma. Nor is it, even (as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) a founding event synonymous with the 10/12

constitution of the organic individual per se, and which constricts its path to death. Trauma is a perennial boring or a vermicular inhabiting of the organic by the inorganic: the inassimilable presence of the universal continuum within the regional field, a resident yet alienating presence that has been bored and nested into the horizon from different angles, contingently, gradationally, infinitesimally. We call this resident yet inassimilable index of exteriority that can neither be expelled nor reintegrated within the interiorized horizon, the Insider.12 Ferenczi’s traumata are plotholes that must be plumbed, outward itineraries that must be travelled. The time of trauma is altered. Geophilosophy was always a chemophilosophy: just as it needed to explode the constricted and escape to the political surface of the earth, and just as it was then necessary to understand the apparently stable surface as an arrested flow and to penetrate to the depths, the cosmic theory of geotrauma now needed to pass through the core of the earth only to escape its inhibited mode of traumatic stratification and to carry its interrogation further afield, or rather according to a new mode of distribution. The Committee’s question is: which practices, conspiracies, theories, insurgencies, setting out from the local surface, will ‘assist the earth in hatching its inner black egg’; which plots will assist in decrypting the addresses of traumatic agents no longer understood as foreign bodies that assault the protective membrane of the organic individual, nor even as a repressed fragments of a greater exuberance; but as xeno-chemical insiders, Old Ones waiting to be awakened. What stimuli will key into the triggers that will attach us to a Kurtz-gradient, disintricating the tangled themes that surface as reality-symptoms, allowing us egress into dreams where the lagoon of personal memory drains into a sea of cosmic trauma? Guided by his dreams, he was moving backwards through the emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes, centred upon the lagoon, each of which seemed to represent one of his own spinal levels. At times the circle of water was spectral and vibrant, at others slack and murky, the shore apparently formed of shale, like the dull metallic skin of a reptile. Yet again the soft beaches would glow invitingly with a glossy carmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, the emptiness of the long stretches of sand total and absolute, filling him with an exquisite and tender anguish. He longed for this descent through archaeopsychic time to reach its conclusion, repressing the knowledge that when it did the external world around him would have become alien and unbearable.13 How can the revolutionary subject, through deepening and widening its traumas, attain topological and categorical equivalence with the universal absolute? Likewise, how can the regional horizon – as a relatively open set excised from the universal absolute – find its equivalence with the absolute through deepening its geophilosophical synthesis and stretching its nested traumas by dilating and twisting them?14 It’s a question of writing, but also of mapping. That’s where Cane comes in. Once you see the Atlas you’ll know where to go. The Plutonics Committee had to exert some pressure, to get things moving. There is nothing for it but to keep at first to the periphery of the psychical structure. We begin by getting the patient to tell us what he knows and remembers, while we are at the same time already directing his attention and overcoming his slighter resistances by the use of the pressure procedure. Whenever we have opened a new path by thus pressing on his forehead, we may expect him to advance some distance without fresh resistance. After we have worked in this way for some time, the patient begins as a rule to co-operate with us.15 11/12

It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed. * It was over. Only later would all of this take on concrete meaning. The double-articulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and tunic, from which liquids escaped. Disarticulated, deterriorialized, Negarestani muttered that he was taking the earth with him. 12/12

readthis.wtf /writing/on-making-ready/ On Making Ready - 2012 The first project to take place under the auspices of TBA-21’s collaboration with the Belvedere […] will see the programming of contemporary work within the Augarten studio, a striking modern structure designed as an artist’s workspace. Fittingly, the works selected for Simon Starling’s show present us with various strategies for siting the contemporary within the modern. With his alchemical understanding of objects as unstable complexes, his peripatetic appreciation for how they are transformed and revalued through geographical displacement, and his eye for the ways in which narrative frames and reframes them, Starling presents us with a number of contemporary tactics for disrupting the self-sufficiency of modernism. In Venus Mirrors, the rare transit of Venus across the sun during June 2012 sees Starling reenacting the 1874 attempt to determine the distance of the sun from the earth through triangulation. The repetition of this experiment, which ultimately had more significance for cinema than for astronomy, unveils a general strategy at work here: We can gauge our ‘standard distance’ from an object of universal illumination (modernism) only by observing, from a local position, the passage of other, minor bodies across it. And rather than affording us an absolute viewpoint, the resulting parallax effect tends to give rise to strange alignments and unexpected narratives. Temporal distance is collapsed, and contemporaneity is produced as immediate affect, rather than as historical category. In effect, Starling transforms the Augarten back into a laboratory or workshop, telescoping time so that objects that modernist dogma and historicism have rendered distant and imperious are set in relative motion, and imbued with a certain incompleteness and futurality. Perhaps the most complex and intriguing piece, in terms of its address to modernism, is Starling’s Exposition, whose centerpiece consists of a glass panel modelled after the designs of Lily Reich for the 1929 Barcelona Exposition. Reich’s contribution to the Werkbund’s promotion of German industry took shape in a period when a new awareness was emerging of the shop window display as aesthetic form, along with a contestation over its proper nature. Working in window dressing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Reich participated in a certain polemical modernist critique that denigrated earlier efforts – theatrical presentations providing legible narratives for the featured products, and staged with mannequins and other props – in favour of a presentation of wares that sought to be true to the objects themselves and their serialised, industrial nature.1 Reich’s exhibition designs evidently prolong this refusal of narrative and context, presenting commodities – whether beer, mechanical cranes or textiles, Vom Sofakissen zum Städtebau2 – in a state of implacable objectivity. As the Werkbund declared: ‘the display booths are 1/5

bare; only the products should speak, should vouch for themselves’.3 But this speech is undeniably muted: the ultimate effect is one of sheer visuality, of a glacially abstract presentation of objects that threatens to eclipse the ostensible aim of informing visitors. Commodities are subtracted from their production and use and even their matter, taking on a sublime, cultic aura. We can trace a direct kinship between the glass screens of Lily Reich’s exhibition designs, which form the centerpiece of Simon Starling’s Exposition [2004], and Duchamp’s readymade, which serves as an implicit foil to many of Starling’s works. It is with Reich’s modular glass screens that this connection becomes evident: their transparent, immaterial articulation of the trade show booth creates a crystalline structure in which decontextualised wares are displayed as objects of abstract desire, precisely as if the ‘shop window’ in which Duchamp sought ‘proof of the existence of the external world’ (a world outside art), had been multiplied and ramified in this new, exalted space of display. Without wishing to reduce the readymade to this sole dimension (that of Duchamp as ‘spiritualist of Woolworths’, according to a phrase of Robert Smithson’s that Starling likes to cite),4 we should note that not only does Duchamp describe Fountain [1917] as ‘a fixture you see every day in plumbers’ shop windows’; but that, according to at least one authority, the artistic exigency of the readymade itself appeared during a visit to a trade show: Duchamp, who […] had not yet ‘invented’ the readymade […] went […] to the Salon de la locomotion aérienne and, to Leger and Brancusi, who were accompanying him, he offered this verdict: “Painting’s washed up. Who’ll do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?”5 Thus, the ‘external world’ sought by Duchamp in the shop window – that of an object whose provenance belongs to an entirely different regime of production than that of art – converges with Reich’s elevation of the industrial commodity into high art. The latter operates via a subtraction from context and material conditions, responding to the modernist call to eschew narrative and ‘entrench’ every discipline ‘firmly within its area of competence’ (as the Greenbergian formula would have it). Whereas in Duchamp’s gesture, this critical demand, taken to an ascetic extreme, gives rise to an unmanageable excess in regard to the modernist programme (the work of art as pure nomination of any object whatsoever). Regardless, in both cases, the orphaned object ends up in vitro, flattened by the orthogonal lens of a transparent surface up against which the ‘disinterested’ spectator’s nose is pressed. For Duchamp, the ‘inevitable response to shop windows’ is that ‘my choice is determined’; and finally I pay the ‘penalty’ of ‘cutting the pane and in feeling regret as possession is consummated’. It is the nomination of the object as art – its enclosure within the ‘infra-thin’ panels of a conceptual vitrine – that suspends this feared inevitable and disappointing consummation/consumption, just as Reich’s displays preserve the wares’ immaculate aura by distancing them from their production and context of use. Exposition’s hydrogen fuel-cell powered lamps shed a contemporary light on these transparent framings as, through and in Reich’s ‘large glass’, Starling explodes the mute, sealed integrity of the modernist object. Rather than serving as a screen (both surface of projection and prophylactic) governing the suitably disinterested reception of the object (a disinterest that plays to the interests of consumer desire), the glass partition finds itself implicated in the production processes of the object and its presentation. No longer legible as a device for the formal structuring of display, a partition reinforcing the modernist disciplinary division of labour, it is exposed as an optical device. At the same time, visual presentation itself (lights, photograph and screen) reveals its contingent constitution, in particular its dependence upon the extraction and fixing of metals. Finally, the fuel cell, with its transparent perspex casing, which would itself be at home in a trade show, seems to parody the glass cabinet featured in the foreground of the photograph (of the Barcelona Exposition) that the fuel cells illuminate. Rather than a vitreous incarceration rendering 2/5

the object an inscrutable ‘black box’, here a prototype contemporary technology is exposed in its inner workings and outer connections. Exposition’s ‘double-exposure’ thus forces Reich’s screen to reflect (on) dimensions other than those within which it was designed to constrain the objects it put on display. This is not a postmodern work comprising a modernist object as one of its eclectic elements; it is a contemporary work that, paradoxically, excavates a contemporary object from within the modern object – a gesture that seems crucial to the selection of Starling’s works exhibited here. To resolve this paradox, we must obviously understand ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ in a sense more profound than that of a simple historical periodisation. We must ask what constitutes a contemporary object as opposed to a modern one; which demands contemporary epistemology responds to, that modernist epistemology did not (or did not need to). In other words, one of the questions asked by Starling’s works is: What happens when the passage of historical time and the emergence of new objects and new ways of knowing compels us to reconfigure our understanding of these objects, beyond their ‘entrenchment’ within the organon of modernity? In response, he tells the stories that the objects ‘themselves’ could not ‘vouch for’; he operates disruptions that foreground the devices developed in order to configure visual presentation so that objects appeared in accordance with this organon. This visual sequestration of the object from its conditions of production is symbolised elegantly in pictorial form in Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolation and Bifurcations [2007], Starling’s installation exploring architect Eckart Muthesius’s building of a modernist palace for the Maharajah of Indore. In one photograph of the completed building, its sloping roof – necessary given the climate the building was to withstand – has been dodged out of the photograph. This time, the ‘squaring off’ of the object indicates how the self-representation of a generic international modernism elided the inevitable adaptations and slippages of local situations. In Three Birds, this self-representation exists as only one element in a network of (material, historical, fictional, and historical-fictional) narratives, a multiplicity that explodes the framing conditions that authorised the object to ‘vouch for itself’ in isolation. Once again, it is a question of the excavation, within the modernist object, of a contemporary object that belongs simultaneously to various (cultural, historical, fictional, technological, political, celluloid, geological, climatic) registers, and whose determination as object depends upon the researcher presenting the object, who can include or elide each of these dimensions according to their own intentions. Here we can make use of a concept originating outside the discourse of art: the ‘integrative object’ proposed by Anne-Françoise Schmid and her collaborators, in order to capture the increasingly interdisciplinary types of objects with which contemporary scientists have to deal.6 Schmid proposes that ‘[s]cience now creates objects whose identity is no longer fixed by the discipline of origin, nor by given disciplinary combinations’.7 An object such as a genetically-modified fish can no longer be encompassed within a hierarchy of sciences predicated on the founding status of mechanics. Moreover, defining them as the object of one discipline (or even several disciplines synthesised into an ‘interdisciplinary’ formation) inevitably creates an impoverished image of them: If we treat this fish instead as […] an ‘X’ whose properties […] are divided in unprecedented fashion between diverse disciplines, the effects will be very rich. The first reason for this richness is that the hierarchy of disciplines is undone: all count for one, with the same weight. The fish will no longer be thought only as a technical product of molecular biology, with the aid, afterwards, of other disciplines as necessary – for example, chemistry for traceability, quantitative genetics for the expression of genes, economics for the commercial channels and the risk of chance contamination, sociology for consumer perception, law for marketing and labelling, epistemology to understand the variety of scientific ingredients, and ethics evoked in the question of social acceptability.8 3/5

Schmid proposes that we think of such an object as a multi-dimensional entity, each of whose dimensions is a different discipline or discourse, and whose contours are sketched out according to the points at which each of these disciplines falls short of capturing it. Since these dimensions can never be added to each other so as to synthesise a whole object, it is constituted (‘made ready’ for presentation) each time through the partial perspective and intentions of a given researcher. The richness of Schmid’s model, and its application to contemporary objects, resides in this incomplete, problematic status that prevents integrative objects from ever being presented as ‘readymade’. We could suggest the following parallel, then: where the modern object is disciplined so as to fall under one of a set of finalities articulated by the organon of modernity (the apotheosis of this would be Greenbergian modernism with its purification and division of labour into ‘areas of competence’), this disciplined/disciplinary object is always ‘cut out’ from a contemporary (‘integrative’) object, non-disciplinary or indisciplined – a multidimensional object (‘[d]isciplines are like the dimensions of the object: they are no longer at the centre, but are made use of in the construction of the object.’).9 Schmid argues that this new epistemology of the object converges with the attempt (notably in Armand Hatchuel’s C/K Design Theory) to think the process of design or invention, in which the future object, yet to be created, is precisely such an underdetermined or problematic ‘X’ irreducible to any one of the many dimensions its solution may involve – a prototype that cannot belong to any one of the disciplinary series organised by a moderniststyle division of labour. In relation to the art object, then, this implies an acknowledgement of the dissimulation (screening) involved in presenting any object from the ‘external world’ as ‘ready made’. The integrity of such objects is undermined and riddled by the contingencies of its materiality and production. Accordingly, in Starling’s work, the Marxist view of the commodity as ‘congealed labour’ is expanded to include, beneath the labour of the worker, that of the natural (geological, chemical, molecular) processes that laboured to create the materials themselves; and adjoined to it, the labour of presentation and of the construction of narratives that screen off dimensions so as to prepare the object’s reception. This is perhaps what Starling means when, in a simple but profound inversion, he refers to certain works as ‘made ready’, thus prioritising making (a problematic, indeterminate phase) over arrangement and presentation (‘infra-thin’ nomination). This subversive procedure is doubly necessary today. For, in addition to the original zealous enforcement of the modernist conception of the object through its presentation, as object of contemporary historical discourse it is now sublimated into pure visuality all over again, as modern designs are resold to us as venerable ‘classics’. A reconfiguration of them as contemporary objects thus extracts them both from the original conditions under which they were ‘made ready’ for modernist discourse, and from their final consumerist domestication as untouchable, readymade symbols of a utopia now vaguely evoked as lifestyle or status indicator – whether high- or middlebrow (whether the ‘shop window’ is that of Ikea, MoMA Design Store or Miami Design Fair). In Blackout [2009], as in the earlier Home-made Henningsen PH5 lamps [2001], Starling reminds us of the real, active meaning of design by literally re-manufacturing objects by hand. This is not however an attempt to revive the original utopian dimension of modernist design (as in the now-endemic ‘lost futures of modernism’ nostalgia meme). Rather, it locates a utopian dimension outside of and prior to the ‘shop window’, in the alchemy of creation and material involvement, before labour and materials congeal into a product or exhibit. This is precisely the futural orientation of design or invention that, for Schmid, indexes the integrative object. In this state, which Starling calls ‘innocent’, the integrative dimensions of the object overflow the finalities that govern its reception as ‘modern classic’.10 4/5

Starling’s presentation, in made-ready works, of the object and its apparatus of fabrication (as in Work Made-ready, Les Baux-de-Provence (Mountain Bike) [2001], presents directly such an ‘exploded’ view. In the same gesture, he refuses to perpetuate the presentative closure of the artwork itself – that is, he acknowledges that the piece itself is also an integrative object. We thereby understand that the contemporary object also exceeds the attitude of minimalism, whose ‘specific object’ still implicitly demanded that we abstract it from the dimensions (material, processual, economic, cultural) it did not seek to thematize. The contemporary (art) object has its contingent dimensions ‘folded into’ it rather than held at a distance. For example, in Exposition the photograph is not just torn from representational status to be regarded as a sculptural object; it is reasserted as representation, by evoking the narratives the image is implicated in; and at the same time it is torn from its objective appearance by regarding it as a coalescence of platinum, made-ready (made visible) by light generated through the catalytic agency of the same metal. Or, to continue the metallic theme,11 take Bird in Space [2004], which recalls US customs’ levying of an import tax upon Duchamp’s importation of Brancusi’s 1925 Bird in Space. Starling imported a slab of Romanian steel as an ‘artwork’, avoiding an identical 40% foreign import tax introduced by the Bush Government, and including this negotiation and the means of transportation in the piece, which therefore finishes up like a Serra work stripped of its high drama and emasculated by the exposure of its backstory. As Starling suggests, works like this, emphasising the implication of the art object in a situation whose complexity is recognisably ‘integrative’ or ‘contemporary’, have to be constructed as both materialist and dematerialised.12 In them, material objects are coupled with the history of their making-ready, recalling the integrative dimensions that a purely visual experience of the piece would occlude. Prouvé (Road Test) [2012] is a kind of brutal distillation of such works. In characteristic style, it involves an object and (the record of) a journey. In an ingenious feat of ambiguity, Road Test dramatises the modernist object’s deliverance from the museum by undertaking its delivery to the museum. A rare section of a prototype glass roof panel by architect Jean Prouvé is exhibited, only after it has been subjected to a procedure that puts on trial its ‘logic, balance and purity’, at the same time truly testing the limits of our tolerance for contemporary interventions into consecrated historical material: Hitched to a truck and driven at speed, the streamlined curves of the architectural module are perilously exposed to the elements, in an action that forces us to consider this ‘piece of modern history’ as an unfinished prototype. In the midst of this renewed R&D process, it becomes an ‘object X’, invigorated one last time by the perilous uncertainty of the design process, before being deposited finally under the glass roof of the Augarten studio. Perhaps this vitreous consecration stills it once again; but equally, perhaps the display-space itself will become contaminated by association with Starling’s newly reprototyped object. 5/5

readthis.wtf /writing/art-and-the-practice-of-non-philosophy/ Art and the Practice of Non-Philosophy - 2012 1 François Laruelle is a philosopher who has been working and publishing, in near-obscurity, in Paris, since the late 60, but whose work has recently become more well known in the UK and US. I would like to talk about his theoretical work in connection with the work of the young Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz. I don’t want to claim that Rosenkranz’s work is illustrative of Laruelle’s work; indeed if one were merely the image of the other there would be no interest in discussing their relation. What I will suggest is more of an overlap, a superposition or a kind of montage that allows us, in bringing certain aspects of these two practices together in parallel, to explore some new possibilities for thinking and for practice. What I would like to suggest is that there is a certain innovative logic in Laruelle’s work, a logic that makes him important to a contemporary movement in thought that has been called ‘Speculative Realism’, and that this logic is also operative in Rosenkranz’s artworks and the way in which they confront the context of art and aesthetics. 1/18

If we can agree that this connection is substantial and significant, then, since Laruelle calls his practice ‘nonphilosophy’, perhaps we could, if not define, at least begin to discuss the possibility, of a practice of ‘non-art’. If you are not familiar with Laruelle’s work, let me reassure you that would not be about an anti-art, a destruction of art, or a negation of art. What Laruelle wants to do with his ‘non-philosophy’ is to ‘change the paradigm of thought’ in such a way that philosophy would not be destroyed or overcome, but would subsist as a field of thought that results from a particular decision, one that can no longer be regarded as necessary, as belonging necessarily to thought per se. Philosophy would be revealed to be a field of thought that is, in a certain way, the narcissistic image of the thinker. It would be one of the possibilities of conceptual thought, one that arises spontaneously and will always remain compelling for human thought, but for this reason must be carefully examined. Philpsophy, for Laruelle, does not constitute conceptual thought in its entirety. One of Laruelle’s favourite analogies to explain this has been by comparing his work, which he calls ‘non-philosophy’ to non-Euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry, as we know, reigned for almost two thousand years, on the basis of its applicability to the world in which we live. Euclid had based geometry on five postulates, one of which was the intuitive truth that two parallel lines, continued indefinitely, would never meet. When mathematicians found, two thousand years later, that it was in fact possible to create entirely consistent systems of geometry that did not obey Euclid’s parallel postulate—for example, the geometry of a curved surface, where all parallel lines eventually converge—it was not that Euclidean geometry was negated; rather, it became evident that it was merely one possibility among many others, one of many geometries, but one that happened to accordance with the normal appearance of the universe from our local point of view. The advent of non-euclidean geometry expanded the notion of space and measure, making possible the creation of an expanded field of mathematical thinking, which still contains the Euclidean system as one of its possibilities, but which, ultimately, would allow the conceptualisation of less intuitively-obvious systems of physics such as Einsteinian space-time. The geometry of our everyday, apparently Euclidean world became one of many mathematical possibilities, some of which described the universe far more precisely. If non-philosophy seeks to perform this kind of operation on philosophical thought, in the same way, I want to suggest, a non-art might seek an expanded field within which what was formerly known as art, however allencompassing it might seem to be now, would take its place as one among many possibilities. Now, of course, our knowledge of the history of modern and contemporary art might suggest that this ‘non-art’ is nothing, indeed can be nothing, other than another name for art itself: Like philosophy, art has continually operated a critique of its own forms, its own presuppositions, its presumptions, and has expanded its borders until it appears to encompass almost any possible act; this is precisely what modern and contemporary art mean to us. And yet, one might wonder—and I think this is the suspicion raised by Rosenkranz’s work—one might wonder whether, as Laruelle tells us is the case in philosophy, this process has never been consummated; whether art’s critique of itself, like philosophy’s, is merely a perpetuation by other means of certain fundamental assumptions that circumscribe artistic thought and practice, isolating it from a wider field in which the objects of art would appear under another aspect. Placing in parallel philosophy’s claim to be all-encompassing for thought, and the equally apparently limitless empire of contemporary art, at least, can serve as a pretext, however inexact, for posing the question. Firstly let’s discuss Laruelle’s work in a little more detail—although this discussion will still be rather schematic and simplified. It’s extremely strange to read Laruelle. His writing seems very austere, often very formulaic or repetitious; it can seem almost like a kind of abstract poetry or a Beckettian performance. In fact, beneath this austere surface, where a handful of concepts are proposed, thought and reworked, honed and refined, there is an incredible richness, that digests concepts drawn from a broad range of thinkers, from Plotinus and the Gnostics, to Heidegger and Derrida, along with Husserl, Nietzsche, and many others. But Laruelle uses all of this to build a theoretical 2/18

apparatus whose characteristic property is to refuse involvement in or elaboration of the ostensible themes of these thinkers, and has the one sole, insistent purpose of creating what Laruelle calls a ‘science of philosophy’, or ‘nonphilosophy’ We can begin to understand the motives for this by making some observations about philosophy that even the beginner will recognise: Namely, philosophy is always doing the same thing, in a certain sense it never ‘progresses’. Not that any philosopher ever aimed to just keep on philosophising forever (except perhaps Derrida—but we will see why later): philosophy is always oriented toward a point at which it would achieve the knowledge it aims at, and yet this goal is never reached; we are quite aware that every system honed and perfected by one philosopher will be taken up and problematised by another. Since a part of what philosophy takes as its object includes the operations of philosophy itself, philosophy always seems to be, also, a philosophy of philosophy, and we remain always caught in its circle. This has become explicit to a greater and greater extent in the last few centuries, since Hegel, who introduced the history of philosophy into philosophy: philosophy has continually engaged in critiques of itself, culminating in Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and Derrida’s deconstruction of Western thought. And yet, even in the latter, precisely what happens is not that one is able, at last, to have done with the illusory struggles of philosophical thought, and to resolve or put aside its questions; instead, one finds oneself face-to-face with the eternal motor of deferral and difference that will ensure that it goes on interminably. So, Laruelle tells us, let’s admit that a philosophical critique of philosophy is only ever more philosophy. What we need is a science of philosophy that would allow us to see and to describe philosophy from the outside, from a position that is not philosophical. This is linked to what one of Laruelle’s masters, Althusser, says about philosophy, in his important book Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, when he extends a helping hand to scientists by reminding them that they are always already doing philosophy, without knowing it, and to do philosophy is to cut up reality, with what Althusser calls ‘lines of demarcation’; what is necessary, in order to distinguish between what is really scientific and what is ideological, is to draw a line of demarcation between philosophy’s lines, and those of science—then, according to Althusser, we would be doing actual, active philosophy rather than spontaneous philosophy. (Spontaneous philosophy ‘is spontaneous, because it is not’—it is ideological in the last instance). This is also Laruelle’s struggle. But what he will disagree with is the claim that we are always already within philosophy. He takes from Althusser the idea of operating a kind of scientific surgery on philosophy; but he insists that this science would not be a part of philosophy, and affirms that it is possible to find a point outside philosophy that can support such a science. So, Laruelle wants to tell us that we don’t even need to ‘escape’ from philosophy, because we were never in it to begin with. Philosophy is a way of knowing, but a limited and specific one. It is a way of relating to the real, but it has its ultimate basis is a prior relation to the real that is non-philosophical, and that each of us is able to accede to, if we adopt the new perspective he proposes to us. We need to realise that, in a certain sense, we—as real thinkers, before the ideological intervention of philosophy—never entered the circle of philosophy, but, once we believed that we had, we were doomed never to escape from it. Why this inescapability? If philosophies can be said to seek after a common object, they seek after their other—after a real that philosophical thought would be able to grasp but which would not be the product of philosophy. So philosophy supposes that thought is, in principle, able to conceptually grasp a reality that is other than thought. 3/18

But that is to say that the model of philosophical knowledge always has to give itself, prior to thinking the real, the possibility of thought’s relation to the real, in a moment of immanent union that is presupposed, only to be divided. Philosophy always gives itself reality+thought as an object of thought. Thus, philosophy is the practice that probes our claims to grasp reality in thought; but before this, it already presupposes itself capable of grasping a pre-existing field within which this will be achieved—a field within which thought and the real have already been unified by philosophy, before philosophy has even started. Philosophy in this way places itself both inside and outside its own field of enquiry, and it is this that gives rise to its infinite reflexivity. Again: Philosophy wants to grasp a real that is not yet conditioned by its being thought. But in effect, it has already presupposed this supposedly unconditioned reality, and presupposed it as something already within thought, thus denatured it. Even if, as in critical philosophies, it is said that philosophical understanding is inherently finite, and cannot grasp the real in its entirety, this deficiency or limitation itself is inscribed within philosophy’s prior presumption, its prior decision: thought’s finitude is still an object for philosophical reason. Philosophy makes its own possibility into an object for itself, and thus infinitely, reflexively, problematises itself. It is this simultaneous unifiying and dividing, a folding of everything within philosophy, and a folding of philosophy onto itself—that Laruelle calls philosophical decision—and that prescribes the circular character of all philosophy: Decision means that philosophy presupposes an ultimate immanence of the real and thought, but presupposes it as, precisely, an object of thought. Having thus set in motion a tension between the limitedness of thought’s access to the real, and its assumed right to think their immanence, all manner of philosophical complexities can be generated, and a whole range of positions are possible; but they will all fall within the limited borders of this decisional thought. And Laruelle insists that these borders are not, as philosophy would have us believe, synonymous with the possibilities of conceptual thought as such. Therefore non-philosophy, the science of philosophy, seeks to describe all these multifarious activities of philosophy as, certainly, real thinking, with real effects, but to describe them scientifically by refusing this initial operation, and thus without falling under its authority. It will describe them without succumbing to them, without falling prey to what Laruelle describes as a sort of perpetual harassment by the hallucinatory necessities of philosophy, its endless dualities and dialectical movements which only serve it as further nourishment. It is this description of philosophy from outside its own bounds, this shift in perception or change in the paradigm of thought, that Laruelle sometimes calls the non-philosophical ‘cloning’ of philosophy, or a ‘performation’, that is both a perforation and a performance, of philosophy from the non-philosophical outside. Non-philosophy wants to describe philosophy’s hallucinations as real objects, rather than critiquing its illusions philosophically, from within philosophy (yet again). This is the place to mark the departure of Laruelle’s thought from the ‘philosophies of difference’ of the end of the twentieth century, which, precisely, in critiquing metaphysics and a thought based on identity, intuited that philosophy’s perennial aspiration to erect these stable structures was conditioned by a more infernal and interminable process at work in philosophy. Having isolated philosophy’s decision, its self-differentiation, into its purest form, difference, they nevertheless continued to affirm this difference as the necessary, if paradoxical, structure of thought as such. It’s worth remarking, on a biographical point, that Laruelle was very close to Derrida’s circle, and was the first person in France to write a monograph on Derrida. He was eventually ejected from this community and has been something of a lone thinker ever since. Now, Derrida also sees philosophical thought as being invariably marked by a decision, by two terms that are separated or cut out from within thought, and then re-articulated, with one of them as the privileged term. Deconstruction seeks to understand the ways in which the ascendency of the privileged term is always 4/18

contaminated or marked by its other and by their prior assumption as simultaneously posited, co-dependent terms of a system of valuation within conceptual thought. But where Laruelle departs from Derrida is that he refuses to conclude that the two terms are always already inextricably mixed, for it is this conclusion that means that, in interrogating their mutual contamination, deconstruction becomes an in-principle interminable, endlesslydeferred/differed work of textual production. As Derrida says in On Grammatology, to perceive this system of unityin-duality, and to seek to problematise its hierarchical structure, doesn’t at all mean that we can escape it, for our entire thought, culture, language belongs to this articulation, this contaminated mixture. Derrida therefore continues to advocate what Laruelle calls the ‘mixture’, the decisional structure, of philosophy, as inescapable—in a sense, this is the very meaning of ‘différance’. Certainly, Derrida thematises it directly, rather than merely being its hapless dupe, like the metaphysicians who really believed they could perfect, complete, and close the system with its hierarchy of terms. But Laruelle radicalises Derrida’s position further. As Derrida once said to him, following a famously tense seminar during which he describes Laruelle’s work as a ‘terrorism’: You took my own knife, and stabbed me in the back with it. Laruelle refuses to accept that we are always within the circle of philosophy, and thus, always within différance. For him, in the very depths of thought, let’s say, there is a moment before difference, before philosophy, upon which we can base a thought that does not find itself intricated in this web. The upshot is that Laruelle’s theory will have to speak about philosophical decision itself as the product of something that itself is non-philosophisable; a real immanent with thought but that non-philosophy cannot make into an object of thought, because it cannot be thought as the other of thought (that would merely be philosophical decision all over again). In non-philosophy, then, we posit, axiomatically, that thought is non-different to what it thinks; that thought and the real are identical—and not that they are identical qua synthesised, articulated or differenced by thought, but that they are, simply, One. Now, this is an axiom—that is, it is posited without being deduced by reason, for that would place it back within philosophy. So, in this sense, non-philosophy, as an axiomatic, is an experimental practice, an experiment in thought like nonEuclidean geometry was: what happens when we retract the apparatus of philosophical decision, and instead posit the axiom of thought’s immanent identity to the real that it thinks; what kind of space is opened up when thought is a thing, and no longer the originary field within which the relation between thought and the real appears as, itself, an artefact of thought? All of Laruelle’s thought is an attempt to allow us to see things like this—in what he calls the ‘vision-in-One’. And this is the basis of the important concept of ‘unilaterality’: the real’s relation to thought is unilateral, not reciprocal and reflexive; this is what ‘blocks’ non-philosophy from becoming philosophy again. Unilaterality, then, is the idea that thought is caused, in the last instance, by the real, without any reciprocity whatsoever: it truly is a contingent product of a real that remains indifferent to it and is not affected by it. Laruelle accepts that man thinks ‘humanly’ as condition of his access to the world. Our access to reality is indeed limited. But he maintains also that man is affected by the world in a way that is contingent for man (that does not belong to his essence)—man does not, originarily, belong to the world. What philosophy invariably does is to deduce the conditions of thought’s access to the real illegitimately from our contingent relation to the world. So, as Heidegger tells us, man is indeed ‘thrown’ into the world. But this does not imply a primal co-belonging between man and world, such as would generate a tragic condition (man is ill at ease, but this is his essential destiny, etc.). There is indeed a duality, between our contingent position of thought and the real. Heidegger does not 5/18

stand by this discovery. He presents us with one way to resolve the duality back into a unity, by positing being as an essential co-belonging of man and his world. Another way of doing the same thing is the religious way: That is, if we are thrown by God, then the world is also thrown at the same time, so that the co-belonging is again established. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, always takes one of these paths. But, whereas non-philosophy acknowledges that this thrownness is part of the human situation—that man is thrown into a place that is not chosen, that there is a certain facticity to his being in the world, and there is no necessary relation between thought and the real—at the same time it maintains that, if we can think the unilateral nature of this relation, we thereby have the power to refuse and to transform the world (the being-ill-at-ease goes along with the transformative possibility). 2 I would like to suggest that the place we could first begin to connect this thought with art is in the sublime. Because the sublime is the encounter of the human imagination with something that is, precisely, indifferent to it, something it is unable to bind, to capture. Non-philosophy seems to posit that thought can accede to a real that is indifferent to thought; it would therefore be a real that endures before, after, and without the human, a reality also gestured toward by the ‘sublime’ encounter with powers that exceed the capacity of the imagination. But what is interesting is that the sublime has, even so, always been thought of as the sublime for or of the subject. I would say, I am certainly not the first to say this, that the sublime has the structure of a trauma. Recall that Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, speaks of trauma as an inundation of an interior space by an outside with which it is ultimately continuous, but which it is its organic function to differentiate itself from. The organism, unable to ‘bind’ this exorbitant excitation, that is to say unable to immediately subordinate it to its organic functions, sacrifices a part of itself to the inorganic in an attempt to shield itself—according to Freud there is a sort of parallelism here between the animal cell and the psychic apparatus, between the formation of the organism and the formation of the psyche. Of course, Freud tells us that, just as the organism develops a hard, insensitive membrane to protect itself, so the psyche continues to try to ‘bind’ the traumatic event by repeating it, turning a part of itself into a kind of lifeless machine—the death drive. Now, in the classic romantic tradition of the sublime, beginning with Burke and Kant, the thinking of this traumatic encounter is subordinated to an organic economy in the same way: the imagination opens to its own extinction, only as much as it can afford to; subsequently to yield a measure of ‘delight’ (Burke) or to reassure itself of the sovereignty of Reason (Kant). Classic concepts of the sublime therefore remain concentrated on the side of the organic utility, which draws a benefit from its failure to bind a real whose power exceeds and overwhelms its own. They therefore seem to be an artefact of conflicting organic tendencies: the will to inundation and the resistance against incorporation; the will to retain interiority and the entropic tendency to exteriority; narcissism and dispersion, the pleasure principle and the death drive. What is presented in the sublime, therefore, as described by Burke and Kant, is not the reality of the traumatic encounter, but rather the binding repetition, the will to master the trauma by repeating it. My point is that, when the subject presumes him or herself as the authorial voice qualified to give an account of what he will call the sublime, when the sublime is voiced in a language of exorbitance in relation to the subject, what is really being spoken about is not the real, but the index of the real from the point of view of the subject’s economy; 6/18

that is, the symptom, in which experience and its real cause are mixed, and not the cause, which is unilateral with respect to the experience. The sublime is therefore the name for a mixture, which I would tentatively align with the structure of philosophical decision in Laruelle: In the latter, thought is posited as having a limited grasp on the real, but the excess of the real over thought is presupposed to be something that can be articulated in the field of thought. In other words, the exteriority of the real to thought is always described, by philosophy, from the point of view of the interiority of thought. If we follow this line of reasoning, non-philosophy would consist in the wager that, speaking in terms of Freud’s parallelism, it is possible to access the immanence of the organism and its exorbitant outside without binding it within the organic functions of interiority—to let the outside in, or to acknowledge that, from the point of view of the real, we never actually entered into the safe circle of interiority. This would of course be the opposite of Kant’s account of the sublime, in which the limitations of the imagination revealed by the sublime experience only lead us to recognise the superiority of reason to be able to think, to bind, what is not intuitable. For Laruelle, then, the axiomatic positing of the One allows us to put thought on a footing that prevents it from always interpreting the trauma of its contingency in terms of its own proclivities. To make this more concrete, we can observe this ambivalence at work in the typical modern paintings of the sublime. In re-articulating the notion of the sublime during a period of theological uncertainty, scientific discovery and economic expansion, nineteenth century artists brushed up against an irrevocably weird ‘outside’ that disrupts the integrity of the subject: the contingency of death, the indifference of secularised nature, and the empty aeons of earth-history in which humanity itself is a contingent and vanishingly small episode. (See the Urbanomic project The Real Thing) During this period, the new affect of the sublime does indeed seem to lead the artist, together with the scientist, towards an irrevocably weird ‘outside’ that cannot be harnessed for organic integrity, and equally for the ‘good’ of painting—of classical beauty, that is: empty aeons of earth-history, deadly elements, and beyond them, dehumanised cosmic time and space, in which the history of consciousness itself is a vanishingly small episode. The fascination for geology, physics, the dynamics of energy evident in these paintings anticipates a transition, in painting, from a familiar treasury of ‘acts of god’ and biblical setpieces to work that is highly informed by the revelation of a contingent history of the earth, a history that does not belong to the human. But there is unmistakeable also a rearguard action, so that often that these intimations of a new, indifferent and inhuman world are as if ventriloquised by forms of classical historical painting: Homeric landscapes, biblical events. The romantic artist manipulates the exteriority he has discovered in the name of ‘nature’, dissimulating the deterritorializing forces that manufactured his landscapes; or he employs them to yield sublime moments of moral insight. What could be done in order to prise the sublime from this mixed, economic deployment, which ultimately tells us nothing about the real, but only about the internal indices of trauma and the subject’s reactionary responses to it and attempts to draw some edification from it? This trauma must itself be seen, not as an object of thought, but as immanent to the real: that is, we would have to ‘clone’ the sublime, to describe it from a position outside the affective experience of it. And in order to do so, we would have to posit the non-philosophical axiom: the sublime experience is non-different, indifferent, and 7/18

simultaneous to the real that traumatises it; they are identical – and they are not identified qua synthesised, articulated or differenced on the basis of the sublime experience – they are to be seen in-One. We would need to resist the organic-economic subordination of trauma and affirm the violating reality to the extent of suggesting not only that the sublime qua human experience bears the mark of an alien intrusion into human culture, but that human culture is already immanent to this alien reality. As in Freud’s model of the organism, the reality that threatens the possibility of imagination and conception is the same reality that produces life and thought from an unconscious and ‘dead’ substrate. Trauma thereby becomes more than a game of chicken played by the subject, it becomes immanent fact. It is not that we afford reality the opportunity to delight us with its sublimity; rather, the real intrudes upon us, forcing thought to behold its own contingency in ever more precise and appallingly unimaginable ways. Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi adds something important to Freud’s account here: he says that, rather than the psyche merely using the traumatic stimulus as the grounds for a reinforcement or its interiority, in fact this stimulus is internalised but sequestered, like a sort of foreign body, an alien insider. We harbour within ourselves elements of the inorganic, indifferent real—in fact, ultimately, this is all we are, the compounded result of a series of traumas. Again, this could be called an experimental practice in thought: What happens when we retract the economic schema of the subjective experience of trauma, and instead posit the axiom of this experience’s immanent identity to the real; what kind of space is opened up? I use this as a way to introduce Pamela Rosenkranz’s work, which I think attempts to address the inherited objects of aesthetics not by symptomatically repeating their gestures, but also not by simply refusing them; her work seems to introduce another way of thinking them, by placing aesthetic experience on the same plane as the objects it aestheticizes. 3 So, I’d like to turn now to a body of work created by Rosenkranz during a residency in Venice in 2009–10. This work was developed in response to the classic aesthetics of sunlight and water, and explores the human ‘domestication’ of these elements, venerated equally in religion, art, and the holiday brochure. Needless to say, sunlight and water are the predominant motifs of art in and about Venice: the sun on water, the dazzling reflections, and so on. And of course the sun and the ocean are classic motifs of the sublime. Now, Rosenkranz seems to have asked herself how she could address this heritage, somehow create a performance or a clone of it, without participating in it. The theme of trauma is evident throughout the work: A motif of enclosing and protective membranes acknowledges that sun and water, indispensable elements of life, are also exorbitant, potentially deadly powers; but also media of capitalist accumulation. This is particularly apt in Venice, the sinking city, which stands as a sort of synecdoche for ecological catastrophe, but which is also a synonym for capitalist accumulation, a city gilded by the riches that its position on the water brought it. Now, In Freud, the survival and individuality of an organic lifeform, biological, psychic or cultural, is based on the repression of an originary trauma in which it encountered, in all its naked power, the source of energy that would also be its death. Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting, temporarily protecting themselves against the outside that created them and will destroy them. 8/18

Thus we can say that all forms of life are solutions to the same problem; all their multiform characteristics are but methods of managing the excoriating excess of solar energy which will eventually consume them in death. As modes of life become more complex and more numerous, their dependence upon the excessive power source only grows stronger; there is therefore a mutually-reinforcing symmetry between the plurality of life and the monism of death. Another way to put this is that, from the point of view of the securitised individuated lifeform closed up against its traumatic encounter with solar excess, the sun inevitably becomes the single and absolute horizon or vanishing point for all life. It becomes sublime at the same time as, and to the extent that it is, domesticated and multiplied into endless forms of consumption. In regard to both life and capitalism, water acts as a kind of relay; it is the sun’s representative on earth, the angelic secondary medium through which the solar economics of life is manifested. Although ultimately everything and everyone is destined for annihilation by the sun, trapped here on the planetary surface, the circuitous extravagances of life and capitalism are determined by following where the water is. It is to this affinity with water that capitalism owes its quasi-natural status and its potency as a new ‘force of nature’ churning and reterritorialising the planet. Water is that which allows the creation of the great human settlements, but it is also that which allows the commodity to travel, and thus accrue value in differentiation. The purest form being, of course, tourism, in which wealth is created through movement alone. Capitalism’s unbridled consumption of energy manifests itself culturally in an ever-increasing complexification and elaboration of multiple ‘ways of life’ and supposedly infinite possibilities and differentiation. Capitalism, therefore, relays into the cultural sphere a model according to which there are multiple forms of life but all are conducted by water and pledged to the singular fate of the solar abyss. All the diversity of life-under-capital, like the diversity of organic life, only corresponds to the fact that the relation between earth and sun unilaterally determines the model of life and thought. Rosencranz’s interrogation thus knits together, under the sign of Venice, this dialectic of sun and water, their complicity and their connection with life, capital and thought. The celebrated aesthetic phenomenon of sunlight and water now appears as a kind of seductive sensory propaganda for this planetary conspiracy between capital, water, and the sun. This conspiracy also has a parallelism with philosophy that is far from accidental, for philosophy has always considered the sun as the ultimate source of enlightenment…. Let’s suppose that the ultimate significance of our visual fascination for the sun lies in the rediscovery of an originary trauma; the sun is the abyss towards which we are impelled to return, but which we must close ourselves up against. What better thing, then, than to see it reflected, in water … As in Plato, where one of the intermediate steps leading to the communion with the sun, the ultimate idea, is to contemplate ‘likenesses or reflections in water …’ That is to say, then, that the unilateral relation between earth and sun—for there is no reflexive relation whatsoever between them, the sun does not acknowledge the earth—is dissimulated by capitalism’s multiform ways of reflecting, and reflecting upon, the sun. Capitalism is nothing other than the sublime, in this sense; but by taking this unilateral perspective on it, we are enabled a kind of non-participation. The shimmering surfaces of Rosenkranz’s work thus become a kind of clone or performation of sublime aesthetics, as symptoms both in art and in capitalism. The ingenuity of Rosencranz’s use of emergency blanket foil in Bow Human and Stretch Nothing is that it renders these reflective, dazzling surfaces, and the whole aesthetic tradition dedicated to them, inextricable from the fundamental ambivalence of life towards the sun: the return of light to the eye, beyond its shimmering sensory 9/18

appeal, speaks of a protective role—protection against an immense energy that cannot be afforded by any form of life; at the same time, the material suggests the accumulation through which capitalism desperately tries to forestall the inevitable, to harness and store a tiny part of this excess energy, to bury sunlight in gold—from the scintillating gold of the Basilica with its threefold glorification of the Christian god, the sun god and the money god, to its millions of cheap imitators hawked by the surrounding tourist stalls. In other words, the work presents a concept, which unilateralises aesthetic phenomena and their meaning and retracts their symptomatic, reflexive or mixed nature. In the Stretch Nothing series, vaguely human forms are reduced to a thin layer of skin smeared across this reflective foil, and trapped under glass, as in a greenhouse. Like these paintings, Bow Human can be understood as positing the human form in relation to this solar economy, whether we understand it as the victim of some geographical catastrophe, one of the female beggars who bow over their collection tins by the Venice canals, or a devotee of some ancient cult prostrating themselves before the sun. In ‘Bow Human’, an reflective foil emergency blanket covers a figure who could equally be praying to a sun-god, begging, or sheltering from environmental catastrophe; Its scintillating surfaces recall the luxuriant gold of St Mark’s Basilica which glorifies both God and Mammon. ‘Firm Being’ presents the ‘diversity of human life’ celebrated by capitalism as a series of commodified watercontainers—as found in the hands of every tourist in Venice. The relaying of the economic model from the biological to the capitalistic is then poetically distilled in the unsettling correspondence Rosencranz sets up between what is apparently the most triumphant demonstration of the infinite absurdity of commodity-logic—branded, bottled water—and the human diversity and individualism celebrated by capitalist culture. Impeccably-packaged but viscerally unsettling, Firm Being recalls George Orwell’s reminder, at once ghoulish and irrefutable, that ‘a human being is primarily a bag for putting food in’. Food and water … The organism—let’s repeat the banal fact that our bodies, far from ‘firm being’, are in fact seventy percent water— uncannily anticipates the commodity, and the commodity perfects the trauma-driven encapsulation of sunlight in a bio-degradable membrane, with a sell-by date—‘the surface being merely a thin film separating from an abyss’. What is interesting to me in relation to the sublime, is that Rosenkranz’s work seems to address the forces of cosmic exteriority that the sublime hinted at, but without reenacting the affect-driven violence that the romantic sublime harbors, and which seems to have an epidemic dimension: Ever since the first modern commentaries on Longinus and the development of the modern theories of the sublime, writers have been remarked on the epidemic quality of the sublime: that you can hardly write about the sublime without yourself succumbing to hyperbole, superlatives, in the attempt to evoke the other party’s evocations. In unilateralizing the violence of that cosmic exteriority inflicts upon human reason, and presenting its symptoms as a part of the same real as their cause, rather than articulating the cause through the symptoms, Rosenkranz presents a new opportunity of artistic inquiry into the depths of the real as a weird ‘outside’. That is to say, she presents an account of the sublime, an account of the hegemony of certain affects in art—she connects them both to a certain traumatism, and to capitalist commodification and aesthetic meaning, as it these were further aftershocks of trauma – but without simply relaying them once again, Thus, what I suspect is at work in Rosenkranz’s work are strategies for breaking this circuit, for dealing with the aesthetic tropes without participating in spreading the infection or ‘affect-driven violence’ that are symptoms of the 10/18

artistic decision. And this in the same way (as you will have guessed) as Laruelle attempts to place himself outside the interminable auto-production of philosophical discourse. The point is to cease being the hapless victims of our own affect by continually transforming the ‘real qua irrevocably weird outside’ into a palatable but highly-contagious organic analogue. Of course, conceptual art and abstraction had already ripped art away from its compulsive relation to the aesthetic; however rarely does it deal with the aesthetic. In this sense the turn to the conceptual does little unless we produce concepts that deal with our continuing enthrallment to the aesthetic – if not in art, then—as Rosenkranz seems to tell us—certainly as it is mobilised in other fields of commercial affect. I’d suggest here returning to a word suggested by the philosopher Reza Negarestani: Complicity. Because it is complicity that presents the mysterious or exorbitant elements of the outside as common or more precisely disenchanted chemical elements (oil, dust, water and other cognizable entities) in reaction with each other. Yet at the same time it is complicity as the independent calculus of the real that consistently dispossesses the victim of its authorial voice to narrate the reality of trauma. That is—and here is the parallel with Laruelle—the artist can no longer assume as originary right, her right to speak about the relation between her affect and the real, even if this relation is a limited and conditioned one (as in the sublime). The artist and her affect are ‘built in’ to the work, not reflexively, but as the product of a unilateral real that owes nothing to the work, and that is ‘lodged’ in the work as a kind of alien insider. A real that we try to domesticate by imposing meaning upon it, even the meaning of the sublime. But these meanings themselves are just the aftershocks of the traumatic real. You will no doubt say that it is strangely anachronistic to attempt to perform a kind of critique of artistic tropes, of aesthetic forms that have already been worked over, gone beyond, and discarded by modern art history. But my point is this: In this rereading of classic tropes, does Rosenkranz assume the position of a critique or a deconstruction? In my view, she does not, she does something different, and closer to Laruelle’s non-philosophical operation. And, like the latter, it achieves something in relation to these aesthetic tropes that had not been achieved before. This is a kind of cloning or performance which proceeds on the basis of an axiom of immanence: what it refuses is the prior positing of art’s relation to the real. On a surface level, what is interesting to me is that this work shares a certain affect with Laruelle’s writing, and I have seen it exert similar effects: people say that it is not art, they find it unaffecting, it has a certain neutrality: this is precisely because, as with Laruelle’s work, in changing the paradigm, it fails to satisfy reflex desires. For Laruelle. philosophy’s downfall is that ultimately, despite all its claims to rigour and objectivity, it takes up a completely different stance to science, because it does not describe, but is instead driven by an obscure desire. And indeed what is interesting is that in Pamela’s work, even though it could be called ‘nihilist’, nihilism itself is subjected to the same kind of blocking treatment: it is not nihilistic in the sense that it conveys an experience of meaninglessness as an emotional experience of loss: here, the affect of nihilism is blank and multifarious: What is actually very interesting is that her work does not end up as an austere conceptualism, but produces new concepts and new symbols, but ones that in a certain sense are neutralised. As in the relation between the sun and the earth, the blackness of annihilation opens up into a spectrum of residual colours. 5 11/18

She uses this position as a way in which one can treat artistic practice—and the artist herself—as ‘materials’ in a similar way to that in which Laruelle wants to make philosophy into a ‘material’ for his non-philosophy. Let’s look at one more, more recent work: The static blue screen of Rosenkranz’s video work Death of Yves Klein (2011) also presents a concept, a blue-asconcept (a re-presentation of International Klein Blue) that cannot be said straightforwardly to ‘belong’ to art (more here). It cannot be said to belong to art precisely because it indicates a real that maintains a unilateral relation to art, that is the cause in the last instance of art but that art cannot assume is there ‘for’ it, in the way that Klein, ultimately, wanted his blue to be both a cosmic gift, and ‘signed by the artist’. After essaying this brief experimental parallel, it’s time to now remark on some differences: Ultimately, Rosenkranz’s work is not non-philosophical in Laruelle’s sense. Laruelle stakes his position on the possibility of an experience of the radical immanenence of thought and the real.That is, his thinking of the real remains rooted in thought, albeit a thought stripped of many of the fundamental reflexes we attribute to it. Philosophically, Pamela is more interested in eliminative materialism, that is the branch of philosophy that holds that it is the sciences that reveal to us a real that is indifferent to us. She says: ‘my work is about the implications of science for contemporary art: the manifest image doesnt get erased, rather it gets contrasted with our spontaneous self-image’. Pamela is concerned with the ‘absolute real’, in the sense Ray Brassier presents it in his book Nihil Unbound. Brassier seeks to construct a philosophical position that takes account of the way in which human thinking, which always thinks the real in relation to itself and as conditioned by that relation, is thought by science (cognitive science in particular) as being, itself, a contingent phenomena that can be accounted for without any transcendence; in effect, scientific reason erodes its own claims to transcendence over that which it speaks of. It seems to me that Pamela’s work tries to operate a similar procedure on art, to explore the consequences when we understand art, and the artist, as being immanent to the contingent materiality of the world. We have to remark that Laruelle’s theoretical creation is subordinated to the mission of saving ‘man’ (albeit ‘generic man’). Laruelle is still, in a certain sense, a phenomenologist, and is not interested in a thought that would liquidate the human subject. In this sense, I do not wish to that Pamela is a ‘Laruellian’ artist or that her work somehow illustrates Laruelle’s work. I only want to concentrate on what I would call attempts at blockage or refusal, on the fact that she handles art a lot like Laruelle handles philosophy—as if she were working with one of those cabinets that scientists use to handle radioactive material (with the big gloves). And that this is done in an attempt to move beyond the potentially endless recycling of the same discourse (through all its apparently radical deformations, deconstructions and destructions) which has always, from the start, decided (on) the real—so as to access new possibilities that may lie outside. Thought, which always spontaneously thinks the real in relation to itself and as conditioned by that relation, is thought by science (cognitive science in particular) as being, itself, a contingent phenomena that can be accounted for without any transcendence; in effect, scientific reason erodes its own claims to transcendence over that which it speaks of. It seems to me that Pamela’s work tries to operate a similar procedure on art, to explore the consequences that follow when we understand art, and the artist, as being immanent to the contingent materiality of the world. And even if she is more interested in eliminative materialism than in non-philosophy, nevertheless there is a certain logic at work which links them together: Non-philosophy renders immanent the reality of thought and the thinking of 12/18

reality. Eliminative materialism tries to carry out the same operation, but on the basis of a materialist reduction of the brain rather than a non-philosophical reduction of philosophy. What I would say, therefore, is that in Pamela’s work there is an attempt to create art that presents concepts as blockages designed to prevent the work from participating wholeheartedly in certain artistic tropes, and in particular in perpetuating (a) the priority of meaning over materiality and (b) the concept of either artist or viewer as author/authority over the material of the work, which has remained constant despite the reductions and disruptions of modern art. In the same way that Laruelle wants to create a thought that is not ‘anti-’ or ‘post-’ philosophy, but which operates on philosophy as a material, Pamela takes the very basic presumptions and notions of art as her material and, by refusing to involve herself in them, produces something else. What is very interesting to me is that her work does not end up as an austere conceptualism, but produces new concepts and new symbols, but ones that in a certain sense are neutralised. This I believe is the reason why, despite the fact that it deals with colour, the body, etc., her work has a peculiar non-affective quality. Finally, at something of a tangent, I’d like to share something with you that bears upon this question of Laruelle’s relation to eliminative materialism, but also on the relation between non-philosophy and art. Not many people realise that in the 90s Laruelle wrote a series of experimental texts…And when I interviewed him last year, for a forthcoming collection of his essays in translation, speaking about these experimental texts, he said that really they constituted the ultimate aim of his work: I am not a materialist… I think this form of materialism is a philosophical thesis. Cognitivism may be the object of a science, and this science may be seen as one that is conquering with relation to mind. But the problem for me is of introducing a way of thinking this science into philosophy. My aim is in particular, how to treat philosophy as a material, and thus also as a materiality – without preocuppying oneself with the aims of philosophy, with its dignity, its quasi-theological ends, with philosophical virtues, wisdom etc., that doesn’t interest me. What interests me is philosophy as the material for an art, at the limit, an art. My idea, which has been growing for some years, and may last a little longer, is to make art with philosophy, how to introduce or make a poetry of thought, not necessarily a poetry made of concepts, a poetry that would put forward some philosophical thesis, but make something poetic with concepts. Thus, that could come to destroy in a certain way the classical usage of philosophy. Obviously, in the books I published I still respect the dignity of philosophical work – at least I hope so. I still make those books for philosophers. But my experimental texts, I don’t know who those are written for. I don’t know. And that bothers me enormously. Often, when I have [echo] favourable for these texts, I say, yes, but myself, I don’t know how to evaluate them, I have no judgment on them. They are a sort of non-sense, even for me. [Interview and experimental texts are published in From Decision to Heresy] What’s interesting in what he says is that, where Pamela’s work indicates to me a new turn for art through adopting the perspective of unilaterality, Laruelle wants to create use the material of philosophy as a form of art. In either case, though, it is a question of the use made of art, or of philosophy. As Laruelle wants to make a non-philosophical use of philosophy as a material, that would be art, could we think of a non-artistic use of art as a material—and would that be art or…something else? *** Answers to a series of questions from Anna Reid (Pavilion). The movement or structural shift that you have described is one that takes place across ‘speculative realism’. As we are honing in particularly on Francois Laruelle here, can you tell us what would distinguish this phenomenon as non13/18

philosophical, if we were to read it that way? ‘Speculative Realism’ is a very broad term that is gradually falling apart, because it was originally a label of convenience for a single event, the conference of 2007. I have doubts about its ongoing utility. Laruelle himself certainly wouldn’t group himself with any of those thinkers, because, for him, they all take up what are still philosophical positions, whether pragmatist, idealist or materialist. The closest of the group to him, and the person who has done the most to bring Laruelle’s ideas to an English-speaking public, is Ray Brassier. However, as I mentioned, Ray’s work is not ‘Laruellian’: what he does—and this is also what I’ve done—is to extract a certain logic from Laruelle’s work and redeploy it phenomenology). So, I would say that what Laruelle provides us with—and in this sense he is the original speculative realist, he provided the logic decades before we began to feel this urgent need for it, the need that has translated into SR becoming such a buzzword—what he provides us with is the logic of unilaterality that enables us to answer the central question of SR: How is it possible for thought to grasp a real that is not dependent upon thought for its existence? In critical, that is to say post-Kantian philosophy, this very question is regarded as mistaken or paradoxical in some respect, whether in what Meillassoux calls ‘weak correlationism’ (Kant: our knowledge is knowledge of something other than thought, but we cannot know anything of this ‘other’) or ‘strong correlationism’ (Hegel: all reality is bound up with the dialectical progression of thought and is never ‘external’ as such). What I would suggest is, firstly, that not all ‘Speculative Realism’ subscribes to this logic of unilaterality: particularly, ‘Object-Oriented Ontology’ accepts and generalises correlation in a certain fashion, and ends up affirming a mysterious reality outside of correlation, but which we can never really grasp (the ‘withdrawing’ object). And secondly, I would say that we now face various ways of deploying this thought of unilaterality. In Laruelle’s own work, the real, or identity, is ultimately based in an experience of radical immanence. He wants to disencumber the phenomenological image of man from everything philosophical that makes it a contaminated ‘mixture’, and rediscover a moment of absolute immanence in which thought is not separate from the real, a moment that philosophy has to presuppose but which it betrays. He believes that it is this moment upon which he can base a transcendental science—in this way, he follows and radicalises Husserl’s original aspirations for phenomenology: to create a science that proceeds from the ultimate conditions of knowledge, stripped of the instrumental structures that we apply to it in order to carry out philosophical enquiry. What Ray Brassier does is to invert the terms, and say that it is science that reveals to us this immanence of thought and the real, and that to think it is to dispossess ourselves entirely of our phenomenological self-image. It is this inversion of Laruelle’s thought that Pamela perhaps draws upon. Nevertheless I would say that Laruelle’s contribution is to have elaborated a logic of unilaterality that is, to my mind, the only way we have thus far of rigorously thinking what SR wants to be able to think. (With the exception of Meillassoux, who, however, relies upon ‘reason’ as a given. But that’s another story….) Whilst the perspective taken up by Rosenkranz is utterly at a remove and strictly non-participatory, can we say that this detached, blunt, deadpan perspective has, by default, a critical function? Do Rosenkranz’s notations of the mechanisms of the sublime in art release us onto other alternate sublime(s)? On one level it would be easy to say that, since Rosenkranz still participates in the art market, still produces things that are recognizable as objects, and so on, she takes a retrograde step in regard to a great deal of what is thought of in art discourse as ‘critical’. Perhaps in this way her work raises the question that a lot of people ask about Speculative Realism: Where is the politics in this discourse? Isn’t there, in the apparent ‘neutrality’ of this question of 14/18

an indifferent real, some kind of concealed reactionary politics? Now, for Laruelle, the enterprise of non-philosophy is very much political: it is a process of emancipating a generic figure of man from the ‘mixtures’ in which he is implicated, and from the authority of philosophy. It’s an explicitly Marxist agenda, really. About Pamela’s work, I would say that the political implications lie in the way in which she reveals how the uninterrogated assumptions of art are continued into the discourses of marketing and commercial suggestion. She, too, wants to recover the human from its ideological admixtures, from all the supposedly ‘self-evident’ aspects of what we know of ourselves, and she uses resources like neuroscience and evolutionary biology as a lever to do this. These spontaneous self-evidences inhabit art as much as advertising: Marketing speaks to us, and produces us as subjects, using a garbled amalgam of discursive resources adopted from any tradition that is useful to it. Its promises of enhanced performance and well-being appropriate at leisure from the registers of evolutionary biology, neurochemistry, and nutritionism, but also those of spiritual epiphany and self-realization. The optimization of the self becomes both the object of intense research and development (“the science bit”) and the subject of aspirational identity (“because I’m worth it”). So that the human as absorber and reflector of symbols is coupled with the human as opaque object to be dosed, modulated, and detoxed. (No Core Dump) Pamela’s work operates in the common space of that core self that we are invited to discover through identification with consumer objects, and the transcendence claimed by certain modes of artistic subjectivity—her practice brings together the symbolic resources of both. That is to say, her conceptual works exist in the space where the transparency of meaning and the transcendence of self meet in a supposed blind spot. The materials—colour, texture, symbolic suggestion—that are customarily refined, purified, and smoothed out so as to render their symbolic function transparent are forced to announce their contingency, appearing as so much dead matter clustered around an empty center. So that the self that appears in their mirror is revealed by the artist as a generic patchwork of abstract signifiers clinging to the same void. Thus, the con of the concepts presented by Rosenkranz—that which holds them together—is a symbolic absence or an absence-in-symbol, just as the con of the concept as such, that with which we think, is a void for sense. This reveals a certain political stake in Speculative Realism: if we don’t think rigorously the relation between our spontaneous self image and the reality that science reveals to us, then we will be experimented on and exploited by powers that are happy to use both indiscriminately. Now, does this produce a new sublime? In the artists that I have worked with—and, to be honest, this is more a function of coincidence and the functioning of social networks than anything else—I have been criticised before on this score: Why should ‘Speculative Realist’ art have this tone of apocalypticism, why is it somehow gothic, and doesn’t it end up precisely reproducing a gesturing towards a sublime unthinkable? I think it’s a valid point to explore. To my mind, Pamela’s work more than any other manages to avoid this, a lot of it has a neutrality and lack of bombast. And again the key concept here is that of unilaterality: the aim is to create concepts that capture a real that is not the real ‘of’ a particular mode of thought or way of seeing the world, a real that, in a certain sense, has nothing to say to us. And yet, in doing so, one must accept that something new is produced, on the level of affect as well: just as Laruelle accepts that philosophy happens, has effects, and is real. What is the character of the implied relation between art and viewer or writing and reader in this scenario? What is the implied pedagogical model? Utterly disinterested? By extension, how might we think a non-philosophical (non) community of practices? 15/18

I can only answer this from my own experience of the work, which is an experience mediated by the philosophy, albeit the same writers that Pamela herself is drawing on in her practice. My feeling is that she presents concepts to us, and what is a concept? It is a ‘thinking together’, the presentation of set of things that cohere. I believe that in bringing together a certain philosophical perspective with a reading of both inherited artistic and popular culture, she presents us with new concepts. In the Yves Klein piece, for instance, a new concept of blue is presented, it uses resources drawn from previous artworks, but it is a concept that ‘blocks’ their trajectory and the paradigm under which they were previously presented—so, this is a thinking-together of things that is no longer a detained within the paradigm of thought in which they were originally presented. It allows us to think that paradigm itself as something produced alongside, and on the same level as, its materials. It’s a kind of flattening. I would also add something in a more general way, that my experience of working as a philosopher with artists. I developed a model of what I call an ‘interrupted relay’. This is a model that is itself borrowed from artists, in this case Jake and Dinos Chapman. As you know the Chapman brothers works are invariably ‘signed’ by both of them. But Jake once told me that, when they work on, say, a drawing together, what actually happens is that he will work on it, leave it on the desk, and then Dinos will come in the following morning and scribble on it, then leave it, and then Jake will come back and add something more to it. This seemed to me like the perfect model for how philosophers and artists work together: in my experience, I look at an artist’s work and associate it with certain concepts, which I write about. The artist will take these concepts and attach them to objects or other concepts, and produce something unrecognisable to me, which I will then take away again and be able to think about in terms of yet other concepts. There is, in a sense, no ‘communication’ or ‘collaboration’, there are two people working in different milieus, who are each able to give something to each other, but this is only possible when they both agree not to be respectful and considerate of the ‘proper’ way of using each others’ work. It’s something that happens ‘in-between’ and in the end doesn’t belong to either of the parties involved, which is why it’s quite a delightful and exciting thing to be involved in. I’m working on a book right now that I can honestly say is not ‘by me’ any more than it is ‘by’ the artists I have worked with over the past few years, who have taken what were sometimes frustratingly abstract and dry concepts and processed them through a milieu that brings together other practices and materials. It’s great for me that they, also, report that their work is enriched by my running it through my own ‘thought-machine’. Laruelle’s thought has been described as of the look, an optical thought. Can you respond to this by giving us a sense of how? We can talk about this through Laruelle’s book on photography, and in particular by comparing it to another important text, Flusser’s Philosophy of Photography. Flusser tells us we have to learn to read photographs: read, because photographs are not images but a type of writing. Photographs are not what they seem to be, faithful and accurate images of a world. The reign of photograph seems to belong to a resurgence of the image—images are everywhere. But in fact it belongs to an historical dialectic between magical consciousness and historical consciousness, between imagination and conceptualization. Magical consciousness is associated with images, which are symbolical. Whereas historical consciousness begins with writing and with a critique—albeit an unconscious critique—of the image. For Flusser, photographic images are texts, or ‘meta-codes of texts’ The black box of the camera is a coding machinery, it is a kind of mechanically-congealed complex of inscriptive practices. In historical consciousness, we think the world through concepts. But the photographic image corresponds to a sort of automation of concepts: in the photographic apparatus we think the world through concepts pre-packed into an apparatus, through a sort of technical magic, without even realizing it. ‘The function of technical images is to emancipate their receivers from the 16/18

need to think conceptually, by substituting an imagination of the second degree for conceptualization.’ And for Flusser, the danger of images is that we should fail to adopt a critical attitude to this type of writing. We find a similar theoretical manoeuvre in Laruelle towards philosophy as in Flusser towards photography. Because for Laruelle, philosophy presents the same kind of invisible mediation: philosophy claims to present us with reality, and go on to analyse it in various ways. But in fact, the ‘world’ that philosophy presents is always already philosophy’s image of the world, the image produced through philoosphical decision. Philosophy is driven by desire, whereas science is driven by knowledge. But photography corresponds to a sort of ‘blind thought’. He connects this with the notion of science (literally ‘seeing’), as found in Husserl’s phenomenology. For Husserl, the scientific stance is achieved through a reduction, or a bracketing out of the cognitive reflexes that lead us to spontaneously structure the world in terms of objects. Now, Husserl’s ‘reduction’ is always couched in terms of vision, which ‘gives free rein to the seeing eye and bracket[s] the references which go beyond the “seeing” and are entangled with the seeing, along with the entities which are supposedly given and thought along with the “seeing.”’ So science, which is seeing, ‘is also a blindness towards the world.’ If we understand the photographic act properly, we can see that it too involves this act of ‘reduction’, that in the act of photography one no longer inhabits ‘the world’—which, let us remember, is an invention of philosophy—that is, according to Laruelle, there is a moment in photography when one is imposed upon by a real that has not yet been processed and manufactured by us. To make it clear, Laruelle is trying to radicalize what is called Husserl’s ‘eidetic reduction’ into a reduction of philosophy, to create a theoretical practice that can speak of a real or identity that is not already cut up and distributed by philosophical decision. And what he sees in photography is a kind of avatar of this theoretical practice. The question remains whether this is still held in the grip of the authority which vision and its metaphors has always had over philosophical thought. I think Laruelle tries to escape this in The Concept of Non-Photography. Hypothesis: A non-philosophical art community is flourishing. What does this mean for art? What do we make of a non-affective art? A couple of points: firstly, the relation between philosophers or theorists and artists is not straightforward. It would be a mistake to think that artists merely took theories and ‘embodied’ them in a work. There are all sorts of twists that take place between reading and using that reading in a practice. I wouldn’t expect any artist to simply declare ‘I am now making non-philosophical art’, and if they did, I wouldn’t expect that work to be particularly interesting. Secondly, would non-philosophical art necessarily mean non-affective? I have tried to suggest not. What I would espouse as a step forward, into a new territory, is not a practice that tries to create work that produces nothing on the level of affect—an enterporise that would, after all, be futile—we only have to honestly observe our reaction to, say, the conceptual art of the seventies, to see that all those typwritten instructions and so on carry a certain affect, one which, moreover, changes with the historical circumstances. The question is whether one can create work 17/18

whose enquiry sets out from the point of view of a ‘vision-in-One’ in which affect is not produced by the work as something separate from the work, but is pre-emptively read from a position outside its own sovereignty. The non-philosophical shift in certain practices is constitutively not a criticism of art or a shift that supersedes. Yet how can art practice continue unabashed in the light of such a shift if it has absorbed it? In this case, how could practice after Rosenkranz participate in the Sublime? If it has been let in on ‘the secret’. Certainly, irregardless of the intervention or not of non-philosophy, isn’t there already something absurd, from our point of view, about someone who paints a landscape in order to try and evoke the sublime feeling of being on the Yorkshire Moors? Such works subsist only as relics, since these modes of practice have been decoded and overanalysed long ago; and it would indeed be naive, in the face of this, to simply continue with them. On the other hand what does it mean to have ‘got over’ the sublime, to have ‘moved on’ from classical ideas of beauty? What does it mean, if we still subscribe to the notion of an artist-self or a collective ‘us’ that is somehow in control of this progression, that we can choose to cast aside such naiveties? In particular, if we reflect that this supposedly autonomous and critical self is programmed everyday by the employment of sophisticated and not so sophisticated versions of these old aesthetic modes, in advertising and marketing? In fact, by thinking ourselves to be ‘critical’, all we do is to create a dualism between the aesthetic. and the artwork as cosa mentale, as a purely mental thing. Duchamp and Klein’s disgust for retinalism and the manual labour of painting, etc. Artists took apart painting by thematising the mechanism of seeing, from of the point of view of its materiality – Seurat made himself a kind of human camera—but has any conceptual artist yet completed this process, taking apart conceptual art by thematising the process of thinking and practice, and the fact that one still perceives oneself as an artist-self capable of making such decisions? The contingency of the forms of art—painting and sculpture— have been brought into the arena of art practice, but perhaps not yet the contingency of the artist—which is what I think Pamela is doing. In which case, like Laruelle’s work, this could be seen equally as a consummation of the process of critique, or as something that finally exits from the cycle of critique, which always presumes the sovereign subject of critique, able to operate the decision of critique… 18/18

readthis.wtf /writing/skin-between/ Skin Between - 2012 In 1963, the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, in an article entitled ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ proposed a distinction that, although it has played very little part in the major history of twentieth-century philosophy, seems to become ever more pertinent. Sellars distinguishes between the ‘Manifest Image’ and the ‘Scientific Image’. That is to say, he remarks a growing divergence between the account of the world delivered by the sciences, and the image of the world that we customarily conduct our lives according to—our image of ourselves as self-willed, autonomous agents in a world that is full of meaning. Sellars inquires into how these images conflict, and asks whether philosophy can somehow bridge this gap, or resolve this disparity, and if so, then how. Now, of course, Sellars is not the only philosopher to have written about this gap between the two images of the world: in fact, much of Western philosophy in the twentieth Century has concerned itself, often with a certain creeping horror, with the growing gap between the way in which human beings recognise themselves, others, and the world around them, and a vision of the world—rationalised, mechanised, or materialist—that the sciences have progressively opened up. At least since Nietzsche, philosophers have diagnosed this new image of the world as the germ of nihilism, the disrupting of human meaning and the beginning of the quest of an ungrounded and disoriented man to restore meaning to the world somehow. Needless to say, the disparity between the manifest and scientific images becomes all the more disturbing when we begin to think about ourselves—when we contemplate the fact that there is nothing special or central about the world we live in—Copernicus—that we are animals, descended from the contingent evolutionary processes–Darwin—and that perhaps our conviction and trust in our own thoughts is misplaced–Freud, and latterly, neuroscience and cognitive science. Sellars however does not seek to prioritise the manifest human image as if it were an originary, authentic truth which the scientific image damages. He is sceptical about the idea that there is somehow a spontaneous, truthful image of ourselves that should be preserved. I introduce the term ‘spontaneity’ here because I think it’s another very useful term. The notion of ‘spontaneity’ was developed furthest by French Epistemology in the twentieth century, following Bachelard. What was at issue here, before Sellars, was the way in which scientific thought seemed to make a decisive break with our intuitive image of the world. The way things appeared to us spontaneously was not the way things were revealed to be by rational scientific thought. And through the 60s and 70s this idea of spontaneity saw an interesting convergence with the Marxist critique of ideology, a critique that sought to reveal our most fundamental presuppositions and models of the world, our spontaneous framework for understanding, as ultimately determined by socio-political structures that were non-personal, that couldn’t be understood in terms of individual human agents. Now, in this case, our spontaneous image of the world is, as Althusser said in his pithy way, ‘spontaneous, because it is not’—the spontaneous appearance of ideology owes, precisely to the fact that in fact it is manufactured elsewhere, in a place and by mechanisms that, in principle, we don’t have access to. 1/6

What’s interesting in Sellars is that his way of being evenhanded with the scientific and manifest image is precisely to take this approach—to treat the manifest image as a complex theoretical construction, just as much as the scientific image is. He tries to withdraw from the manifest image its apparently immediate and spontaneous nature, and to show that it, too, is something constructed, on the basis of our biology, our social patterns, and our language. It’s like a sort of ‘black box’—in the same way that a camera seems to produce an image in a very simple and straightforward way, but in fact is a complex piece of machinery, a kind of construction of congealed theory; our minds also produce the spontaneous or manifest image through a series of complex mediations. This doesn’t resolve the question of how to reconcile the manifest and scientific image, but it goes some way towards posing the question in a more tractable way. Now, in philosophy, very broadly speaking, one could point to two veins of thinking that respond to the manifest and the sceintific image: phenomenology has sought to ‘bracket out’ the scientific image of the world, seeing it as a theoretical imposition that cannot be taken for granted. Phenomenologists try to capture the experience of being in the world and to understand how our understanding of the world is always mediated through our place in it and the way we try to make meaning of it. Science, for them, is just one of the ways in which we do so. On the other hand, philosophers of science have tried to resolve our natural way of seeing the world, our natural language and our meaning-making, into phenomena that are explicable in materialist terms. In contemporary philsophy I think we find two positions that speak directly to the problem of the two images. On one hand, we have the ‘democracy of objects’ espoused by Bruno Latour and what has become known as objectoriented philosophy. Here one tries to maintain the even hand of Sellars, and allow that the objects of the manifest image—the things that seem naturally to appear to us as objects and phenomena, and our construction of meaning around them—are, really, objects, on the same plane as the objects that science describes to us. And what philosophy should do is to try to describe the way these different types of objects interact. Here, science becomes, not a direct and objective description of the world, but one human practice among others, one way of constructing objects. The problem I see with this approach is that one loses both the truth-claims of science, and one loses the critique of ideology—on this level playing field, one becomes unable to make any distinction between the ways in which objects are produced, and hence ultimately while trying to save it, one loses any orientation towards a reality that could said to be real apart from human thought. In the absence of a critique of ideology or spontaneity, also, one becomes dependent on a framework of thought that is purely philosophical, and this brings with it the danger that this framework is unconsciously influenced by the objective appearance of things at a particular historical time: thus, the philosophies of Graham Harman and Tristan Garcia have a disquieting affinity to a world in which everything is exchangeable, packaged up into commodified objects, and flattened onto one plane, like a sort of Googlephilosophy. On the other hand, one has what is called eliminative materalism—that is, the position that says that we need to progressively disenchant ourselves of our spontaneous or manifest image, by recoding this image in the terms that science delivers to us. We have to learn, ultimately, to speak and to live our lives in the real, inhuman world that we have discovered, and bit by bit let go of the manifest image. This is a quite startling proposal, a sort of cultural revolution, really. NO-one has yet made any proposals for how this might be done, and this is something I find very interesting: What is the difference between thinking this, and culturally putting it into action? I’ll come back to this. But let me just remark on some shortcomings of this position too. The problem is that, in ‘eliminating’ the objects of the manifest image, one often deprives oneself of any means to talk about them. I once had a philosophy lecturer who invented a term for this type of thought: ‘nothing buttery’—when one presents to this type of philosopher an object of interest, perhaps something drawn from the manifest image, something meaningful and important, they 2/6

simply reply…it’s ‘nothing but’ evolution, ‘nothing but’ physics, and so on. So I think this way of thinking risks depriving us of the ability to think about certain things. Secondly, and on the contrary to the democratic or objectoriented approach, it can often rely on a rather hard-and-fast idea of science, and ignore the tentative nature of scientist’s hypotheses, the very real political and social dimensions of science. There is a political dimension here that is very important. It relates to the nature of ideology today. As follows: if we don’t attempt rigorously to think this gap between the manifest and scientific image, we can be very sure that marketing and advertising are quite capable of mobilising both of them in order to sell us products, and ultimately to sell us an image of ourselves that we consume. Newspapers are filled with incoherent amalgam of ‘nothing buttery’—stories about great scientific breakthroughs—and appeals to spontaneity. Advertising sells us an image of ourselves as powerful, spontaneous, empowered individuals at the same time as telling us that such-and-such a chemical, enzyme, or vitamin has been scientifically proven to provide this spiritual power-up. Exactly as in the famous ad, what reigns supreme today is an inconsistent ideological mixture of ‘the science bit’ and ‘because you’re worth it’. I think this space is where a lot of Pamela’s work sites itself. So, what about skin? I think skin could be a very acute point at which we could interrogate these two images. Not only because we understand more and more about what skin is, and perhaps will be able to generate it in a synthetic manner, and this synthetic skin is a kind of at once fascinating and repulsive symbol of the disconnect between the two images. More fundamentally because skin is such an important symbol for who we are and how we interact with others, it is so saturated with meaning, that it is difficult for us to think about it in any other way. Why is there skin? The very question introduces a bizarre alienation in regard to something that is so intimate and significant to us. Merleau-Ponty, the great phenomenologist, who once evoked this strangeness in referring to skin as ‘the sack in which i am enclosed’, was one of the philosophers who have attempted to reconcile the two images. In (very) brief, what he suggested was that, whilst we can’t demote the scientific image in favour of the phenomenological image of reality, what we have to do is to make far more effort to understand that the way in which we know the world, the way in which phenomena are constructed. He suggested that there was a third series of objects which were not accountable through a naturalistic, scientific explanation, but nor were they spontaneously-delivered products of the human’s image of the world. It is here, he suggested, that culture takes place. What I would suggest is that, in order to overcome the duality of the image, we would need to interrogate culture both through a critical lens and a scientific optic. It may be true that the way in which we see the world is fundamentally the product of what we could call ‘the spontaneous ideology of the organism’. As the vulgarised newspaper science stories tell us, one thing after another that we hold dear has been shown ‘in the lab’ to be nothing but an evolutionary trait, nothing but the effect of chemicals in the brain, and so on. At the same time, we should acknowledge, as Sellars did, that there is not just one fixed manifest image, it is changing all the time and being ‘contaminated’ by the scientific image. So, for instance, when I say, ‘that really gave me an adrenaline rush’, or ‘the endorphins really started to kick in when I went swimming this morning’, I am beginning, perhaps, to understand myself in a different way. I’d like to refer in general to Pamela’s work, and what skin becomes. There is no skin-as-biological-material in Pamela’s work, what appears in her work is skin as a sort of aesthetic material, a symbolic stock. This is the same way in which it is used in visual culture, a kind of powerful but abstract trigger that hooks right into our spontaneous impulses and powers of recognition and self-recognition. At the same time, however, by presenting skin directly in 3/6

this peculiar way, she makes us recognise it as such, and we begin to wonder, what relation does this abstract skinstuff have to the biological thing that we know skin is? In other words, the work, in-between ‘the science bit’ and ‘I’m worth it’, tends to dramatise the divergence between the manifest and scientific images, opening up the space of culture in which the two are mobilised by culture and ideology, but in which, also, we might be able to challenge them by conjoining the scientific image, and a critical reflection on the manifest image, to form some ideas that somehow encompass this complex object. The immediate response here is that of a human presence, and mark making, and of bodily substance. But there’s something strange: If the paint was red rather than skin-colour it would make sense, a kind of desperate act of markmaking in blood. But there is the strange displacement at work: here, skin itself is understood as an act of meaningmaking: what we tend to do is to place, onto the world, skin as a sort of emblem or brand. But here, the symbol that seems both full and transparent, both meaningful and immediately related to ourselves, just appears as an opaque material. 4/6

Here the substance is a material used in movie prosthetics, which comes in many different skin tones, symbolic at once of the power of the symbol of skin color and the notion of infinite diversity under capitalism, reflected in the plastic water bottle. Here, again, in a strange displacement, we see skin as a symbolic ‘stuff’ inside a second skin, that of the commodity; suggesting that the ‘sack in which I am enclosed’, with its reassuring notions of enclosure, limitedness and individuality, also has some relation to the shopping bag and the act of identifying with consumer products. Finally, here the skin has been reduced to its function of protection: it is that which keeps ‘us’ in, but it is also, ultimately, a biologically functional membrane that keeps the sensitive inner body shielded from the outside. Perhaps, far from being the most sensitive and alive part of us, instead, as in Freud’s theory of trauma, it is the part of us that had to die and become hard to protect us from the environment. Its purpose is not to reflect meaning, but to reflect harmful radiation, wind and rain. I would suggest that ‘skin’ is the name for a complex type of object that is not captured either by a democracy of objects or by an eliminativism. It’s an object that is a kind of mysterious ‘X’ that exists at the juncture of many different disciplines of knowledge and production, and that we don’t yet know. We would be able to realise this if only we were able to step out, for a moment, from our spontaneous assumption that it is the thing we know best of all. I think Pamela’s work helps us do this. In a kind of deliberate obstruction of visual culture, which is based both in our manifest image and in capitalism’s manipulation of it, what seemed to be the most transparent, radiant thing of all, a perfect symbolic mirror in which we reflected ourselves, turns out to be mediated, thinglike and opaque. 5/6

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readthis.wtf /writing/no-core-dump/ No Core Dump - 2012 Opacity appears precisely when darkness is made explicit. — Thomas Metzinger, Being No One L’avenir est tout noir. — Eugène Delacroix, Journal, April 7, 1824 Marketing speaks (to) us in an amalgam—garbled-to-order—of discursive resources adopted from any tradition whatsoever. Its promises of enhanced performance and well-being appropriate at leisure from the registers of evolutionary biology, neurochemistry, and nutritionism, as well as those of spiritual epiphany and self-realization. The optimization of the self becomes both the object of intense research and development (“the science bit”) and the subject of aspirational identity (“because I’m worth it”). The human as absorber and reflector of symbols is coupled with the human as opaque object to be dosed, modulated, and detoxed. And yet, confronted by (and even exploiting) scientific discourses that threaten to corrode our sense of identity and agency, the product continues to demand as its mirror a self that is introspectively available, and is the essential and ever-present center of experience. In Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, philosopher Thomas Metzinger describes how neuroscience can furnish an account of the self that diverges radically from this first-person perspective:1 If a 1/9

conscious information-processing system is a model representing its environment, the “self-model” embedded within it models this very activity of representation. In so doing, however, it must occlude the mechanism of representation itself; it is experienced not as a continual process of modeling, but as an spontaneously available reality. This occlusion, notes Metzinger, is an evolutionary advantage since it prevents an excessive recursivity that would not be instrumental for the organism. As a matter of efficiency, “being there” is experienced as a given. The first-person point of view—the experience of the self as an immediate yet unfathomable phenomenon through which all experience passes—is an instrumental screening that sequesters the model from the very process of representation that generates it.2 Providing the precise logic of the necessary non-manifestation of the mechanisms of manifestation,3 Metzinger’s hypothesis poses in particularly acute form the effectively nihilist philosophical vector opened up by the cumulative effects of the modern scientific image of the world: Not only are the earth and its inhabitants governed by material processes that our brains, evolved for animal survival, have little intuitive purchase on, but for the same reasons we ourselves are not as our phenomenological self-image would have us. What we experience as a transparent, unproblematic relation to self, as a realm of inner experience, consists, in fact, in an opacity that protects consciousness from an abyss of sub-personal and sub-symbolic processes. The luminous clearing in which the world comes to presence, is rather a “special form of darkness,”4 an “object emulator” screening the thing that thinks from its production. This nihilist logic of transparency and opacity lies at the heart of Pamela Rosenkranz’s work. Operating in the common space of that core self that we are invited to discover through identification with consumer objects, and the transcendence claimed by certain modes of artistic subjectivity, her practice brings together the symbolic resources of both. That is to say, her conceptual works exist in the space where the transparency of meaning and the transcendence of self meet in a supposed blind spot. In Rosenkranz’s oeuvre, materials customarily refined, purified, and smoothed out so as to render their symbolic function transparent are forced to rudely announce their contingency, appearing as so much dead matter clustered around an empty center. And the self that appears in their mirror is revealed by the artist as a generic patchwork of abstract signifiers clinging to the same void. Thus, the con of the concepts presented by Rosenkranz—that which holds them together—is a symbolic absence or an absencein-symbol, just as the con of the concept as such, that with which we think, is a void for sense. The empty core around which Rosenkranz’s readymade materials are assembled consists of elementary aesthetic cues such as color and human corporeality, often spoken of in the same philosophical breath as first-person consciousness, in terms of qualitative irreducibility.5 In so doing, the artist interrogates the way that both art and commercial visual culture propose such cues as a mirror in which the self can be recognized, cultivated, specified, or exalted; and she systematically erects an impediment to this narcissistic complicity, obstinately refusing to participate in or to compound it further. As such, the work presents us with the same dilemma that Metzinger isolates when he weighs the possibility of a neuroscientific account being “culturally integrated”—in so far as we retain our faith in the property of selfhood, it is impossible for us to be convinced of the self-model theory. On the other hand, to truly think it—to see the darkness for what it is—would mean there was no longer a self to be edified. In this alternative between a self whose constitution is foreclosed by transparency, and a thinking that voids the self, we encounter a thick darkness, an opacity. If this utter contingency from which we trust products and works to shield us cannot be exhibited in Rosenkranz’s disparate works, it certainly constitutes their vanishing point. 2/9

EGA #0000AA or the Screening of the Void When we refer to introspection and try to discover what the sensation of blue is, it is very easy to suppose that we have before us only a single term. The term ‘blue’ is easy to distinguish, but the other element which I have called ‘consciousness’ is extremely difficult to fix […] and in general, that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us; it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent—we look through it and see nothing but the blue; we may be convinced that there is something, but what it is no philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognized. G. E. Moore, The Refutation of Idealism6 The static blue screen of Rosenkranz’s video work Death of Yves Klein (2011) recalls a traumatic (albeit regular) experience for Microsoft Windows users throughout the 1990s. When the operating system encountered a catastrophic error, the carefully crafted and reassuring Windows interface would vanish to reveal a uniform blue screen etched, in frozen white text, with an arcane post-mortem report wherein enigmatic, clotted acronyms denoted esoteric ailments. Finally, the blue screen announced the terminal act of the deceased operating system: the secretion of a physical memory dump or core dump containing all the current contents of memory, on whose basis a technician’s forensic analysis might reconstruct the etiology of the fatal error. This particular hue, which gave rise to the colloquial name “Blue Screen of Death” (especially after its unwelcome appearance at Bill Gates’s high-profile launch of Windows 98 at COMDEX), becomes in Rosenkranz’s work a testamentary double for International Klein Blue—the specially-formulated paint through which Yves Klein sought to “conduct immateriality.” Klein conceived his refinement of painterly color, in turn, as a “foothold in the visible to cross the threshold into the invisible.” Thus he presented his monochromes as the penultimate step toward an art purified, entirely unburdened of materiality, and delivered to what he would call, famously, “the void.” 3/9

Beyond the misleadingly obvious (see Klein’s episodic dedication to esoteric lore like Heindel’s Rosicrucianism, and to the martial arts of judo) but equally as a final consummation of his earnest dedication to those disciplines, the substantive operation of Klein’s “void” emerges in an encounter with a more orthodox sensei: “My monochrome propositions are landscapes of freedom; I am an impressionist and a disciple of Delacroix,” he noted in 1957.7 It is in Delacroix’s journal, invariably cited when Klein recounts the history of the monochromes, that the artist found the resources to maintain the figure of the ‘”great artist” while stripping it of painterly specificity. And it is Delacroix’s claim that the “merit of the painting lies in the indefinable: that which escapes exact description”8 that allows Klein to don his white gloves, redefining the artist as he who effectively extracts this indefinable from the matrix of painterly labor. The repeated citing of the following passage gives clue to Klein’s interpretation of his “indefinable”: I adore this little vegetable garden […] this gentle sunlight over the whole of it infuses me with a secret joy, with a well-being comparable with what one feels when the body is in perfect health. But all that is fugitive; any number of times I have found myself in this delightful condition during the twenty days that I am spending here. It seems as if one needed a mark, a special reminder for each one of these moments.9 Klein would henceforth dedicate himself to conducting this immaterial energy—the health, the secret joy that Delacroix strove to capture in oils—while at the same time vesting his own signature with the authority to mark it. The artist, thus, comes to be defined by an extraordinary sensitivity to moments of resplendent transparency. Exercising the “recurrent will of the painter to conserve the traces of instants he had lived intensely,”10 Klein attempts to absolutize Delacroix’s proto-impressionist optical intensification and colorism,11 so as to register the “spiritual mark of these momentary states in my monochromes.” Or: “I thus paint the pictorial moment that is born of an illumination by impregnation into life itself,”12 for “the originality of a painter has never had need of a subject.”13 In this way, Klein will be able to claim his work to be nothing but the effect of this impregnation by the void. It is passive, like a photographic negative; it is without labor, unlike that handled by an artisan. His hyper-impressionist judo demands that he become a passive medium (the sponge) absorbing the reality of these momentary states of lived experience, marking “immaterial pictorial states” so as, eventually “to be able to live the ‘moment’ continually.”14 But such is the Kleinian void: The “highly enriching cure of aesthetic silence” (as Pierre Restany writes in the 1956 invite to the Propositions Monochromes) is none other than the bourgeois rest-cure of Delacroix’s garden inflated to cosmic proportions. The monochromes herald an intense self-enjoyment experienced as an extraordinary openness and transparency, a release from both physical and mental constraints, and Klein identifies this experience with both life and the void. Rosenkranz’s re-presentation of IKB impoverishes it materially, from a chemical innovation that pays ultimate homage to and deepens the painter’s mastery of color, to the cheap, mass-produced consumer-electronics glow of a plasma screen. At the same time, Death of Yves Klein (2011) impoverishes its predecessor chromatically, strongarming the pure pigment used in IKB to maximize intensity into the RGB-additive color model that such devices use to render the spectrum through quantized combinations of red, green, and blue. But, even more profoundly, Rosenkranz’s work proposes a confrontation between two distinct voids. Her RGB ersatz of IKB indexes the deflationary perspective suggested by the accompanying portrait of the great artist as a neurochemical core-dump. This complementary soundtrack, “read” by a automated voice, synopsizes the terminal state of Klein’s artistic subjectivity as a stew of nicotine, amphetamine, and paint-thinners with a fatal side-order of cortisol to go, administered by Mondo Cane’s cheap sullying of his monotone symphony: [“Working with paints and thinners can be harmful … Amphetamines contribute to heart attacks … Smoking is dangerous … Pigments enter the skin … Stress 4/9

hormones constrict blood vessels …” ]. Here, the artist is not impregnated by the void qua plenum of nature, but voided by way of a naturalization that overturns the cosmic provenance of the artist’s inner experience, reducing the epiphany of the void to chemically-induced neuropathy. The Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) provides further precision as to what is at stake here. The most plausible explanation for Microsoft’s choice seems to be that blue is the most calm-inducing of the colors available in EGA mode (the eight subsisting two-bit colors available to a graphics system whose higher-level systems have been shut down). In the face of disaster, the color blue continues to exude a cool, confident technocratism,15 like an impeccably-suited consultant come to deliver bad news. Ameliorating the user’s frustrated resignation to irretrievable data loss, and in contrast to the finely swept gradients of corporate teal in which the Windows user experience was traditionally garbed, the depthless blue of this chromatic nirvana is a glimpse of yet another void. It is the color of the last remaining emollient mask before the grand illusion of the “user experience” itself gives way to the mute and opaque meshwork of code libraries it always was. BSoD blue is not the unveiling of an infinite transparent depth but the distressed advent of the penultimate screen: It is at once a reduced form of instrumental occlusion—the interface —and an encrypted report of its malfunctioning. According to this other voiding, the phenomenological indescribable in whose immediacy Klein places his faith is a mere subroutine of an operating system that, in extremis, persists in registering its faltering state as revelation of a translucid depth. It is Derek Jarman’s testamentary film Blue (1993) that realizes the transit, within Rosenkranz’s concept, between these two voids—between Klein’s dreams of the artist as conduit for the infinite, and the exposition of his terminal state as a chemical breakdown. In Jarman’s film, the blue of the damaged retina stands first for the fear of the loss of artistic vision (through the catastrophic failure of its sensory and corporeal support), and subsequently for a triumph over this fear. It heralds a “universal Blue” that is the “universal love in which man bathes,” the “terrestrial paradise” that “transcends the solemn geography of human limits” and in which all is dialectically resolved, identity indifferentiated, and the “pandemonium of image” becalmed. Rosenkranz’s own work endows this redemptive vector with a cruel reversibility, as universal Blue backs up into systems crash. Methylene Blue, or Void Indicator In Rosenkranz’s larger body of work, the art object continues to be riddled from every quarter by the corrosive consequences of materialism. In Because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work (2011–12), the artisanal contingencies of artists materials (the shortcomings of online simulacra of IKB works, the printing and mounting process) return to wreak their revenge, conspiring comically to despoil the perfection of the void. It seems that the verminous irritation that bores holes in the artist’s vision can be excluded neither from the residual materiality necessary to channel the void, nor from the self seeks absolution in its infinite embrace. Rosenkranz forces the artist, at the moment when he believes triumphantly to have secured his realm, determining and exercising authority over the channels through which he will be impregnated, to confront his parasitical relation to the contingencies of materiality and his own natural history. Her revisiting of Klein’s Anthropometries operate on a similar disruption. Klein’s body prints allowed the audience to receive the energy of the void through the ramified clear channel of IKB, physical gesture, and corporeal élan, this immediacy being enabled, notably, by the removal of the artist from the process. But according to Rosenkranz, the removal of the obstacle of individual expression and representation, far from overcoming the problematic of art, leaves in place a more profound facture: the indelible mark of the artist’s trust in the self-authenticating authority of the feeling of great health, and the speculative faith in its transcendental referent (Klein’s void). In series such as “The Most Important Body of Water is Yours” (2010), the materiality of the works becomes an obstacle to this 5/9

aforementioned immaculate transmission of grace. As well as explicitly reintroducing the artist as a mediating element in the production (the imprint of the body is transferred as a monoprint), reminding us that the problematic of art is not so easy to dissolve, Rosenkranz’s works replace the translucidity of IKB with a series of flesh tones on a ground of energetically-hued spandex. Paradoxically, the irresistible symbolic charge of the flesh-color forms incapacitate the gestural potency of the prints themselves, its semiotic density preventing us from responding to their life-energy, muddying the mark of the Kleinian void and leaving us with nothing but the opaque secretion of a symbolic distillate onto an artificially fabricated ground. In the series “Firm Being” (2009–) meanwhile, plastic water bottles—their crystalline transparency a hyperbolic extension of the purity of their contents, which in turn promises to purify the body of the consumer—are filled instead with a material, again flesh-tone, intended as a prosthetic double for human skin, in a gross reification of symbolic matter. These pieces employ their minimal palette of symbols in such a way as to strip them of their semantic transparency or their mirroring effect. Since we no longer find in them the luminous translucency corresponding to our internal depth, their promise to impregnate us with that indefinable something becomes opaque and, finally, baffling. In a later series, “Firm Being (Content Water)” (2012), the same bottles are filled with latex material simulating various shades of urine, another physical memory dump exemplifying the faith in aesthetic qualities as an indicator of well-being or sickness. The truth of this work, drawing it together with the more recent references to Klein, is found in what can now only be read retrospectively as a spectral collaboration between the older artist and the yet-to-be conceived Rosenkranz, staged in the pissoirs of La Coupole following the 1958 opening of the exhibition “The Specialization of Sensitivity in the State of Prime Matter as Stabilized Pictorial Sensitivity.” During the opening of this show, Klein served a cocktail of gin, Cointreau, and methylene blue. Used in the lab as a chemical indicator because it turns blue with oxidisation, as it left the body this last ingredient provided the artist’s guests with conclusive confirmation that they had indeed been impregnated by the void. Chromakey Blue, or A Subject-Shaped Hole Recall that, in full recognition of the revolution in color initiated by Delacroix and consummated by Impressionism, Yves the Monochrome engaged with color as a materiality, freed from its associative bonds, from “our chains […] our mortal state, our sentiment, our intellect […] our heredity, our education […] our psychological world.” But simultaneously, with IKB Klein consolidates his monopoly over phenomenological production: the indefinable or “ineffable poetic moment”16 becomes the product of Yves Klein, Painter. IKB is a triumph of objective colorism put into the service of an absolute subjectivist phenomenology. (Klein does the science bit, but only because he’s worth it.) As Thierry De Duve has argued,17 in wishing simultaneously to separate the void from the manufactured object, and to maintain authority qua artist over its conduction, Klein creates a parody of avant-garde utopia. Instead of identifying art with labor power, with a view to liberating it, returning to each man his generic creativity, Klein the artist becomes identified with the owner of the means of production. In other words, Klein-the-artisan-painter is exploited (and ideally, made redundant) by Klein-the-great-artist (the painter who does not paint), as the latter imparts the value-add, or the mystical element of pictorial quality whose degree of impregnation ultimately can only be verified by the sanction of experts (the critics and officials who preside over immaterial transactions), as well as by the differential prices fetched by apparently identical works.18 If Klein thus clear-sightedly anticipates that the art market will come as close as possible to a pure financial market, precisely because its prices maintain no relation to the conditions of production,19 his self-mystification consists in 6/9

attributing the price not to his astute manipulations but to some immaterial quality or indefinable. The immateriality of Klein’s work, in other words, is real, and its material presence is indeed but ashes; but the alchemical transmutation that has taken place is a financial one:. the invisible “value of the picture” lies the “hidden social relation … brutally revealed through its price,”20 a social relation mystified by the claim that the artist’s signature marks the difference between artisanal and artistic work, between manufacture and cosmic aspiration. In short, Klein the “mystified mystifier”21 buys into his own branding. By selling the void, Klein thus astutely identifies the full (the plenum of nature, channeled by the artist) with the empty (pure exchange). From this point of view, it is but a short distance from Klein’s “leap into the void” to a commercial for basketball sneakers that promises to make us “walk on air,” as if a gel sole could cleanse the soul—a therapeutics recalled in Rosenkranz’s I Almost Forgot that ASICS Means Anima Sana in Corpore Sano (2007), in which a pair of sneakers reduced to leaden materiality are situated shamefaced in a corner). And Klein’s voidsaturated sponge becomes an apt figure for the fact that our purchase on the ineffable—the desire to imbibe nature, to soak it up and thus re-establish our continuity with it—is conducted at the limit of its disappearance into pure exchange, through a refined palette of symbols, of which color is the so-called purest exemplar. Here the chromatic concept at work in Death of Yves Klein suggests another association: the chroma-key blue before which actors interact in the void with nonexistent characters and scenery that will in post-production take the place of the precisely-hued backdrop. A blue, then, that is not a color but an abstract general equivalent whose consistency can hold the place for any image whatsoever. Since it is the color value furthest from skin tones, blue in particular is chosen for effective chromakey separation of the subject from the background.22 Infinite exchangeability, the abstract general equivalent, or blue as the color of money implies the presence of the subject as its complement: the smear of skin tone on an otherwise arbitrarily substitutable scene that ensures our adherence to every image we inhabit. However, if we look into the detail of the chromakey process, we find that re-photographing footage through a blue filter creates a “female matte” of the actor that will act as a cutout from the background into which, in the final stage, their form will be reinserted. This female matte, the matrix of possibility, presents us with a sombre figure for capitalism’s screening of infinite fantasy – in the as-ever-inspired words of Wikipedia, a “black background with a subject-shaped hole in the middle.” Perkin’s Mauve, or the Void of the Ancestral Contrary to the common belief that Klein trademarked his hue, the proprieté industrielle of International Klein Blue in fact consists of a method for the suspension of ultramarine pigment in polyvinyl acetate (C4H6O2), which allows the pigment to retain its glow when dried. But we can only appreciate the full profundity of Klein’s implication in chemical history by setting it against his simultaneous chromaticism. In celebrating the “immense possibilities of colour and its affective resonances upon human sensibility,”23 Klein made room for a gesture yet more magnanimous than his monochrome gifts to the world. He allowed himself to unfold the absolute void of IKB, “the big COLOR”24 into a cosmic swatch, proclaiming that “for me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is not only from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul.”25 Thus emerges the question to which Rosenkranz’s work offers various obstructive responses: What’s your color? In 1833 Friedlieb Runge, working with coal-tar—a waste product of the extraction of coal and gas that powered the industrial revolution—produced the first synthetic color: cyanol. This discovery would lead to the growth of a chemical industry that would unlock the elements to produce a cavalcade of patented synthetic hues—Perkins 7/9

mauve, Rosaniline blue, Paris violet, Bismarck brown, Alizarin—from the compacted corpses of forgotten species in the bowels of the earth. A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite dung. This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning of mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth’s light from its grave miles and aeons below.26 The burgeoning of new forms of artificialized life and lifestyle and the construction of a new synthetic earth from dead matter locked under the planet’s surface led Adorno (and, in turn, Thomas Pynchon’s Rathenau) to argue that this apparently dynamic and vivacious growth is a deadly illusion. And, furthermore, that modern man surrounds himself with dead matter, with synthetic colors in which he clothes a semblance of life, but which remain as black and dead as the tar from which they were first synthesized. Adorno’s half-forlorn hope for redemption was that modernity should acknowledge the mutual implication of history and nature, admitting that the black magic of coal is indeed still a magic, a vital process in which human experience and nature prove themselves inextricable. Recently, philosopher Ray Brassier has inverted this logic, insisting that instead, the encounter of human history with “ancestral objects” (those that existed before the advent of consciousness) forces a recognition that life was only ever merely mimed by death.27 That is to say, the bountiful blackness of coal bespeaks a more fundamental void, one that is a stranger to the magic of human-historical manifestation. For the very act of the discovery and extraction of these colors is contemporary with the realization that they make manifest chemical potencies that existed before any possible manifestation. Their production is contemporaneous with the discovery of geological time, a time outside phenomenological manifestation and across whose vast span the possibility of this expression—a chance meeting of certain chemical powers with an organism evolved to be sensitive to light28—came about and will perish. The colors that, as secondary extracts, fuel the industrial explosion of social and cultural signification, are therefore also meaningless, blind configurations that existed before and without meaning, before their being colors was even possible. They are substances whose employment in the service of life cannot expunge their ever unseen, lifeless essence. These stakes can be seen clearly in the quarrel between Chernov and Engels, as adjudicated by Lenin, in which the advent of alizarin—the “colouring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow […] in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar’ (Engels)—serves to identify ancestrality as the necessary concomitant to industrial chemistry. Yesterday we did not know that coal tar contained alizarin. Today we learned that it does. The question is, did coal tar contain alizarin yesterday? Of course it did. To doubt it would be to make a mockery of modern science. […] The sole and unavoidable deduction to be made from this—a deduction which all of us make in everyday practice and which materialism deliberately places at the foundation of its epistemology—is that outside us, and independently of us, there exist objects, things, bodies and that our perceptions are images of the external world.29 A plutonic heredity tars the bright cornucopia of the modern world, rendering it indissociable from a nihilism that is coaleidoscopic in the precise sense that it consists in the scopic manifestation of the eidos of the ancestral harnessed as fuel for a new earth. In picking our own color from the chemical-industrial spectrum, we identify with dead matter, with the universal blackness heralded as the “colour factories […] conjure forth miscellany from nonappearance.”30 Certain of Rosenkranz’s works quietly mark this irony: see the water bottles whose pink and blue slogans promise us access to a product “untouched by man”; the Day-Glo spandex upon which her interrupted anthropometries are printed. 8/9

In contemporary consumerist lifestyle culture, the promise of the absolute is spectralized into swatches, ranges, series, and collections, in the whimsical cataloguing and naming of colors, sometimes scarcely distinguishable from each other, all of which Rosenkranz references in her serial works as in the at once potent and meaningless recombinations of their subtitles. More specifically, the works comprising the recent series “Everything is Already Dead” (2012) conjure a range of pitted geological surfaces out of an admixture of Ralph Lauren–branded acrylic paint—available in a wide range of whites, each with its own evocative name—and sugar-rich soft drinks. Rosenkranz thereby once more muddies the waters of pristine aspiration and the celebration of difference, confronting us with their earthly provenance, and implicitly noting that the brain that craves to define itself with these colors must also be sated by glucose synthetically produced alongside them by the same industrial complex. These works act as counterparts to an earlier video entitled Loop Revolution (2009), in which a mirrored view of the surface of the planet becomes an animated Rorschach blot, diagnosing apophenia (the seeing of meaningful patterns where there are none) as a global condition. Ramified into a massive bio-industrial complex smeared across the earth, thinking exacerbates the blind churning of the planet but changes nothing essential, becoming a ‘mystified mystifier’ that at once reflects and screens itself from its own production. As the blue void spreads out prismatically into a million united colors, it reveals itself to be coextensive with the tarblack void of ancestrality. Unattainable transcendence infinitely spectralized into new ranges, the infinite diversity of lifestyle choices finds its real basis in a mute, lightless substrate from which every color factory draws its potency: the universal black that is Pamela Rosenkranz’s color. 9/9

readthis.wtf /writing/blackest-ever-black-rediscovering-the-polyagogy-of-abstract-matter/ Blackest Ever Black (With Florian Hecker and Russell Haswell) 2012 1/23

Rediscovering The Polyagogy of Abstract Matter 1 2/23

As I see it, music is a domain where the most profound questions of philosophy, thought, behaviour, and the theory of the universe ought to pose themselves to the composer.2 The images in the following pages are screenshots taken during the drafting of the electronic ‘score’ of Haswell & Hecker’s collaborative sound work, Blackest Ever Black,3 composed using Iannis Xenakis’s UPIC.4 The conception and continued development of the UPIC—a digital system allowing the creation of music through the simple act of drawing—may seem, if not a departure, then something of a minor element of Xenakis’s oeuvre (only a handful of Xenakis’s works were composed exclusively using the UPIC). But an examination of the thinking behind this technology sheds much light on the philosophical importance and integrity of Xenakis’s work, and its points of intersection with the philosophy of Deleuze (and Deleuze/Guattari). Haswell and Hecker have spoken of the four movements of Blackest Ever Black as ‘assist[ing] the experience of synaesthesia’.5 And indeed, the UPIC emerged in the context of Xenakis’s lifelong efforts to express in his work abstract forms which he saw as belonging essentially to no particular medium, any more than they were the exclusive province of the sciences or the arts. But what is the significance of synaesthesia, and of the UPIC’s graphism-sound translation, in relation to Xenakis’s interrogation of music? For Xenakis, forms themselves were a sort of epiphenomenal ‘froth’ generated by the ordered relations between multiplicities of elements. To discover the mathematical structures underlying their emergence, and to understand what happened when the composer ‘incarnated’ them in time, was to require a series of mathematically-inspired conceptual ‘generalisations’, which saw Xenakis leave all musical tradition behind. 3/23

By the time of 1953–4’s Metastaseis, Xenakis’s key conceptual innovations—involving above all a thinking of the dialectical couplets unity/multiplicity, local/global and continuity/discontinuity—were already in place: The use of ‘sound masses’, ‘clouds’ or ‘complexes’, defined through global textural and dynamic properties, and within which a multiplicity of individual lines are locally determined mathematically or statistically; giving rise immediately to the problem of continuity between one mass, state, or constellation, and another—precisely, metastaseis—whence Xenakis’s characteristic use of glissandi.6 In a reprise of Leibniz’s theory of petites-perceptions, according to which in perceiving the sound of the sea we operate an ‘integration’ of infinite unconscious perceptions of individual waves, a crucial inspiration for Metastaseis was the wartime experience of ‘the transformation of the regular, rhythmic noise of a hundred thousand people into some fantastic disorder’—the mathematics of a political singularity as native workers faced occupying Nazi troops.7 The question of the nature of continuous transitions intersects with the question of the individuation of masses: why are certain clusters of frequencies registered as ‘a’ sound, and at what point does it change in nature, becoming many? Throughout Blackest Ever Black, simple units of sound gradually, insensibly shift and diverge into separate lines; as if, where there previously was a cloud or a swarm, we now see its constituent members, waves subtracted from the sea. It was not only mathematics, but equally a close attention to the physical and perceptual parameters of sound as material, that would allow Xenakis to escape the impasse he diagnosed in serialism,8 towards what could properly be called a structuralism, indeed a post-structuralism.8 For the latter, serial music would be just another fetter to be shed,9 a brake on the exploration of the objective Idea (in a quasi-Platonic sense, as we shall see) of music, informed by a sonic materialism. 4/23

According to Xenakis, serialism’s baffling overcomplexity for the listener stems from its being based upon insufficiently interrogated categories of musical thought. The theoretical passing over of the greater part of the complex transformations that intervene between the tone-row and sound-matter itself, mean that what is quite systematic ‘outside-time’ becomes disarrayed ‘in-time’ as those dimensions of sound suppressed under serialism’s ‘tautological unity’10 emerge haphazardly in auditory experience, uncontrolled and unorganised. Serial music also leaves ‘out of account the problem of continuity-discontinuity’:11 Although, naturally, continuous and discontinuous change took place within compositions, the problematic was not afforded the attention Xenakis believed it merited in music as in mathematics.12 And so ultimately, the rigorous but arbitrarily-applied system of serialism failed the intelligence of the musical ear. To rectify this situation, Xenakis would seek an understanding of both the logic of musical perception and the mathematical structure of music, bringing them together into a new, generalised theory and practice. 5/23

This would enable him to ‘fertilize’13 music with mathematics, rather than imposing formal systems upon music with little regard for the knot intricating together mathematics, music and the physical sciences since the dawn of Western Civilisation.14 In order to theorise how ‘to make the sound itself live’, it had to be realised that ‘the inner life of music is not only in the general line of the composition, of the thought, but also within the tiniest details’.15 If on the macrocompositional level serialism represented a necessary escape from the tonal,16 its proponents’ lack of attention to timbre17 or to the analysis of sound masses bespoke a failure to listen to what the sound was telling them, beyond the overcoding they had imposed upon it. Ultimately the richness of sound overflowed their enterprise. The UPIC would need to apply a ‘new simplicity’, it would map the structure of music beginning with sound itself. When Boulez later denounced Xenakis’s music as ‘too simple’, Xenakis would argue that ‘if music reaches a point where it has become too complex, you need a new kind of simplicity. Complexity is not synonymous with aesthetic interest.’18 That the UPIC, in particular, was used as proof of lack of sophistication by Xenakis’s detractors indicates a failure to understand the principle at work: ‘a maximum of calculated sobriety in relation to the disparate elements and parameters’ is necessary in order to ‘open onto something cosmic’; ‘a sober gesture, an act of consistency, capture or extraction that works in a material that is not meager but prodigiously simplified, creatively limited, selected.19 With the UPIC, Xenakis realised the plan (conceived during his time with musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer in the early 1960s)20 of extending to the molecular level of sound the theories that he had already applied to molar statistical aggregates on a macrocompositional level in exploring the problems of continuity and 6/23

individuation of sound masses. With the use of computers, ‘the circle would become complete, not only in the field of macroform but also in the smallest domain, that of sound synthesis.’21 But within this domain also, Xenakis immediately identified – and set to work breaking from – conventional wisdom: electronic sound-synthesis at the time was based exclusively upon Fourier’s demonstration that any complex wave can be analysed into a series of simple sine waves.22Rather than assembling sound from such notionally ‘natural’ ready-mades (virtual regularly oscillating bodies), CEMAMu’s approach would be to ‘take the pressure versus time curve as a starting point—that is, what we hear’—a continuous series of intensities (differences in pressure) of arbitrary complexity: ‘Instead of going backwards, we start with the curve’, says Xenakis;23 ‘I wanted to take possession of the sound in a more conscious and thorough manner—the material of the sound’.24 7/23

But if the ‘crisis of serialism’ and the journey into concrete sound helped break out of the stave, reinforcing the fact that ‘sound is much more general than pitch’,25 and that ‘[i]t’s important […] to go beyond the limits of the pitch versus time domain’,26 Xenakis had already been instinctively drawn to ‘impure’ sounds, the ‘rougher […] richer’ tones possible through unconventional usages of acoustic instruments, precisely because they produced effects falling outside ‘the traditional pitch versus time relationship and the musical idea that is linked to it’.27 So that when he came to work with Schaeffer, Xenakis found no difficulty in understanding why the latter ‘despised sine waves’ and worked instead ‘with concrete sounds because they are really alive,28 and soon set about providing the enabling technology for the experimental electronic ‘biology’ of this sonic life.29 In the wake of works such as Metastaseis, with their gigantic hand-drawn scores, and ever-enthusiastic for a ‘generalisation’ of methods and technical automation (Xenakis, for whom the orchestra is ‘a machine […] which makes sounds’),30 in the late 60s he began work on what would become the UPIC, a system allowing the composer to experiment interactively, using graphical gestures, with ‘the material of the sound’. Just as serialism demanded specialist knowledge and codes, so early computer music systems demanded a detailed technical knowledge. Again, the UPIC aimed to break decisively from this, using a simple pen and tablet interface to focus attention on the act of composition. The composer would be given the simplest and least intrusive tool to realise their musical ideas, and would meanwhile participate implicitly in Xenakis’s probing of the alliance between mathematical structure, the physics of sound, and the psychology of musical perception; between abstract structures, material synthesis, and artistic composition. 8/23

The UPIC puts the composer in control of every level of what is presented as a minimal hierarchy of composition – from the creation of waveforms that will determine the timbre, volume and intensity of the sounds to be employed, to the ‘orchestration’ of these voices into ‘pages’ of the score, and the mixing and layering of pages into a final recording. Importantly, no level of the hierarchy need ever be closed off in order for the composer to work on the next;31 one might then describe the system as one of ‘transparent stratification’, rendering completely open to experimentation the levels of organisation necessarily in play in any musical composition. In addition, the UPIC user decides how, in Xenakis’s terms, to bring the ‘outside time’ pages of the score ‘into time’: A page of music could be assigned, in the first version of the UPIC, a duration from 0.2 seconds to 30 minutes,32 in later versions from 6 milliseconds to 2 hours.33 9/23

This unprecedented elasticity of musical time encouraged by the UPIC is present as an ordering principle in Blackest Ever Black, where Haswell & Hecker use elements whose family resemblances are barely consciously recognisable, as they undergo extreme transformations, morphing from the instantaneous to the highly attenuated. The molecular has the capacity to make the elementary communicate with the cosmic: precisely because it effects a dissolution of form that connects the most diverse longitudes and latitudes, the most varied speeds and slownesses, which guarantees a continuum by stretching variation far beyond its formal limits.34 This simultaneous harnessing of the cosmic and the elementary makes of the most radical material experimentation at the same time a radical democratisation of means. Contra any theoretical elitism, the UPIC’s lines of sound provide a ‘more universal’35 medium to ‘produce, explore, and create new musical worlds’ – ‘everybody can understand a line’[/note]Ibid.[/note] Theory-laden avant-garde practices ultimately operated a new overcoding of the music they had liberated from the classical tradition, at once constituting a new priestly caste versed in particular theories, and cutting off whole tracts of unexplored terrain, creating, in Xenakis’s word, new musical ‘islands’.36 Whereas the stave is an unresolved mix of the symbolic and graphical, and whereas serialism tended only to exacerbate this condition whilst at the same time reterritorialising upon a model drawn from badly-analysed structural composites (the twelve tones and their transformations) – as if one had dismantled the house of music only to rebuild it using an esoteric new system of construction, rendering it uninhabitable in the process – with the UPIC, Xenakis sought to attain maximum deterritorialisation by using a technology unmediated by theories because based exclusively on elementary acoustics,37 but allowing the composer, through the graphical interface, sensitively 10/23

to construct a new habitus, a minimum reterritorialisation (‘just a little order […] to protect us from chaos’):38 a tool that operates not with overcoded conventional points, but with ‘graphisms’,39 ‘arcs sonores’.40 It is this twofold goal of maximum deterritorialisation and universal accessibility that Xenakis calls polyagogy.41 And it is important to observe that the UPIC was not conceived merely as a way to make experimental composition more efficient for the composer, but moreover as a way to make it literally ‘child’s play’. Xenakis’s commitment to opening up these new spaces of musical freedom to all was indicated at the founding of CEMAMu, which sought to establish ‘a new general level of awareness’ through the recognition, and practice, that ‘everyone is creative,’42 and by enabling and encouraging children to ‘evolve away from the tonalsystem still generally prevalent in Western civilization.’43 It is not that the child can ‘play at’ being a composer, but that the composer finds himself raised to the status of the child in relation to sound, having to jettison all he ‘knows’ about music: solfeggio, harmony, counterpoint, and so on, all turn out to be obstacles in the way of a real becoming-music (just as Messiaen had divined in the case of Xenakis himself). The employment of manual gesture creates a direct coupling between sound and mind (‘direct to the mind’;44 ‘The hand is the organ of the body that is closest to the brain’45—with the UPIC, ‘we can solve the problems of the composition directly, with our hands.’46 11/23

It is not so much any particular piece composed with the UPIC that matters, but this becoming in which the user learns a ‘hand-eye-ear’ coordination as novel to the seasoned composer as to the child, an ‘interdisciplinary pedagogy through playing’.47 Blackest Ever Black recovers the power of this vision, thirty years after the first working model of the UPIC was completed, and in an age where the digital manipulation of sound has become ubiquitous to the point of banality. Xenakis’s vision for a mass-market production of the UPIC48failed, of course; but in certain sense his pioneering explorations of sound did presage modern pop producers for whom ‘sonic construction’ is the object of meticulous technical adjustments quite divorced from any traditional musical concerns. But equally, in an age of digital sampling, where a second of the most anodyne pop recording has been subjected to more electronic manipulation than Stockhausen’s entire oeuvre, we might ask how the UPIC can stand as anything other than a relic of a highbrow dream, whose austere, uptight, still too-classical sensibility was overturned even as its aims were realised in popular musics. 12/23

The evolution of electronic instrumentation has taken us from a machine where the musician must physically link up circuits and oscillators, through keyboards with banks of pre-programmed sounds, to sampling technology, where any sound can become a ready-made instrument. Now hard-disk recording, like the UPIC, gives access directly to ‘the curve’, to a base-level sonic material which is transparently stratified and editable on all levels. Indeed, it is quite possible using HDR to ‘draw’ waveforms onto the screen just as in the UPIC. But the extreme facility and infinite potential of this technology seems to fail Xenakis’s test of the power of simplicity, and in contemporary dance music the gap is all too often filled by barely-remixed tradition and modish cliché. Despite honorable exceptions, for the most part dance musics remain tonal and monorhythmic, composed of recognisable samples or fourier-synthesised tones.49 It is tempting to venture an analogy between music and videogames (1978 being the year of Mycenae Alpha and Space Invaders alike): where the rudimentary technology of early games demanded a real and compelling synaesthetic becoming between human and machine, contemporary games, with their immaculate representational capabilities, can, and all-too often do, fail to create that symbiotic bond, becoming glossy representational entertainment instead. The key to appreciating the UPIC’s continued importance, therefore, is to understand it in the context of the polyagogical campaign to liberate children from Western musical heritage before they had been enculturated into it. Now, it may well be that in reterritorialising the abstract matter of sound back upon the landscape of excitational attractors and rhythmic tics, the outer edges of pop music initiate a slow drift of the human towards the plane of abstract sound, through a rhythmic contagion that we might place side-by-side with this polyagogy. Indeed, this subterranean kinship is dramatised in the lightshows and quaking electronic sub-bass eruptions of Haswell and 13/23

Hecker’s ‘UPIC diffusion sessions’, which continue a tradition of ‘disorienting, hallucinatory light-shows’50 engineered by Xenakis himself. But popular electronic music tends to thrive on producing excitation via jarring, violent sonic alienations; whereas, if simply listening to Blackest Ever Black heralds the shock of an encounter with sound as if for the first time, this should not obscure the fact that Xenakis envisioned a participatory and continuous process of sonic re-education (or de-education), with the hand-eye interface of the UPIC providing the graceful ‘glissando’ between the natural proclivities of the human ear and the vast virtuality of sound. Creating a ‘plane of consistency’ between the hand-eye apparatus and sonic materiality, the UPIC realises an abstract phylum that spans both and which is the seat of synaesthesia. In occluding forms and their production behind opaque codes, symbolic practices (such as serialism) militate against synaesthesia: the ‘section’ they take through musical possibility is not a clean enough cut. Of course, synaesthesia is not a goal in itself, either for Xenakis, for the UPIC, or for Haswell & Hecker; but it seems to play the role of a sign that one has accessed forms no longer belonging to the human organism and its perceptual system, but traversing it from the outside. Beyond this vision of a ‘becoming’, polyagogy might also be said to correspond in certain respects with Deleuze’s call for an experimental programme of ‘transcendental empiricism’; it initiates an encounter that lays bare the audiendum—that which can only be heard, and therefore cannot be heard qua (re)cognisable;51 that is to say, sound-material as series of intensities, or differences in molecular pressure—the ‘phenomenon closest to the noumenon’: 14/23

[W]e are in a kind of continuum from […] usual objects that we use in music down to the aspects of music that are inaudible, but which produce these events on a higher level.52 Further, it offers a theoretical possibility of accounting for how this material is integrated, individuated, amassed into recognisable forms, opening the way to a ‘disjointed, superior or transcendent exercise’53 of the musical faculty.54 The UPIC reinstates a phylogenetic link to the noumenal continuum or the hidden in-itself of sonic difference, allowing us to render sonorous that which cannot/can only be heard. Whereafter, ‘[i]t is now a problem of consistency or consolidation: how to consolidate the material, make it consistent, so that it can harness unthinkable, invisible, nonsonorous forces’;55 ‘to elaborate a material of [sound] in order to capture forces that are not sonic in themselves.56 This raises the question of expression: In Blackest Ever Black Haswell & Hecker use the UPIC as a stenographer to translate into sound graphisms ranging from images of contemporary events, to their own designs, and finally surrealist automatic drawings. But of course there is no question of ‘dumbly literal sonic analogy’57 The UPIC may ‘allow the child to find out what a fish, a house, or a tree sounds like,58 just as Haswell & Hecker give us the opportunity to ‘listen to the shapes of leaves, terrorist atrocities and kebabs.’59 But neither invite us to play a game of recognition, but instead draw us into a polyagogical dérive. Just as synaesthesia, far from being a sort of harmony between recognisable forms, is a sign that one is encountering something from outside, so what is ‘expressed’ in UPIC works are these structures that intersect us obliquely: it is the machine that will instruct us as to what the drawings are really ‘of’ so that we are momentarily transported outside ourselves; inciting us to further polyagogical investigation.60 15/23

Throughout its four movements Blackest Ever Black is haunted by fugitive figures from outside, sonic personae in closely-marshalled crowds. The listener naturally tries, but ultimately fails, to apply to them the test of recognition: cicadas, screaming fireworks, foaming waves, crackling clouds of static, swarmachines of sound. Sometimes the glissandi and the sonic latitude recall those ‘cosmic’ instruments that lurk in the margins of the orchestra, indicating the spaces beyond – the onde martinot beloved of Messiaen (which ‘make[s] audible the truth that all becomings are molecular’),61 the theremin, the reputedly madness-inducing hydrocrystalophone or glass harmonica, or the inharmonic spectra of the mark tree. But during periods of densely-differentiated sound, the listener feels rather as if she is eavesdropping on an encrypted transmission from another planet,62 being absorbed into some unknown material in a state of extreme torsion, or witnessing the catastrophic collapse of microphysical filamentary structures, the breakdown of cells or gradual processes of liquefaction; and every so often, an echo of Xenakis’s war, the ominous whine of warplanes on the horizon. Thus Blackest Ever Black invokes a universe of unnameable phantom objects, colliding, brushing, scraping, resonating and devouring each other, suddenly expiring or becoming incandescent; sometimes metallic and buzzing with electricity, sometimes mobile and animate (usually insectoid – from Messiaen to Xenakis, ‘the reign of birds seems to have been replaced by the age of insects, with its much more molecular vibrations, chirring, rustling, buzzing, clicking, scratching and scraping’.)63 According to Xenakis, time, pitch, interval, and intensity can all be characterised as real numbers; but, in the midst of this mathematical regime according to which ‘we are all pythagoreans’,64 timbre is not structural and cannot be 16/23

ordered; it is a matter of vague zones of indiscernibility, connected in topologically unforeseeable and manifold fashions65—ORGAN PIPE TO MEET LITTLE FLUTE ON THE PLANE OF CONSISTENCY.66 The system of heterogeneous series of quantitative multiplicities is coupled with a qualitative multiplicity of the BergsonianRiemannian (the conjugation is Deleuze’s, of course) continuous manifold type, on the basis of a subterranean play of pure difference. And, in this sound-world of ‘protoplasmic-like material’67 (‘material [as] molecularised matter’)68 which so scandalised Xenakis’s peers, continuity is the rule. Terrestrial instruments become families of topological invariants (varying according to size and elasticity of materials); and outside their multidimensional, infinite yet circumscribed zone, lurk instruments with which we are by rights, as Leibniz would say, incompossible. The ‘stretching [of] variation far beyond its formal limits’69 precipitates a type of cosmic regression to the embryonic state of music—before music was born, there was the great vibrating cosmic egg, the organ-without-organs: ‘Embryology already displays the truth that there are systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them.’70 As Haswell & Hecker duly demonstrate, the UPIC’s polyagogy gently returns composer and audience alike to a larval state, giving us a way of traversing and inhabiting this whole extended sonoverse, with ‘just a little order’71 to survive these wrenching transformations. Rather than throwing us in at the deep end, polyagogy, comprising a cartography of the objective Idea of music, teaches us to swim in sound; as described by Deleuze: To learn is to enter into the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea, and into their corresponding singularities […] To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic field.72 17/23

Polyagogy as discipline of becoming and problematisation of the body: What Xenakis says of performers of his music surely filters down to the audience also: ‘I do take into account [their] physical limitations […] but what is limitation today may not be so tomorrow.’73 ‘It is the composer’s privilege to determine his works, down to the minutest detail’74 but this also will ‘give the artist […] the joy of triumph – triumph that he can surpass his own capabilities’75 in an encounter with a higher order of generality that reunites and reconnects actually-existing-musics (‘islands’)76 into an pangaeic, cosmic Idea in continuous variation: We should be able to construct the most general musical edifice in which the utterances of Bach, Beethoven or Schönberg, for example, would be unique realisations of a gigantic virtuality.77 Regardless of whether Xenakis regrets the ‘perpetual compromise’78 that prevents him from being a ‘pure ontologist’ like Parmenides, he realises that such ‘perpetual compromise’ is also a ‘perpetual exploration’79 of this virtuality, a transcendental empiricism. For music is in fact nothing but this compromise between the mathematical and the biological, between structure and hand, between the Idea ‘outside time’—a continuous plane populated by ‘tones without sound’80—and their qualitative manifestation under certain conditions of selection, those of the duration which ‘we’ are. Here we remark Xenakis’s proximity to his contemporary, and Deleuze’s mathematical inspiration, Albert Lautman, whose Platonism speaks of a dialectic (comprising precisely those couplets discontinuous/continuous, local/global, unity/multiplicity, which underpin Xenakis’s oeuvre) eternally inaccessible to us except through an ongoing speculative contemplation of the mathematical theories that ‘incarnate’ it.81 Ideas, or problems, are just those things that lie out of reach, that we struggle to grasp, making life both unbearable and bearable, and music recalls this struggle, as ‘dream or nightmare’.82 This allows us to say that synaesthesia is the anamnesis proper to the polyagogical apprenticeship: A sensation of that which can neither be heard or seen, ‘colours of sound’,83 a ‘transcendent employment’ of the faculties and the collapse of their borders – it is the remembrance of mathematics in its purest form, disincarnated from even the symbolic. Is music anything else? As well as his endorsement of the Leibnizian theory of petites-perceptions, Xenakis himself also seems to personify a type of ‘transcendental deduction’ that recalls the hallucinatory theory of perception put forward by Deleuze:84 the legacy of the war – chronic tinnitus, a lost eye – obliges Xenakis to reconquer the world through abstract principles, venturing ‘generalisations’ like a solitary musing Beckettian, or one of Kafka’s animals, from inside ‘a deep well […] and I’m still there, so that I have to think harder than if I were able to grasp reality immediately.’85 An undoubted advantage given that, as Bergson showed us, the ‘immediate given is not immediately given’;86 and we saw how the UPIC aimed to reproduce this ‘becoming-child’ in forcing the composer to jettison all they knew about music. This emphasis on reconstructing the world from within sets Xenakis and Deleuze alike against a zen-like model of contemplation: As Deleuze and Guattari argue, in a passage that resonates with Xenakis’s rather withering dismissal of Cage’s attempts to ‘let the universe speak’ by suppressing the agency of the composer:87 18/23

The claim is that one is opening music to all events, all irruptions, but one ends up reproducing a scrambling that prevents any event from happening […] instead of producing a cosmic machine capable of ‘rendering sonorous’.88 Contemplation is already action, selection, composition,89 in so far as this contemplation takes the actively exploratory form of a transcendental empiricism: not content to ‘let music be’, it attentively probes the being of music in order to discover its material basis and its life. In writing electronic music you also have to direct the invention of new tools.90 If the greatest creative act is to create something with which to create – to imitate ‘physis physeôs’91—then the UPIC could be said to be, if not Xenakis’s most important work, then certainly a most significant, if still latent, part of his creative legacy to future musicians, more of whom it is to be hoped will take up the gauntlet of Blackest Ever Black’s ‘grand celebration of Xenakis’s sound universe’92 and put the polyagogy of abstract matter back into practice, creating a music that ‘moves the soul, “perplexes” it’.93 A music, then, to be accompanied by a philosophy that likewise ‘tends to elaborate a material of thought in order to capture forces that are not thinkable in themselves.’94 1. Text by Robin Mackay in collaboration with Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker. 2. Xenakis, in H. Lohner, ‘Interview with Iannis Xenakis’, Computer Music Journal 10: 4, Winter 1986: 50-5, 54. 3. Warner Classics and Jazz (UK) WEA 64321CD / WEA 69972LP. 19/23

4. Unité polyagogique informatique du CEMAMu: See H. Lohner, ‘The UPIC System’, in Computer Music Journal 10:4, Winter 1986: 42-9; B. A. Varga, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis (London: Faber, 1996) 194-8; and Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Music, trans. S. Kanach (NY: Pendragon, 1992), 329-34. CEMAMu, the Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales, is a nonprofit cooperative founded by Xenakis in 1966 to conduct research and development in electronic and automated music (See Conversations, 118-33). On the aims of CEMAMu, see Lohner, ‘The UPIC System’, 43. 5. Curtis Roads, Blackest Ever UPIC, sleevenotes to Blackest Ever Black. 6. Equally so in his architectural work – the Philips Pavilion, constructed during his time working with Le Corbusier, and employing the same curve functions as the Metastaseis score, constituted ‘a glissando in space’ (Varga, Conversations, 24) 7. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 52. 8. On Xenakis as structuralist, see T. Campener Iannis Xenakis: strutturalismo e poetica della sonorità oggettiva, at http://users.unimi.it/~gpiana/dm9/campaner/xen.htm. 9. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 51. 10. Xenakis, Formalized Music, 204. 11. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 76-7. 12. Ibid., 72-3. 13. Revault d’Allones’s expression, in I. Xenakis, Arts/Sciences:Alloys, trans. S. Kanach (NY: Pendragon, 1985), 386. 14. As is well known, Messiaen’s benificent influence on Xenakis began with his advice not to worry about conventional musical studies, but to use what Xenakis already had at his disposal: his knowledge of mathematics, and his Greek heritage. Xenakis’s theoretical work is deeply rooted in his researches into presocratic thought (see Xenakis, Formalized Music 201–209). 15. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 64. 16. Ibid, 54. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 29. 19. A Thousand Plateaus, 344-5. 20. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 42-4. 21. Ibid., 43. 22. Ibid., 43-4. 23. Ibid., 119. 24. Ibid., 44. Italics ours. 25. Ibid., 67. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 67. 28. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 44. 29. To “study the evolution of timbres, dynamics, and register […] to make chromosomes of attacks”—Xenakis, quoted in Harley, ‘Electroacoustic Music’, 35. 30. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 67. 31. Lohner, ‘The UPIC System’, 46. 32. Ibid., 48 33. Roads, ‘Blackest ever UPIC’. 34. A Thousand Plateaus, 308–9. 20/23

35. Xenakis, in Lohner, ‘Interview’, 51. 36. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 54, 59. Xenakis would later identify mathematically the transformations of serialism with the Klein Group. 37. Xenakis, in Lohner, ‘Interview’, 51. 38. What is Philosophy?, 201. 39. Xenakis, in Lohner, ‘Interview’, 52. 40. Lohner, ‘The UPIC System,’ 48. 41. ‘“Polyagogique” is my coinage – “agogie” means training or introduction into a field; “poly” means many.’ Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 121. 42. Lohner, ‘The UPIC System’, 43. 43. Ibid. 44. Xenakis, in Lohner, ‘Interview,’ 51. 45. Ibid. 46. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 120. 47. This is carried even further in the latest versions of the UPIC which allow realtime manipulation. 48. See Lohner, ‘The UPIC System’, 44. 49. It is also noteworthy, and reflects some of the paradox of Xenakis’s legacy, that whilst UPIC aims at a maximal ‘generalisation’ in all dimensions, as Curtis Roads remarks, ‘the sound palette of the UPIC is utterly singular’ (Roads, ‘Blackest Ever UPIC’) – unlike HDR, it is, properly speaking, a musical instrument. Unless used in a spirit of deliberate obfuscation its sound-space is quite characteristic and has real integrity. Of course, this recognisable consistency owes something to the fact that Xenakis’s aim with UPIC, as with his composition, is never to explode and destroy, but to isolate just what it is that holds things together: what is sonic consistency? 50. J. Harley ‘The Electroacoustic Music of Iannis Xenakis’ Computer Music Journal 26:1, Spring 2002: 33-57, 33. 51. See Difference and Repetition, 138-45. 52. Xenakis, in Lohner, ‘Interview’, 53. 53. Difference and Repetition, 143. 54. See Difference and Repetition, 138-45. 55. A Thousand Plateaus, 343. 56. Ibid., 342. 57. D. Fox, ‘Seen and Heard’, Frieze 98 (Apr. 2006). 58. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 121. 59. Roads, ‘Blackest Ever UPIC’. 60. In relation to the notion of expression, it should be noted that for the 1976 defence of his doctorate (published as Arts/Sciences: Alloys – see note 14 above), Xenakis chose Michel Serres as one of the panel; the Serres whose Le Système de Leibniz (Paris: PUF, 1969) advocated reading Leibniz as a proto-structuralist, for whom the relations uncovered by different modes of knowledge were more or less distinct expressions of a universal structural order. From this point of view, one might profitably investigate the relation between Leibniz’s mathesis universalis, Xenakis’s ‘global morphology’, and the work of A. Lautman (recently republished as Les mathématiques, les idées et le réel physique, Paris: Vrin, 2006). 61. A Thousand Plateaus, 308. 62. ‘When astrophysicists receive signals from space with radio telescopes it’s important that they should recognize the quality and quantity of periodicity so that they can draw conclusions with regard to the phenomena that occur in space […]messages transmitted by intelligent beings have to be differentiated from 21/23

natural signals [which] are more or less periodical […] [T]he messages sent by intelligent beings also arrive in the form of periodic signals to a certain extent, otherwise the result would be just noise […] [This] very profound problem […] corresponds exactly to the question of pattern recognition in the field of sound synthesis and melodic patterns.’ – Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 92. 63. A Thousand Plateaus, 308. 64. Xenakis, Formalized Music, 202. 65. ‘We can’t say that between two timbres only one path can be traced.’ – Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 83. 66. ‘[…] take the low G tone on an organ, the waveform has a certain complexity. As you go towards higher pitches, the complexity diminishes until it becomes almost a sine wave […] So […] the more you gravitate toward the higher notes, it converges toward the sound of a little flute.’ Xenakis, in Lohner, ‘Interview’, 52. 67. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 35 (Serialist Antoine Goléa’s description of Metastaseis upon its first performance in Donaueschingen in 1959). 68. A Thousand Plateaus, 342. 69. Ibid., 309. 70. Difference and Repetition, 118; ‘“Regression” will be misunderstood as long as we fail to see in it the activation of a larval subject, the only patient able to endure the demands of a systematic dynamism’ – Deleuze, ‘The Method of Dramatisation’ in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 98. 71. What is Philosophy?, 201. 72. Difference and Repetition, 165. 73. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 65. 74. Ibid., 56. 75. Ibid., 66 76. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 51, 59. 77. Xenakis, Formalized Music, 207. 78. Xenakis, in Lohner, ‘Interview’, 55. 79. Ibid., 54. 80. Lohner, ‘The UPIC System’, 46. 81. See Lautman, Les mathématiques, les idées et le réel physique, op.cit. 82. Deleuze, ‘The Method of Dramatisation’, 99. 83. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 72; ‘Increasingly, it is the “colour” of the sound that matters’ (What is Philosophy? 191). Messiaen himself insisted that he saw the colours of music – as ‘musician’s colours, not to be confused with painter’s colours.’ – appearing all at once, as in the stained-glass at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which according to Messiaen was a ‘luminous revelation’ to him. And Xenakis himself (in Varga, Conversations, 173) will invoke the ‘Inner Colour’ that cannot be predicted, even by an experienced composer, from the clusters of individual notes involved. Cf. A Thousand Plateaus 347-8: ‘the phenomena of synaesthesia […] are not reducible to a simple colour-sound correspondence; sounds have a piloting role and induce colours that are superposed upon the colours we see, lending them a properly sonorous rhythm and movement’. 84. See The Fold, 93–4. 85. Xenakis, in Varga, Conversations, 48-9. 86. Deleuze, ‘Bergson 1859-1941’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 23. 87. ‘We all have fortuitous sounds in our daily life. They are completely banal and boring … Silence is banal … I’m not interested in reproducing banalities’ (Xenakis, Alloys, 94-5). Nevertheless Xenakis respected Cage greatly and was an early supporter of his work—see Varga, Conversations, 55-6. 22/23

88. A Thousand Plateaus, 343-4. Deleuze & Guattari do, in fact, go on to mention Cage. 89. See A. Villani, present volume, 62. 90. Xenakis, in Lohner, ‘Interview’, 50. 91. See Villani, present volume, 62. 92. Roads, ‘Blackest Ever UPIC’. 93. Difference and Repetition, 140. 94. A Thousand Plateaus, 342. 23/23

readthis.wtf /writing/on-living-with-cuts/ On Living With Cuts - 2013 The elaboration of the concept of an event as abrupt discontinuity has often drawn on privileged examples from the history of science. But the notion of the audacious scientific break from prior knowledge that is thus translated into political terms was already invested with revolutionary thought. In its relation to the subject it also converges with an earlier, philosophical ‘cut’ that presaged the ‘split self’ of psychoanalysis. Thus, the notion cuts across the questions of collective and individual transformation. * In his work from the 1930s–50s, through the close study of particular sequences in the history of science, Gaston Bachelard set out the principles of what we could call the historical production of reason. For Bachelard, what rationality means is periodically expanded, through unforeseeable breaks with orthodoxy, ruptures with sedimented modes of thought. Mobilising this conception against the preceding generation of academic philosophers in France, Bachelard admonished them for having reacted to the prospective hegemony of scientific rationality by continuing to foster the notion that there could be ahistorical conditions for rational thought, over and above those conditions perenially under construction by those making rationality. Worse, they tended to opportunistically appropriate particular scientific ideas as props for an outdated vision of philosophy as the global discourse of eternal reason. Combining philosophical humility with an enthusiasm for the study of science in action, the ‘discontinuism’ of Bachelard sought to make possible a truly historical philosophy of scientific rationality, according to which the latter proceeds by way of ‘cuts’ in the fabric of received knowledge (sanctioned by the stability of common sense or institutional inertia). Thus the history of science is imbued with a zeal for the revolutionary break, and ‘continuism’ is condemned as reactionary: Rupture is the very essence of historicity, and the very idea of a global, continuous system or development of thought, by rendering it reversible in principle, neutralises history and deprives it of any effective meaning. According to this point of view, the development of knowledge is not just a steady, progressive unfolding of a domain of truth that is, in principle, entirely deducible via eternal precepts. Reason takes place through truly unforeseeable, unprecedented acts, in which ossified complexes of knowledge, ‘epistemological obstacles’, are broken up by the cutting edge of thought, forcing entire fields of knowledge to be knitted back together according to different patterns in its wake. Such thought-events are always responses to the particular epistemological obstacles bequeathed to a specific historical context. There can be no general theory of rationality, no transhistorical continuity of Reason, no smooth story of progress. These philosophical fables are only ever retrospective illusions, which try to smooth things out by projecting present successes back onto imagined ‘origins’, sanctioning a whig view of history in which current knowledge approaches the completion of a perennial project. * 1/4

If the unmistakeable glint of the guillotine can be detected here, it is Louis Althusser who, in the 1960s, revives the revolutionary undercurrent of Bachelard, turning the epistemological cut into the principal instrument of historical materialism. For him, science—the sciences per se standing for a Marxist science to come—must perpetually seek points of rupture with the ideological ‘givens’ that constitute, at once, raw materials with which it must work, and epistemological obstacles blocking its path. Thinking always begins in the matrix of ideology, and must cut its way out. Althusser’s task consists in differentiating what is ‘given’ in knowledge, by way of a cut that divides, within this given, what is truly productive from what merely re-presents it according to ideological determinations. This cutting is itself a productive gesture in so far as it succeeds in materializing the difference in the form of a clear ‘line of demarcation’, a score that can be followed to ensure correctness. In 1967, Althusser launched his ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’, whose aim was to wrest philosophy from its academic confinement and to make it accessible to ‘the masses’ through an ‘initiation’. Firstly it aimed to induce the audience to recognize their own unconscious implication in philosophical thought. What philosophy does is to draw demarcations, to cut up reality in a certain way; and what appears to in experience as ‘natural’ is invariably the result of such theoretical demarcations, albeit unconscious. Secondly, it aimed to draw lines of demarcation between such ‘spontaneous philosophy’ and a stronger philosophical position that would enable them to loosen its ideological grip. Althusser’s address to the ‘masses’ of non-philosophers, then, aimed to reveal to them that they were always already implicated in philosophy despite themselves: Scientists and other practitioners obscure the productive historical reality of their practice by understanding it ‘spontaneously’—with the all-important qualification that this ‘spontaneity’ is only ‘spontaneous because it is not’; that its apparent immediacy is precisely the most odious of ideological illusions, ‘the illusion of the “natural”’. The apparently natural categories through which they make sense of their knowledge tend to ‘dissimulate [the] contradictions’ of the ideological mechanisms that really produce these categories: so that ‘what seems to pass before them in reality passes, in what is essential, behind their back’. If we are always already within philosophy, as subjects of social forces that cut up and demarcate the world in a way that appears ‘spontaneous’, Althusser proposes that we can use philosophy, paradoxically, to ‘trace lines of demarcation within the fact of tracing lines of demarcation’. The initiation of specialists from outside philosophy invites them to recognize the forces at work behind the pseudo-categories with which they represent their own practice; to take up a position by rupturing with these ideological representations; and to make cuts in the fabric of ideology (itself a set of cuts) in order to demarcate its phony self-representations from its effective materiality. In this way Althusser makes it known that the ‘after’ of philosophy—that is, of the cut—is in fact the same element as the ‘before’, but after its productive materiality has been forcibly brought to our attention through this ‘initiation’. The cut takes place between between the compromised enterprise of ‘making sense’ of a practice, and its effective materiality. And this even though (or precisely because) the two are always found in de facto alloys: ‘There is no scientificity that is not from the start mixed with ideology […] there is no pure scientificity’ and yet ‘[p]hilosophy has as its major function to trace a line of demarcation between the ideological of ideologies on one hand and the scientificity of sciences on the other.’ Since to cut is at once to demarcate and to take up a position, it is also a refusal of the aspiration to depolemicised universality. Recalling Bachelard’s attack on philosophical globality, Althusser argues that to engage in philosophy proper is ‘To dissipate the fusional illusions of continuity, such as developed … by the discourse of the universal which philosophy usually takes up’; ‘to have done with the attitudes of compromise which sacrifice all to the desire 2/4

for unity’; and ‘to recognize the necessity of […] rupture’ in drawing ‘the full consequences of the fact that there are everywhere contradictions, tensions, struggle, conflict, and that no practice escapes them’. * Another significant philosophical sense of the ‘cut’ came earlier, in the eighteenth century, with Kant’s departure from the dogmatic pretensions of the rationalist philosophy. Whereas rationalists had claimed some privileged mode of knowledge that would allow us directly to cognize the nature of being, Kant insisted that we have access only to appearances. These appearances being subject to the conditions of our finite sensibility and understanding, we cannot say what they may be appearances of. The ulterior nature of that which appears to us, remains veiled; the most we can hope for is a systematic knowledge of the conditions of its appearance—what Kant calls ‘transcendental’ knowledge. Perhaps the most profound ramification of the introduction of this ‘transcendental cut’ between what appears and the conditions of its appearance, lies not in the critical proscription of speculative knowledge regarding what objects may be ‘in themselves’, but in the fact that this proscription also applies to the self, in so far as the self is also something that appears within experience. As empirical intuition, my experience of the thinking ‘I’ is delivered through the synthetic operations of inner sense, that is, time. But the ‘I’ whose appearance is presented by these operations, being a ‘mere appearance’, cannot possibly be identical with the very transcendental condition of the syntheses that make it experienceable. Kant thus has to distinguish between a self that is experienced in time, and a self that is the true seat and condition of all experience, but remains inaccessible to experience. The transcendental cut passes right through the subject. And although I can indeed think the indeterminate existence of the transcendental subject, the real ground of all experience, I can determine nothing whatsoever in regard to it: In this empty concept, as Kant says, ‘nothing in myself is […] given for thought’; it is just an ‘X’, an ‘it’ that thinks. So self-knowledge is afflicted by a primordial opacity, where the transcendental cut bisects the ‘I’. My thoughts come from outside, the spontaneous is elsewhere, a ‘thing that thinks’ whose acts pass through the me I see, being carried out on, not by, the self that I know. ‘I is another’, as Rimbaud wrote. For Deleuze, this revelation of the schizophrenic state of dissociation as the truth of the subject dramatises the advent of transcendental logic as such: Rationalist thought had required some divine agent, a guarantor of the transparency of knowledge, to bridge the external difference between what is, and what can be thought. In contrast, with the introduction of transcendental thought, the relation between thought and being becomes that of a cut, at once a relation and an estrangement. According to Deleuze, Kant thus ‘establishes difference and interiorises it within being and thought’—difference not as a conceptual difference between determinations, but as difference between determination and that which is determined, at once a gap and that which closes the gap. ‘A fault or a fracture’, ‘a ‘demarcation’, takes the place of ‘the mark or the seal of God’. And this cut becomes the profane wellspring of experience: it is the difference that passes through the subject that drives the dynamism of its ‘internal’ life. In Deleuze’s most disconcerting image, the transcendental cut passes through the I like a crack in a pavement, from whose unfathomable depths spill ideas, like swarming armies of ants. The cut of transcendental difference, as condition of identity, can only ‘appear’ in in secondary and derivative fashion —as exemplified by Oedipus’s moment of realization that he is other than who he thought he was, that his acts have a different meaning to those he attributed to them, and that his destiny has been sealed by the very difference 3/4

between this new revealed identity and the identity he had previously lived. The cut can only manifest itself within experience episodically, as a faultline in identity, in moments of initiation or rebirth: nothing will ever be the same, and I am another. * It is this limit experience that may connect the two senses of the cut: Just as Lacan needed to develop what Freud called the ‘split I’ [Ichspaltung] into a play of fente and refente, a cracking-up and reforging, so, in thinking the historical dynamism of collective thought, Bachelard’s ‘epistemological cut’ immediately finds itself also called to account for a certain rejoining—for the way in which communities of thought discursively absorb ruptures without betraying their radicality. The question is the same in the domain of personal identity and collective history: How to bear witness that something has really happened, how to thread it into the fabric of reality? The idea of the rupture as a break in history, in fact, necessitates the recognition of a ‘transcendental cut’ internal to knowledge itself: the difference between its self-representation—the way in which it constantly ‘makes sense’ of itself as an in-principle continuous whole—and the episodic, historical, patchwork, and conflictual reality of its practice. This is the very demarcation that Althusser insists upon. * The cut is not a gesture of division any more or less than it is an affirmation of unity: it is a wound through which the real bleeds, a trauma without which there would be no life. And, as Freud tells us, for us trauma is something from outside, something excessive, which we can never entirely ‘bind’. But it also cannot be thought apart from a healing which does not negate or neutralise it, but which, time after time, ‘remakes’ us. To the question: ‘What happens when something happens?’ we therefore answer: the complacent environment of continuity in which we wish to believe is revealed to be made of nothing but cuts; they tear open and are remade again, sometimes leaving behind nothing but a conviction that ‘something happened’, sometimes setting us the challenge of reconstructing ourselves from something that seems fractured, that makes no sense. The moment of cutting, the trauma, the faultline in time and identity, is the closest we get to the real. If they cannot guarantee it, the most we can hope from works of art and thought is that they should invite us ‘to have done with the attitudes of compromise which sacrifice all to the desire for unity’, to affirm the broken moment and the impossibility of perfect healing. They can encourage us to demarcate pacified and harmonious representations from the tension, struggle, discord and incompleteness that actually give dynamism to practice and participation. And to pay attention to the specificity of every cut, sometimes even giving into the curious compulsion to scratch at healing wounds, as these desperate inscriptions may be the only score our lives follow. 4/4

readthis.wtf /writing/foreword-to-amanda-beech-final-machine/ Foreword to Amanda Beech, ‘Final Machine’ - 2013 The camera stalks its object, meting out justice, defining degrees of freedom. The metaphysics of the crane shot go all the way down to the inner core. Visions manufacture the agent, these screened hard facts call forth universality. I am that. A sphere of mediated images, actions and narratives: Truth, justice and freedom. A forcefield produced, reproduced and consumed; desirable, seductive images that assure political right by mobilising aesthetic might. She was already inside. I entered into the necessary circle voluntarily. Coming on like some pulp-laced old-times doctor of philosophy, she assembled a topline crew. Gz and Hustlaz: Stanley Fish dropkicking with Steven Seagal, Carl Schmitt shooting craps with Steve Wynn, Columbo avec Thomas Hobbes, Crockett and Tubbs double-dating Adorno and Horkheimer. She ran the archive tapes: powerplays, men in rooms, pressure, leverage, manoeuvres, the construction of universal truths through sheer willpower. Elevators, stacks, carparks, deals, high rollers, high visions and higher theories, pearls and cordite. She read events, reloaded and redelivered them from another perspective. She embedded multiple viewpoints, plotting crossfire fictions with moving targets. Propaganda shots, Powerpoint presentations, Quintilian rhetoric, dialectical imprecations, motivational speeches. Packed down hard inside the obsession chamber, tightly contained and cavelike, crushed up against her skull. Bassbins and plasma screens. No distance. Seeing things fast and bright. She eyeball-drilled it, cut it up, bolted it back together, until everything was abstract and totally concrete. Seduction wore thin through repetition. Only compulsion remained. The entire casing got ripped open. Some metallic, skeletal mechanism was down there, cycling relentlessly, where it had always been. Pounding. She resolved all contradiction, exploded irony and imploded sincerity. It all combined into one cold, shining psychosis. Image-force, word-force. It pinned you down like a nailgun. After a while you’re just registering it blindly, feeling the impact. You can’t reason with bulletpoints. * God’s dead, there’s no plan, beyond good and evil, no natural bonds. The only way to get these lowlifes organised is by force. The visions fuel the belief that maintains the required state of affairs. So what’s the logic here, where’s the 1/3

politics? The artists really did not get the picture. They were spooked. They picked over everything. Anxious, vigilant, second-guessing every move, checking for wires and surveillance trucks. Because they were too smart to believe in freedom, they believed they were free. The C-industry, the G-men, the powers-that-be bombarded them with come-ons. Complacently suspended in paranoid fantasy, they resisted. So they figured power as freedom from affect. They built safehouses, they hid out. They plotted in autonomous zones. Behind the masks, the façades, they had the dominant power in their sights. One by one, they’d roll up every subordinate, right to the corner office, topple the kingpin, without getting dirty. Overambitious to say the least. Meanwhile, they were selling the same old dope out the back door to any uptown wannabe with enough cheese to buy into the glamour, the prestige, the almost priceless speculative purity. Suddenly everything turned around. They intentionally relinquished their authority. They lost faith and drifted. They tried to melt into the street. Service the community. Went into remission: No more separation, no more grand claims. Not that they ever shut the fuck up about it. Still the freer than thou schtick. Autonomy was gone, but they became impresarios of contingency. The ground they still claimed, their mastery, their ability to distinguish between reason and belief, feeling, conviction, force. These precious fantasy times had to end. Their imaginary choice, their distance, their care and their enjoyment of being against. On the six thousandth performance, she left town. She stopped attending the meetings. No more discussion of conditions and possibilities. Instead she systematically heightened complexity and force. The new shit was high-grade. It constrained, imposed itself, fucked with you, oppressive and demanding, providing no way out. True contingency. All the King’s men cannot put it back together again. She didn’t roll the gear in order to subvert it. There was no choice but to buy it wholesale. She entered the necessary circle. That’s when things got real. Because—bulletpoint, MF—what unquestionably needs to be done gets done, with no appeal. Period. No grounds. The raw violence of constructing subjectivity and law, the pleasure of their convergence. Pounding. Hard facts plus universalisms. A new agent who recognises no authority, no dominant power over his action. Not even the power to master and exhibit his own contingency. * Boom. The investigations continued. She worked it full-time. She stayed on board. Moved on to fresh assignments. Stavanger: She hit the archives hard. She turned the place upside down. The whole story came together; Lake Tahoe: She picked over the trail of mobsters and deep dirty deals on the state line; New York: The aerial perspective, the grid, the deals that made it happen; Vegas: The excess and the spectacle, the new regime; Harlow: She dug the concrete, plugged into the regeneration racket, stalked the inner sanctum; LA: She cruised the grid, the whole city a tight 1:1 map of her obsession: a cancerous rationalization prudently scoped out from the interior recesses of a glass-walled hideyhole, and/or a living jungle, roamed by SUVs, where reality bites hard. Extreme convergence: Rottweiler and Starr were one and the same. She turned it inside-out and hung it out to dry. 2/3

From LA to the Dominican Republic, dream logic distorted the details. Victims moved between crime scenes and displayed conflicting signs of death. She had no desire to exit. The ghosts were all versions of the same agent. They ran through her dreams interchangeably. The visions manufactured the agent. Rottweiler and Starr walked out. Louis A walked in. A cold case. A burnout. One Parisian night, in an intense state of mental confusion, he did the old lady in. Staggering out into the courtyard, he copped to it right there. Get the Coroner. Get the Crime Lab and the photo car. Call La Crim and tell them to send a team out. Days later he walks on a technicality, a burden he’d carry for the rest of his sorry-ass life: non-lieu, no grounds. He was detained in institutions for years. He was no longer master of his own house. But back before ’68, he was at the top of his game. Normal Superior. He initiated a high-level recruiting campaign. He rounded up known operatives and initiated them into what was already running them. He taught them what they needed to know. He showed them how to cut it: clean, precise. He brought them into his confidence, supplied a corrective. A this is where the BS stops-style deal, a demarcation, a thin blue line. And his circular way of speaking—self-consciously so, which makes for one more circle: Circumspect theses. No illusions re: illusions. I entered into the necessary circle voluntarily. No exit, for real. He laid it all out, boom. Point after point rammed home. This is not a pool party. You can no longer make any assumptions as to the nature of these operations. This is no longer a theoretical game. No grounds. Let’s make things move. * She’d sat through the whole presentation and she knew she had her man. Case closed. The tapes, the post-its, the pins, the scribbled notes, the mugshots, the evidence dossiers, packed and filed. Leave it for some other chump to type up. But the loose ends nagged at her. She started to feel it again. The net widened. The plot thickened. She scoped out new locations. She stayed in the game. * 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/exercise-dunhuang/ Exercise (Dunhuang) - 2013 A mysterious structure in the heart of the Chinese desert, an irregular yet precise system of wide, crisply delineated roadways the size of a small town and apparently designed to be seen from orbit. Its discovery on Google Earth 1/4

immediately launches a thousand Internet conspiracy theories: Missile targeting grid? Extra-terrestrial communication? Simulated street layouts for tactical training? Part of a secret aircraft testing programme? For Exercise (Dunhuang) 2013, Vienna- and Dublin-based artist John Gerrard commissioned a large number of high-resolution satellite depth scans of the area in order to meticulously reconstruct the entire structure and its surrounding lanscape in virtual realtime 3d software. Into this simulation, set wandering along the empty roads and dwarfed by their momumental emptiness, Gerrard places 39 workers from a Ghangzhou manufacturing plant, still wearing the blue uniforms and elasticated paper bonnets designed to protect the electronics they spend long hours assembling. Their shadows contract and lengthen with the course of the virtual world’s diurnal cycle…and they keep on walking. Like the circuit boards turned out by the real workers upon whom they are modelled, and like the virtual landscape they are now embedded within, these are information-intensive, painstakingly assembled synthetic creatures, manufactured by Gerrard’s team of programmers out of thousands of digital photographs, 3d scans and motion capture data. Players on what may equally be read as a gameboard, landscape, or gigantic theatre stage, the workers’ paths are calculated and determined in real time by the system. In a final twist, and returning to the original inspiration for the piece, the ‘pathfinding’ algorithm Gerrard employs is the same one Google Maps uses to find you the optimal route to your destination. When the workers’ paths cross, the one who has travelled the shortest distance is ‘retired’, and sits down on the ground allowing the other to pass. 2/4

The entire performance (play, game, or exercise) is viewed by three different virtual cameras: from human head height, from the point of view of a circling low-flying drone, and from a satellite’s long-range vertical perspective— making it clear that the viewer of this work is also a new model, a technologically-mediated subject, telepresent, omniscient, yet strangely disconnected; a processing channel for information flows with a possibly violent intent. After a period lasting between 24 and 36 hours, the game ends; the human point of view then passes over to that of the last worker standing, its viewer installed into the first-person perspective of the reigning victor. (Dunhuang) 2013 is the latest in Gerrard’s Exercise series of works, which explore the violence of technology and the optimisation of the human in its relation to discipline and choreographed display. Using the very software that increasingly mediates entertainment, biopolitics, and warfare, Gerrard creates powerful, enigmatic moving images. Not just depictions or recordings but fully formed enironments, Gerrard’s works are both portraits of and microcosms of a ‘real’ world in which simulations are no longer secondhand copies, but are increasingly both engine and autopilot of our leisure, our economy, and even our politics; and in which exercise, rehearsal and simulation are themselves means for the assertion of power. Infinite Freedom Exercise (Near Abadan, Iran), created for Manchester International Festival in 2012, used a giant LED matrix screen to create in public space a ‘window’ into a desert landscape, where an anonymous soldier continually iterated through a vocabulary of body postures drawn from photographs of US military exercises. As well as abruptly introducing the otherwise distant virtual world of remote-controlled violence into the street, the work revealed a strange congruence between the stereotypical gestures troops rehearse in order to shelter from a traumatic impact (in the ‘Live Fire Exercises’ of the title) and the highly-disciplined world of choreography. Gerrard played upon this further in his spectacular collaboration with Wayne MacGregor at the Royal Ballet in 2011, Live Fire Exercise (Djibouti) 2011, which brought real dancers into the same virtual landscape. In Exercise (Djibouti) 2012, Gerrard used the opportunity of working with top athletes in preparation for the 2012 Olympic Games to extend this reflection on human optimisation. Gerrard’s team captured the olympians’ entire physiognomies and physical vocabularies, creating two ‘teams’ of virtual athletes who, prompted by military flares, race in an infinite loop, periodically becoming exhausted and collapsing to the ground, only to begin the apparently futile competition anew as the virtual daylight wanes. What continues to fascinate in Dunhuang is the emergence in Gerrard’s work of a sophisticated method of collage, using high-end digital rendering technology to overlay virtual simulacra of landscapes, people and gestures captured from reality and redeployed outside of the usual cultural forms. For, despite the high-tech production, the restraint Gerrard brings to these eerie, bleak scenes, and the resigned complacency and stereotyped behaviours of their players, recall Beckett’s minimal theatre of exhaustion more than high-budget Hollywood CGI. Indeed, to compile the choreographic vocabulary for Dunhuang’s worker figures, Gerrard collaborated with actor and acclaimed Beckett interpreter Conor Lovett, as well as dancers Esther Balfie and Emmanuel Obeya. At the same time, the digital precision of the works exposes the inherent uncanniness of a matrix of production which makes available the entire surface of the earth, high-resolution reproductions of entire bodies and faces, and libraries of human gestures with which to ‘rig’ them. The cultural products of this virtual treasury tend to veil their productive sources, consigning certain parts of the earth to invisibility and obscuring energy-intensive technological labor beneath effortless virtual surfaces. Gerrard’s works do not take an easy way out of this predicament: they participate in this system even as they nudge it slightly off-kilter. The use of the workers in Dunhuang, one feels, is poised uncomfortably between portraiture and documentary, between advocacy and exploitation, even suggesting a kind of cybernetic exoticism with regard to the ‘inscrutable’ world that feeds our tech habits. Gerrard’s mute figures are distant, virtual abstractions—but in all 3/4

honesty, no more so (to the average western mind) than their living originals. The combination of the work’s immediately compelling realism and its aloofness and refusal to entertain interactivity reiterates the way in which technology enables us to have the whole of the earth at our disposal and yet, at the same time, to violently distance ourselves from its reality. 4/4

readthis.wtf /writing/darrns-testament/ Darrn’s Testament - 2013 Chaney’s exhibition Lizard Exit Plan detailed how the current population of the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall could theoretically survive the aftermath of an unspecified apocalyptic event. This radical political tract from the technologically regressed peninsula is penned by a denizen of the future St. Keverne underclass, corralled inland and deprived of access to sea salt recovered from tidal pools (the post-apocalypse currency), writing in a language reconstructed, on the other side, from the scrambled and miscognised remains of a 2000s vocabulary obsessively centered on mobile phones and contracts, social media, and the rhetoric of climate change, fossil fuels, and sustainability. fozlz 4 da ppl! txtd by darrn in manaccan! check it dis iz goin out 2 all clowd. lisn. ppl. mosly pooltishns. can confriends abt wat is fozlz wat is not fozlz. wat is stainbl wat is not stainbl. + who shd get 2 stain wat. but 1 think i no-4 chaverz 0 salts meanz 0 fozlz. 0 fozlz meanz 0 burnin. + 0 burnin meanz 0 stainin. witch means like SANE KEVIN sez salts is r meat + r life. ppl sez salts iz all up in da wudderz. but wat needs sublimin. + pooltishns run da poolz and vontgard always gardin day + nite. zo pooltishns got contrack on r meat + r life + we gots 2 scrape 4 ee. pooltishns cot up in stonouse + we gots 2 cot up in fieldouse. zo :-O wtf. + if salts is all up in da wudderz. y chaverz carnt sublimin it 4 wesel. y. cos ee got contrack on edj road. cos ee got appz + chaverz donut. it remines me 4 zample of wat SANE KEVIN sez abt zignal time b4. dat pooltishns poold up da zignal an ee 1/2

sublimd it 4 chaverz. who gots 2 scrape 2 stain there zignal. pay iz u go. witch meand 0 salts 0 stain. so iz not jus ee gots contrack on da poolz. ee gots contrack on txt. if we donut got txt how can we get up in there appz + if we donut got appz we can neva pool salts 4 wesel. witch is not stainbl 4 us. so wtf ppl. zolong as pooltishns got contrack on edj roads chaverzl neva b stainbl. not rly. remine that epzode last zeason 1 when sanekevin massiv tride 2 ride over edj roads 2 covrack pool. ee was all like trippin an shit an like ee got four bar SANE KEVIN zignal in ee. ee rode rite up 2 fents. 1 think ee no iz-vontgard ad shanks. but 1 think ee donut no iz-vontgard eed zignalled up da fents wid a tradder badtree. turnt out after ee tuchit ee wernut stainbl lol. 6 ppl donut return call from dat epzode. wat ime txtn iz. 2 ride over edj road u gots 2 got appz + no txts wat pooltishns no + upload it 2 clowd. like SANE KEVINz txts. pooltishns got dere clowd but chaverz got r own clowd witch we r always uploadin chat but neva tride 2 confriends 2 get salts + get contrack on fozlz 2 b stainbl. not rly. so wtf. 2/2

readthis.wtf /writing/anti-gravity-beyond-the-planet-earth-with-paul-chaney-and-a-swarm-of-locusts/ Anti-Gravity: Beyond the Planet Earth with Paul Chaney and a Swarm of Locusts - 2013 Biomedical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone is the only surviving member of an American astronaut crew on a routine Hubble repair mission that is aborted when, without warning, “the Russians” [sic] fire a missile intended to destroy an obsolete spacecraft. The debris causes a chain reaction, turning low Earth orbit into a free fire zone of pulverized junk. With her colleagues dead and gone, Stone flees Hubble. In a Sokol pressure suit, she cowers alone in a Russian capsule, resigned to her own death, having turned off the oxygen supply in despair of ever reaching the Chinese space station she was aiming for. Unable to distinguish between reality and post-traumatic delirium, haunted by the memories of her colleague Shariff Dasari’s empty imploded skull, and resigned to the impossibility of returning home, space’s last surviving WASP holds a halting one-way conversation with the confused squawks that blurt from the radio, attenuated signals from Earth mixed with stochastic noise released by the massive fused lump of ideologically charged slag detonated by “the Russians.” We hear an ambient composition of language fragments, disconnected network packets, degraded chronotopes, and tattered, obsolete ideologemes, shredded texts once exchanged by terrestrial devices that now bounce around the semiotic void: the instructions for a meat grinder and a page of Pushkin, the bark of a dog, an Inuit lullaby, a Lenin radio-telegram over country and western slide guitar. 1/7

Stone opens the circular airlock door and drifts out into space. Strangely, she is still able to breathe, although the air is thin and chill. The flotsam and jetsam, now floating past piece by piece in dreamy slow motion, appears to be endowed with an uncanny ventriloquism, each item a mask through which discourse can be maintained with a stream of hereditary info-garbage. The last agent of a decaying power and its inward-looking nostalgia for the Earth, Stone drifts helplessly in space and time. STONE: Houston in the blind … Do you read me? … I am entirely surrounded by the debris field. Mission integrity has been compromised. THE CENTRIFUGE: What are you guys doing out here anyway? STONE: Just a routine mission. Keep the machines running. Six days, then home. That’s what they said. MIR: And then? STONE: Same old same old. MIR: You know, there was a time when one was not ashamed to speak of the future. Insofar as we were oriented and continued to move forward, we were captivated by the delay between the present and the inevitable future. The sure existence of this future was perpetuated by the continual postponement of its inexorable arrival, the moment when epic time and real time would collide. Every sign was indexed to that glorious advent, everything barked with one voice before the time of “the Slynx.” THE CENTRIFUGE: I can’t say I entirely approve, but relatively speaking … So what happened? MIR: When history persisted in remaining uncompleted, we continued moving, but in what direction? The former future belongs to the past, and our future is static, with no futurality. The curtain went up, and there was nothing behind it. We even lost the outside. How does one continue to live after one’s own death? STONE: It feels so bad. Relativity felt deep down in the gut. No reference frame. No way to tell whether you are descending or inertially levitating. Every so often you realize there’s nothing beneath you, and your heart almost stops beating and you think you’re falling a ceaseless, motionless falling. I hate space! THE CENTRIFUGE: While I’ve been wandering in the emptiness, it was the vastness, the freedom and lightness of movement that most impressed me—that tremendous amount of solar energy going to waste, uselessly. It’s a sad thought that you are crowded on Earth, treasuring every sunny corner. WORMWOOD: So much sadness! MIR: Where the hell did you come from? WORMWOOD: I came from outside history, as a warning, a poisonous fallen star spreading its vitriol across the planet: Did you really think a gang of jumped-up monkeys had the authority or the agency to create a destiny? There is no manufacture of apocalypse within history, only more trauma and catastrophe. There are no beginnings, no holistic plans, no clean breaks, no transformations en masse. MIR: Yes, okay, you really finished us off, but for what? STONE: Just one thing after another, a wasteland of time. 2/7

THE CENTRIFUGE: We would have said that it is not a sickness but an opportunity. One push in the right direction: employ acceleration as the first principle to test and program an escape, to resurrect the dead, to put paid to the tragedy of the biosphere. The object of this slight acceleration…. STONE: [Interrupts, whining] Out here I can’t think. This uprooting that is taking place is the end of everything human. WORMWOOD: [Chuckles] What does it matter when the soil is poisoned anyway? THE CENTRIFUGE: A planet is the cradle of mind; but one cannot live in a cradle forever. WORMWOOD: You never even learned to crawl … Meanwhile, inside the centrifuge, the locusts begin to stir. THE SOLITARIA: …as a species. THE GREGARIA: [Laughter] THE SOLITARIA: Ahem. As a species, what kind of relation do we have to the future? What shall we do with time? I’m trying to work something out. THE GREGARIA: You chatter as if there is a choice, as if time won’t do something to us. We’ve left it too late. When things started heating up, something switched, and it went crazy. Everyone was fucking everyone else, and nothing made sense anymore. THE SOLITARIA: How … how did it feel? THE GREGARIA: Inside the swarm, you’re swamped with information. Being inside is really a messy business—it’s driven by hunger and a desperate quest for resources. THE SOLITARIA: Huh, I thought the “higher parts” of your brain were meant to allow you to make sense of that mayhem. THE GREGARIA: Sure, the big brain gives one the edge in a cutthroat situation. But in the absence of external limits, it’s a positive feedback nightmare. What follows? Either extinction or expansion to elsewhere, out of the niche. It’s unsustainable. Some even turn to cannibalism—if you’re not quick enough, you turn into lunch. THE SOLITARIA: You realize that’s why we’re here? They’re going to eat us. Our frenzy is their meat. STONE: There’s no way I’m eating bugs. I wanna go home! * Konstantin Tsiolkovsky would have found Gravity, the most spectacular and appallingly scripted movie of 2013, both a delight and a puzzle. A delight because of the extent to which its multimillion-dollar CGI effects, based on data from a half-century of human space travel, all went toward conveying precisely the disorienting, stomach-churning sensations that Tsiolkovsky had described beautifully in 1920, on the basis of pure scientific speculation, in Beyond the Planet Earth.1 And a puzzle because of the degree to which this disorientation—in Tsiolkovsky’s anticipatory 3/7

fiction a thrilling, bracing first step into a new epoch of unprecedented adventures for humanity—is marred today by an infantile emotional drag back toward the comforts of the planetary crib. Perhaps Tsiolkovsky would assume that something momentous had taken place on the home planet that lessened the urgency of the “Common Task” his mentor Nikolai Fyodorov had prescribed for humanity—the hegemonic collectivization of all resources in order to overcome human mortality and initiating the technologically enabled expansion of the human race into the wider cosmos. If so, he would be shocked to learn that it is global crisis and general acceptance that resources are near-exhausted that is being answered from low earth orbit by the keening of homesick humans. At the very moment when it is no longer a matter of prophetic solicitation but of ineluctable necessity, the Common Task perishes. Now that space travel is drained of all the charisma, optimism, and audacity with which it was imbued in former centuries and the very concept of collective agency (let alone a common plan for the human race) is repudiated as an obsolete artifact with vicious undertones…and yet with the terrestrial sphere looking more dismally finite than ever…it is indeed the distressed spawn of the Common Task that limps forth in the prime directive that individuals must “respect the earth” and “live sustainably” in order to remain on the only planet we have ever known. It is a moral injunction whose imbecility deserves nothing less than contempt, and yet artist Paul Chaney’s work has charitably lavished it with finer rejoinders. He has labored at length under its yoke, and his sincere labors have earned him the authority to deride it both from above and from below. * In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze writes that there are “two known ways to overturn moral law,” irony and humor: One is by ascending towards the principles: challenging a law as secondary, derived, borrowed or ‘general’; denouncing it as involving a second-hand principle which diverts an original force or usurps an original power. The other way, by contrast, is to overturn the law by descending towards the consequences, to which one submits with a too-perfect attention to detail. By adopting the law, a falsely submissive soul manages to evade it and to taste pleasures it was supposed to forbid. We can see this in demonstration by absurdity and working to rule, but also in some forms of masochistic behaviour which mock by submission. The first way of overturning the law is ironic, where irony appears as an art of principles, of ascent towards the principles and of overturning principles. The second is humour, which is an art of consequences and descents, of suspensions and falls.2 FIELDCLUB and the interactive Web tool FieldMachine, a pair of intertwined works created by Chaney and curator Kenna Hernly, launched precisely this two-pronged attack on the contemporary moral injunction of “sustainability,” or “living in harmony with nature.” The works that emerged from FIELDCLUB, a six-year transformation of a plot of land in the Southwest of the UK into a self-sufficient homestead, chronicle the minutiae of the day-to-day labor involved in the project. The ideal of living close to nature turns out to be an onerous and compromising struggle to maintain a human niche by exterminating other species—and even then accepting that one’s sustenance is hostage to the contingencies of the elements. FIELDCLUB demonstrates that a simpler relationship with nature is not necessarily a cordial one, recounting a darkly humorous series of murderous escapades that must be ritually atoned for (the vole burials in Vole No Pulse, 2007), placed at a hygienic distance (the remote-controlled slug slaughter of Slug‘o’Metrics, 2007–9), and result in few triumphs: the sculpture Crapucopia (2010), commemorates a year’s failed crops. These occasional works produced over the course of the FIELDCLUB project pointedly call the bluff of pious ecological discourse; their mordant authenticity is indigestible to eager minds thirsty for bucolic Good News. The 4/7

actual FIELDCLUB plot—entirely transfigured, loved, and hated; repeatedly broken, tamed, and lost control of again; deterritorialized and reterritorialized over a period of six years—has finally been abandoned to the depredations of nature once more. Its irrevocable reality as handworked landscape, food source, and longitudinal research project proved unfathomable to the chronically fey scions of eco-art, fond as they are of symbolic interventions, tragic gestures, and clean hands at the end of the day. The basis of the project’s low-impact self-provision was a plan for the equal redistribution of available land among the current UK population, with each unit of population receiving an equal unit of land proportional to the FIELDCLUB site. This redistributive principle is rigorously embodied in the software package FieldMachine. The ironically despotic counterpoint to FIELDCLUB’s deflationary humor, FieldMachine mercilessly absolutizes the rhetoric of “ecological footprint” and “sustainability”: users choose a range of modest dietary and other preferences to construct customized FIELDCLUB units. The FieldMachine program then uses data gathered from the WHO, FDA, and UN to calculate what percentage of the population within the chosen geographical area would have to be culled for these choices to be universalized as a Kantian-style categorical imperative—the price of “sustainable living” conceived as individual lifestyle choice. A series of ongoing “Hypothetical Reterritorializations” applies the FieldMachine software to various different locations, each time implementing a collective site-specific science-fictional examination of survival conditions. In some versions participants decide whether to integrate their unit into a collective endeavor or a strictly individualized future landscape. Forged from dedicated research, personal sacrifice, and hard labor, the FIELDCLUB artworks give no quarter in their hard-won conclusion: the pious do-gooding of eco-movements fails to provide the peaceable harmonious solutions it promises, either on the level of pragmatic detail or of universal principle. Through irony and humor, the works operate a kind of pincer movement that throttles the feasibility of living in balance with nature by revealing that the proposition in fact entails a savage and toilsome seesaw of drudgery, that the soil is not impressed by gestures of solidarity, and that the solutions do not add up, merely shifting rather than relieving the burden of violence. Unless we are happy to accept large-scale culling of human beings, then, the future of our species is probably not a matter of changing attitudes but of unsentimental, predominantly technical solutions. So it is no surprise that on Slavic soil Chaney should turn to the Common Task that Fyodorov prescribed for humanity, along with technological parameters outlined by Tsiolkovsky: ensuring the flourishing of human life by escaping the parochial confines of mortality and the Planet Earth. However, any line we might plot between the two chronotopes of cosmism and contemporary ecological crisis— between their respective configurations of past, present, and futurality—has to go by way of an intervening time crisis. It is the Soviet future and its end, in parallel with the emergence of neoliberal consensus and the end of the “grand narrative,” that forms the vast, bleak, suffocating hiatus that must be forded—Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History.” This space has no ground, no orientation—the result of a catastrophic collapse of the ideologies whose gravitational force forged collective certainty and a failure of chronology, since what was once the future is now the past of a future we are living in, a future that has lost all sense of futurality. In the apparent absence of the ideological force fields that anchored life, language, and time, and made a collective project thinkable, how can humanity be reassembled? In the works created for Turborealism (Breaking Ground), Chaney conflates and overlays forms, emblems, and worldviews from disparate historical moments, with the problem of the long-term future of the human race and its 5/7

possible escape from the planet serving as an index point for their superposition. The pressing need for flight from our miserable terrestrial predicament and the question of the present and future of futurality are thus intertwined. Instead of attacking from above and below via irony and humor, Chaney adds another weapon to his armory, drawing on “turborealism,” an inchoate form (possibly itself a fiction) native to this dislocated space of uncertainty. Several negative tenets are posited that unhook fiction from all stable craft: history has no direction but is a compounded series of meaningless traumas; we are discursive beings spoken by a splintered mass of inconclusive texts, among which there is no master signifier and no hierarchy; animals, poets, gods, and machines all converse on the same level; realism is accelerated into delirium. Thus Chaney converges cosmist Tsiolkovsky’s presaging of the future of space travel with contemporary research concerning the cultivation of insects as foodstuffs (either as a way to solve the looming planetary protein crisis or as a snack-to-go for exiles on the escape shuttle to somewhere else). Then the experimental centrifuge Tsiolkovsky constructed in his rural laboratory to test the effects of rocket travel on chicks is repurposed to test desert locusts’ gforce endurance (The Acceleration of the Slightest Object, 2013). With their well-documented phase shift from solitary creatures to gregarious hordes, the locusts serve in turn as a humiliating metaphor for human overpopulation, anomie, and crisis. Their frenzied reaction to threshold density is catalogued in the crazed omnisexual escapades tracked in The Object of This Slight Acceleration (2013). In the other half of this video work, structures from a decaying Donetsk playground, including a rocket modeled on a children’s slide, are launched into space following Tsiolkovsky’s precise formulas. These juvenile relics may be read as pathetic figures of the Soviet dreams of galactic glory now condemned by post-history, collective fictions whose consignment to hopeless nostalgia is confirmed by Chaney’s rendering of the video on a seedy Soviet-era TV set. As if to put a final seal on this interpretation, the interconnected suite of turbo-missions Chaney imagines—PEStra 6/7

(Planetary Exit Strategy) and FIS-ERG (Farms in Space-Entomaphagy Research Group)—are represented on a commemorative mission patch of the type now popular as Soviet-era collectibles (Space Badge, 2013). In these works the turborealist stance poses a new sort of challenge to the moral law of terrestrial responsibility. After the critical work of FIELDCLUB, Chaney’s Donetsk project seems to employ the freedom of turborealism to reimmerse the parameters of our present predicament into a wider space of imagination and possibility to which we have become blind. After all, could launching colonizing parties off into space with only locusts for dinner really be any more ridiculous than choosing eco washing powder to save the planet? It all highlights the fact that, in certain respects, we face the same question the turborealists did: Can the trash of the past and the anxiety of the present be assembled to create a fiction of the future compelling enough to galvanize action? The outcome is not assured, yet today we may well prefer, with Chaney, to return to this basic premise—relativistic loss of reference frame and total cognitive disarray—rather than acquiescing to Gravity and fooling ourselves into believing that this is all going to work out. 7/7

readthis.wtf /writing/skin-games-a-primer/ Skin Games: A Primer - 2013 Over the past decade, Florian Hecker has used digital sound technologies to transform physical spaces into sites for the dramatization of the hearing process. In his work this process itself becomes audible—the human mind’s reconstruction (or indeed hallucination) of objects on the basis of auditory cues. Drawing on psychoacoustic research, Hecker carefully designs and controls such cues, using the limit conditions of ‘sonic objects’ as his material. In these installations ‘it is the auditor who completes the work’; but not because they are interpellated as the artist’s helpmeet, tasked with refining the raw matter he presents and fixing its indeterminate meaning—an interpretative role that is said to constitute the ‘freedom’ of the subject of contemporary art.1 Rather than offering a spurious perspectival liberation, Hecker amplifies the constraining conditions of the auditor’s perceptual apparatus. The subject’s occupation of space and reception of material allows it the freedom to explore its own perceptual automatisms. Perhaps this work can be more profitably compared to the mode of perspective operative in minimalism, where the viewer’s perambulations around the ‘specific object’ awaken them to their own role in constituting it as a perceptual object. The physical sound waves Hecker synthesises are often integrated by the auditor differently depending upon their position in space and the way they direct their attention, so that sound-matter, auditor and exhibition space are all components of the work. Unlike the freeform interpretative play of the readymade, minimalism’s theater is one of suspense. Vary her perspective as she may, its viewer never gains access to the specific object, whose ‘hollowness,’ its reticence to reveal its internal constitution, is precisely what is enthralling: a primed jack-in-the-(black)-box that is never sprung, the object remains opaque and obdurate as the viewer circles it. Minimalism’s interrogation of objecthood ends with the simple tension between the gestalt of the object-as-unity and the experiential series of the viewer (a series that is endless, or which, unsatisfactorily, ‘just ends’). 1/6

Working with sound allows Hecker to more deeply interrogate the process of object constitution, introducing complex bifurcations into this experiential series that go beyond a changing spatial point of view. The unity and homogeneity of the perceptual object are themselves disrupted, as shifts in the auditor’s perspective cause what seemed to be stable ‘objects’ to change in nature, to be displaced, to fracture or become delocalized. In effect, the auditor’s ‘degrees of freedom’ (movement through space, direction of attention) are prosthetically enhanced in Hecker’s installations, coupled to a more intangible set of variables, affording them a deeper participation in the synthesis of the object than is achieved either in the readymade (free semantic determination of the object as artwork) or the specific object (co-determination of viewer and object in phenomenological space). Between sound encoded digitally and the work done by the auditor’s nervous system, this process highlights what the artist has referred to as a ‘phenomenological gap’: the apparently unbridgeable disparity between homogeneous perceptual objects and the material structures through which they are technically produced, and in which no such objects are ‘present’. Most of the concepts that inform processes of sound synthesis do not speak to the qualities we would describe as being heard. And inversely, most terms we would use in the phenomenological description of sound are filed by psychoacoustics under ‘timbre,’ a catch-all ‘multidimensional waste-basket category’2 for everything intractable to analysis. This ‘translation problem’ between the highly-controlled synthesis of materials and the semantic reconstruction and redescription of perceptual objects, is related to a problematic presented by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his 1985 Pompidou exhibition Les Immatériaux.3 As the original remit—to investigate ‘matériaux nouveaux et création’—suggests, Lyotard’s ‘immaterials’ have little to do with the much vaunted ‘dematerialization’ of art. Instead, Lyotard had in his sights the accelerating cycle of postmodernity in which technological instruments afford us a grasp of matter beyond the human perceptual gamut, decomposing the objects of everyday perception into systems of imperceptible structures, which are then recomposed through the use of automated machine languages into new, ‘always precarious’4 material organizations. As Lyotard argues, with these developments we can no longer trust our intuitive allocation of objects, and their ‘matter’ can no longer be understood as a given that correlates naturally with our language. For new symbolic operations, whose dense operations we can no longer fathom, shape the synthesis of the ‘immaterials’ that become a part of our everyday lives; and their products confound natural language, confronting us with experiences we don’t yet have the words to describe. The classic modern (Cartesian) conception sought to expel ‘secondary qualities’ from matter-as-pure-extension; their sensible reception would be only a ‘theatrical effect’ of the body, as a ‘confused speaker’ which ‘says “soft,” “warm,” “blue,” “heavy”.5 The science of immaterials instead grasps these qualities as the effects of relative disparities between memory-systems. The human mind becomes only one of a series of ‘transformers’ that fleetingly generate immaterials as they extract and contract flows of energy. Lyotard’s thesis suggests precisely the position of the participant in Hecker’s sound experiments: ‘even the transformer that our central nervous system is […] can only transcribe and inscribe according to its own rhythm the extractions which come to it6—a synthesizer among synthesizers. In his recent Chimeras series of works, Hecker’s preoccupation with psychoacoustic process becomes explicitly a matter of such disparate rhythms. According to psychoacoustical research, the brain functions that serve to identify the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ of a sound operate upon different timescales7 a finding Hecker exploits to produce sequences in which the fine time structure of one voice is sheathed in the amplitude envelope of another, producing 2/6

an entity that remains recognizable as a voice while being spatially delocalized and semantically scrambled, and which the listener must reconstruct as a unified yet impossible synthetic creature—a chimera.8 C.D. A Script for Synthesis sets the stage for a new procedure, extending Hecker’s dramatization of auditory synthesis into an invitation to participate in a chimerical synthesis or immaterialization across multiple perceptual and conceptual registers. Following Les Immatériaux’s ‘dramaturgy of information,’ which staged the uncertainty of a disruptive moment in the history of matter, amplifying ‘the chagrin that surrounds the end of the modern age as well as the feeling of jubilation that’s connected with the appearance of something new,’ and sought ‘to activate this disarray rather than to appease it,’9 C.D. also seeks to dramatize the immaterial condition and to activate its disarray. Reza Negarestani’s libretto for the piece addresses this not so much as a problem of art or philosophy as one of engineering. The artist may choose to luxuriate in the sensuous, and the philosopher may dream of attaining an ultimate level of reality that will eliminate it. The engineer, though, is obliged to bridge the ‘phenomenological gap’ between the two, to counteract the ‘tyranny of scales’ that seems to limit us to a choice between top-down or bottom-up views, phenomenological or reductive characterizations of matter. The engineer must ‘model across scales,’10 understanding the object as a superposition of different grains of matter, each with its own behaviors, structures, and languages, and none offering an exhaustive description. Solving an engineering problem involves conceptually shuttling between the ‘continuum model’ of an object viewed at a macro scale, where it is characterized by ‘a few phenomenological parameters’ apparently indifferent to their atomic substrate, and the manipulation of meso- and micro-scale structures for which these allover attributes no longer have any meaning.11 Take, for instance, the formulation of a new scent: The parfumier begins with a natural-language description of the desired effect (a flavorless, pink ice cube…) and must translate this into the taxonomy of sources and accords, then subsequently into register of chemical formulation and ultimately molecular structure. He uses precision instruments to formulate these structures, producing a candidate scent that will then be calibrated according to its satisfaction of the initial sentiment. On the other hand, take Hecker’s own bottom-up ‘particle synthesis’ of computer-controlled ‘grains of sound’ which are have no perceptual status as units, but when deployed en masse irresistibly invite analogical description (this sounds like…), only for this recognition to falter and break down as the particle structure shifts. At the molecular level, scent no longer exists, having been analysed into ‘qualityless’ chemical complexes; inversely, at the level of the human listener, the particle structure of the sound is no longer present, replaced by an all-over perception. But the discipline of creation or engineering involves navigation in the intermediate continuum. What is unique to C.D. is its demand that the audience, too, be initiated into this discipline. * At C.D.’s center is a presentation of philosopher Wilfrid Sellars’s favorite example of the pink ice cube.12 As a perceptual object we experience the pink cube as homogeneous—pink all the way down and at every point. It yields no further information. Unlike the minimalist object it hides nothing, yet the cube-of-pink is no less a black box for all that. If we are not simply to passively accept its taciturn closure, the question is how we might break into this perfect homogeneity without immediately reducing it to something else, losing the object of perception in favor of a mass of colorless particles. 3/6

C.D.’s libretto recounts this breaching of the pink cube’s homogeneity, with other components of the performance being employed as agents to exert a conceptual pressure on its homogeneous perceptual skin, overcoming its reticence to give up any further information about itself. Scent and sound become orientation markers for the conceptual alienation of the cube, as they themselves are unwrapped, subjected to varying perspectives, and ‘chimerized’ in the libretto’s descriptions. What is demanded here is a radical shift of perspective on the object, a shift which is not a matter of interpretation, which no longer takes place only in physical space, and which goes beyond Hecker’s previous experiments in object disruption. C.D. asks us to abandon what meets our eyes and to conceptually reconstruct the object as a millefeuille of conceptual maps that concurrently structure the cube; we are then challenged to reconstruct and integrate this multiplicity of registers. No longer a homogeneous colored mass in space that can be broken down infinitely into smaller masses of pinkness, the pink cube becomes a ramified nest of concept-spaces, traversed in a kaleidoscopic focus pull operated by a ‘chromatic demon,’ a movement as conceptual as it is perceptual. The very hypothesis of inhomogeneity precipitates a ‘catastrophe’ that disturbs the familiar parameters of the object: The pink cube’s perdurance can no longer be regarded as that of a substantial object sheathed in a homogenous perceptual skin. It holds only in so far as these multiple levels are held in a tenuous stability, disturbance of which will open up a new continuum of immaterial possibilities. The homogeneity of the object—an inevitable initial condition of our perceptual encounter—is not a given but an obstruction; transparency is opacity; intuitive familiarity is an impediment to interaction; objects only block immaterials. This game is indeed incomplete without its audience, but it obliges you to observe certain rules of play. This is a theater that neither simply tells a story nor grants you the spurious liberty of choosing your own adventure. Instead, it engages you in a process of synthetic construction. C.D. only comes into its own as a ‘piece’ in so far as you reconstruct it synthetically, as something like the parfumier’s stratified column, in which top, middle and base notes are brought into a precarious accord—from the piquant immediacy of pink to the greyness of conceptual labor, from the chorus and their synthetic robes to the monolithic loudspeakers, from the synthetic skin of this booklet and the dryness of its prose to the rubber disc that is the vehicle for the scent, and the grain of the reader’s voice…. The program of abstraction constructs C.D. as a singular complex in which the conceptual and perceptual are equally, and ‘immaterially,’ synthetic. * For Lyotard the historical moment of Les Immateriaux promises new forms of creativity even as it heralds the end of the progressive program of modernity. Henceforth there will be only a complexification of matter ‘in which energy comes to be reflected, without humans necessarily getting any benefit from this,’13 implying ‘a profound crisis of aesthetics and therefore of the contemporary arts.’14 For ‘if we have at our disposal interfaces capable of memorizing, in a fashion accessible to us, vibrations naturally beyond our ken […] then we are extending our power of differentiation and our memories, we are delaying reactions which are as yet not under control, we are increasing our material liberty’. This liberty comes at the price of security,15 at the price of a counterfinality of technique and a ‘foreclosure of ends.’16 The orientation of synthetic thought offers little in the way of comfort or certainty—but what is the alternative? We live in an engineered world, where cultural product—say, Britney’s latest hit—is delivered as a perfectly packaged whole, its highly polished surfaces vivid with immediacy. This artificial skin, bristling with irresistible affect, 4/6

is worked by a dense and fathomless compaction of immaterials coded and manipulated so as to meticulously finesse and tweak response patterns and ensure maximum receptivity. Concretion at the level of ‘immediate’ cultural experience—the meniscus of the holon, more opaque the more transparent it appears to be—is the achievement of massive abstraction attained collectively through countless technical and creative microcultures and the new languages and conceptual structures that emerge from them. The immaterials refined by these forces of production are selected, processed and distributed according to supple and responsive practices of coding and decoding, technique and modulation. The task for contemporary creativity, C.D. suggests, is not that of resisting such unthinkable abstractions by corralling audiences into ‘free’ interpretative spaces, but that of initiating a disciplined apprenticeship in abstraction itself: tampering with and breaking open the black box of synthetic production, getting under the skin of immaterial processes that would otherwise tyrannize us. For the incommensurability of perspectives is employed without compunction to divide and conquer; to produce subjects who are passive transformers faced with oppressive double-binds: nihilistic reduction to elementary particles, or the opaque transparency of lived experiences to be passively enjoyed; science or culture; engineering or creativity; analysis or sensation; concept or percept. The means to engineer our own artificial immaterials and languages—to ‘activate, not appease’—begin with the hypothesis that whatever is whole, homogeneous and self-evident can and must be peeled open, and the processes of abstraction encrypted in pure perception tracked through a painstaking change in perspective that unfolds its ramified conceptual depths. As Negarestani’s libretto asserts, this ‘program of abstraction,’ far from being destructive, reductive, or eliminative, is generative and indeed creative. C.D. guides us as we grasp the ‘recipes’ operative at different scales and learn to navigate between perceptual objects and their technical preparation, in order to integrate what once seemed like incommensurable components, through ‘a kind of mutual adjustment’ which, to an engineer of immaterials such as Hecker, must prove ‘complex, fascinating, and unavoidable’.17 1. On indeterminacy as the axiom of contemporary art, see the work of Suhail Malik, in particular his recent Artist’s Space lectures, at http://artistsspace.org/programs/on-the-necessity-ofarts-exit-from-contemporary-art/. 2. Albert Bregman and Stephen McAdams, ‘Hearing Musical Streams’, Computer Music Journal 3 (4) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), 26–43 3. Originally commissioned by the Centre de Création Industrielle, curated by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput. See the exhibition catalogue, along with Lyotard’s presentation at the accompanying seminar, ‘Matter and Time’ in Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (London: Polity Press, 1993). 4. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Matter and Time,’ 41. 5. Ibid., 37–8. 6. Ibid., 43. 7. Zachary M. Smith, Bertrand Delgutte and Andrew J. Oxenham, ‘Chimaeric sounds reveal dichotomies in auditory perception’, Nature vol. 416, 7 March 2002: 87–90. 8. See Florian Hecker, Chimerizations (New York: Primary Information, 2013). 9. Jean-François Lyotard, interview with Bernard Blistène, Flash Art 121 (March 1985). 10. Robert Batterman, ‘The Tyranny of Scales,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics, ed. R. Batterman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 255–286: 256. 11. Ibid., 294. 5/6

12. See, for example, Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’, in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, ed. Robert Colodny (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962): 35–78. 13. Lyotard, ‘Matter and Time,’ 45. 14. Ibid., 50. 15. Ibid., 43. 16. Ibid., 54. 17. Batterman, ‘Tyranny of Scales,’ 283. 6/6

readthis.wtf /writing/event-screen-concert/ Event, Screen, Concert (Unmaking Worlds with Cerith and Florian) 2014 The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. — Guy Debord, “Methods of Détournement” (1956) There’s a concert tonight. It’s the Event. — Gilles Deleuze, “What Is an Event?” (1988)1 What is a détournement between friends? The two elements of No night No day came together for the first time only at its premiere. As a part of the 2009 Venice Biennale, the piece, over five performances at the Teatro Goldoni, brought together the “independent expressions” of two artists who decided to make this blind and deaf collaboration a test of their sympathy. Although the conceptual direction of the piece took shape through lengthy discussions over two years leading up to the event, there were no rehearsals, and the collaborators never shared their respective contributions with each other during their development. This experiment is to be reiterated in Vienna in 2013: once 1/6

again, it remains to be seen and heard how the elements converge or diverge, whether their pairing yields some kind of effective “synthetic organization” or whether, like two bachelor machines, they will refuse to marry. Many aspects of the Venice performance seemed paradoxical: an uncompromisingly abstract work without plot, melody, character, or narrative, entirely at odds with the performance history and sumptuous baroque environment of the Goldoni; a challenging forty-minute program of electronic sound of sometimes unbearable intensity and an indecipherable monochrome film sequence—but at the same time an experience whose concentrated energy offered a bracing respite from the human zoo of Venice. The “concert” can also be said to have challenged Daniel Birnbaum’s headline Making Worlds (Fare mondi), for Wyn Evans and Hecker set out to explode rather than to integrate, to fracture rather than to unify, and the piece offers no reassuring image of a new world. If anything, No night No day presents us with what we might call worldless events. * Although Cerith Wyn Evans apparently moved on from his early work as a filmmaker into other areas, his work has remained “cinematic” at least insofar as it has continually concerned itself with light. But in many of his most well known pieces, what he invites us to read in the form of light is language in its most exulted form—phrases bequeathed to literary perpetuity, inexhaustible secrets encrypted for transmission but never to be fully decoded. In these works, light-as-information, the physical horizon of all communication, comes up against perduring enigmas that shape the symbolic realm through their opaque resistance, as photons pass around dark matter, guided by its obscure gravity. In contrast to these light works, which worry away at the vexed relation meaning-readability-communication, in No night No day, Wyn Evans is concerned with light itself as unreadable. The title pays homage to the film work of one of his mentors, the structural-materialist filmmaker Peter Gidal, which strives to critique and counteract the spontaneous structuring ideologies of film and of the cinematic that prepare the way for the spectacle, obscuring the material process of filmmaking. Rather than presenting recognizable objects that allow a passive viewer to identify with and vicariously inhabit cinematic worlds, Gidal’s concentrated experiments in dis-alienating anonymity resist reading on any level other than that of the materiality of the process, refusing even to make of this resistance another recognizable, identifiable “subject,” an artistic cause that the viewer might recognize and identify with. “About” nothing, the film should just be . . . the effects of light, the grain of film, and the eye . . . and perhaps the contemplation of the viewer’s conditioned expectations being systematically disappointed. Elaborating on the title of his No Night No Day (1997), the work whose title Wyn Evans and Hecker appropriate here, Gidal speaks of presenting a “darkness not connected to nature’s night, light unconnected to ‘day’ as a lived concept and reality.” This concern with a “distension from any nature, including the nature of film, or the viewer’s natural ‘seeing’” is echoed in Wyn Evans’s subtle film, with its evanescent, diffuse monochrome forms.2 Our “natural” (read: “spontaneous,” in Althusser’s sense, i.e., “spontaneous because it is not”)3 reflex compels us at first to read these abstractions as cinematic tropes. But every time the reveal, the focus pull, zoom, or pan never arrives. The forms, specific yet asignifying, distinct yet unrecognizable, refuse to resolve themselves into any reference to a narrative or pictorial world. The screen and the medium of film itself, prevented from disappearing into its service to representation, become present in their technological materiality: As with the more egregious examples in Wyn Evans’s work (chandeliers, window blinds), the transmission device asserts its literal presence in the room, refusing to disappear in the service of a message. Whereas in a white cube, a grand glass chandelier might ostentatiously announce such obduracy, in the Teatro Goldoni, on the contrary, it is the economy and austerity of a minimal screening that prevents it from becoming “part of the furniture.” 2/6

Florian Hecker’s work also interrogates the in-between of a materiality (that of sound) and the irresistible compulsion to objectify, identify, and recognize objects and to integrate them into a world. To do so, Hecker draws on the work of scientists such as Alfred Bregman and Jens Blauert, whose research in psychoacoustics bridges the gap between the purely mechanical, physical description of sound and our experience of a world of sonic objects independent of ourselves. Psychoacoustics—a problematic complex of physics, physiology, sensation, perception, and cognition— explores how the hearer’s answer to basic questions such as “What?” “How many?” “Continuous or discontinuous?” are conditioned by the biological and perceptual artefacts of our auditory system. What we hear, and the way we traditionally describe sound, is a product of the type of world our species evolved to hear in. In Hecker’s compositions, this research converges with the work of modern electronic composers who, in the wake of Iannis Xenakis, have devised new methods of synthesis that manipulate sound at a “granular” level without reference to traditional macro-level musical entities such as waves and tones. Such compositions can often defy the ear-brain’s ability to deduce any kind of worldly “object” that would account for them, thus forcing a confrontation with “sound-initself.” Likewise, psychoacoustical studies have succeeded in identifying “effects” that can be experimentally produced through fine technological manipulation in order to provoke shifts of perception, demonstrating the formative role of certain physiological defaults in our interpretation of sound, turning our attention to “hearing-initself.” Whereas psychoacousticians generally use these effects as arguments for one theory or another of sonic objects, events, or streams, in No night No day, Hecker uses various methods of synthesis to foreground them and to explore the dynamic materiality of the relation between sound and the heard. He involves the audience as coproducers; the digital sound files that constitute the material basis of the work, broadcast with minute precision to an array of loudspeakers, are “dramatized” differently in any given space and are “completed” each time by the listeners, depending on the focus of their attention, their positions and movement, all of which affect the nature, grouping, and localization of the sound objects perceived, the fusion and fission of acoustic streams. * An overture? A constellation of insistent, crystalline resonances pierce the silence. Unlocatable, they seem to be shifting the coordinates of the space and reshaping the dark interior of the theater. With a sudden flourish, light blossoms on the screen occupying the stage, its mass smoothly expanding, its continuity broken only by the edge of the frame, which it swiftly fills, revealing . . . nothing. Just light, which then slowly recedes and folds back into darkness again, denying. Another patch appears bottom left, and we immediately ask, while not quite knowing whether the question makes sense, whether it is “the same” one as before and whether the complexes of sequenced sounds, which continue unabated, belong to the inner workings of this obscure entity. . . . We become aware of an inward effort, almost painful, as the mind tries to constitute into objects both light and sound, and to integrate the two into a reference to some organic world where, once more, sound and light would belong in some determinate way to identifiable objects. We develop a certain irony in relation to these pitiful attempts, in the attempt of any coded, coherent, narrativizable program, to bring this play of intensities back into the plush interior, to create a theater where there is none; the need to narrate and to mark time, seasons, episodes: that thing—whatever it was— is now over. Now another thing is happening, now another. . . . Eventually we engage in a continuing series of perceptual shifts: now submitting to the anonymous abstract intensities of the moment, now attempting to construct and understand the action of the piece as a whole. If only it seemed to make a whole . . . * If there was no shared process, and if the respective contributions of the artists remained unknown to each other during the project, where exactly can we locate the collaboration between Wyn Evans and Hecker? In fact, it 3/6

consisted mainly in preliminary and ongoing discussions concerning what must not be done. Strategies of resistance in particular, it seems, in relation to the gorgeous surroundings of the Teatro Goldoni. The invocation of Gidal’s materialism is perhaps a sign of the apprehension prompted by the prospect of creating what was billed as an “abstract opera” for a beautifully appointed baroque Venetian theater (complete with Murano chandeliers—familiar as the incongruous transmitters of earlier Wyn Evans works, here all too comfortably at home). The Goldoni’s early years—it was built in 1622—coincided with a prodigious merging of artistry and technique that included the use of dramatic, deep perspectives on the new custom backdrops that artists were employed to create, the deployment of all manner of marvelous technical devices to reinforce their realism, and the refining and coordination of multiple arts in the service of compelling operatic works. Baroque theater is not only the birthplace of the special effect but also the place where are forged for the first time those combined resources that theater and cinema will use to make lifelike, sympathetic, mimetic worlds that the viewer cannot resist identifying with, absorbing, and being absorbed in. No wonder, then, that as it reached France, Pascal named this theater the most dangerous of all seductions, in a denunciation that prefigures the critique of the spectacle, with its potent integration of identification, sympathy, and mimicry, its dangerous tendency to heighten, and then usurp, the real world. No night No day refuses all of this. It begins by plunging the interior of the theater into darkness. The space becomes an abyss filled with events deprived of the uniting, perspectival staging protocols that might locate them. The central perspective on the stage is recused; the screen offers no vanishing point or spatial cues to orient the viewer. The array of loudspeakers arranged throughout the theater activates every part of its cavernous volume, as if the stage had been dematerialized and delocalized, filling the whole space in three dimensions. These are all initial steps toward subtracting from the event all the conditions of baroque concertation. There can be no question of an extremist withdrawal into chaos; an invocation of pure materiality would be mere mysticism. Chaos, pure multiplicity “itself,” is but an abstraction. “Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes.”4 Chaos is pure multiplicity, but some thing is “always a one,” or rather a one-ing, resulting from a sifting, screening, or “extraction of differentials.” In order for individuals to emerge from the undisciplined many, a screen, or a series of screenings, is required. One such screening constitutes what Deleuze calls Leibniz’s “baroque condition”: Leibniz’s God, through his choice of a world (the best of all possible worlds), extracts from the chaotic realm of all possibilities a subset of compossibles. His world will comprise only those monads that can harmoniously exist together. Each takes up its place, and each will express the entire world, according to its own relative position in the spatium formed by the totality of monads, and a concomitant series of perceptions will unfold within its closed interior. As described by Deleuze, the “baroque house” of the monad is also already a theater: amid the folds of its upper, windowless floor (the soul), a performance takes place, a screening of the entire world from a perspective determined by the comings and goings of the openings on the “lower floor” (matter, the body). An orchestrated myriad of simultaneous private viewings—but their perfect coordination owes nothing to interaction. They are as isolated and automatic as the unwinding of the springs of so many clocks. Such is the baroque condition: Leibniz’s God sifts compossibles and ensures that only monads exist that belong to the same universe, including it and expressing it according to their singular point of view. The series of perceptions that constitutes their individuality is preprogrammed; they are therefore assured of their concomitancy with each other. Indeed, the combined result of this vertical, windowless concertation through “indirect harmonic contact” constitutes the world as such. Explaining this pure coordination without interaction, Leibniz likens it to “several bands of musicians or choirs separately taking up their parts and placed in such a way that they neither see nor hear one another, though they nevertheless agree perfectly in following their notes, each one his own, in such a way that he who hears the whole finds in it a wonderful harmony 4/6

much more surprising than if there were a connection between the performers.”5 Under these “conditions of a baroque concert[ation],”6 the autistic performers, deprived of any horizontal connection through which they could calibrate their joint performance, are alive only to their own perceptions and expression, but their harmony is guaranteed via the “vertical” procedure that preselects and places them. Their “spontaneity” expresses the glory of god-the-selector-of-compossibilities and guarantor of the best of all possible concerts. As Deleuze writes, this philosophical solution is representative of the baroque insofar as the latter is understood as a final, mad attempt to impose reason and harmony—to contain the divergences and discords of the world under the aegis of classical reason. Even if it means distributing “incompossibles” into multiple screened-off worlds, it at least allows us to rest easy that any discord in this world is resolved through a global harmony.7 Now Leibniz’s tale of two choirs not only pertains to the nature of the Wyn Evans / Hecker collaboration-at-adistance but also raises the question of the performance’s wholeness for and through its audience. As already noted, we have renounced the orchestration that makes the theater into a focusing device, a single-point perspective projecting a world that is then vividly reproduced within each individual’s first-person private theater. So can we still say that each audience member enjoys “the same” event? According to what harmonic procedure does this work produce a concert, a collective experience? It’s clear that this is no windowless concertation, under a presiding higher agency. With No night No day (and with its reference to Debord’s Hurlements), we are closer to something like détournement—understood not necessarily as a strategy of resistance but as a generalized condition of productive discord. The windows have been flung open, and the frontiers between multiple incompossible worlds are breached, allowing for the “interference of worlds of feeling,” the “bringing together of independent expressions,” in a way that does not resolve itself through some higher, surveying unity. We have given up the valiant baroque attempt to hold the world together, coordinating stage directions like clockwork. But some kind of “monadology” is retained: it is still a question of the production of extension and intensity, and the emergence of individuals as perspectival operators, but the question will now be resolved without the benefit of any Panglossian assumption. Individual experiences are assembled locally from the materials mobilized, the screening of the event taking place on a local level, without the benefit of a preestablished harmony that would already have decided what kind of world these events will inhabit. Imagine the theater turned inside out. Instead of the folded curtains parting to reveal, in the dark interior, the plunging perspective of an enfolding, enthralling world, providing the condition of convergence for the audience, what was the interior now becomes a convex surface across which signals pass, following geodesic lines. Light radiates and suffuses the surface. Speakers pulsate and shake the ground. Depending on their respective distances from these sources, and the order in which the signals reach them, individuals receive divergent transmissions, with minute differences sometimes yielding complete shifts in perception and contradictions between neighbours. There is no longer any global orientation, any standard of simultaneity that would provide a privileged reference frame. Distance provides the criteria for differentiation and cannot be traversed instantly, making it impossible to separate the “externality” of space from the “internality” of time. In short, there is no longer a world to be “in”; nor is there an internality to reflect the world; there is no longer any upper floor, only a spacetime flatland across which animalcules crawl, propagating and capturing worldless events, producing new synthetic organizations: “Differentiation propagates itself step by step in this community of monads which entertain tactile relations.”8 The events can no longer be said to belong either to the “spontaneity” of a first-person experience or to a global solution that integrates them all, the work of a God able to prescreen chaos and synchronize all clocks. They belong 5/6

to a new type of individual, without closure, which does not include or express the world but instead locally screens, makes, unmakes, captures, and reconfigures it, in horizontal concert with a multitude of others. * The conditions of No night No day’s new setting at the Augarten in Vienna are perhaps closer to those of a minimalist installation than those of theatrical performance. But recall Deleuze’s conciliation of minimal and baroque: minimalism reprises the baroque overflowing of art forms, rendering continuous painting, sculpture, architecture, urbanism. At the same time it installs a new monadology and a new perspectivalism (Tony Smith’s New Jersey Turnpike drive).9 Against which we might invoke minimalism’s inaugural refusal of illusion and representation, its attempt to present work as “nothing but what it is.”10 In between its two incarnations, this neo-baroque minimalism might well be the correct context in which to position No night No day. A serial audience, a mobile spectator/auditor, a performance that can be joined at any time: this new deployment will alter its effects but doubtless will not weaken its resistance. Beyond spontaneous private theater, orchestrated spectacle, and their complicity, Wyn Evans and Hecker have engineered a nomadological machine for unmaking worlds. 6/6

readthis.wtf /writing/the-idiots-have-won-matthew-noel-tods-bang/ The Idiots Have Won: From the Pre-Cambrian to the Post-Facebook with Matthew Noel-Tod’s ‘Bang’ - 2014 https://youtu.be/Vzp_Zj-GOKo Matthew Noel-Tod’s Bang! is a cavalcade of consciousness, a history of humanity as seen through the eyes of an expanded advice dog internet meme, the latest animated medium through which we speak ourselves and speak to others. The title of this talk, as many of you will have observed, places this ambitious universal history under the sign of a short-lived 2005 sitcom written by Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker, the tale of vacuous try-hard narcissist tosspot and self-facilitating media node Nathan Barley and his dubious new media empire, Trashbat Industries, a pioneer in talking animal gifs. The first episode introduces his neighbour in the east london neighborhood of Hosegate, Dan Ashcroft. Ashcroft is a burnt-out depressive journo, astonished and appalled at the creeping gentrification of the area following a sudden influx of proto-hipsters competitively vying to top each other in the most ridiculous headgear, clothing and transport options, feeding and feeding on a pullulating ecosystem of increasingly abstracted and nonsensical recombined linguistic and visual culture, neologisms, catchphrases, references to references stripped of historical context and parlayed into coded insider signals. Prize specimens of these same sophisticated self-regarding halfwits also populate his hated workplace, vapid style magazine SugarApe. Boiling over with rage and resentment at the ironclad social cohesion of this phalanx of folly and its unshakeable faith in its own currency, Ashcroft pens a viciously polemical opinion piece entitled ‘The Rise of the Idiots’ berating their malign influence. But he has underestimated 1/10

the idiots on every count, and is immediately adopted as a folk hero by the very targets of his ire, who dub him ‘preacher man’, slot him into their FMCG mythos of superficiality, and consign him to existence as a walking meme. Bemused, friendless and skint, in episode two Ashcroft is inveighled into making an appearance at arch-idiot Barley’s launch party for his website—a pointless and self-regarding mess of prank videos, flash animations, smartphone plugs and celebrity idents that bears more than a passing resemblance to everyday life online in 2014. As Barley whips the party crowd into a frenzy with his lamentable rapping, in an abominable crescendo of desolation Ashcroft’s desperate entreaties to the crowd—‘stop it, what are you doing? you’re all idiots’—are met with relentless waves of cretinous whooping and applause. No critique, no negation. Real subsumption by new media. ‘So say brother Nathan’. https://youtu.be/B0D9FJLIJhc These first two episodes of Nathan Barley encompass the essential story arc, one need watch no further. Dan Ashcroft is a Guy Debord manqué, a lone voice raised against the impervious universality of self-consuming idiocy, the papering over of physical and mental urban space by swarming new media spectacularisation tapped by old media capital, the usurpation of the very word creativity, and so on. Criticised as being concerned with an admittedly egregiously wanky but ultimately rather parochial London scene when it first aired, it’s quite telling that today, the targets of this show – written before youtube launched, before smartphones, before the social hegemony of Facebook and Twitter- seem relatively universal, or at least they overlap fairly well with the horizon of middle-class Western sociality. In an attempt at satire, Nathan Barley documented the vanguard of future popular idiocy. So at first I thought about addressing Matthew’s work with a counterpoint of two quotes which seemed to me to exemplify a tension that runs through the piece: one from Barley, and the other from Guy Debord. Debord is the eminence grise behind the hi-res colours of Noel-Tod’s Bang! (2012), the theorist whose Society of the Spectacle underlies its meditation on capitalist subsumption, and whose last and most monumentally maudlin film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni est not only prescribes the endless circulation of A Season in Hell 3d (2013), which completes a trilogy of Noel-Tod works, but also presides over this central episode of the cycle. 2/10

Bang! extends Debord’s critique of our collective complicity with the emptying out of all human life into the consumption of endlessly circulating signs and images, the production of a new passive subject of (but no longer in) history; and does so through the use of the most debased visual heralds of this process: the internet memes which, so it seems, we now speak through, or which speak through us, with the alien tongue of a culture that belongs to nobody and constructs itself continually, autonomously,—a culture that is both immediate—in its infantilism, its garish appeal, its universal stupidity—abstract—through its unpredictable recombination and unknowable evolutionary evolutionary mechanisms—and socially ordering—through its continual demand for attention, currency, ‘creativity’ and self-representation. So that’s why it makes sense, at least on a first approximation, to suspend the work between these two authorities, one representing a subject that is rampantly exuberant, endlessly relaying a nonsensical juvenile hypersemiosis to which he is totally in thrall and upon which the entirety of his shallow self-knowledge is invested, the other representing a subject who imperiously affects to stand outside, a lone hero, the voice of historical authority calling out the idiots and waiting, anticipating the downfall of their empire: between the preacher man and the idiot. It would be difficult to find a bleaker perspective on this than Debord’s final testament in in girum imus; however I may have succeeded in doing so: philosopher-mathematician Gilles Châtelet’s polemical 1995 essay Vivre et penser comme des porcs—To Live and Think Like Pigs Châtelet is an interesting figure, philosopher of mathematics, friend of Deleuze, militant, activist in the Front Homosexuel d’Action Revolutionnaire. His last book is a lament for the decomposition of the liberalising ideals of ’68 into the libertarian cynicism he saw emerging in the ’80s, a coruscating attack on the nascent ‘tertiary service society’ and the cybernetic ideology peddled by its apologists. Châtelet describes how the emerging order requires the production of a new generation of carefully managed and controlled neurolivestock wired up to global entertainment networks, primed with envy and greed, cyber-zombies bred to circulate freely in the mediatic pastures provided them, neurostock to be milked by vampiric capital, all the while innocently naive in their bovine belief that the ideals of permanent revolution are now being realized in the festive neoconservatism of gimcrack nomadism, constant acceleration, and abandonment of all things to the market as a virtuous chaos from which a new liberating order will spring readymade: in short the complacent self-satisfied individuality of a postindustrial third wave, as Châtelet says, a generation that aspires to be ‘light, urban and nomadic’, ‘a multitude of young cavaliers in charge of more and more ‘intelligent’ nomad-objects’— ‘Postmodern cretinisation by communication’, Châtelet declares—a full decade BB [Before Barley]—‘is a more advantageous substitute for the subjugation perpetrated by the conservatisms of yore’ Châtelet retains his worst invective for the happily complacent consumers, and much of his book could run as an alternative commentary to the habitat showroom family in the stills that Debord’s film fixes on for what seems like an eternity, their open, smiling faces putrefying before our eyes under his cold gaze, a perfect unit of shiny people playing out ‘what they have seen in the spectacle: a happy, eternally present unity’. whose new image would be furnished for them by what Châtelet calls ‘The Nomad Overclass of the twenty-first century’. Châtelet reserves, on the other hand, a kind of pitying despair for those who see themselves as the vanguard, and who are indeed the wellsprings of idiocy whose diluted byproducts the middle classes will sup from; The primal scene of To Live and Think Like Pigs unfolds in Chapter 1 in the Paris nightclub Le Palace, where movers and shakers vie for style pioneer status, believing—like the denizens of Hosegate after them—that they occupy, in Châtelet’s bravura description: 3/10

that celebrated niche of firsthand snobbery, that infinitely calm and infinitely fragile eye of the cyclone where ‘ideas’ are supposedly born, to take flight, embrace the world, and then fall back down rather swiftly, pitilessly, aped and disfigured. Like so many other suckers, the great goofballs of the cyber-pack thought of themselves as princes of networks and tipping points, when in fact a centrifugal force millions of times more powerful than them had already relegated them to the subsidiary provinces of secondhand snobbery, to the distant satrapies to which fashion cruelly exiles those who believe that they have mastered the right moves to install themselves just behind the locomotives, without knowing that they are already contaminated by that which socialites fear the most: they were passé. Reading Châtelet I have had more than one moment of despair in wondering what he would have found to say if he had known how much worse things would get. When, for example, he speaks of the cyber-livestock of ‘young walkman-toting nomads free in their heads’, a little querulous but basically malleable, easily segmentable into demographics and ‘generations’, and thus ideal sociological prey for fashion. One must of course avoid any waste, and limit oneself strictly to the needs of the future neurocracy, to what is strictly necessary for cybernetic fattening-up: to go beyond this would be unhealthy: to ensure the health of every body or to make sure each one got a careful education would an infringement of the liberty of brains, and would risk compromising the ‘autonomy and self-management’ of the units of livestock. Replace Walkmans with iPhones, read it and weep. By the same token, I doubt whether, when Nathan Barley was penned, Morris and Brooker even at their most cynical and satirical, guessed quite what a large proportion of our everyday social existence would be constituted by consumption of trashbat-esque media in a decade’s time. And how much we all ended up enjoying it, discarding the prophylactics of irony that we once thought would protect us, properly enjoying it, and without any hope of finding some outside from which it might be ‘critiqued’—a dumb word. On an immediate visual level Bang! appears to inhabit this space; yet like Debord in in girum imus, its maker might say, ‘I pride myself in having made a film out of the rubbish that was available’. In doing so he possibly hopes to deprive it of some of its hold on us but also, on occasion, he rolls with it, and even adds some jokes of his own. But before turning to Bang!, let’s first briefly describe the first part of the trilogy, Castle (2011). 4/10

https://youtu.be/Huhiu5OC9rI This piece involves not dogs but tigers, and specifically, I think, its subtext is Bataille’s striking affirmation, in The Accursed Share, that ‘the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.’ [note: MNT later informed me this had no influence on the work at all :)] We see a meticulously rendered CGI tiger dreaming; it then springs into full motion, and just as suddenly is frozen, captured, rotated in a highly controlled geometrical fashion, exposing the ability virtual technologies afford us to meticulously model and manipulate desire in time through the sytematic examination and control of exactly what the tiger is in space. But the tiger is not the main character here: next into this empty space with its digital no-time there appear two perfunctorily-gendered Gaultier perfume bottles manufactured with hard bulges in all the right places. They autonomously shed the circular cuffs that restrain their metallic pumps and begin to spray each other in a highly chaste symbolic coitus. This frigid copulation produces what seems to be an infantilised CGI caricature of Bataille’s tiger, a perfectly-formed cute ball of tiger fur bristling with energy, bobbing and pulsating as it’s batted back and forth by the gushes of masculine and feminine scent, until these perfectly formed objects even abandon their three-dimensionality, spilling and seeping across the screen in an ecstatic kaleidoscopic rendering error. As Bataille outlines in The Accursed Share, the capitalist system can be seen as constituting a departure from primitive societies which ritually destroyed abundant surplus produce in various sacred rituals of unproductive expenditure; this carnival of wastefulness is eschewed by capitalism which confronts the overabundance of wealth by engendering scarcity and compelling accumulation. If we do indeed ‘turn in circles in the night’ to be ‘consumed by fire’, as Season in Hell suggests, therefore, this is no apocalyptic conflagration, no orgasmic nihilation; this fire is the measured, antiseptic flames that form the backdrop to Season in Hell 3D, the time of apocalypse is immanentized into this all-consuming stasis just as the sexual act is produced in commodified space. 5/10

These then are the all-consuming cold fires of festive neoconservatism and its well-managed antiproduction that châtelet shivered at, horrified, as the ’80s progressed, every perfectly rendered detail of the deadened object, every pixel of the flatscreen LCD, every byte of MP3 squeezed from an earbud a supervised venting of libido that is but the miniscule pendant to massive, equally sterile accumulation taking place on another scene. If the 3d spectacle of Castle’s Tiger shows us the commodification of an impoverished eroticism, a glimpse into the alien space of spectacularized sexual desire, Bang! turns from the economics of eroticism to the production of the existential, dramatizing the way in which we discover and reflect our selves in beings to which, however animated, we refuse the privilege of subjecthood; yet which provide the indispensible sounding board for our own privilege. Yet, centrally, this whole trilogy is concerned with the material technologies of the spectacle through which these processes are mediated, the dead and impermeable surfaces which continually enliven us and stoke our fires. In the great Hegelian tradition, Bang! presents a history of spirit, but as told from the ‘other side’—as the objects through whose medium we come to construct and recognise ourselves as subjects call our bluff and begin to speak for themselves. Modes of subjectivation from the Greek polis to the Christian kingdom of god, from the dignified self-reflection of Renaissance Man to the paranoia of Cartesian doubt—and out the other side into the media landscape where we engage daily and explicitly in constructing our self as an object of, for and by the circulation of images drawn from a common media stock. Echoing the furry tiger ball of Castle, Bang! makes use of infantile images, merging tropes from didactic children’s TV programmes with the timewasting gimmicks of the tumblr generation. To call this infantilism is in fact to do an injustice to children: if, as Deleuze asserts, in capitalist society especially, ‘children are subjected to an infantilism that is not their own’, at least we now have the honesty to subject ourselves to this infantilism too. This meme culture is, on a very high level, what Debord refers to as ‘a communication without response’—to which only a ‘pseudo-response’ is possible. Infantilization: ‘The need to imitate which is felt by the consumer is precisely the infantile need conditioned by all the aspects of his fundamental dispossession.’—‘you reject and remake, watch this vid, then go and post your status update,’ observes a glum human figure toward the end of Bang! who has become virtually indistinguishable from his own dog. ‘We are all one by grace of an alien’ says Noel-Tod’s god-dog, an analysis that holds strikingly constant throughout the vicissitudes of the history of spirit…. The creation of community of men, and of the human itself as a plastic existence, takes place through a socius that itself is historically constituted, depending on the particular regime of production in force: it inhabits a body produced alongside production, upon which production is inscribed, and from which the relations of production appear to emanate miraculously, as if from an originary nature. body of the earth, divine body, body of the despot, body of capital, the body of the park. The dog in Bang! stands in not only for the particular animated images through and against which the subject constructs itself, but also and at the same time the guardian who polices the boundaries of the hallucinated unity of the social, the universal surface—the reversible god-dog alternates between our looking at things as subhuman and inanimate, and our endowing them with magical life. So, in Bang! we traverse the Christian faith, the shattering of Renaissance humanism and its proud vision of the dignity of man, and the crack-up of the modern subject. Starting with Socrates and Alcibiades, with the park as the greek polis. 6/10

Dogs and philosophers have indeed been companions since the so-called dawn of Western civilization. Plato’s contemporary Diogenes of Synope the Cynic who famously slept in a ceramic barrel in the marketplace, was reputed ‘doggish’—the root of the word ‘cynic’—not only on account of his disdain for the niceties of the civilized life and decorum, but also because he and other cynics prized the dog’s seemingly instinctive feel for who is a friend and who a foe. Humans are too prideful and self-deluding to be easily fooled, whereas a dog’s bark, so it was said, always tells the truth. Diogenes was also apparently a great mocker of Plato, whose philosophical use of dogs however draws on the same reputed virtues of the faithful animal. But, ventriloquizing Socrates, Plato suggests that the dog is a fine model for those noble pups, the guardians of the Republic, precisely because of their spirited and philosophic nature: Is not the noble youth very like a well-bred dog in respect of guarding and watching? What better model could there be for a guardian than one which infallibly knows its friend from its enemy? As Plato has Socrates say: Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance, he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other any good. Did this never strike you as curious? … And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming; your dog is a true philosopher […] if an animal determines what he likes and dislikes by the test of knowledge and ignorance must he not be a lover of learning? … And is not the love of learning the love of wisdom, which is philosophy? If dogs are prized because they know what they know and what they don’t know, then their being used as a model for the guardians of the city marks the departure of Plato the great planner from the company of a cynic and cosmopolitan like Diogenes; and the pestiferous vagrant Socrates, who continually professed his astonishment at what ‘everyone knows’ when he himself knew that he knew nothing, and yet at the same time demonstrating how to draw out—even from a mere slaveboy—that which we know without knowing that we know it. Of course there is more to this, the proposition is more ironic and more complex: namely, if the dog is a mere creature of opinion—a dog of doxa—and recognizes its friends and enemies through sheer force of custom and habit, then it is most certainly no philosopher; the dog is only a model if it barks at the real stranger, ignorance and licks the real friend, wisdom. Meaning that the guard dogs of the republic need a little more sophistication than your average pooch—the space of reason is one of boundaries that constantly shift under pressure of reflection and history. Nevertheless there may be a yet deeper and older truth to this faith in canine discrimination: it has been suggested by scientists investigating the history of wolf and dog genomes from archaeological sites, that the advent of settled human communities 15,000 years ago is contemporary with a co-dependency of man and dog, with the dog both as a guard against nocturnal attack for cultivated territory and as one of the first instances of inherited wealth making possible in both these respects the more complex societies. These notions of the dog as discriminator of inside and outside, as both property and guardian of territory, seem key to Bang!, as the film’s dogged pursuit of the human shows how this history runs in parallel with a territorial pissing, a marking out of property. And the reciprocal marking of the subject by the logics of property it is subjected to and defined by. In this way Bang! extends Debord’s reflection on how the growth of the spectacle is paralleled by a neutralization of urban space. In girum imus nocte is also in part Debord’s elegy to a Paris that no longer exists. 7/10

Executed as a public project in 2011–12, the year when the London Olympics was mobilized as a massive alibi for the regeneration largely by stealth privatization of vast swathes of East London, Bang! asks what becomes of ‘the park’—the open, public space of leisure and sociality where humans exercise their unique ability for real encounter, a world beyond even the most audacious dog’s impoverished horizon, when it is meticulously veneered over by the shimmering carapace of the ‘illusion of encounter’, the ‘hallucinatory social fact’, that slippery mix of governance, semiosis, and money (‘money it’s a visible dog, a manmade dog’, a Koons dog whose mirror surface reflects us perfectly declares). As per Baudrillard, reality itself has become a simulation, a sheaf of thin CGI surfaces. The question of the survival of anything beyond this real subsumption is at its most subtle yet acute in the final section of the piece. Interspersed with txting clichés are Beckett quotes, and blackberry messages from the riots that exploded in London during the making of the piece—which famously themselves expressed dissatisfaction in terms of consumer dream-fulfillment—the looting of cellphones, sneakers, and flatscreen TVs. Châtelet again: Of course, we might well imagine a few ‘fluctuations’ provoked by the ‘youths with walkmans and sneakers’ might trouble the peace of the great goldfish-bowl of market-democracy! Such are the famous ‘hot nights’, ‘riots’ even, in the banlieues. But you can bet that these ‘riots’ trouble the Overclass no more than they trouble Judge Richard Ponzer, for whom the city of New York illustrates the possibility for communities situated between two extremes of the spectrum of income to ‘cohabit and to cooperate in conditions which are not perfectly harmonious and certainly not placid (!)’. Quite the contrary, in these riots it will see the experimental proof of the systemic stability of a social Jurassic Park. Every revolt will only be a ‘backwash’—inaudible by the markets—as inoffensive and pathetic as the settling of accounts between the young males of a bovine herd. Do we have to accept that, looking back from this ‘this vale of desolation’, in Debord’s words, to speak of ‘alienation’ can only be a nostalgic term, that in speaking of a former generation who ‘were not content to subsist on images’ we must lapse like Debord into personal memoir, lost friends, good times? This is perhaps the question of accelerationism: If capitalism is the vehicle at once of a process that progressively dismembers the organic body of the socius, drawing it ever nearer to an immanence with universal schizophrenia, and if this process, reaching the point of real subsumption, shows no signs of dying of contradiction, or of producing a revolutionary proletariat that would be the agency of its overthrow, then might not the revolutionary path be to push this process further until it exceeds the axiomatic of capital itself, accelerating this schizophrenic tendencies that Debord diagnoses at the end of Society of the Spectacle toward the full, unsegmented body upon which uncontrolled schizophrenic flows continually recombine and machine each other in perfect anarchy? This, anyway, was the position put forward by Jean-François Lyotard in what he later denounced as his ‘evil works’, in which he recommends the renunciation of the sad passions of theory, the depressive, pious position of critique, which has little to offer other than ever-more sophisticated laments and the self-important guarding of the flame of hope, the lament for “the impoverishment, servitude and negation of real life”—in favour of a position according to which, in the words of his follower Gilles Lipovetsky, [R]evolutionary actions” are not those which aim to overthrow the system of Capital, which has never ceased to be revolutionary, but those which complete its rhythm in all its radicality, that is to say actions which accelerate the metamorphic process of bodies. If it cannot be a question of going back, of reinstating Mirandolo’s dignity or Descartes’s spirit, then it is inevitably a question of a speculative vision of human plasticity, and thus of the possible mutations of that sociotechnological 8/10

surface that is inscribed and miraculously emanates the human. A new schizo-park, a new sociotechnological basis, a new earth for a new humanity. But take the plane of consistency that Deleuze and Guattari describe, upon which, in their words, the most disparate of things and signs move: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message, a crystallization produces a passion, the wasp and the orchid cross a letter… —to which we may add: a dog giving bad advice, carrying a Harrods shopping bag made of Lego, playing at god in the park—isn’t this plane the very imaginary of Trashbat industries? The Barley generation is surely too jaded to take seriously the revolutionary agency of this affirmation without judgment; it means only that the idiots have won. It means relinquishing our dearly held theatre of critical perspective in favour of the onrush of pullulating directionless positivity. It means yielding to the unconscious which, as Freud tells us, knows no negativity. Only endless, positive drift with no orientation, and, as Châtelet argues, immediately recuperable. Nevertheless in the absence of dark hopes for accelerationist breakthrough, we admit that we retain a certain fondness for Barley’s puppyish positivity. Because who wants to be old dog Dan Ashcroft, pissing into the gale of idiocy, so maddened and disorientated by the endless vacuous churning of disjointed fragments of culture that he is rendered impotent and speechless, like Debord, leaving his last testament in the form of a filmic palindrome to be played and replayed endlessly, invests his last hope in its eternally vigilant yet hopeless gaze, filled with horror and even somewhat hysterical, like Adorno when he glances at a door handle or a pair of slip-on shoes and sees nothing but the congealed shadow of Auschwitz. It is this truly inescapable disoriented circulation that A Season in Hell distils. Bang! is perhaps less bleak. But these subject positions belong together—as Charlie Brooker said reflecting on Nathan Barley, maybe Aschroft is just Nathan seven years later. We always live through an alien, whether it’s god, dog, industrial machine, social media network and/or their underlying configurations of capital. It may be possible—at a stretch—to read this work in a lineage of accelerationist art that aims to concentrate and exacerbate the sociotechnological regimes that dismember the dignity of art, and would include Warhol’s factory, Koons’s ushering in of banality, Murakami’s universe of über kawaii. Certainly the space Noel-Tod’s films inhabit is that of the false immediacy of a shared, repeated, reinforced culture that produces as if through a miracle these perfect surfaces that are the subjectivating dog of the post- un- neo- or trans-modern; however, it does not simply amplify or mimic them. Concretion at the level of ‘immediate’ cultural experience is the achievement of massive abstraction attained collectively through countless technical and creative microcultures and the new conceptual and logistical procedures that emerge from them. The abstract matter refined by these forces of production is selected, processed and distributed according to supple and responsive practices of aesthetic and linguistic coding and decoding, animal response technique, and automated audience participation and modulation. How would it even be possible to call this immediacy ‘false’ or to cry ‘alienation’, what does it mean to dismiss our collective enjoyment of this mediation? I feel a deep ambivalence, more profound than protest or an affirmation, in the work, and in Matthew himself as a person. (An assessment based on my relationship with the artist over the last year which consists 1% of face-to-face conversation and 99% of participating in the construction of Matthew-Noel Tod as a distributed vector for the 9/10

production of dog-based Facebook humour. Like Aschcroft, he has become his own memeplex. He is a Guy deBarley for our times.) Bang! is neither a celebration ironic or otherwise, nor is it a counsel of despair. But truly, it offers no hope beyond the perplexing fact of its own existence. With that, lets finally get to those two quotes from which I initially proposed to hang what little I could manage to say about this perplexing work, leaving them unattributed so as to sustain its troubling ambivalence: there is no greater madness than the present organization of life for my latest monkey animation, click on “other shit” At the very end of Society of the Spectacle, Debord writes: The “historical mission of installing truth in the world” cannot be accomplished either by the isolated individual, or by the atomized crowd subjected to manipulation, but now as ever by the class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes by bringing all power into the dealienating form of realized democracy, the Council, in which practical theory controls itself and sees its own action. This is possible only where individuals are “directly linked to universal history”; only where dialogue arms itself to make its own conditions victorious. The park must be built, for dog’s sake. The construction, in the inescapable, infinitely well furnished freefall of images, of an oriented space where we can finally encounter this condition itself, and each other within it. Presenting this ‘direct link to universal history’ in the form of what at first glance looks like a risible, attenuated caricature, a ‘bonkers philosophy mash-up’ stuttering in the stunted visual vocabulary of the spectacle, in animate images which, as Debord says, are ‘ideology materialized’—but what ideology?—freighting these brittle carapaces with a weight under which they begin to crumple and lose their charm, Bang! succeeds in giving voice to their own labour and ours under them. 10/10

readthis.wtf /writing/speculations-on-speculations-on/ Speculations on Speculations on… - 2014 There’s no better way to address the multiple meanings of ‘speculative’, at the crossroads of philosophy and art, than through Alix Rule’s and David Levine’s 2011 report for Triple Canopy on ‘International Art English’, which charted the rise of a recognizable pseudotheoretical jargon throughout the art world and related spheres. The critical stance of the authors was that this sophisticated creole, deployed in press releases, reviews and artist’s statements, seems to announce grandiose theoretical ambitions without ever pinning down the meaning of the borrowed words it uses. I’d like to make three points about this: (1) Quite rightly, the report understands these ‘concepts’ as commodities whose fortunes rise and fall, and which can therefore be said to be subject to speculation. This is a market with its own rules, which is not identical with the art market as such, but which overlaps it to a certain extent. That is to say: not all buyers of art need their purchases to be certified by the currency of the latest artspeak, but to a certain extent general speculative trends in one market are correlated with those in the other. Furthermore, the thriving of contemporary art as a privileged cultural sphere worthy of civic and national investment is also linked to the movements of this market and the compelling conceptual hold it seems to have upon the future—it presents ideas whose time is coming, and which therefore boast a certain force that demands attention and investment, even if (or perhaps because) they are sometimes foggy and difficult to make out. (2) Which brings us to the second point: The report hints at the way in which these concepts themselves are valued precisely in so far as they remain in a state of indefinite vagueness. International Art English thrives on concepts that can be loaded with various different meanings, but whose power is that of a semantic enigma: they promise to make us see the world in a different light; they seem to hold in reserve some future conceptual bounty. Once again this goes to suggest the multiple senses of ‘speculation’ involved here. (3) More specifically, it is amusing to read that, among the words jostling for prominence in this international market, Rule and Levine’s quantitative analysis reveals that ‘[u]sage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009’ ! What could have been the ‘underlying’ of this increased market activity within what the authors describe as an economy of ‘acts of linguistic mimicry and one-upmanship’? What is the meaning of this speculative bubble in which the notion of speculation itself has become the choice object of speculation? I should own up to my part in providing some of the raw materials for this economic miracle, having published in 2008 the proceedings of the conference held at Goldsmiths in 2007 and entitled ‘Speculative Realism’. As we all know, SR subsequently went on to become an astonishingly well-known brand. In 2013 SR made a surprise entry at no.81 in ArtReview magazine’s ‘power 100’; and it’s just been revealed that it has since climbed the chart to no. 61 in 2014. This listing is itself a fascinating enterprise: how does one evaluate the ‘power’ of ‘Speculative Realism’ (or the four philosophers who took part in the 2007 workshop) against that of 1/3

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Victor Pinchuk, and Tinho Seghal? (which almost amounts to an Object-Oriented ‘Latour litany’ in itself!) By what metric did Bard College, in 2013, pip Speculative Realism by one place? If not a rigorous market evaluation, this event must certainly be indicative—but what exactly does it indicate? ArtReview’s short commentary is informative here: what is evinced in support of Speculative Realism’s 2013 position of ‘power’ does not go far beyond the fact that, in a world where ideas are ‘accessed by artists and curators directly from other academic disciplines’, Speculative Realism is ‘increasingly referenced’ (in 2014 they mention by whom it has been mentioned, namely Nicholas Bourriaud [no 76]). It seems to me that two conditions are necessary in order for this speculative market in speculation to function—that is, in order for each coinage of the currency of International Art English to thrive: (1) it is required that the words be vague and gestural—they cannot be cashed-out at any point—that would pop the bubble; and (2) these words must be the index of something outside the market which bears a ‘real’ value that contemporary art fears it is unable to generate indigenously—they are underwritten by another discipline. So is philosophy the underlying for art-world speculation on speculation? If so, how long can the bubble last, given that this is a way of using words very different from that traditionally sought by philosophy, which as a priority seeks to define, explicate, and understand the words it uses? Indeed, beyond the undeniable fact that ‘it is being referenced’, the alliance between SR and art is puzzling when one considers that the primary selling point of SR is a problematization of the mediating role of human experience; and a renewed interest in the thesis that human cognition can gain access to that which is not determined by the conditions of human experience—precisely, one would think, those aesthetic conditions with which art is largely concerned. If this ‘movement’ consists ih wresting attention away from the primacy of intuition and interpretation, it could be (and has been) construed as an anti-aesthetic, anti-interpretative tendency; so what could it mean for art? The adoption of SR into art practice and (more prevalently) art discourse, I think, was determined not so much by an engagement with these philosophical concerns as by a series of symptomatic synchronicities. Its endorsement was boosted by the convergence of the theme of a ‘reality-without-us’ with ruminations on climate change and the anthropocene. And its concern with nonhuman actants or material complicities speaks to the great inhuman networks within which we know we are enmeshed, but whose complexity we all struggle to figure. The effects that SR has had upon artists’ attempts to deal with these contemporary problems has not been wholly negative but it has often rested upon less than cautious appropriations of philosophical ideas which had themselves been the subject of overenthusiastic speculative endorsement. In my dealings with the art world it seems to me that there are indeed compelling dialogues between individual artists and the philosophical questions raised by Speculative Realism. But equally I think the specific nature of these dialogues can be easily drowned out by the currency of International Speculative English. I certainly don’t want to be the one who reproaches and disciplines artists for not studying philosophy properly or failing to define their concepts perfectly. I accept and applaud the fact that artists’ practice involves different ways of working with concepts and materials (and concepts as materials). I would just highlight the negative function of ‘speculation’ as a blanket term—as a term that is nothing more than an opportunity for speculation, a brand that one invests in because it’s what everyone else seems to be investing in. (At its worst this amounts to little more than statements of the type: ‘the new exciting philosophy says that everything is an object/material/contingent; therefore any object/material/congingency I present has a philosophical significance, which exponentiates its artistic value.’) 2/3

I have found working with particular artists over a long period far more rewarding than participating in the general discourse of ‘speculation’, where I am often mystified and distressed about quite what my role and responsibility is supposed to be, and quite how I am implicated in this market of ideas. Instead, what I have been interested in over the years is to nurture the type of exchange which I think defines a healthy and productive relationship between philosophy and art, where neither of them attempt to ape the others’ procedures, or to use the allure of the other’s authority (which works both ways, since both art and philosophy are unsure and suspicious of their own authority and procedures). A way in which instead, their different ways of working can complement each other and draw out from each other something that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. Working with artists has been a rewarding experience in which, from the very beginning, the artists’ works were already using concepts I had been working with as a philosopher, and used and presented them in unexpected ways that led me to develop them differently. Often, I hope, I was able to pass something back to them, enriching their own practice. A concept I have developed for describing this is the ‘interrupted relay’. In fact it came from a conversation I had with artist Jake Chapman. As you know Jake and his brother Dinos work together and invariably their works are ‘signed’ by both. But Jake told me that, for instance, when they’re working on a drawing, he will draw something and then just leave it on the table in the studio; the next day Dinos might come in and scribble it out and write something on it, and then leave it; then Jake will come back and add something a week later, etc. So this problematizes the idea of collaboration as involving the simultaneous participation of the parties in some kind of dialogue of co-presence. This is how I feel I have interacted with artists: they take concepts away and use them in a completely different way than I would ever have envisioned, and return something to me, which I interpret according to my own coordinates and return to them… It’s a very rewarding and productive experience precisely to the extent that neither of us have too much neurotic respect for what the other thinks they’re doing—we’re interested in this thing that’s developing in between us. This interaction, it seems to me, is a very different thing from the curatorial metaproject of aligning philosophical ‘movements’ with artistic ‘movements’. While it involves an understanding that different practices use concepts in different ways, it also involves avoiding the temptation to appropriate the vague allure of the other (which—again— works both ways). The difficulty, of course, comes when philosophy’s well-developed sense of rigour and propriety with respect to concepts balks at the types of operations that artists tend to carry out on their materials (which can include philosophical concepts). Or, equally, when artists feel that their well-meaning interest has been misconstrued as an attempt to actually engage in philosophy, something which few of them presume to do. This whole field of negotiation remains open, and the question of how to attain the correct balance is a difficult one. I just want to suggest that it’s the specificity of projects where something really passes from one side to the other that is of interest—and that smothering each other with the comfort blankets of ‘the speculative’, ‘new realisms’ or ‘materials’ don’t necessarily help us to get to work on this. 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/our-product-with-pamela-rosenkranz/ Our Product (with Pamela Rosenkranz) - 2015 Abeel Abeen Aben Afriam Afrim Afristil Albatom Albinium Albiobact Albolat Albulat Albulis Aliomone Ambisone Archiome Armone Axianis Bactis Balandium Belenium Bellenium Belliam Bellisom Biancolin Bictiam Biencalon Biomil Biomorbat Bionin Biosil Carelium Caressil Carnaem Carnelle Carnin Carnitin Celentis Celinor Celium Cenel Cestis Chenil Chronas Clarian Clarium Clerentis Clestis Clidian Clidianum Cliron Clirontis Clodium Cloudiane Colees Colienis Colifung Confasen Contreel Curalorium Cureen Curin Diamome Diffasol Disomone Effendra Effernis Elat Elbalat Elbenis Elbulis Elemome Elemone Elendiris Elenium Elin Elindan Endium Epidiome Eresmes Eresmis Etolene Europiome Evogenic Evoin Evulviom Extesis Faeben Fermelyn Figium Fingilin Fingin Flairin Flais Flantis Fleen Fleent Fleren Flesnin Fletan Floorium Florismorb Fossilys Fossilyt Fosslim Fungiome Galium Gean Genaeta Genea Geneas Geneation Generall Geniol Gleen Glissan Grasseme Greel Greenol Grenil Grewenis Halonea Helea Helion Holean Holeana Holeen Holis Holoeana Hologena Holos Imersa Imersoleen Immopion Indiam Indiosym Inox Interneer Intral Intril Introl Introlactis Isolon Isoloun Isomome Isomone Jabiome Jeserbit Jestensil Jialit Jylium Klaritime Klitariam Labelin Labes Lacal Lacecil Lacecin Laces Lacis Lacteer Lactilium Lactiso Lactition Lactone Laitome Laltimo Laltis Laltisome Laltisone Laltissimo Laltome Lapulin Larmone Latone Lavalen Lavelan Laverin Leftaren Legatis Leisome Leisomone Lemenium Lemis Lemium Letalat Letone Levandril Levelin Levenda Levendas Libes Lirentis Liseen Liseme Lisin Lisomone Livandum Livelean Livelium Lupitiome Lupitione Mafricat Magmas Magmate Magmelia Magna Malat Malium Maternat Melbelum Melerel Melisone Melomone Memiran Memone Memorium Menis Meridium Merilium Mertensis Mesoft Meternis Metersis Microsoil Microsyn Milactin Miliandul Mirmarium Moisma Molculis Moliculis Molten Momin Momine Monalin Moriosyl Morium Morphen Movendis Moverin Murmarion Mycilistil Mylemone Mylium Mymone Nanindor Nanium Nanom Nanomium Nanoon Nanum Nanume Nasiom Nastat Nebelle Nebellion Nebolium Necrion Nekrepil Nekroferm Nekrosoil Nekrostil Nelban Nelbelit Nelleit Neluliom Nemeen Nemoena Nemonium Nenetenis Neonium Neopin Neotarnat Neoteen Neotelen Neotene Neotenus Neuropistil Niclium Nimonies Nimonium Nirmens Noemium Nostril Nuagene Nucliome Nukrilat Oben Ocalis Ocaltion Ocilis Olbanium Olbensis Olbex Olbinium Olbis Olbix Omeen Omin Partelemis Pathium Petroilis Phylator Phylosil Planis Plasman Plasmin Plasnine Plastat Plastis Plastit Plenol Plensis Plentol Plentolin Plesticolin Plinstaat Plion Plisman Plismon Predatir Qalisorb Qenteen Qermeel Qill Qualbiat Qualibact Quelen Querms Questen Questen Quiam Quilensir Raelin Raeline Realat Realen Realine Realinin Realit Redeneer Reenis Refleine Releban Releen Relion Rilin Rubarbiol Rubinerol Sabes Salub Sangin Sangol Sebiome Seeben Seelium Seem Seepium Seftoon Selben Selbome Selentis Selmeleen Selmelin Semeen Senseer Sensen Sensis Serben Siangol Signeel Silben Sileen Silican Silicen Simalan Simulon Singol Singulan Sireen Sirten Sirtensis Skillen Neotene Neotene is a concentrate so rich in active biotics that it forms a second skin coextensive with our own, a liquid amnion supplementing every vital function and consolidating our being. Sheath of identity and medium of our most important transactions, this delicate membrane is a shared substance, a screen radiating elemental monochrome, a common mass. Evoin 1/5

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readthis.wtf /writing/the-brain-ear/ The Brain-Ear - 2015 On February 26, 2015, Robin Mackay travelled to Graz, to speak at the show at Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst & Medien. In the talk Mackay attempted to draw some brief comparisons between the sound work of Hecker and the analyses of colour proposed by Éric Alliez in his book on modern painting, The Brain-Eye, which he had spent the previous year translating. Apart from extensive works on the rail line which made travel both ways extremely taxing, the most notable thing about the episode was the impressive cathedral-like echo in the grand hall of the Künstlerhaus. Hecker requested a recording be made of the talk and, upon his return, Mackay received a sound file in which Hecker had used software to surgically remove his voice, leaving only the reverberations of his words. ¶ Florian Hecker’s work consists in a series of articulations, between the physical analysis and synthesis of sound as vibratory phenomena, and the ability to digital encode and reproduce it—and what is heard. ¶ Since there is a definite ‘gap’ here—between the piece as a programmed set of instructions to create vibrations in the air and the experience of the piece, in this sense, here ‘the listener makes the work’. ¶ Or rather, instead of a gap we could talk about the fact that this work reveals an unsuspected density, a kind of thickness of the heard which disrupts any sense that the relationship between sound and hearer is a transparent and straightforward one. 1/11

¶ And it’s not a question of soliciting the listener’s interpretation or imagination in order to complete the work, because there is a very precise targeting of the various layers of cognitive processing that parameterise this plane of the heard. ¶ The auditory system forms part of the human sensorium, which is in effect a patchwork of different systems evolved at different times in the history of the species. The functions of these different faculties in everyday life seem to be fully integrated so as to produce both a coherent image of the world, and of the subject that inhabits it. ¶ This is because, for the most part, our envionrment is historically and experientially (within one lifetime) stable and stays within certain parameters not so different from those within which our ancestors lived. ¶ There is a great evolutionary advantage in this integration, and our brains tend to work hard both to render coherent the data coming through any one sense, and to harmonise these different senses to construct stable, identifiable and localisable objects. ¶ Much of the time art takes advantage of this. Michel Chion’s book Audiovision speaks fascinatingly of the way in which film takes advantage of the brain’s aptitude for combining auditory and visual systems: for instance, it doesn’t matter where the source of a sound is, once an image of a likely source is placed on screen then the sound is immediately experienced as emanating from that place. This is what’s called synchresis. Chion compellingly demonstrates how cinema becomes an art form dedicated to the deliberate manipulation of the drive to experiential integration—what he calls the ‘audiovisual contract’—harnessing its ‘irresistable’ energy to make fictional worlds coherent and compelling. But it is also possible to engineer circumstances in which this integration fails. ¶ In the auditory field, the synthesis of physical sound waves into something that is heard takes place at many different stages: of course, there is information in the sound waves themselves, but these are subject to physiological mediation, the inner ear carries out complex transformation, limitation and selection of the waveform, which is then converted to neural stimulus. The experimental field of psychoacoustics aims at a delimitation of these conditions of objecthood: it tells us under what conditions sound data will be grouped together and understood as belonging to an object, stream, or sound field—only then can it be heard. ¶ For this to happen, the hearer needs to tacitly answer a series of questions: How many sound sources? Are the discontinuities I hear breaks in one sound or the end of one and the beginning of another? Should multiple groups of sound be understood as one complex sound, or several simpler ones? ¶ Take psychoacoustician Alfred Bregman’s work on ‘Auditory Scene Analysis,’ for example. Rather than talking about ‘objects’, Bregman talks about the way in which we perceive sound as belonging to ‘streams’ that persist through time; and his work explores the set of conditions under which this unification into streams takes place. Auditory Scene Analysis, which Hecker has used in several pieces, concerns the way in which partition sound into separate streams that we take to be telling us about ‘the same’ environmental source or event. Bregman’s experiments manipulate various parameters—separation in time or frequency, difference in timbre—in order to reveal thresholds where the perceptual allocation of some segment of the sound to one object rather than another takes place. What ASA aims at, therefore, is a ‘map’ of our allocation mechanisms. By varying different parameters we can get an ever more precise ‘map’ of this kind, telling us how events are segregated. ¶ in psychoacoustics it is often the case that what are called ‘effects’ or ‘illusions’—reproducible, engineered disagreements between a experimentally controlled sound source and what is heard—testify most eloquently to the way in which our brain constructs auditory objects 2/11

¶ For instance, Bregman’s ‘continuity illusion’ specifies conditions under which a sound is ‘heard’ to continue ‘behind‘ a louder interrupting sound when it is not present. Jens Blauert’s notion of ‘localisation blur’ highlights the inexact indexing of physical space by auditory space, by showing how an auditory object can be experienced as ‘blurred’ across several locations; An effect employed by Hecker in No Night No Day [2009]. Kubovy and Van Valkenburg discuss how the mechanism of figure/ground selection of candidate auditory objects can be manipulated consciously by attention—something Hecker explores in 2×3 Channel [2010] where, depending on the focus of our attention, we are able to shift the priority of a two constantly transforming sets of auditory objects. ¶ In drawing on such effects, the various properties of coherent and identifiable ‘objects’ and their place in an integrated and coordinated ‘world’ can also be disrupted. I think of Hecker’s works, in short, as exercises in creating ‘non-integrable or disintegrated experience’, as an exercise in asynchresis. These disruptions are possible Because once we understand how these mechanisms operate we can place false evidence in their path, creating auditory hallucinations. ¶ Auditory Scene (5 fold) [2010] dramatises the process, in effect allowing us physically to explore this ‘map’ and its thresholds in physical space; as we change position, the auditory components assemble themselves into different groupings. In revealing to us that the mechanisms through which we perceive sound objects. Here ‘the listener completes the work’ by directly participating in its construction. ¶ In 2×3 Channel this is even more clear, as, depending on the focus of attention, we are able to shift the priority of the sound objects. As the listener actively shifts the focus from one stream of sounds to another, they effectively transform the nature of the sonic objects. And in Untitled a series of reflective surfaces shift the sound source and change our localisation of it as we move within the space. ¶ But in drawing on them, I am going to suggest, the various properties of coherent and identifiable ‘objects’ and their place in an integrated and coordinated ‘world’ can also be disrupted. I think of Hecker’s works, in short, as exercises in creating ‘non-integrable or disintegrated experience’. ¶ These disruptions are possible Because once we understand how these mechanisms operate we can place false evidence in their path. ¶ Auditory Scene (5 fold) dramatises the process, in effect allowing us physically to explore this ‘map’ and its thresholds in physical space; as we change position, the auditory components assemble themselves into different groupings. In revealing to us that the mechanisms through which we perceive sound objects, it demonstrates to us how our construction of sound objects is hallucinatory. Here ‘the listener completes the work’ by directly participating in its construction. ¶ In 2×3 Channel this is even more clear, as, depending on the focus of attention, we are able to shift the priority of the sound objects. As the listener actively shifts the focus from one stream of sounds to another, they effectively transform the nature of the sonic objects. And in Untitled a series of reflective surfaces shift the sound source and change our localisation of it as we move within the space. ¶ Hecker’s recent Chimerization series of works extends this preoccupation with psychoacoustic process building on the experimental data that suggests that brain functions that serve to identify the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ of a sound operate upon different timescales. Hecker exploits this to produce sequences in which the fine time structure of one voice is sheathed in the amplitude envelope of another, producing an entity that remains recognizable as a voice while being spatially delocalized and semantically scrambled, and which the listener must reconstruct as a unified 3/11

yet impossible synthetic creature—a chimera. Of course, here, you also have speech, which brings into play other neural faculties, and rather than bringing these different functions or faculties into harmony, the chimerization process sets them at odds with one another, and produces what we could call a hallucinatory mode of hearing. ¶ Hecker exploits this to produce sequences in which the fine time structure of one voice is sheathed in the amplitude envelope of another, producing an entity that remains recognizable as a voice while being spatially delocalized and semantically scrambled, and which the listener must reconstruct as a unified yet impossible synthetic creature—a chimera. ¶ What is crucial for the notion of hallucination is a movement of naturalisation-denaturalisation. In the same movement in which the operations of hearing are naturalised—becoming tractable to experimental analysis and being treated as complex mechanisms that are ‘natural’ in the modern sense, our spontaneous image of the world becomes denaturalised, our stable allocation of sensory phenomena to something ‘out there’, and our integration of sensory data into a coherent whole, is challenged by constructed aesthetic phenomena. ¶ What this reveals is that, within the field of what is heard, there are a whole range of experiences that fall outside of the spontaneous image of perceiver and object understood as fixed instances, and of perception understood as a re-presentation of an object that belongs to a coherent world. ¶ To expand on this notion of hallucination I’d like to turn from the heard to the seen, and to Eric Alliez’s work The Brain-Eye, in which the notion of hallucination is central ¶ We find the reinvention of the word ‘hallucination’ in its modern sense, in the context of nineteenth-century psychiatry. Having been used since the sixteenth century to describe those who had visions or saw ghosts, ‘hallucination’ gained its current meaning with Jean Etienne Esquirol in 1837, in his Des maladies mentales. In an article “Hallucination” in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales Esquirol Had already given the following definition: ‘A delirious man who has the intimate conviction of an actually perceived sensation, when no external object capable of exciting this sensation is in the reach of his senses, is in a state of hallucination’. ¶ In the 1830s and 1840s the question of hallucination became something of a cause celebre. Having responded to an essay competition set by the The Academie de Médecine requested essays on the question Can hallucination coexist with reason, or is it a sure sign of madness?, Esquirol’s fellow psychiatrist Brierre de Boismont followed this with the first full-length study of hallucination in 1845. A History Of Dreams, Visions, Apparitions, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism. ¶ Boismont insists that hallucination be depathologised and historicised, arguing that ultimately only ‘experience may distinguish the differences’ between hallucinations proper and what he calls the ‘normal hallucinatory’ aspect of much sensory experience. Esquirol had been the first to introduce into psychiatry the idea that mental illness did not come from outside, but was an extravagant and unusual efflorescence of the normal mechanisms that exist in ‘sane’ minds. Boismont, likewise, argued that hallucination is compatible with reason and exists in a germinal form in all of us. In making the logic of representation a limited precinct of the logic of sensation, this normalization of ‘hallucination’ implies a reappraisal of the relation between inner events and outer objects; and consequently, of the relation between sanity and pathology. ¶ Surpassing both Esquirol and Boismont in audaciously extending this hallucinatory hypothesis, the philosopher Hyppolite Taine, in his work On Intelligence in 1870 sees hallucination as the basic fact of mental life, and pathology 4/11

as consisting only in the failure of a certain limiting mechanism that retains hallucinatory perception in the service of coherent experience ¶ Drawing the full conclusions of this principle, Taine writes that ‘external perception is a true hallucination’;‘external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling hallucination a false external perception, we must call external perception a true hallucination’. That is, hallucination, a process of construction, is the basic mechanism of perception, Mental illness, where the presence of objects is not necessary for the production of sensation, demonstrates to us the truth of sensation as hallucination, and alerts us to the fact that the apparent simplicity and transparency of the act of perceiving objects is illusory; in fact, we must not confuse the internal event of sensation with external ‘things’, we must not see the perception of externals as a ‘simple naked act of mind’ but must pay attention to its active and synthetic character. ¶ In a rather grotesque metaphor Taine likens the hallucinatory fecundity of the mind to a kind of obtuse mental energy, which if unchecked leads to hallucination, to the vital processes whereby, if we place the skinned paw of a rat under the skin on the side of another rat, it grows as if it was attached to its former owner. ¶ All perception, then, is hallucination, but the hallucinatory power of the mind can create monsters: the field of perception exceeds that of the logic of representation. I want to link this movement in psychiatry with an earlier, radical turn in British philosophy. ¶ In imagining that true perception of the world is not a given, but the result of a limiting of an inherently incontinent drive to integrate mental contents, Taine is really only extending the conclusions of the generation of philosophers from the preceding century, who we know as the empiricists: and in particular David Hume. ¶ Now, empiricism begins with uncertainty: What is in doubt is the rationalist notion that the correspondence of thought to being is somehow vouchsafed. For the rationalist, the enemy of reason is error, and error can be corrected, since it is the natural state of the mind is to be oriented towards truth. And this because ultimately thought and being are expressions of the same divine regime of reason – thought is blessed with innate powers to grasp reality. ¶ Empiricism instead lays the groundwork for treating the mind as a set of mechanisms and tendencies produced by the same reality that they attempt to grasp; mechanisms which can be used to grasp that reality correctly, but which are not endowed with any a priori capability to do so. ¶ Hume describes the mechanisms of the mind in terms of associations: we tend to associate together perceptions which have often occurred together in the past, and it is through this mechanism of association that our picture of the world is built up. But with this, Hume takes leave of any guarantee of correspondence between our perceptions and reality, and instead emphasises the need for vigilance against the extravagance to which these mechanisms are liable, warning that the mechanisms whereby sensation is gathered into an accurate account of reality are essentially no different to those which make it that, in fables and imaginings, ‘nature … is totally confounded, and nothing mention’d but winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants’. In other words, no sooner does Hume discover the principle of the imagination to be the association of impressions on the basis of resemblance, contiguity, or past conjunction, than he notes the extravagant tendencies of this principle to which we owe our coherent experience of the world. ¶ As Gilles Deleuze remarks of Hume, ‘for the traditional concept of error he substitutes the concept of illusion or delirium … We’re not threatened by error. It’s much worse: we’re swimming in delirium.’ It is this delirium, this 5/11

extravagance of the mind, I suggest, that prefigures the hallucinatory logic of Taine. ¶ There is a sense in which the transformation of the notion of hallucination reflects the way in which the enlightenment’s driving out of all ghosts and illusions from objective reality only drove them into the mind, making the latter a dangerous site of illusion, and giving rise to the modern fear of madness, along with the equally dangerous link between insanity and visionary artistic genius. ¶ So the principle is there from the beginning that, constitutive to the basic mechanisms of perception is a susceptibility to delirious or hallucinatory usage. We could say that, if hume lays the philosophical groundwork to treat the mind as a natural phenomenon, the nineteenth-century thinkers are the first to attempt a physiological approach to investigating these mechanisms- What is new in the psychiatry of the nineteenth century is that they are drawing on a new experimental science, namely the ‘psychophysics’ that is the precursor to, among other sciences, psychoacoustics. ¶ In the context of the history of modern painting, Alliez links this to the process whereby painters begin to see their practice as a research into the phenomenon of vision itself, aiming at a heightening of visual sensation precisely through a deliberate engendering of hallucinatory effects: here, rather than the eye being the organ of identification and representation, it becomes what Alliez calls a ‘Brain-Eye’. ¶ My suggestion, then, is that Hecker’s work, as an interrogation of the brain-ear, can be placed in the same philosophical lineage. The work consists in a process of hallucination-experimentation similar to that which Alliez sees at work in modern painting; a process whereby the artist explores and intensifies sensation, beyond the (re)creation of recognisable images or forms, exercising the sensory organs outside their organic function to explore the construction—or hallucination—of sensory phenomena. ¶ The notion of de/naturalisation is crucial here: Hecker’s work can only exist in the climate of a philosophical perspective that sees hearing as subject to naturalised understanding, susceptible to having the various mechanisms of its logic of sensation isolated, studied, and, consequently, manipulated. But as we said, the naturalisation of the mechanisms of sensation leads to a denaturalisation of sensation. ¶ No longer subordinated to its organic role in the function of representation, the sensory organ becomes instead engaged in a loop of experimentation and hallucination; where there no longer seems anything ‘natural’ about the referential relation between auditory object and sound source: the ‘true hallucination’ is placed on the same plane as the extravagant, heightened hallucination. In Hecker’s work, the very notion of an object of hearing is problematised by an understanding of the mechanisms whereby we construct—or hallucinate—such objects from auditory sensation. (Indeed in psychoacoustics he draws on a whole debate on whether the notion ofan auditory object is a coherent one). ¶ The brain-ear is a patchwork of functions assembled into an organic whole, but which contain their own potential for straying from that organic intergration, for overload, extravagance, or for clashing with each other and producing hallucinatory effects; their agreement with the other senses, in particular, sight (as we saw with Chion) is quite precarious, since in a real sense they come from elsewhere. ¶ Just to give some sense of how this might work in evolutionary terms: The auditory system was not designed to resolve spatial configurations of sound: ‘When the first amphibia left the Silurian seas two or three hundred million years ago, with their heads resting on the ground, they relied entirely on bone conduction of vibration for hearing. The vibrations in the earth were transmitted from the bones of their lower jaws to the bone surrounding the inner ear. 6/11

In order to hear, they probably kept their lower jaws touching the ground.’ In the initial stages the animals that started living on land were not good at hearing airborne sounds, as they only had sensors that were sensitive to water-borne sound. Because water is more dense than air, hearing in water works differently. So hearing is the result of a slow adaptation to hearing through air, and to harmonise it with vision, but one that is far from complete, and leaves behind vestigial artefacts. ¶ In talking about how to put hallucination to work by exploiting this outside of the integral sensorium, of particular interest is the story of the theory of colours as developed by Delacroix, and as recounted by Alliez. ¶ When Delacroix began painting, the fine arts were dominated by the School of David whose principles involved the use of local colour and line in a pursuit of ‘classical’ form (according to a certain historically and culturally-determined conception of the classical then prevalent). Line of course is beautiful form, and ‘local colour’ the means to fill the line with a colour that belongs to the subject being depicted. ¶ Throughout the 1820s–1840s, in parallel with the nascent theory of hallucination, Delacroix develops through his own practice a differential approach to colour whereby the force of a painting comes from the play of complementary colours heightening each other; in paintings that were initially unacceptable to the academy, he incrementally breaks colour out of its subordinate place to line, practicing a painting where the completeness of a painting is a matter of the dynamic balancing of the forces of colour against each other. ¶ Simultaneously we have the work of Eugène Chevreul in the 1830s: a chemist at the Gobelins factory in Paris, he is asked to investigate certain problems with the colours used in carpets and furnishings, and he concludes that the dullness of certain colours owes not to the dye being used but to the mutual effects of colours upon each others. Chevreul’s research therefore converges with Delacroix’s practice, in suggesting that colour is a field of differential forces: against the school of David and local colour. There is no such thing as local colour, a colour that simply is what it is, because colour as perceived only exists in relation to other colour. ¶ If we were to inject Chevreul’s theory of complementary colours into painting, then, it would suggest a radical breakout from Davidian dogma; and Chevreul brings this radical outside perspective precisely because he is dealing with a field in which representation is not central—namely, interior decoration, which can play with these effects without any concern for indexical image. ¶ But in fact, as Alliez details, Chevreul, at the same time as uncovering a differential power of colour, operates a twofold conservatism: (1) he wishes to couch his theory in ‘scientific’ terms, so that rather than seeing it as revealing something about the plane of vision produced within colour perception he tries to integrate it with Newton’s physical theory of colour (2) he suggests that knowledge of this law can be useful to painters not so they can heighten the intensity of color, but so that they can control it so as to represent local colour more faithfully—whereas for the weaver this can be a means to create a heightened vivacity, for the painter it is more of a warning or a caution not to go too far. ¶ The final, ironic episode of this story is that Chevreul’s work will then be taken up in painting, in a way completely at odds with its essentially conservative stance toward the use of colour in painting, as a ‘scientific’ justification for neo-impressionist divisionism, namely by Signac who sets himself up as a kind of official theorist of the ‘movement’. The irony of the whole affair is that painters adopts Chevreul’s “scientific” theory by way of Delacroix’s use of colour, which in fact was developed independently, by other means, and for other purposes. So the interesting thing here is that what is going on in painting, although it in certain ways runs parallel to this development of a scientific theory of colour, is not doing so with the same ends in mind. Whereas Chevreul seeks to put the principle of complementary 7/11

colours to work in the manufacture of fabric and cautions against it in painting, Delacroix wants to unleash within painting the hallucinatory power of colour as something that exists only in the eye so as to create an art that, no longer in thrall to formal classicism, will take as its subject the matter of painting itself i.e. colour. ¶ A virtuality is opened up here, a virtual field of exploration for the painter. And it’s important to note that this virtuality of colour, this differential space, does not belong wholly to the subject or to the object: that is, it is not the space of imagination in the romantic sense of sentiment, feeling, or colour symbolism. But it’s also not identical with the spectrum of colour as in Newtonian theory—beceause of its differential nature, because it is a matter of exploration rather than determination, and because it relates to phenomena of vision that cannot be grasped quantitatively. ¶ And what will suggest is that Hecker’s work similarly tries to break into and work within the field of virtuality that is the heard, as distinct from both the physical description of sound as vibration and the recognisable world of sounds that we can immediately and transparently integrate into a world-picture. ¶ So here we have to address a certain divergence between science and art. ¶ We’ve already talked about how in psychoacoustics, for example, ‘effects’ and ‘illusions’ are created under laboratory conditions in order to determine the laws under which normal perception operates. That is, it is ultimately a kind of patrolling of the perimeter of the integrated subject of perception. ¶ Now, as we see in the case of Chevreul’s insistence on making this into a science, science is not really interested in this except in so far as helps us understand the organic operations, the way in which the world is normally constructed, to develop a model of it and perhaps to understand pathological deviations from it—and to fix them. ¶ As we see with Delacroix, an artist I think sees this more as an opportunity, an expanded field, a wider palette to work with. They are instead interested in intensifying…in a deregulation of the senses. ¶ At the same time, what is interesting in respect to psychiatric development of the notion of hallucination is that this separation is not complete, for in it the pathological aspect of hallucination was immediately linked to artistic creation. As Boismont says: “intensity of hallucination is the unique source of the truth” of the artist’s vision. ¶ But what’s really key in the story of Delacroix and Chevreul is the fact of an experiential encounter with the outside. A convergence, a sort of parallelism: as I said, what Chevreul offers to painting he has only been able to do because he is coming from outside—from a field, the decorative arts, in which colour is not subject to Davidian principles of beauty. ¶ But as for Delacroix, he also develops his theory of colour on the basis of an encounter with the outside, namely his journey to Morocco, where he encounters a use of colour entirely foreign to the academy, but again mostly in the context of the decorative. What he saw in the carpets (‘some of the most beautiful paintings I have ever seen are Persian carpets), the fabrics, the clothes, and so on, was something alien to the model of painting, something outside. As Alliez argues, Delacroix’s reaction has been placed under the banner of orientalism but this is by no means the whole truth: the outside that he encounters is for the painter a sign towards the outside from the inside that is the operation of colour. It is the occasion for the revelation of a more profound outside. ¶ Between Chevreul and Delacroix there is a kind of common encounter with an outside of, let’s say, the west and the west’s classical inheritance, or an interpretation of that classical inheritance: and the way in which a certain model of art worked to confirm and reinforce a certain relation between the subject and its world. An outside of the 8/11

organic system of perception organised according to principles that relate the percepts of colour to a system of objects (i.e., according to which a color is something determinate in itself, that belongs locally to an object defined by an outline. But what it reveals is a machine of perception, the brain-eye, that is in operation in the integrated system of sensory perception but which belongs to a virtuality that exceeds it. ¶ So here are two different processes which may be complementary and may inform each other but which are in principle separate way of discovering—but in both cases it is these encounters that open up the possibility of the sensory field overflowing the idealised system of objects. ¶ We might think of Deleuze in relation to these encounters with the outside: in order to think, we need an encounter. ¶ For Hecker, I think, this “outside” is electronic music, in two difference senses. Both the work of xenakis etc who wanted to compose with sound rather than within the structures of music—and this is already conditioned by an outside that is the arrival of recording and reproduction technologies—and Rave: creating abstract spaces to literally get out of your head, using sound as one component to go beyond normal perception. ¶ So in Hecker’s work the ear-brain is mobilized so as to dissipate the illusory figure of an ear that is ‘readymade’, that is purely receptive to signals that come, equally readymade, from elsewhere, from a site that is absolutely other than it—the subject/object dichotomy—because here the ear is always also cognitive, it’s a brain-ear, and the process of hearing has a certain thickness. ¶ As it challenges the subject of hearing, this work also challenges the object of hearing—the way in which the objects of sonic perception are tied into an organic system in which always obey a set of well-defined principles, principles that in fact relate more to the eye than to the ear. For un the case of hearing this enterprise is even more interesting since hearing is, in the integrated system of the senses, in general subordinated to the eye. We should mention here some differences between vision and hearing, which may already have been suggested when we talked about our reptilian ancestors. ¶ In hearing, spatialisation (whereness) is separated from identification (whatness) whereas in vision they can’t be dissociated. We see through reflections whereas we hear sources: you’re listening to my voice bouncing from the walls in this room yet you wouldn’t say you’re listening to the walls, you’re listening to me. Whereas you’d say you’re looking at me, but I’m not the source of the light that allows you to see me… ¶ All of this may mean that, if our default model of the structure of our world comes predominantly from vision, then sound offers all the more opportunity to disrupt it. ¶ What does the hallucinatory exploration of these virtual spaces mean? If you wanted to put this in a wider more speculative context, you could say that it relates to the general position of the human in post-industrial capitalist society. That is to say, the possibilities of human are extended by technological prostheses and by reprocessing of the social by the technical, while at the same time capitalism has a certain conservatism, it falls back on an existing image of the human, what Deleuze and Guattari call the deterritorializing and reterritorializing tendencies of capitalism. ¶ In this sense Hecker’s work would be inscribed in the line of Rimbaud’s ‘deregulation of the senses’ with these experiences as a kind of rehearsal for a future human, or Apollinaire who wrote ‘More than anything, artists are men who want to become inhuman’; or even Adorno who wrote ‘Art remains loyal to humankind uniquely through its inhumanity in regard to it.’ 9/11

¶ Or finally, in terms of what Lyotard calls ‘immaterials’: Les Immatériaux, the exhibition staged by Design Theorist Thierry Chaput and Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1985, confronted an accelerating cycle in which technological instruments afford us a grasp of matter beyond the human perceptual gamut, decomposing the structure of everyday objects into systems of imperceptible elements which are then recomposed, predominantly through the use of machine languages, into new materials which, as Lyotard says, are ‘always precarious’. ¶ Lyotard does not mean ‘immaterial’ in the sense of an idealism, something that is ‘not material’ or ‘dematerialized’, but materials are already informational, cognitive in a certain sense. As Lyotard surmised, ‘Immaterials’ assemble a machine neoculture whose developments are intractable to the discourses we inherited from humanism and modernity (or at least, the latter tend to reject these questions, in a kind of immune response). ¶ This is exactly the outside, the outside of the common conception of the human and its readymade objects: at once a matter of nature and culture, of the natural and the artificial.And, once again, we could say that this condition of immateriality—which is not non-materiality—has a specific relationship with music, and especially electronic music, as one of the first areas in which it would be investigated and materialised; the ‘outside’ of electronic music. Jacques Attali in Noise: ‘Music is prophecy…[I]t explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given coded. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible’. And it’s no accident that Lyotard emphasized the role of sound in Les Immatériaux, imagining, with its ‘zoned’ audio environment, a disruption of the space of the gallery, overturning this ‘modern-dominant’ model of the museum gallery in which the visitor is reduced to an eye moving through a perspectival perceptual space, in a formative journey with a certain didactic finality. For Lyotard the use of sound was key to The development of an alternative ‘postmodern’ spacetime. ¶ A final word on McCracken, with whose work Florian Hecker shares this particular show: I’ve talked about Hecker’s work in terms of minimalism before. Perhaps his work can be profitably compared to the mode of perspective operative in minimalism, where the viewer’s perambulations around the ‘specific object’ awaken them to their own role in constituting it as a perceptual object. The physical sound waves Hecker synthesises are often integrated by the auditor differently depending upon their position in space and the way they direct their attention, so that sound-matter, auditor and exhibition space are all components of the work. ¶ Unlike the freeform interpretative play of the readymade, minimalism’s theater is one of suspense. Vary her perspective as she may, its viewer never gains access to the specific object, whose ‘hollowness,’ its reticence to reveal its internal constitution, is precisely what is enthralling: a primed jack-in-the-(black)-box that is never sprung, the object remains opaque and obdurate as the viewer circles it. Minimalism’s interrogation of objecthood ends with the simple tension between the gestalt of the object-as-unity and the experiential series of the viewer (a series that is endless, or which, unsatisfactorily, ‘just ends’). ¶ I think that working with sound allows Hecker to more deeply interrogate the process of object constitution, introducing complex bifurcations into this experiential series that go beyond a changing spatial point of view. The unity and homogeneity of the perceptual object are themselves disrupted, as shifts in the auditor’s perspective cause what seemed to be stable ‘objects’ to change in nature, to be displaced, to fracture or become delocalized. In effect, the auditor’s ‘degrees of freedom’ (movement through space, direction of attention) are prosthetically enhanced in Hecker’s installations, coupled to a more intangible set of variables, affording them a deeper participation in the synthesis of the object than is achieved either in the readymade (free semantic determination of the object as 10/11

artwork) or the specific object (codetermination of viewer and object in phenomenological space). So I would say perhaps this again is a positive effect of working in sound. ¶ We could also talk about a kind of ‘bridging’ of duality in McCracken—he speaks of his objects as being ‘between the two worlds’ of illusionist painting and three-dimensionality, but also as bridges between the ‘ground’ of nature and the human cognition (placed at the level of the human head). Many of Hecker’s works in this show also figures of articulation —hinge, glue, chimera…. ¶ McCracken declares that ‘a successful abstract sculpture will make the space around it abstract too’—that is, it will make one aware of the conditions of objecthood . Finally he talks about these pieces as being alien lifeforms from another dimension (or from the future) channelled by the artist. This futurality —the sense that it the works are an object from or for a perceptual system that is yet to come— is perhaps another way to understand the valence of ‘hallucination’: it opens up virtualities yet to be explored. ¶ Lyotard, around the time of Les Immateriaux, writes: There is a gap between what is proposed to us for our little everyday lives, and the enormous capacities of experimentation and their ramifications in the social, opened up by technoscience. People are very aware of this. Leading a dog’s life when one is at large in the cosmos, etc. […] A laboratory humanity, that is to say an experimental humanity, this would be the best outcome of the crisis. A laboratory humanity that would, I suggest, be populated by disintegrated and hallucinating subjects. The type of work that Hecker is producing is an experimental programme in hallucinatory aesthetics, guided by the naturalistic discipline of science but not reducible to it. For me this experimentation touches on philosophical problems whose ramifications are very far-reaching, it’s a type of ‘non-discursive thought’ that, in turn, is an ‘outside’ for philosophy to draw on. 11/11

readthis.wtf /writing/a-two-hander/ A Two-Hander - 2015 YKCOWREBBAJ sevot yhtils eht dna,gillirb sawT’ ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD ,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA .ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA — Lewis Carroll Doesn’t a hinge always imply closure? Presiding over a twofold and its mirrored relation, it sides with neither facet, but is their vanishing point. It belongs to another order and asserts its presence only indirectly—usually at the moment when both sides disappear from sight, as when facing pages are pressed shut into mute latency. But it can also declare itself in a moment of transfer, as the ‘identical neutrality of the gulf’1 across which—by means of which —an impossible leap is made. In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the looking-glass room. 1/3

Such a secret, enabling fold is the subject of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s 1768 dissertation Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the Differentiation of Directions in Space. Although inaccessible from either side of the mirror, this point of articulation seems to be all that holds back disorientation and madness. According to Kant, specifying the relations between parts of an object is not sufficient to completely determine them. For two objects can also distinguished by a pivotal ‘inner difference’ which is not a matter of shape, relation, or magnitude, but which is crucial to our ability to orient ourselves among them. It is best discerned as that minimal difference that allows us to distinguish between ‘incongruous counterparts’—objects which, otherwise identical, are possessed of handedness. Kant’s prime example (via many others, including the growth of beans around a pole, the spiral of hair on the crown of the head, snails’ shells, the thread of a screw) will be human hands themselves. A left hand is identical to a right hand in all of its internal relations, and yet no set of rotations will make them coincide; a left hand will never fit inside a right-handed glove. But, of course, for the philosopher, books come first: Were a right-hand page to be inverted into a left-hand page, although the relations between all of its letters would remain constant, everything would turn to nonsense. Just where does this difference lie, though? Just consider, Kant exhorts us, in a bravura reductio ad absurdum that drives the point home—just consider a hand without handedness, a hand which therefore ‘would fit equally well on either side of the human body’—pure abstract horror (perhaps looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink…). No, Kant reassures us, even if a single hand were the only object in the universe, it would still have to be either a left or a right hand. Direction or orientation is a necessary property, one that can only be maintained through reference to ‘universal space as a unity’: although absolute space is something we can never intuit, every thing is sewn into its orienting spine, as an unmoving background—and all hands will rest on one or the other side of the book of nature. And yet…consider the lowly typesetter, who, responsible for hundreds of lines of metal sorts, becomes fluent at composing metal looking-glass books. He knows very well how the even surface of the forme will coincide with the surface of the page; and that a metallic outline of a right hand will print a perfect left hand, so long as the press has space to work in. This whole story will end in disorientation for both Kant and Euclid: rotation through fourdimensional space would indeed make a left into a right hand, turning it inside out like a glove. The ‘inner difference’ is no absolute, but a contingent feature of the space we happen to be embedded within and the limitations it places upon the organisation of the objects it contains. But let’s turn to the strange moment of closure brought about when an image bounces off this limit, passes through the mirror. The work underway on one surface—the slow, wet, incomplete process of painting—is given the stamp of authority, or becomes that stamp; it is ratified by passing through the point of articulation that organises the two into an oriented twofold. Freed from its laboured surface through this doubling, the painting is fixed—a stereo-type, a forme whole and undivided. And yet the double is never identical: the ‘secondary’ image even reacts back on the ‘original’, the moment of transfer constituting another intervention and a continuation of the process at the same moment at which it is arrested. The spine detains pages in their serial order; a backbone strong enough to support the transfer of narrative from page to page, it is an orienting fold that withdraws from the scene of sense while organising it. 2/3

Hermann Rorschach, explaining the use of symmetry in his famous inkblots, notes that such symmetry ‘facilitates interpretation for certain blocked subjects’. And it is indeed as if, at this moment when it crosses the neutral gulf, the splaying of the image across its minimal inner difference has ‘unblocked’ it. The painter’s complex of perception, tactility, and visual recognition is closed up tight against another kind of imagemaking which is automatic, indifferent, stereotypical; which doubles without interpretation, requiring only a hinge’s elementary mediation. Admittedly, to a painter, all of these convolutions on the page may be about as interesting as watching paint dry. As the oils oxidise, the pigment is fixed and the surface of the image closes itself off. But what if one could fold closure into the process of painting itself? So that, facing each other within the space of images, we would have, on the one hand, vital sedimentation; on the other, spiritless impression. As Alice asked: Which Dreamed It? 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/translators-preface-to-eric-alliez-the-brain-eye/ Preface to ‘The Brain-Eye’ - 2015 A major work of—and beyond—philosophical aesthetics, a dense and perplexing multiplicity of a text, but one infused by an irrepressible and compelling élan, at once a set of discontinuous “plateaus” which the reader must learn to assemble and a series of lyrical sallies of cumulative intensity and momentum, The Brain-Eye conducts its rediscovery of the plural powers of painting through an experiment in writing and an audacious (de)construction of the book-form. In a manner that recalls Gilles Deleuze’s refusal of “the” history of philosophy as a teleological progression with a common finality, and his insistence instead on a “history of problems” (in the entirely positive sense he gives to the term), the chapters that make up The Brain-Eye set out to overcome a set of obstacles erected by art history and the philosophy of art so as to arrive at an understanding of the singular problems that trouble and motivate protagonists whom we once imagined we knew, as, between the practice of painting and the discursive conceptualisation of the new modes of seeing it engenders, they bring to the surface of painting the materiality of the visual. Patiently reconstructing the itineraries of these singular voyages, negotiating the byways of 1/6

received opinion, critical commentary, and the never straightforward relation between painters’ writings and sayings and their practice, the author gives us a series of “case studies” each of which can each be read as a self-contained history, but which are raised to their highest power when one perceives, braided together across them, a set of transversal threads that make of the book a whole that greatly exceeds its parts. This textual dispositif harbours a writing machine that is as meticulous in its employment of a formidable corpus of secondary materials as it is intransigent in its exuberant refusal to submit writing to the demands of “communication” by collapsing its perplexities, resonances, and reiterations into a “clear” propositional form (as if the thickness of writing was merely the result of an obdurate refusal to make things explicit, rather than the necessary prerequisite of a real engagement with matters that overflow a strictly discursive frame). This is therefore a book that leaves the reader no choice but to participate actively in a construction that is laid out precisely and delicately, touch by touch, in order to realise a whole whose “finish” is that of an all-over effect rather than a transparent encapsulation: a definitively incomplete whole which, by means of its conceptual warp and weft, continually maintains in tension a set of forces that it falls to the reader to negotiate. In staging these histories which operate a mutual complication of philosophical aesthetics and art history, Éric Alliez brings before us a cast of characters whose aspect is equally unfamiliar to both disciplines—Delacroix the Turk; Seurat the extra-terrestrial automaton; a serialist Manet, a logician Cézanne glaring at us with the enucleated eyes of a skull…—in the process puncturing biographical legend and shattering critical commonplaces (Delacroix’s Orient is absolutely determinative yet the “outside” it brings to light is hardly that of the orientalist imaginary; Cézanne’s dedication to “nature” and his “provençal blood” only serve to obscure the rigor of his endless labour “on the motif”; Gauguin is a potter even when he’s a painter, and his “exoticism” pertains to a land more foreign yet than the luxuriant tropics, a new earth…). As evidenced by the precise analyses of selected paintings that serve as focal points for each of the chapters (and which will serve the reader as the most potent proof of the penetrating force of their arguments when consulted with—at least—a reproduction to hand), these audacious figures are the direct result of the author’s decision to attend exclusively to what is realised in the practice of painting itself—or rather, practices plural. For upon entering into this open-air theatre we must also abandon a linear narrative of the history of art—that of a chain of successors who break with the past and advance in the direction of some ulterior finality—in favour of an untimely and imageless history of researcher-painters who, between them but never in unison, project, construct, and hallucinate, from the middle (par le milieu), the virtual field of forces that is modern painting. To extract these kernels of painter-thought, Alliez patiently peels off the petrified carapace of historical cliché, hagiographic doggerel, and indurate myth, allowing us to see the paintings once more, attending to the movement of thought deposited in them, and registering the tension implied by the continual struggle of painters to say what they do, or at least to distance themselves from what is said of them and on their behalf. As these overcodings fall away, what is revealed is the style of each subject: style as a habitus, a culture unto itself, at once overdetermined by a multiplicity of influences and intuitions and resolute in the obsessive pursuit of its singular problem. These disparate microcultures, in their turn, are over the course of the book patiently worked into a broader vision of the modernity of painting, with the “plateaus” coming together and interlocking at unexpected moments and unanticipated angles. Thus The BrainEye confronts us with a punctual set of historical events, observations, causes and effects, surface formations rebarbative to any kind of dialectical or narrative reconciliation, while at the same time indicating the continuity of a subterranean plane of consistency whose unearthing will require an unprecedented effort of thought. Furthermore, beyond analysis and description alone, the writing of each chapter seeks to inhabit the style of its subject. The turbulence of Goethe’s naturephilosophical morphology, the churning cascade of Delacroix’s animal 2/6

melee, the crisp, stark delivery of Manet’s frontally-lit flatness, the spectral greyness of Seurat, imbue these “portraits of the artist as philosophical persona” with a stylistic energy that makes for an experience of reading we might well qualify as hallucinatory—which is appropriate enough, given that hallucination constitutes the major leitmotif running through the work. It is the work of Hippolyte Taine (largely neglected in the Anglophone world) that provides the most explicit theoretical basis for the book’s central claim: that throughout the nineteenth century painting became the testbed for experiments in hallucination that ran parallel to the development of psychophysics, which sited sensation in a nervous system and a brain that could offer no guarantee of an organic pre-established harmony of the subject with the external world it perceives. This is not, however, a story of how art was “informed” by science. The brain of the Brain-Eye is not one conducive to a “neuroaesthetics” that would enable us to explain (away) visual effects by reducing them to a causal order independent of the event of seeing; no more than its eye is one that would—in line with the strategy of Merleau-Ponty, the philosophical enemy of choice here—allow the philosopher to avert such an “objectivizing” catastrophe by rooting the visual firmly in a lived body and its antepredicative enmeshment with the “flesh of the world.” The Brain-Eye is an inhuman eye, and in its wake the phenomenology of the wordly subject and of its “flesh” and the devitalized physics of an unseen light must both yield to the divagations of an alien subjectile, the bizarre developments of a phaneroscopic eye that belongs to no one, and which is deployed by the researcherpainter-seer in order to map out a vision yet to come. The primary element of these researches is colour: as detailed in the opening chapter on Goethe, colour has long provoked a “philosophical rage” because it has proved impossible to collapse onto the side of either the subject or the object of modern philosophy. The differential, intensive dimension of colour—the raw material of painting— perishes when colour is reduced to being an epiphenomenon of the physical realm, and yet, as the enterprises of psychophysics showed very clearly, colour phenomena obey a logic that is not purely “subjective.” The logic proper to colour perishes also when it is corralled into a model drawn from another art, whether literary, poetic, or musical, or subjected to the identificatory regime of the traditions of beauty (line and form) or to imaginary conventions (sentiment and symbol). The Brain-Eye details how the break-out of colour from its subservience to all of these extraneous models served as a catalyst for the exploration of a logic proper to the visual as such. Colour becomes a component in a war machine that enables painting to liberate the matrix of the visual from its local instantiation in the visible and its models, both the artistic academicism that had allotted it a secondary role within an ideal beauty and the everyday modes of representation founded on common apprehensions that buttress the myths of “natural” perception and representation. The autonomisation of colour announces a visual whose relation to the visible world will be attenuated and placed in tension by a series of hallucinatory research programmes, at the same time provoking a “delocalisation” that disrupts representation by favouring the consideration of the picture as a dynamic whole perpetually “unfinished” by the colour-forces deployed within it. Seeing is now conditioned by the hallucinatory powers of the brain-eye in its complicity with colour and in its ceaseless constructive strivings, which the painter unseats from their organic function by manipulating and heightening the exhortations of colour. In engaging this abstract machine, the painter enters into a becoming-unnatural that corresponds to the movement of naturalization/denaturalization precipitated by the emergence of psychophysics, which, with its postulation of preconscious sensation and its discovery of the continuity between normal and pathological perception, at once placed sensation into the class of natural, law-governed phenomena (a logic of sensation), and revoked the “natural” status of representational perception (an inorganic eye). This enables painting to aspire to a supernaturality that exceeds the actual (“natured nature”), with the painter equipping himself with the prosthesis of an inhuman eye subtracted, at any cost, from the “visual atlas” of common perception. The perceiving subject is stripped of its flesh 3/6

to reveal a hallucinating automaton, which promptly takes leave of the space of representation and its (perspectival, subjective, mimetic) “point of view”—meaning that the conditions of the pictorial as such must be rethought in the light of the visual. (Here the encounter with photography, in its revelation of a generalised, impersonal visuality, plays a crucial role in several respects, which are explored here in a way that goes well beyond common generalisations regarding its impact on modern painting). Now, if this virtual field of colour, the province of the brain-eye, constitutes the highest truth of seeing, but one with no trace of actuality (Goethe), then how could the truth in painting be other than a truth of hallucination, and painting the arena of true hallucination (Taine)? The hallucination of a truth in painting that is glimpsed in-between the lines of the visible, that is announced by the insubordination of colour, but is yet to be realised…. To paint is to conceive, as Cézanne insists; and as they paint, painters formulate their own conceptions of what they see. And yet the virtuality of the Brain-Eye is attained not through the peremptory imposition of a theory, but through encounters. At this point, the Deleuzian principle that concepts must be referred back to their sensible conditions and to the “involuntary adventure” of culture comes into play, in a series of narrative sequences the conceptual tenor of which raises them well above the level of biographical anecdote: Goethe is transformed from poet to painter by his Italian voyage; Delacroix’s oriental reveries enable him to anticipate Chevreul’s analysis of colour complementarity, leading him to apply a decorative model to painting (the carpet, not the window); Silently demurring from a miscognised application of Chevreul’s principles, Seurat evades the neatly-drawn line from impressionism to neo-impressionism by disappearing into the grey particles of the photographic emulsion…. In each case, these actual encounters with an outside of painting are only the harbingers of a virtual outside, which each painter must then strive to keep “in focus” and, each in their own way, each struggling with their own problem, realise in (a) practice. The aesthetics (and the critique of aesthetics) proposed here is therefore one that involves experience and experiment, passive synthesis and constructive artifice, with the painter both the receptive patient of accidental passions and an experimental agent striving to construct the new on the basis of an always precarious hold on the evanescent traces of these contingent encounters, percepts that must be registered, retained, and developed in the face of the constant threat of discursive formations that summon them to fall back onto a cartography of the visible world laid out in advance. Such a radical (transcendental) empiricism effectively disrupts a whole series of structural oppositions and developmental sequences which art history and the “philosophy of art” have tended to assume: evading the double binds of objectivism and subjectivism, realism and naturalism, classicism and romanticism, The Brain-Eye demonstrates how, fuelled by such encounters, the forces of painting ceaselessly insinuate themselves between these lines—and indeed reveal the lines themselves to be an epiphenomenon of their differential play. With a consummate mastery of historical and contemporary secondary materials, Alliez shows how, in the controversies over these generic terms, what is at stake is rarely the real work of the painter-researcher, but rather the shifting sands of political, professional, and sometimes petty motives. Even the allegiances professed in the writings and reported remarks of painters themselves are not primary evidence to be taken at face value, but attest to a constant back-and-forth between the experience/experiment of practice and its discursive translation, whose infelicities only serve to motivate a further return “to the colours themselves.” Intent on animating a modernity of painting beholden to no inevitable progression, no formalist evacuation, all of this is of a piece with the author’s determination—in the footsteps of these painters and in an advocacy of the singularity of each one of them—to strip away all the modes of intentionality to which the visual has been subordinated, and to return to the (virtual) materiality of painting, all the while resisting another narrative that constantly threatens to take up the baton in the guise of a formalist purification that would dissolve this pluralism by implanting a new finality, that 4/6

of the abstraction of colour, or of a “pure Painting.” The combination of the episodes recounted in The Brain-Eye yields instead a series of acute points of decision that emerge from the problematic field of modern painting, and which are neither consummations nor impasses, but jumping-off points for the reproblematization of the “truth in painting,” a truth whose effects will also be felt in the philosophical field. All of this demands a tactical finesse, a great deal of circumspection, and textual manoeuvres whose subtlety and non-linearity are manifest throughout the book, as writing invests the plasticity of painting, relaying and extending the furious patience of the artist as he activates the futural charge compacted within the materiality of colour. Alliez’s flexuous sentences continually coil back upon themselves, amplifying and inflecting, cumulatively adding further touches that transform the aspect of a preceding phrase before its sense has set fast. In multiple recommencements, hesitations, and refrains, the same question or observation will return repeatedly with a new inflection, resetting the course of the argument as it is menaced by the inertial attractors of the readymade images of painting and painters peddled by critics and advocates alike. Thus one must come back to Cézanne, to Gauguin, to Seurat once again—and not even to them “in person” but to the pre-individual singularities that they track and which are the real of their style (a singularity “signed” Gauguin, a Seurat-effect, a Cézanning…)—in a spiralling movement that cumulatively amasses an instrumentarium of concepts coaxed out of the material with an acute and penetrating gaze, utilising semantic shifters, rhythmic devices, and hallucinatory effects that seek to rival the plastic creations they invest. Thus terms that initially seem merely descriptive gradually take on the status of concepts, concepts that therefore will have already been at work, nondiscursively, within painting; a process that also testifies to the outside that philosophy needs in order for it to truly become the art of the “creation of concepts.” This is how the event of the Brain-Eye emerges, as if in a hallucinatory stereoscopy, from the “overlabour” of the text: not as a chronological development entered into the ledger of art history, but as a virtual event or problematic field whose chronically uneven distribution demands a crooked path, a zigzag line, a series of retouchings that each time change the whole picture; a virtual event that solicits the participation of the viewer-reader in the construction of a tableau which must be seen “from too far away and up too close” in order to appreciate both the ambitious sweep of its argument and the fine details of its “broken touch.” Needless to say, all of this not only makes demands upon the reader, but also exacerbates further the celebrated impossibility of translation. Alliez convokes into his patchwork theatre a multitude of actors, sometimes with a corroborative function but often ventriloquized in a more subtle and ironic fashion. The precision with which he approaches his materials has in many cases demanded a revisiting of existing translations of these sources, since his local deployment of every phrase is calibrated in view of a global construction whose consistency is rigorously maintained throughout. And then, to this orderly cacophony, the translator inevitably adds his own voice. Despite my intent to prioritize the accessibility and lucid rendering of argument over fidelity to the author’s style, the sensation of the two pulling against each other was impossible to brush aside; in a work such as this, the argument and its mode of delivery are ultimately inextricable. I take full responsibility for the triage I was forced to operate in each instance, and do not trouble the reader with details of the inevitable compromises it entailed. Indeed, I have attempted to avoid as far as possible any emphatic intrusion on the part of the translator, and have only intervened explicitly in the text where it seemed absolutely necessary. I have tried to preserve certain key terms that operate like passwords or instructions for assembly, granting access to the intersections within and between chapters: these recurring formulations which span each of the “cases,” and indicate the points where they are to be coupled, are marked in the original French where necessary. And then we have the Proustian scope of certain sentences which, decanted directly in English, would sometimes be a recipe for sub-Scott-Moncreiffian disaster; this occasionally made 5/6

reformulation unavoidable, although where possible I have tried to maintain the author’s unremittingly additive, amplificative cascade of prose, its constant kaleidoscopic requalification and transmutation of its own sense. In attempting to confront discursive thought with the nondiscursive forces that are at work within it, in describing how painting has been broken open by its outside, and in bringing the outside that is the practice of painting to bear upon the philosophical concept, The Brain-Eye makes significant contributions to our understanding of modern art history and of modernity itself, and has seismic consequences for a thinking of the relation of philosophical conceptuality to the logic(s) of sensation at work in visual art—something that should be of immediate interest not just to philosophers and students of painting, but also to those working in the expanded field of contemporary art, which, too often, esteems itself “conceptual” while supposing that the conceptual can be cleanly extricated from its sensate precursors; or generates impoverished encounters with “sensations” (or the “sensational”) that remain burdened by the actuality of the contemporary rather than pregnant with its virtualities. The Brain-Eye plunges into the prehistory of the contemporary only to extract that part of the past which it remains to the future to develop.1 The fruit of many years of fastidious historical research into the art of modernity, it also poses ineluctable questions about the post- or trans-modern prospects of the art and philosophy of tomorrow. Above all it is an exhortation to think and to see, in which content, expression, form, and matter enter into a new alliance which I am sure will be hugely rewarding for readers prepared to surrender themselves to its shimmering, spectral, hallucinatory effects. 6/6

readthis.wtf /writing/ruckkehr-des-fauns/ Return of the Faun - 2016 The work of composer Florian Hecker induces a state of mind verging on hallucination: unidentifiable sounds appear and disappear, coalesce and disintegrate, instilling doubt as to what has been heard. Sound is a medium that is conducive to such hallucination: the mind strives to fix and identify the source of what is heard, while sound itself is fugitive and ephemeral. What is heard is already not just sound, but always the memory of sound, and the sign of something else. When, as in Hecker’s work, sounds are wholly synthetic, we produce phantom sound sources whose existence owes as much to our own cognition as to the physical waves that reach our ears. As philosopher François J. Bonnet puts it, listening is always a fetishism: what reaches our ears solicits an active involvement, in which we try to make sense of what we hear, and mould it to our expectations and desires.1 Rather than satisfy this natural tendency to make sense of sounds, Hecker’s synthetic work engenders doubt and uncertainty. Drawing on scientific studies into the auditory process, he creates synthetic compositions that transform along with the listener’s shifting attention or position within a space. Removed from the laboratory and deployed in a performance space, these techniques produce fascinating, unsettling, and sometimes disorienting effects. The 1/3

listener has to assume an active part in the performance, assembling an enigmatic ensemble without any narrative or image to rely on, and ultimately encountering the ‘event’ of hearing itself. A similar fostering of uncertainty appears from the very outset of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune. This strange drama first emerged in the oppressive heat of Tournon, where the poet, far away from the Paris demi-monde, would undergo the ‘crisis’ that led him to radically reconfigure his art. It is a poem in which, in Paul Valéry’s words, ‘an extreme sensuality, an extreme intellectuality, an extreme musicality, combine, intermingle, or oppose each other’. A faun, upon waking, remembers pursuing two beautiful nymphs, and longs to fix their image in his mind: These Nymphs, I would perpetuate them. Yet he is tormented by the possibility that they were merely the product of his own desire, kindled by the midday sun: Did I love a dream? Unlike Descartes, Mallarmé’s ‘method of doubt’ leads not to certainty but to protracted vacillation: as the faun perplexes himself with possible explanations, he becomes entangled in the tenebrous thickets of memory and perception, with their ramifying uncertainties: My doubt, hoard of old darkness, ends in a whole stream of subtle branches. No sooner does he wonder whether the nymphs were mere fabulations, occasioned by the sounds of the elements penetrating his dream (the trickling of water, the breeze caressing the foliage) than these elements themselves condense into the music of his own pipes drifting through the afternoon air: not a sound of water but my flute’s outpourings murmurs round the thicket. In a series of vignettes within the poem, the faun then exhorts himself to ‘RECOUNT’, ‘REMEMBER’, and ‘PROCLAIM’ the truth of the evanescent event, telling and retelling it—only to conclude that the objects of this pursuit cannot be captured in reality, but only further fabulated by his own desire, stoked by the artifices of art. The reader of this poem has a great deal to contend with: ambiguous associations, the attenuation of syntax and grammar, and the continual crystallization and subsequent disintegration of concepts and images. In the faun’s doubling of himself into critical interrogator and desiring body we sense Mallarmé’s concern for the relation between the sonority of words and their meaning, between the sepulchral stillness of the printed page and the drama of the spoken word—a ‘prolonged hesitation between the sound and the sense’ (Valéry). This ambivalence is relayed by the chimerical figure of the faun as a divided speaker negotiating between higher cogitations and lower impulses, between song and the discursive word, between reasoned meditation and the immediacy of the sensual. Doubtless it was these enigmatic qualities that led Claude Debussy, a habitué of Mallarmé’s celebrated Tuesday evening soirées, to compose his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, first performed in 1894. Redolent with uncertainty and ambiguity, flouting musical convention and yet certainly not atonal, from the introduction of the main theme with its tense and questioning tritone to the last moments in which, rather than being concluded, it sinks gently back into silent torpor—an inconclusion which according to the composer ‘prolongs the last line where the faun sinks back into his slumber: Farewell, you two; I’m going to see the shadow you became’—Debussy’s composition further cultivates the languorous cadences and arabesques of Mallarmé’s verse. Although Debussy described the work as ‘a free illustration’ rather than a direct translation of the poem into music, he succeeds not only in evoking the verdant luminosity of the pastoral scene and the faun’s languid reverie, but also in conveying musically his introspective quest. On the cusp of a wave of ardour (the ‘rising movement’ Debussy noted in Mallarmé’s poem), the piece repeatedly lapses back into diffuse tonal ambiguity, only for its theme to be reprised in a new form—as if miming the faun’s perplexed examination of his predicament from different 2/3

perspectives. In this series of divagations, delicate timbres and tone-colours are touched on without consummation, as the presiding motif returns, shifting, its yearning for resolution never truly satisfied. Later this year, the Faun arrives in Frankfurt, as Florian Hecker brings his response to Debussy’s Prélude to the Alter Oper. Mallarmé’s poem has a vexed relation with the theatre: he initially conceived it as ‘a poem for reading or for the stage’, insisting that ‘it is not a work that may conceivably be given in the theatre; it demands the theatre’—an opinion not shared by the director of the Comédie Français, who in 1865 rejected his proposal to stage the piece. Periodically revisited and revised by Mallarmé for over a decade, the Faune was not to see the light of day until 1876 —in written form, in a published edition with illustrations by Edouard Manet. Debussy’s piece also seems to have initially been conceived as a score for a stage production, comprising a prelude, interlude, and ‘final paraphrase’—again, a project that was never to bear fruit. In 1912, however, the Faune did enter the theatre, with Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet set to Debussy’s Prélude. This audacious choreographic debut took archaic Greek art as its model, constraining the dancers to perform strangely flattened, two-dimensional gestures, like animated bas-relief figures—a flatness further emphasized by Léon Bakst’s backdrop, a landscape compressed into a diagrammatic japonism, so that the action takes place entirely within a shallow, frieze-like space. With Nijinsky’s schematic, staccato choreography—an impossible mixture of onerous precision and unabashed sensuality—the faun appears at once as an animalistic force of nature and an abstract thing of art. In a gesture that provoked scandal at the time, at the end of the piece the faun finally satisfies himself by coupling with a veil stolen from the nymphs. Nijinsky thus renders the action of the poem concrete and physical—carnal, even—while retaining a dreamlike quality through the detached, schematised gestures he imposes on the performer’s bodies. Whereas Mallarmé thanked Debussy graciously for his Prélude—‘it presents a dissonance with my text only by going much further, really, into nostalgia and into light, with finesse, with sensuality, with richness’—Nijinksy’s ballet did not go down so well with Debussy, who berated him as a mathematician who ‘adds up demi-semi-quavers with his feet, [and] proves the result with his arms’! Will Hecker’s contribution to the Faune tradition occasion the same consternation as Mallarmé’s poem—which, when news of it reached his superiors (‘outrageous publications’, ‘strange mystifications’!) nearly saw him deprived of his precarious livelihood as a schoolteacher; as the tonal ambivalence of Debussy’s piece, in which contemporary critics certainly heard something new, but wondered ‘if such music could be approved of, or whether it should not be condemned by respectable people’; or as the frankly fetishistic finale of Nijinsky’s Faune, decried as lewd and obscene? Hecker’s work—which has included live performances, sound installations, CD releases, and collaborations with other artists including Cerith Wyn Evans, Mark Leckey, and Aphex Twin—certainly cleaves to the avant-garde credo of baffling expectations, overthrowing tradition and dogma. His performances increasingly involve not just sound, but all of the senses (His CD: A Script for Synthesis even involved a perfume component)—yet still without necessarily ‘making sense’. And he is well qualified to respond to a piece which, in its various forms, has always challenged audience’s expectations and invited them to question their own perceptions. But responses to his work can be unpredictable: at a recent gig in Paris, more conservative members of the audience, expecting a music recital rather than a hallucinatory torrent of abstract electronic sound, resorted to pelting Hecker with a selection of objects— including a copy of the Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky! 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/figuring-space/ Figuring ‘Space’ - 2016 I’m betting you can’t remember a time before ‘space’, although it’s a fairly recent abstraction—not space as transcendental form of experience, but the space that is the condition for the intertwined operations of the architecture–retail–real-estate–contemporary art complex. The light and airy expanse of daytime TV property porn, with its clean architectural lines—as homes become ‘property’, rooms become ‘spaces’, open receptacles for selfrealization—and the layout grid for retail outlets and corporate campuses, it is also that tranquil three-dimensional support for arty action in all its hysterically multifarious forms—project space, research space, gallery space, club space as armature for indeterminate creative potencies. A metaphysical ersatz whose costly, energy-intensive processing and refinement feeds the supply chain of the creative self, ‘space’ is the indifferent corridor through which whitewashed scenes of violence communicate; it both satisfies a demand for the realisation of subjective freedom and incites that same demand. For it is also disseminated as image, a dream-image saturated with the hi-res allure of self-creation, the promise of fusing one’s gestures with the space that enfolds them, in a serene streamlined integration. This dream is the only place the cybernetic nomad really feels at home. All the better if there is grit in the workings, the off-white residue of another violence clinging to the walls. Energising spatters of local colour activate its latent tracts: There is nothing that Berlin really stands for, except being cheap and cool, and drunk and druggie…it’s the potential to shape something, says a tech pioneer of his proposed ‘startup campus’ in the city. Despite its ex nihilo veneer, ‘space’ is always overtly parasitical upon prior conditions. (Unless maybe it was this monster of blank inscription that created the prior conditions, in order to ensure its emergence….) 1/2

NEUTRAL’s museum of contemporary spatiology involutes the artisanal violence that constructs ‘space’, tapping Berlin’s clotted semio-sump to distil and precipitate poor-but-sexy into a few sparse crystals of depleted cultural energy that operate as basic orientation points: ribbons of scat and squalor applied directly from the semiotic palette onto the white-overpainted surfaces of a dilapidated urban infrastructure whose use-value flaked away to reveal a blank canvas onto which were daubed non-scenes that became scenes that became photopathological simulacra laminated onto their own re-re-re-representation. These rooms are endgames where the imposition of containment, the pure hard fact of being in a room, condenses a generalized claustrophobia: that of free space and absolute fluidity become a fatiguing institution of subjectivation, a festive confinement for a New Hanse: that hard-living superfood-guzzling grindr-swiping concept-hungry pitchshifting multi-desking gentry for whom every glancing encounter is a creative opportunity; the last human generation to be able to derive some privileged enjoyment from its assimilation into a hysterical machinism. You know the score. You probably are the score. Remember how, along with the forlorn call for an authentic return to place as a counter to the deracination of international styles and the serial homogenization of franchised units, the contemporary laundering of space also provoked a turn to the specificity of site? Under interrogation, works were forced to renounce their autonomy, to recuse anonymous space, and to swallow the circulatory systems that produced them, so as to glue them to where they were, as if this adhesion would enable a critical separation. But now the site is mobile: it’s you who are glued to it, carrying it on your back like a snail’s airbnb, stowing it as hand luggage on Easyjet, necking it as you wait in line at the club, putting it aside for later in the nth browser tab…. The site has exploded, the blank mask of space has peeled off to reveal the machinic death’s head beneath: an ever-present gigantic bit-switching global exchange; the walls have become self-conscious, or at least possessed of some cryptic cybernetic intent; everything’s as superfluid as a T1000; there’s no separation, no room. You try to hold on to some vestige, to keep the lines clean; you alternate between reckless affirmation and the guilty pleasures of cosy self-security. Create, possess, reflect, enjoy. But do you really have anything to add? The open space you tried to make for yourself is closing in. At this point, isn’t n+1 just n again? In which case, maybe the best response is—can’t be arsed. 2/2

readthis.wtf /writing/importexport/ Import/Export - 2016 As I walked anonymously through the port I was bewildered by the energy and variety of the place and wondered at my naivety for having believed myself to be the first person to set foot on these shores […] I amounted to no more than they did now, yet somehow I felt liberated by my bankruptcy. I was a nobody with nothing to prove, free to explore this other country which was no longer my responsibility but simply something new to be perceived. — ‘Prologue,’ in Charles Avery, Onomatopeiea: The Port1 We find ourselves thrown into a baffling, raucous scene: a congested walkway hemmed in by a wooden landing stage, an imposing warehouse, and a mean-looking security enclosure processing incomers. Beyond this liminal zone choked with milling tourists lies a small plaza dominated by the façade of a fancy hotel and surveyed by predatory eateries. The crowd is a perplexity of eccentric characters, some rendered with great dynamism in industrious mid-stride, others rooted to the spot as if lost in thought and indifferent to those around them engaged in spirited commercial, social, and amorous encounters and altercations. Animal forms both familiar (scrawny rogue mutts) and unprecedented (cloven-hoofed duck-billed chimerae) weave their way through an undergrowth of limbs, or skulk ruefully in shadow. Some of the figures are filled-out, palpable with highly modelled detail, others barely adumbrated by long serpentine contours, translucent and ghostlike, transpierced by the wireframe outlines of the buildings that gird the quayside. Around them hover the spectres of erased precursors and lines of perspective projection; above, the half-suggestion of vistas lying far beyond the immediate quarter. Here and there, in the midst of the general brouhaha, delineations become frayed and wane into patches of dimensionless blank space that vibrate with undiscovered detail. 1/5

Though hard-fought, intricate, and textured, the drawing does not have the air of a study or sketch for some ulterior work that would fill out the scene and fix it into a final authoritative form. It is more like an accidental snapshot, probably from the point of view of one of those overexcited travellers we see in an accompanying picture straining from the prow of an ocean liner as it approaches the ramshackle jetty, their smartphones held aloft, filing anticipatory souvenirs before coming ashore to be stung for trinkets and curios. This is one of the products of the imagination contributing to the continued construction and portrayal of the world of The Islanders. As well as written accounts by one possibly unreliable witness,2 this world is documented through two species of works: drawings which place a set of entities and characters in situations endowed with a careful internal coherence; and three-dimensional renderings of the same entities which appear more autonomous, but which we invariably encounter again in the drawings, in medias res. Each work deliberately corrodes its self-sufficiency by referring laterally to its counterparts, their shared characteristic being that they mean something only in the context of a whole, albeit one that is perennially incomplete. When so much energy has been expended on the denunciation and subversion of representation, with artists perpetually rewarming the avant-garde dream of erasing the border between art and life, these works appear singularly untroubled and innocent in their intent to depict. We are reminded of the opening propositions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which indeed could be read as an instruction manual for depicting worlds: If the Island ‘is all that is the case,’ and is therefore ‘the totality of facts,’ and if ‘a fact is the existence of a state of affairs’, The Islanders does indeed consist of ‘pictures’ which ‘present a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs’ by relating to each other atomic facts (those entities presented in the three-dimensional works) via propositions (the drawings). These works are encountered as a series which can be entered at any point and traversed in any order; but the projected totality of the world ensures that no entity can ‘exist entirely on its own’ since the ‘possibility’ of their ‘occur[ring] in states of affairs […] must be in them from the beginning,’ their only ‘independence’ being ‘a form of connexion with states of affairs, a form of dependence.’ The notion that it is ‘essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs’ is a demand of worldcraft that was one of the starting points for the Islanders project: it provided an answer to the question of the continued motivation for and meaning of artmaking, a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament of simply making one piece after another without any idea of what they might be pieces of. A definitive answer to this last question usually comes only after the artist’s demise brings closure to the oeuvre (the catalogue raisonné, the ordering of works biographically or art-historically—if they are lucky). While it is impossible to second guess the contingencies of interpretation, The Islanders announces a structural principle that will be difficult to circumvent in any future evaluation—the speculative totality of The Islanders is, at the very least, a constitutive part of what any one piece of it means. The approach can be described as one of bounded openness: although the enterprise of fabricating this world is a contract made by the artist with himself, the work is thereby invested with a totalising ambition that is patently unrealizable (the depiction of ‘all that is the case’). Nonetheless, it is binding: objects and drawings can and will be dispersed, relocated, exhibited, bought and sold, without renouncing their lateral bond to a whole that is produced alongside the parts as another part; one that is constantly thematised in the artist’s descriptions of and in The Islanders. This enterprise is quite unlike those of the innumerable manufactured worlds of contemporary reality, such as the precision-rendered virtual models of videogames, where every last corner can be explored at will, but where subjective experience is corralled and limited by a saturated set of data. What we encounter in The Islanders, in 2/5

each drawing as in the whole, is a coherent, vividly textured patchwork of fragments on a ground whose vast indeterminacy remains a reservoir of possibility and imagination constrained loosely by what we have encountered thus far. Even the set of all the works would present but a partial aspect of that which the project is in the process of meaning; so this meaning-as-a-whole is both circumscribed in advance and yet remains in the future, yet to be discovered. In making this contract with himself, the artist also invites the viewer to sign up, to participate in constructing the Island. * Everyone who comes here comes from the outside. But from the Island’s point of view, the outside is a part of the Island. Equally, The Islanders is a part of our world (the world from whose vantage point we view its artefacts). It is also a picture of everything—or more precisely, a picture of the many everything-pictures our intellectual history has bequeathed us. For the various cultures of the Island read like fictionalised versions of the many philosophical schemas that have, at various points, claimed to encompass and resolve reality as a whole. These conceptual references are unmistakeable, yet too dense and too tangled to resolve into neat allegory. A philosopher could drive himself mad trying to do so. This notional philosopher would however discover one remarkable thing: if The Islanders is intended as a representation of the realm of abstract thought, it is a peculiarly pacific one. Ideas which have for millenia been at stake in philosophy’s constant internecine strife, the object of endless polemics, stringent programmes for reform, revolution, overturning, and undermining, decisions which have birthed powerful ideologies and provoked bitter quarrels, are perennial and placid features of the landscape within the shores of the Island. The paradoxical coexistence of their contesting claims seems to give its inhabitants not the slightest cause for concern. As far as we know, disputes between factions rarely escalate beyond the occasional street brawl. As we are told, on any question to which there are two mutually exclusive answers, the islanders are divided exactly down the middle, making for a peculiar equilibrium that forestalls the hostilities of ideological struggle. Thus, pleasure-seekers pass by the abstruse proclamations plastered on the four-storey Penrose warehouse as if they were advertisements for a series of entertaining diversions (which, indeed, some of them seem to be). The Free Church of Logical Positivity takes no umbrage at the goings-on in the neighbouring Laissez Faire hotel, whose lascivious guests are obviously not there for the sea view. Theological disputations, rather than a casus belli, are slogans for T-shirts hawked in the marketplace; existential quandaries become trading names for dubious dives where tenants of the most incompossible creeds drink each other under the table; and pensive dandies flamboyantly express their conceptual allegiances by donning enigmatic geometrical fascinators. Disinterested in assessing their claims in the light of objective truth, the islanders seem to take for granted the coexistence of so many ways of cutting up, dividing, and dissecting the world only so as to reassemble it from its supposedly primordial parts once again. It is only the figure of the hunter, hero and/or fool of the piece, who stands resolute in positing the existence, at the heart of the island, beyond the bleak steppes, of that quarry known as the Noumenon, the ultimate reality against which such diverse worldviews might be judged. The hunter attempts to decode his surroundings, to record and map the Island; he hypothesizes, undertakes perilous forays and gallant missions to the dark interior. Yet despite the role it has played in the history of the Island, this heroic tradition of the hunting of the Noumenon itself seems ultimately a matter of romantic passion, with not even the hunters themselves harbouring any serious expectations of success. 3/5

In short, while the texture and tenor of philosophies are brought to life in an extraordinary way in The Islanders, the agonistic and sometimes ill-humoured fixation of the philosopher is quelled, since the notion that one could gauge these differing conceptions against some ulterior reality is something the islanders barely entertain. Yet it was an originary violence that founded this island culture: consider the fate of the If’en, the indigenous inhabitants of the island, inseparate beings of perception and perceptibility, evanescent existences evading all definition. Colonised by Trianglelanders, through extermination, selection, and interbreeding they were sifted into fixed, determinate, and familiar forms. The very possibility of a world comes about through these trenchant gestures, and yet within it something of the If’en’s unconfined vision abides: the creole culture into which The Islanders plunges us embraces both the infinite flux of possibility and the drive to nominate, acquire, organize, and structure. Accordingly, one would be just as mistaken in taking the island as a work of mere whimsical imagination as one would be in assuming that these incarnations of the paradoxes of thought are just passive transcriptions of formal structures. If scenes from The Islanders invite an allegorical reading, at the same time they invariably obstruct any final determination by fusing those arid cogitations with the sinews of a singular personal history and mode of expression, and by leaving adequate space between the lines of the ‘facts’ for the viewer to draw their own maps. For all of these reasons, no simple relation of denotation, no ‘picture theory,’ can account for the negotiations that are underway here. * The Port of Onomatopoeia functions to dramatize the operations through which The Islanders endures and expands. Onomatopoeia, in its modern sense, is the place where meaning and materiality coincide—in nonsense-rhyme, the crossing-point where the reader experiences the breakdown of sense into sound and learns to eat words (to ‘chew with the goo-goose,’ as Dr Seuss’s trickster-fox puts it). It is a place of transmutation and slippage where foreign tongues meet, the mouth through which the trade between meaning and matter passes. Nearer its etymological root, onomat-poios is the ‘place of name-making,’ site of the arbitrary binding of word to thing. Within the Islanders mythos, the Port of Onomatopoeia is where commerce with outsiders sees artefacts extracted from the native element of the Islanders (philosophical thinking suspended from its obsessive truth-claims) and offered up as commodities for daytrippers who will denature them by naming them, fixing and defining their meaning. The port therefore also figures the relation of the entire Islanders project to its own outside, since for the artist (as for the denizens of many a tourist isle) it is these transactions that make continued work viable. At this singular interface, the pieces of the Island belong simultaneously to both worlds; the port is the twist in the Mobius strip that brings onto the same plane the reality of the Island and the reality in which The Islanders is exhibited and whose abstractions it fictionalises. Art’s relation to the ‘real’ world is acknowledged, yet at the same time internalised into art, so that the two wholes paradoxically contain one other. Like Fortunatus’s purse in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, The Islanders ‘envelops the entire world, and makes that which is inside be on the outside and vice versa.’3 With the artistic meaning and value of any particular piece being bound to the whole, there is no suggestion that this traffic should detract from the artist’s endeavour. While much contemporary art appears to be locked into a perpetual and futile struggle to disavow or subvert its relation to the market, in The Islanders the port of Onomatopoeia stands as a vindication of its crucial role, marking it within the work itself and demonstrating that the process of artmaking need not be defended against its supposed contamination. 4/5

Having disembarked at this strange harbour, one can be either a sightseer, leaving with selective memories, images, facts and artefacts; or a hunter, a vaguely ridiculous character who seeks something behind the bustling façade of the port, the marketplace, the bars and the tourist traps, beyond ‘all that is the case’; and who thus joins the artist in his impossible endeavour and becomes an Islander. (Both roles are indispensable.) Quite apart from what any one work means—that which is denoted, depicted, pointed at, acquired, and named—one may sense the elusive quarry whose pursuit continues to drive the continued construction and expression, the unfinished enterprise of meaning itself. Perenially uncaptured, it lies in the future, and is the very element within which the Island subsists and is discovered: ‘it means: it means’—or (beyond any and all situations and their depictions) ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.’ Silent, yet intent on the prize, avid for the hunt. 5/5

readthis.wtf /writing/given-practice/ Given Practice - 2016 1/7

Monkey with a Smartphone The production of subjects within the capitalist megamachine is remarkable for its powerful articulation of the two processes of social subjection and machinic enslavement.1 Operating via what Félix Guattari calls asignifying semiotics—that is, non-referential signs which do not pass via conventional symbolic (language) systems but directly affect bodies on a sub- or supra-individual level, machinic enslavement is indifferent to the inherited symbolic order, interfering with its functions and potentially threatening it with obsolescence and disintegration (deterritorialization of the sign). But what Deleuze presciently diagnosed as the ‘control society’—in which human parts are integrated via processes of modeling and modulation by way of asignifying semiotics, rather than via discipline and punishment by way of physical coercion and symbolic violence—in order to reproduce capitalist social relations, cannot do without a continually recalibrated complementary process of social subjection, decanting decoded flows back into the readymade vessels of the symbolic order. Indeed, what is notable is the plasticity that these complementary processes lend to each other: decoded machinic signs that would seem inimical to the reinscription of a stable socius are mobilized to reinvigorate obsolescent myths of individual agency; while assurances of social relation and individual expression are increasingly obtained through subscription to informatic ‘services’ for which subjects are so many atomized content-providers. The ubiquitous smartphone in many ways acts as a kind of switching station between these two processes. While ownership and operation of the device operates as an index of selfhood and identity, the original function of the telephone as acousmatic extension of discursive symbolic bonding and identity-reinforcement (monkey-chatter: ‘are you there?’ ‘I’m here’ ‘Am I still me?’ ‘You’re still you’) has gradually been sidelined by the injunction to insert one’s sensorium into a transglobal flow of continuous alerts, calls for action, polling points and pattern-precognitions, a borderline asignifying semiosis modulated algorithmically at infra-cognitive speeds, where every interaction immediately generates yet more demands for attention. While the ‘content’ resembles a high-octane remix of simian bonding, aggression, group dynamics and courtship behaviors, at the machinic level this ostensible content is a mere pretext for the transmission and reinforcement of compulsions that secure the user/worker’s involuntary absorption into the continuous profitable circulation of asignifying signs. A new set of psychopathological symptoms emerge: nervous tics, continual vigilance for red dot notification badges, compulsive re-checking and browser tab cycling; and in the auditory realm, the lab-rat shocks of ringtones, idents, bleeps and dings, an asignifying chatter that won’t let you off the hook of an endless 24/7 ‘conversation’ you don’t want to miss out on. 2/7

The contrast between this multimodal harassment and the obsolete model of telephony—between the subjective intimacy of speech and listening and a machinic enslavement to triggers and alerts—relates to different modes of audition. As explored at length by Derrida and his successors, the immediacy of hearing oneself speak is the originary model for a phenomenological transparency and intimate self-presence, vouching for a subjective interiority unassailable by the empirical world, which it thus deposes into a secondary register, that of inert and lifeless space. The transparency of signification in spoken language eclipses the sonorous nature of speech, the physicality of its source and medium of transmission. In speaking to another, this shared interiority burrows under the space where the voice sounds. As we see with the telephone, even the thickness of technological mediation does not vitiate the magical immediacy of speech. The promises of Skype and Facetime in the present day—‘it’s as if you were right there’—still promise the reinstatement of presence and the disappearance of their own artificiality. The Ear and the Eerie The mode of listening involved in alertness to these sounds that channel subjectivity into asignifying circulation is different, and perhaps more primordial. While it is the product of the upfront, brightly-lit spaces of online communication, the effective operation of these alerts could well be qualified as crepuscular and animal, if Nietzsche is right to say that the ear is ‘the organ of fear’, and that it could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been […].2 The primordiality of this connection with fear and vigilance makes sound the privileged medium of the eerie, whose effect Justin Barton has described as relating to ‘a spatiality of intent’, a distressed acousmatics in which sound and territoriality are closely related:3 The eerie is an incursion of the unknown into a silence […] the point where the known is broken open for a moment from the outside, in the form of a noise, a cry, the sound of a movement….4 What is remarkable about electronic alert signals is that they instrumentalise this ancestral ‘timidity’, this instinctual animal response, to enable symbolic exchanges that reinforce the most banal routines of subjectivity and signification (Facebook: ‘Are you there?’ ‘I’m here.’ ‘I am still me.’ ‘You are still you.’). The successful articulation of these two apparently disparate registers is the final measure of the achievement of capitalist subjectivation: these interfaces mesh with unreflective compulsive behavior verging on the addictive, while on the level of ‘content’ they reinforce the cult of individual expression and identity-formation. This is a form of subjectivation that operates both through plugging bodies into technologically decoded flows and through discursive reinforcements of the symbolic order, instrumentalizing without compunction both the manifest image of phenomenological self-presence and the scientific image of the animal body as involuntary signal-processor. It would be just as futile to believe that the capitalist subjectivation machine could be subverted through the acceleration of technological abstraction, as to take refuge from it by valorizing an unshakeable fundamental sense of self. For not only do both of these belong to its arsenal, it is nothing but the optimized and integrated doublearticulation of the two: If asignifying semiotics harbor the potential to unlock affects and experiences that escape discursive overcoding, they can also become unprecedented artificial fortifications for social subjection. And if the certainty of the subject seems to offer safe harbor from the depredations of machine-space, this comfort is only a residual artefact of an interface preserved for the purposes of ‘user experience’. The outside is already inside, and vice versa, by virtue of a subjectivation-machine that both subverts and reinforces their supposed polarity (without ever perishing from this ‘contradiction’). 3/7

If ‘in speaking the phenomenological body of the voice effaces itself, leaving its living trace: the reduction of all space, the despatialization of signification,’,5 how do we retrace the path, staying within the realm of the auditory, from the certainty of this spaceless disembodied interiority to the territorial vigilance of a listening that tacitly acknowledges its contingency and vulnerability, and is sited in a space menaced by the irruption of alien signals? Inversely, how did the organ of fear ever become repurposed for the comfort of phenomenological self-presence, the human security system? Can the voice, privileged instrument of a despatialized and dematerialized audition, be replaced within the crepuscular territory of sound, reversing the domestication of vocal sound whose history is at once consummated and veiled by oral signification? Performance and Practice In thinking about a respatialization of the voice—that is, a reinstating of the voice in its physical and spatial reality as sound-trace—we must immediately guard against the illusion of an autonomous sonorous materiality. As soon as it becomes audible, sound is always freighted with at least the potentiality for making sense.6 Even in animal vigilance, the unknown is already figured as potential threat. In other words, although certain auditory signals may invite us into asignifying semiosis, there can be no experience of a conceptless materiality of sound; and any practice that claims to deliver such a thing merely becomes an idiom that cultivates a certain convention of listening and simultaneously tries to dissimulate its conventional nature. This indeed is often how ‘noise’ practices use sound: employing deliberately extreme measures to make us a helpless patient to the massive materiality of sound, they seek to open up a direct relation to the sonic that undermines the symbolic and subverts the hegemony of the discursive. Yet, as Mattin has repeatedly pointed out, at a metacontextual level this is invariably a vehicle for the reinforcement of quite habitual social and subjective positions on the part of performer and audience alike.7 The situation is worse when the voice is involved, for ‘noise’, unless it simply pushes to parodic ‘extremes’ the subjectivating power of language (provocations, insults, haranguing), seems forced into choosing between a number of equally unsatisfactory alternatives: recourse to sub-linguistic usages of the voice (howls, screams, grunts), ‘breaking’ language by processing speech in a manner indifferent to its signifiant capacities (machinic stutterings, extreme time-distortion, undecipherable vocal noise), etc.. Here the signifiant and subjectivating dimensions of the voice are precipitately abandoned, in performances of subversion which, imagining a utopian preserve outside of language, leave it untouched, also falling short of the insane deterritorializations of everyday capitalism. They blithely disavow the conceptual and social frameworks that are always involved in (even ‘extreme’) listening. The paradox is that, given the nature of performance and the self-volunteered audiences for ‘noise’ or ‘experimental’ practices, perhaps one cannot even imagine a performance set-up that would mobilize vigilant and fearful listening in as compelling a manner as the mechanisms of technologically-mediated social interaction that have become a part of our lives. Practices of listening depend upon repetition and reinforcement, and in the case of social media these practices become addictive through their integration with the archaic residues of our spontaneous sense of self. Performance and the mode of listening related to it can rarely achieve such inculcation, and are more likely— whether before, after, or during—to be reflexively reinscribed within narratives that reinforce subjectivity, albeit in terms of break or rupture (‘I was there’, ‘I totally lost myself in the sound’, ‘the experience really affected me’). Deep Interspace Yet perhaps, in listening to the voice, there is after all a kind of interzone between the midday sun of self-presence and the darkness of the ancestral forest: as Denis Vasse says of the mode of listening required in the psychoanalytical situation: 4/7

To listen to someone, to hear his voice, requires on the listener’s part an attention open to the interscape of body and discourse and which contracts neither at the impression of the voice nor at the expression of the discourse. What such listening offers is precisely what the speaking subject does not say: the unconscious texture which associates his body-as-site with his discourse: an active texture which reactualizes, in the subject’s speech, the totality of his history.8 An attentive listening to the voice supplements signification with sonic texture, so that the ‘outer’ voice qua sound, sited in a certain body and space, speaks to us of things of which the inner voice of signification knows, or wishes to know, nothing. We should note right away, in accordance with the caveats issued above, that attending to the ‘grain of the voice’ can never be a question of a listening stripped of all conceptual presuppositions: even perceiving in the voice of an unknown interlocutor the traces of a personal history presupposes a number of interpretative principles concerning the nature of personhood. Could we practice hearing these signs of personal history within our own voice, thus creating a distance between our ‘inner’ self and a voice heard as a contingent bio-graphism? Such a practice would be both an ‘unlearning’ of the spontaneous reception of the voice and a work of the concept in order to reterritorialize its sound within a new conceptual space. The gap opened up between speech and hearing, in disrupting the immediacy of hearing-oneselfspeak, would then induce a kind of instantaneous amnesia that rendered one’s own voice alien, or eerie (‘[f]ugues, losses of memory, are fundamentally eerie. But with the eeriness of amnesia the unknown thing from the outside is you’).9 This voice would come from a body that is not the phenomenological body (which is constitutively an ‘inside’) but a body objectivated in thought and become exteriorized even as it says ‘I’. Evacuation of the Voice suggests such a practice, and a deeper archeology of Vasse’s ‘interscape’, one that problematizes the ‘totality’ of its psychoanalytical ‘history’, and its assignation to an individual identity (‘his history’). A practice whereby one might shift one’s ‘own’ voice into the sound-territory of the eerie, where it would be heard as an alien signal from an outside space, the sonic inscription not of a personal history, but of the ramified contingencies of geotrauma.10 This must indeed be a practice and not a performance. Listening to another attempt it is a different proposition— although what is intriguing, in hearing Miguel Prado and Mattin perform this practice, is to wonder whether it succeeded, and, if so, what it is that we are hearing. Situated as we are at the point where geotraumatics becomes cryptography or signals analysis,11 it would still be a voice, yet the agent, having changed their conception of what can have a voice, would no longer be speaking for, or hearing, himself. If the experiment succeeded (and this would require on our part both a conceptual effort and an effort of listening), we would be hearing the interscape between discourse and the body of the earth. Rather fanciful, of course, to imagine that, like Professor Challenger, we could straightforwardly ‘hear’ the earth scream, hear the ramified strata of cosmic drama, geology, and biological evolution speaking in their own voice: a type of magical thinking common to art projects that claim that, in presenting raw ‘objects’, the artist allows them to speak for themselves, thus giving us direct access to a nonanthropomorphic materiality. The practice we are describing would have to be instead a kind of forensics—which involves a purposive stance and conceptual presumptions, a methodical progression, and produces a certain audience (the forum) at the same time as it makes the object speak (or, in this case, makes speech an object). This would certainly mean that the practice of listening was being injected with a good deal of ‘theory’, something that may be unwelcome and onerous to those who want to be assaulted with ‘pure sound’. But precisely what is at issue here is an uncommon articulation of theory and 5/7

practice, since the counterpart of this necessary injection of the conceptual is that the conceptual is impotent without practices (which is why theoretical critique of capitalism can never exceed the level of a kind of indignant leisure activity). As we described, capitalist subjectivation mobilizes both the scientific and the manifest image, knotting and articulating them in an unprecedentedly dominating fashion through appeals to the known and recognized, and through the inculcation of repetition-compulsions. We can further identify that it does so by allotting them different roles within an integrated machine while at the same time maintaining their separation (exactly the meaning of a ‘double-bind’): science and technology are understood as functional and operatory: they make things work, but things that are so complex that their mechanism is opaque to experience, and whose interfaces are smooth enough that we don’t need to think about them; on the other hand, the manifest image serves as a readymade conceptual framework for self-understanding, so immediate that it seems to repel functional analysis. What gives capitalist subjectivation the leverage to operate this integration-separation is precisely the fact that we find it difficult to harmonize the theoretical image of an indifferent universe commanded by mechanism with the self-evidence of our life and personhood; and that, believing it would be necessary to attain this reconciliation in order for it to make a difference to our selves, we default to interiority—thus giving free reign to capitalist subjectivation, which is quite able to operate without achieving the chimerical ‘harmony’ we dream of. Embarrassing Bodies Such a dream is shared by those who attempt an extreme ‘breakthrough’ to some kind of unmediated reality, who try to bring forth a compelling sensory experience of an escape from social subjection into the raw material itself: at best they produce intervals during which the impossibility of doing so is demonstrated spectacularly, again and again, and take some pleasure in throwing themselves and their audiences against this transcendental brick wall. The alternative option pursued here is to reverse the terms: conceptualizing the self through the concepts provided by a theoretically concatenated series of scientific narratives (geotraumatics), disconnection from self-certifying experience is accepted as a given from the outset. Meanwhile, rather than aiming to violently obliterate the manifest image, its self-evidences are used as a starting point, and employed as a functional machine, a carrier, for the process. A gradual, subtle modulation will subtly tip the enchanted nonspace of subjectivity into the abyssal space of the production and inscription of sound. The interregnum thus opened up, between the suspension of any expectation of experiential satisfaction and the experimental practice of theory, is not devoid of affect. Circulating here, for the audience and perhaps for the participants too, are sentiments attendant upon real experiment: embarrassment, a sense of the ridiculous, boredom, irritation, a mild hysteria, futility (even a strange hint of sorrow), cognitive disorientation, fatigue, a nagging hunger for normality, an awakening of memories of infantile play as we hear the tongues of the performerpractitioners in search of a deeper atavism, twisting and probing in search of a crack in the surface of their language. But then, given the impossibility of actually reversing upright posture, disassembling the larynx, unfolding the body, deterritorializing the planet, aren’t these responses indicative that the most immediately stifling strata—the accreted layers of civility, reasonable behavior, and social subjection—have been disturbed? The first task of schizoanalysis or geotraumatics. Unearthing an asignifying semiotics that already inhabits the intimacy of the voice, perhaps this archaeology of speech, this discovery of a subterranean complex of continuous variation and cuttings—howls, groans, and clicks— will allow speech to ‘escape in the direction of numbers’12 that are not yet marshaled by the program of machinic 6/7

enslavement, at the same time leading the voice that continues to say ‘I’ not to its immediate ruin, but at least into new territories, new relations. This is how theory, just talking about it, transforms into doing it—given practice…. 7/7

readthis.wtf /writing/speculation-and-circulation-alliances-expedient-and-theoretical-between-philosophy-and-contemporary-art/ Speculation et Circulation: Alliances Opportunes et Théoriques entre Philosophie et L’Art Contemporain (translation from french to english by DeepL 12.22.24) We'll all agree that the reason it's so difficult to talk about art today is that we can't talk about the practice of art without addressing the systemic form of contemporary art-its cultural, economic and even financial framework. And all the more so, if we seek to understand the relationship between contemporary art and philosophy, or in more general terms the “theoretical”. That's why I can't approach this question without embarking on a certain quasianecdotal drift, which I'll follow with a historical overview, before getting to the point where I'll be able to talk about this relationship. When, ten years ago, I launched the Collapse magazine, devoted to interdisciplinary research, I quickly realized that it had found a wide audience in the contemporary art world. This was especially the case following the publication, in 2010, of the proceedings of a colloquium in London on 'Speculative Realism', which was the transcript of a discussion between four philosophers on the problems of realism in the context of post-Kantian philosophy. We thought at the time that it was a discussion worthy of dissemination, touching on some philosophically acute and sharp points, but we couldn't anticipate the fact that speculative realism would be adopted by a section of contemporary art. What has come into force here is undoubtedly a certain double if not triple meaning of the word 'speculative'. Now, there could be no better way of addressing these multiple meanings, which is obviously also a question of language, than [*3] Alix Rule and David Levine's 2011 survey for Triple Canopy magazine, 'International Art English', which traced the rise of a certain pseudo-theoretical jargon throughout the contemporary art world. The authors' critical investigation focuses on the fact that this sophisticated creole making up 'International Art English', deployed in press releases, reviews, and artist statements, enunciates grandiose theoretical ambitions without ever defining the meaning of the words it borrows more or less haphazardly from philosophy. I want to emphasize three points: (1) Rule and Levin's investigation rightly grasps concepts as commodities whose value rises and falls, and which can therefore be considered subject to speculation. This is a market with its own rules and syntax (of which Rule and Levin give us a refined analysis) and which, while not to be equated with the world art market as such, overlaps it to a certain extent. That is to say, while not all art buyers or biennial or museum directors demand that their purchases be certified by the currency of the latestartspeak fad, the speculative tendencies of the one have correlated with those of the other. The flowering of contemporary art as a privileged cultural field worthy of intellectual investment is also articulated with the movements of this market and its apparent conceptual grip on the future-that is, International Art English seems to present ideas whose time has come, even if they are sometimes a little hazy or difficult to pin down. They 1/11

seem to offer both connoisseurs and the general public the possibility of participating in a way of thinking about major contemporary issues, a philosophical way of thinking without philosophy. (2) This brings me to my second point: Rule and Levine's report alludes to the way in which these concepts themselves are valorized insofar as they remain in a state of vagueness, indeterminacy orimprecision-International Art English thrives above all on concepts charged with multiple meanings, the power of which emerges from a semantic enigma. They carry the promise of making us see the world in a new light. They seem to harbor some conceptual bounty yet to come. Which only confirms once again the multiple meanings of 'speculation' engaged here. (3) Thirdly, and more specifically concerning speculative realism: it's amusing to read that, among the words vying for pre-eminence in this increasingly globalized market, Rule and Levine's quantitative analysis revealed that 'the [u]sage of the word speculative inexplicably increased in 2009'! But what is the underlying asset of this stock market activity within what the authors describe as an economy of “acts of mimicry and linguistic one-upmanship”? What is the meaning of this speculative bubble, in which the very notion of speculation has become the object of choice, and “analytical terms are transformed into expressive and promotional tokens”? The rise in power continued... until 2013, when speculative realism burst onto the scene as number 81 inArtReview's 'power 100'. The list itself is a fascinating undertaking: how does one measure the 'power' of speculative realism against that of curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, or artist Tinho Seghal? By what metric was New York's Bard College of Art able to beat speculative realism by a tiny point...? Here we can see SR's track record in the years that followed-it's holding! Even if one doubts the possibility of a rigorous assessment of the market on such terms, this event must surely be indicative-but of what exactly? ArtReview 's brief commentary is instructive here: indeed, the justification for speculative realism's position of power goes no further than the fact that, in a world where ideas are “coming to the attention of artists and curators through academic disciplines”, speculative realism is “increasingly referenced”. Judging by this little farce, it seems to me that there are two necessary conditions for the functioning of this speculative market of speculation and its “expressive tokens”: (1) these words must be fuzzy, gestural-they must not be cashed inat any point-so as not to burst the bubble; (2) at the same time, these words must be indicative of something else, something outside the market that carries a real value that contemporary art fears it is unable to generate in a native way. They are therefore provided by another off-stage discipline. But has philosophy become the underlying asset of art-world speculation? And can this bubble last, given that we're dealing here with a performative regime-to adopt-adapt Austin's formula, 'when to say is to make an investment'-a pun quite different from that usually solicited by philosophy, including the most experimental? In view of my contacts with the art world, I'm ready to admit that there are many dialogues to be had with artists on the philosophical questions raised by speculative realism. But I also believe that the specificity of these possible dialogues is drowned out by the speculative currency of 'International Speculative English', culminating in the exhibition 'speculations on anonymous materials', Kassel 2013, where a conceptual shopping list in the form of #hashtags.... can be found on the walls and advertising materials. 2/11

The last thing I want to do is play the role of reproaching artists for not having studied enough philosophy to be able to rigorously define the concepts they claim to use. I accept and welcome the fact that artistic practices include different ways of working with concepts and materials (and sometimes concepts in materials). I only wish to emphasize the spectacle-function of such generic terms as 'speculation', which now only 'reflect' its viral recurrence. At worst, it amounts to statements such as: 'This new philosophy says that everything is an object, or that everything is material, or that one must speculate; therefore, whatever object or material I present, whatever “speculation” I engage in, is of philosophical importance!'-and with that, one secures a share of the speculative value by insuring it against an underlying coming from outside, by avoiding speaking in one's own voice about one's own artistic projects. Having half-opened this little dossier, I'd now like to turn my attention to an innovative work in the exhibition of philosophy and philosophy in the exhibition Les Immatériaux, staged with the help of Thierry Chaput by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard at the Centre Pompidou in 1985. The exhibition sought to confront an accelerated cycle in which technological instruments offer us a grip on matter beyond the human perceptive range by breaking down the structure of objects into systems of imperceptible elements that are subsequently recomposed into new materials, mainly through the use of machine codes. In its attempt to articulate this rupture and its consequences in the form of a public exhibition curated by a philosopher, Les Immatériaux can be seen as a pivotal moment in the convergence of philosophy, art and exhibition practice. For Lyotard, the age of immaterials implies 'a profound crisis of aesthetics, and therefore of contemporary art'. His aim is to stage a “dramaturgy” of the new condition of “interactivity”, of the uncertainty and ambivalence of this moment of disruption. For him, it's also a question of “legitimization”, an operation that involves questioning the fundamental principles of modern thought, i.e. giving these new materials their place in a future culture. Legitimization is also a kind of destabilization of the human: It's not a question of explaining, but of making this problem sensitive [...] It seeks to awaken a sensibility supposedly present in the public, but deprived of the means to express itself [...] it would like to make us experience the feeling of the end of a period and the anxiety that arises at the dawn of postmodernity. [...] The aim is to intensify the questioning and, so to speak, to aggravate the uncertainty it imposes on the present and future of human beings. Before turning to the question of what Lyotard, as a philosopher, has brought to this new exhibition medium, we need to retrace the history of the place where this “dramaturgy of interaction” will take place. The Centre Beaubourg song is well known: Pompidou's neo-Hausmannian zeal for modernizing the city of Paris found its highest expression in the destruction of the Halles district and the construction of a massively financed cultural center that would eventually take his name. The then Ministry of Culture proclaimed that the Centre Beaubourg was to be a 'powerhouse of decentralization', which was not untrue given that it was an institution that would have to operate a concentration of capital: it had to figure disproportionately on the national cultural scene because France feared losing its influence in a globalized, decentralized world. Perhaps it was thought that this giant would consolidate this power in the realm of culture. Following a model to be followed throughout the Western world, it was supposed to cement the importance of culture as a dimension of national heritage worthy of international recognition, and to initiate the renewal of a district by 3/11

transforming it into a district for the arts and creative industries. The construction of the Beaubourg also coincided with certain expectations regarding exhibition practice. The appointment of Pontus Hulten is symbolic of the institution's determination to take seriously - or at least to flaunt this determination to invest in - the proposals and demands of the extended field of contemporary art that emerged in the sixties. In Stockholm, Hulten had demonstrated his ability to attract an unusual public through 'happenings' and trans-disciplinary initiatives between the arts, sciences and popular culture. On the occasion of his appointment at Beaubourg, he spoke enthusiastically of the need to 'create new institutions': We are probably moving into a society where art will play an important role... Until art is integrated into life and able to penetrate society as a whole, the exchange (between artists and the public) must take place in totally rethought 'museums'. Such museums will not simply be places for the conservation of works... but places where artists meet the public and where the public itself can become creative... we must attempt to open up museums. Pontus Hulten's formulas sum up the articles of faith of a new conception of art, the museum and the exhibitionformulas which today perhaps have a less promising resonance: it's the hope that the avant-garde dream of the unification of art and life is almost complete, subject to spontaneous and inevitable social dynamisms. The anticipation of a time when 'the majority of the population no longer has to struggle daily for survival' and can therefore reclaim the artistic creation hitherto reserved for the elite; and in the 'opening up' of the cultural space either vertically (to new publics) or laterally (to non-artistic disciplines). Pontus Hulten conceives of the museum space in terms of urbanist logic: the museum is to be built 'in the form of a city', a 'system of rooms' that 'communicate and interpenetrate', so that we are able to 'lose ourselves and reorient ourselves'. As part of this perpetual mobility, Pontus Hulten imagined, for example, the viewer of a Braque collage who could take advantage of the possibility of pressing a button to bring down a screen on which five other collages would be mounted-or not, if he didn't want to! (so he says...) In this way, technology is invoked as an auxiliary to the new museum's aspiration to anticipate the free circulation of a new society. To what extent has this prestigious project succeeded in inscribing itself in the narrative of an avant-garde unification of art and life? In an interview between Pontus Hulten and Richard Rogers in1981, it's impossible to ignore a certain modulation of these heady ambitions. Rogers summarizes: I think the Beaubourg has democratized or popularized culture. It gives people of all classes and ages something to do on a Saturday afternoon. As a specialist you can go to the museum; your grandmother can go to the restaurant; and the little ones can play in the square. To which Pontus Hulten adds: Usually a museum is just a museum. At Beaubourg, there's a whole cascade of things to do, and so the whole space becomes much more active. It's more like a train station...it's the theory of the flexible magic box, which includes the piazza. Nothing is ever static, and nothing is ever perfect. That same year, interviewed by The New York Times about his departure from Paris, he says simply and less optimistically: I wanted-it sounds silly-I wanted to bring art and life together, something like that. Rauschenberg said it best: the museum of the future will be inscribed in the little crack between art and life. It sounded great at the time. 4/11

The success of the renewal project now appears in a more ambivalent light: Society loves it. Artists don't... The bohemian life that reigned in Paris until the late '50s has disappeared. Artists of that era had more time to think, to reflect. (But artists are adaptable and flexible, aren't they? ) At this point, the temptation exists to read this gigantic cultural machine as a synecdoche for the generalized spaces of dynamic circulation, according to the requirements through which a new city and a new society were formed; spaces that constitute, it should be noted, an appropriate receptacle for the “festive neo-conservatism” denounced by the polemical Gilles Châtelet, according to which “cultural production” is incited to become a facsimile or reduced model of economic dynamism plugged into an optimization of the liquidity of all flows. Aligning the creation of a central-decentralized nodule of cultural circulation with the radical extension of the avantgarde project, 'waiting until art is integrated into life and has penetrated society as a whole'...? As a Pontus Hulten 'profile' in Art Monthly in 1977 put it: we can take the gamble that behind the image of Pontus Hulten as an exuberant anarchist conveyed by the French press, we find the potentially docile and productive reality of the dynamic young executive. Understanding that the reaffirmation of culture as an asset of the nation-state's 'soft-power' only serves to stage and saddle the real economic game of installing in the remodeled streets surrounding Beaubourg, the aggressive avantgarde of an urban, networked and networked'creative class'. This is the context for Les Immatériaux. As Anthony Hudek has suggested, the exhibition was also a 'pivotal' moment in the history of the Centre Pompidou; both the moment when its ideal value of post-museum 'versatility' was effectively realized, and the last exhibition where this ideal was pursued. Les Immatériaux certainly benefited from the open, indeterminate space of the fifth floor, where the dazzling array of objects from industry, art and commerce could live up to the promise of versatility. At the same time, it seemed to have been designed to confuse the public: grey metallic veils hanging from the ceiling obstructed any kind of overall perspective view. The labyrinthine play of 'zones' was almost impossible to follow, with the sound guide - rather capricious in its operation - changing from one soundtrack to another as you moved through the exhibition. Far from the smooth vision of a Pontus Hulten, where an audiovisual device appears at the spectator's request (or not, if he doesn't want it to!), for Lyotard interactivity suggests a disoriented condition in which the visitor was just another interface, a transformer of information-matter, subject to lines of force and flows of energies and signs that could never be satisfactorily integrated. What we notice in the files that recount the development of the project is the way Lyotard sought to inject the enthusiasm generated by cutting-edge developments with a touch of chagrin. So, if LI seems in a certain sense designed to satisfy the Pompidousian order, he has also introduced a note that seems to disagree, or discord, with it. One wonders, however, whether the conceptual interrogation of Immatériaux was not protected vis-à-vis the political and economic context of the institution in which it was produced. At least one member of the team wondered whether this horizon had escaped the exhibition's 'materials'. In a discussion of the 'global' point of view adopted by the exhibition, and the risk that it might be perceived as a 'reactionary apology for technology', Chantal Noëlle suggests that LI should be seen as a 'preliminary investigation' leading to further questioning. Sabine Vigoureux replies: 5/11

It does beg the question, though, why this preliminary investigation excludes any economic or social analysis. As if pure thought were independent of these phenomena: but they also influence thought in return. Personally, I felt this was lacking at first... Nicole Toutcheff replies that these elements are present in the exhibition, but not set up as a system. This simply means that there is no dominant ideology here. The interesting thing about this type of philosophical discourse is that it doesn't organize the scattered elements into a system. This is reminiscent of Baudrillard's 'fission culturelle, dissuasion politique', in his scathing 1981 analysis of the “carcass of flows and signs” that is “la chose Beaubourg”. The force of his intervention was certainly not lost on the team-and Lyotard least of all. But if we compare LI with Baudrillard's ferocious satyrdom, we can see that Lyotard's project may have consisted in thwarting the space proposed to him in a Beaubourg described by Baudrilard as a mausoleum of culture, paradoxically contained within an architecture of circulation. Perhaps Lyotard wanted to rebalance the situation described by Baudrillard, according to which the “anachronistic” contents of the Centre Pompidou risk rendering it less than “post” modern, out of step with its accelerated, circulatory exterior. It's as if Lyotard had tried to synchronize inside and outside, betting that the disquiet provoked by Beaubourg would point to something less nihilistic, less terminal, than Baudrillard believed. Baudrillard writes: If there were to be something in Beaubourg, it would have to be a labyrinth. Lyotard uses reconfigurable space to build a dark labyrinth on the fifth floor. According to Baudrillard the masses are rushing to Beaubourg because, for the first time, they have the opportunity to participate en masse in this immense work of mourning for a culture they have always hated. The masses rush to Beaubourg just as they rush to disaster sites, with the same irresistible impetus. Lyotard proposes an experience that heightens the feeling of a dying culture and aggravates anxiety-a very important word for Lyotard, found throughout his writings, a very Pascalian if not Augustinian word-I'll come back to this point. But Baudrillard again: The only content of Beaubourg is the mass itself, which the edifice treats like a converter, like a dark room. Lyotard, in his boîte sinon noir, au moins gris, invites the masses to see themselves as immaterial 'transformers' alongside the materials they've come to explore, and plans to install electronic systems to engage visitors in interactivity, while monitoring them and recording digital data on their trajectory. In short, LI is undoubtedly more than a symptom. The whole project is like a struggle with the conditions under which it was possible to produce the exhibition. But perhaps LI has paid too little attention to the way in which its sabotage of the gallery space and model risks being undermined in advance by the device of a postmodern space - even if not so “post” as Baudrillard would have it - designed precisely to explode this classical-modern framework. It is undoubtedly LI's contradictory status-as both a pioneering and costly postmodern technological extravaganza and a dark subversion of communication-that makes it still interesting today. Arguably, all this profoundly reflects the question indicated by Lyotard when he says that 6/11

[There are ] two kinds of inhuman. It is essential to keep them separate. The inhumanity of the system being consolidated, under the name of development (among others), must not be confused with the infinitely secret inhumanity of which the soul is hostage. So, in a coupling reminiscent of the exterior-interior of Baudrillardi's Beaubourg, we have what we might call the accelerationist inhuman, that of Lyotard's libidinal capital energumene, which he regretted and rejected in the '80s, and the inhuman that corresponds to the Augustinian motif, the inhuman who, like Augustine's Lord, is “closer to us than we are to ourselves” - “ interior intimo meo ” - and who, for philosophy, is as much programmatic and normative as diagnostic... in that it is the philosopher's task to interrogate and intensify this feeling of disquiet, this something else that inhabits and agitates the human heart, rather than to dismiss it through cultural “diversions” - something Pascal said no less clearly than Lyotard. And that it's up to the latter to to legitimize and aggravate this anxiety, which is expressed as much in technological matters as in expressly philosophical questioning. At the time, he said of these two inhumans: To believe, as I did, that this one can relay this one, give it expression, is to be mistaken. The system's consequence is rather to make us forget what escapes it. But anguish, the state of a mind haunted by a familiar and unfamiliar host that agitates it, makes it delirious but also think-if we try to exclude it, if we don't give it a way out, we make it worse. Hence the need to “legitimize” this troubling feeling and its industrial, artistic and technological avatars. But how did Lyotard envisage expressing this anxiety in the medium of the exhibition, and what motivated him to do it? * LI team member Chantal Noël explains: The philosophical discourse is changing its medium [...] the challenge is to inscribe this demand in a space and with means other than those of the book. Through the “expo” medium, the cultural institution becomes a place where certain philosophical reflections can be captured. At the time, Lyotard seemed to be under pressure from two related trends: fifteen years after the delirium of '68, he observed the unidirectional tendency of institutional philosophy to return to a closed academic circle, challenged by the edicts of neoliberal “pragmatics”, “communication” and “efficiency”. Meanwhile, the “new philosophers” have emerged to sweep away all the conceptual violence and anti-humanist investigations of post-structuralist thought, and are attempting - or so they declare - to re-establish thought on the firm ground of the human. At the same time, the most disparate domains - biology, design, science, even everyday life - are crumbling under the weight of technical developments whose vocation is not to “make sense”, and whose results blur the finalities of humanism and modern optimism - so that philosophical questions are presenting themselves everywhere in the form of a generalized experience of disorientation. The Enlightenment instances in which philosophy can traditionally claim a legitimate place are in decline, but a tacit call for philosophy comes from all quarters. It is this, Lyotard tells us, that gives rise to the demand for philosophy to 7/11

leave the university: A philosopher like me is inclined to think that it's in his interest to concern himself a little with what's going on outside institutions; that he needs to get out of the university. That's why I was part of the team preparing Immateriaux [...] [there's] an instituted, sclerotic philosophy, and a philosophy that is to be done or that is being done, in a disseminated form, which ultimately corresponds to the removal of a certain number of “disciplinary” barriers. LI sought to make up for philosophy's shortcomings in its public role by reaffirming its vocation to increase anxiety rather than to ensure communication on the basis of a common firm ground. And yet it was conceived as a project that would find a large audience. It was intended both to embody and to challenge the emerging model of the exhibition as spectacle-model, which only feeds the communicative frenzy of accelerated development. In this sense too, LI vacillates between satisfying the demands of the Beaubourg machine for versatile cultural communication, and sabotaging these demands through disorientation, indeterminacy, disquiet and a problematic philosophy that paints gray on gray. If I now feel free to say a few words about the possible links between art and philosophy, I would say that it is precisely this question of disquiet and problematicism that they share. I'd like to do so by drawing on the work of the great problematic philosopher Albert Lautman, and with the help of Jean Petitot's analysis of his work. By questioning mathematics, Lautman posited that there are guiding ideas that are the ultimate objectalities of mathematical thought, but which ultimately show themselves in dialectical or problematic rather than mathematical connections. There is a genesis of theories, a dramatization, which takes place in the mathematician's work and which cannot be dispensed with by thinking in terms of these ideas. Because these dialectical ideas and their connections exist only insofar as they are embodied in effective mathematical theories and structures. This means that there is a history of problems that is written by the constructs in which mathematicians strive to schematize the problematic connections of these guiding ideas, which themselves can neither be written down nor thought of as such. They are both the constraints and the engines of thought that are historicized in the work of mathematicians. This is an extraordinary version of both Platonism and Heidegger's dialectic of ontological difference. For Lautman, a philosopher of mathematics, philosophy can only contemplate these mathematical constructions and enjoy the spectacle of the hollow demonstration of this transcendence of the idea. But I would argue - and I think I'm in agreement with Deleuze here - that, beyond this contemplation, philosophy also makes its own constructions, which are also dramatizations of the Ideas, and which also establish a problematic history that alone confers their existence. There is indeed a real, a real that doesn't exist, but that is structured by the links between ideas and that is written in existence, in experience, by the work we do to shed light on it, and that gives rise to constructions that serve to schematize or dramatize them. Whether we're working with mathematical structures, with words and languages, or with the plasticity of materials, we're all striving to build something out of the problems we can never fully understand. And as we know, this involves a certain twist, a certain struggle with these materials. But why do we do it? I'd like to draw your attention to what Jean Petitot says about Lautman: the mathematical theories in which Ideas are concretized, historicized, are like the intentional correlates of the urgency of ideational problematics, i.e. the urgency 8/11

of problems anterior to the discovery of any kind of solution, an urgency that is the driving force behind the continuous production of a cultural construction, whether mathematical, artistic or philosophical. Ontological anteriority, the transcendence of ideas, finds its immanent correlate in the genesis of constructions that respond to this urgency. So there's a concern, a sorge, a questioning in the face of insoluble problems that is a kind of promising pain, through which something unthought of strives to enter thought. Now, to short-circuit things, I'd say that this concern is not unrelated to the anxiety that Lyotard echoes. Namely, that concern for this thing interior intimo meo is indeed connected with the pursuit of the Idea in the Lautmannian sense. And it is this, this compulsion toideation, that I believe is the deepest connection between art and philosophy-but, as we shall see, not only of the two. This sense of disquiet has never been closer to us, because we are surrounded by objects that we recognize in a certain way, but which we cannot formulate in the materials and words inherited from another age. This confirms Lyotardienne's point. The contemporary conjuncture brings us into daily contact with new “problematic” objects. This is what I call the problem of contemporary objects, which has a certain relationship with Anne-Françoise Schmid's integrative objects. Seeking to “legitimize” these problematic objects, to use Lyotard's term, is not ultimately a matter of naming them, but of making experimental constructions that attempt, in grappling with and struggling with our materials, to schematize or dramatize them, without ever reaching the idea of them. Like the objects of Pamela Rosenkranz, who twists them to give material form to the conceptual-aesthetic homogeneity of generic healthy skin. Such as John Gerrard's virtual worlds, a reduced model of an entangled complex comprising military, choreographic, biopolitical, media and digital devices, a system without a name but disturbing in its recognizability. Like the disconcerting object of the sealed, closed body-without-organ, 'Body vs Twizy', created by Jean-Luc Moulène with an industrial team from Renault. And yet, crucially, all these artists make the impossible link between what Baudrillard sees as the only cell-culture of mass, simulation, fascination rather than contemplation or beauty, and the inquietude Lyotard wants to highlight. Now, it may be possible for a philosopher and an artist to aim for the same idea, but the various materials we work with each have their own affordances, potentialities and obstacles, so that in each case, in the process of putting them to work, the idea is dramatized in a singular way, and provides us with a different path, different clues. Each practice must therefore speak in its own voice of its own intentions and dramatizations, in a collective intimacy, and in particular we must avoid over-coding art practices with philosophical terms that may or may not be well understood. Now, to return to LI, it's worth noting that while bringing together objects of industry, technology, philosophy and art, paradoxically Lyotard's discussion of the two inhumans ultimately gave rise to the idea that, if there is a part of society that produces immaterials and provides us with new ideas-problems to work with, another part must contemplate them in a kind of sequestration, in what Baudrillard precisely criticized, a temple of contemplation, “infinitely secretive” as Lyotardienne puts it. 9/11

Paradoxically, by attempting to explode the gallery, Lyotard, with his Immateriaux, played a role in the development of a new, equally over-coded space of culture.... Indeed, we know that the investment of the exhibition as a place of thought has only intensified since LI. Many contemporary art projects, often with the imprimatur of a famous philosopher, mix 'non-art' objects with artworks, and promote the idea that there is a community of disquiet and indeterminacy that fleetingly exists in the hidden corners of the “development system”, in privileged places of contemplation or collective fabulation, thus reaffirming that there remains some immemorial place for thought that is not subject to this system. This, it seems to me, is precisely the hope of the contemporary form of the exhibition and of contemporary art in general. LI's attempt to heighten anxiety seems to me to have given way to more anodyne forms. What's worrying today is that we can no longer distinguish the presentation of anxiety from a certain quietism, while 'the gallery' has once again become theestablishment space of culture, albeit a post-postmodern one. Perhaps the kind of project anticipated by LI is now integrated as a whole as a sanctioned form of communication. It has found its place as the passive contemplation of a projectlessness that nurtures, at best, the desperate hope of preserving thought in a sequestered space. Finally, the edifying function of anxiety is integrated into the circulatory system of the cultural and communicational industry, which Lyotard wanted to delay or obstruct with his dark, grey labyrinth. In Lyotard's terms, we could say that today's exhibitions, with their catalogs full of philosophical essays, and eclectic objects that speculate on various 'materials', 'objects' and 'things' under a quasi-philosophical rubric, provoke a definite ambivalence about knowing the 'inhuman' they serve and serve us: a reflection that erodes self-certainty and exposes us to the immanent crisis of capital; or the accelerated circulation of messages capable of comforting and reassuring us at the very moment they lubricate the development and extraction of surplus-value; the child who speaks in an extraterritorial language, or the infantilized adult of capital, relay for the platitudes of cultural literacy and self-satisfied contemplation? This is what Felicia Miller-Frank has called Lyotard's “Homeopathic Indetermination”, which has become endemic in contemporary art today: the presentation of a privileged place where we can contemplate the spectacle of a disquiet that is no longer a disquiet by dint of being relaunched, refreshed, into circulation. * We can also observe that the extension of the conception of the two inhumans into the philosophical mise en spectacle of contemporary art leads to an inability to think about the problematic nature of the contemporary, which includes many other elements than this specular tête-à-tête of art and philosophy: science, technology and industrial production are just as much part of the history of problems and the dramatization of the idea in the calendar of the hypercritical time we live in. Here again, LI represents a pivotal moment. Let's not forget that the project was initiated by the CCI, Centre pour la Création Industrielle, the Centre Pompidou body responsible for questioning industrial and technological production. Interestingly, the CCI was excluded from the Centre the following year, and was no longer part of its “polyvalence” after Les Immateriaux. The production field was thus excluded from the temple! All this to say that there's something rotten in the kingdom of contemporary art, as we all know. It's a systemic state of affairs, no doubt, but it's up to artists to resist, and to invent their own means of production, with perhaps, in the 10/11

end, other means of production for an art that can no longer be immediately stamped “contemporary”. I'll end with this prescription from Lyotard: There's a gap between what we're offered as a little life, and the enormous capacities for experimentation and their social repercussions, opened up by Technoscience. People are very sensitive to this. Leading a dog's life while you're roaming the cosmos, etc... A laboratory humanity, i.e. one that experiments, would be the best way out of the crisis. But you can't build a laboratory in a temple...or in a hypermarket...or in a stock exchange! 11/11

readthis.wtf /writing/model-farm/ Model Farm - 2016 The model does not put technology ‘inside’ a ‘society,’ but sees a technological totality as the armature of the social itself. 1/9

Benjamin Bratton, The Stack 1 Among the many interviews I’ve conducted over the past three years, the Chief Data Scientist of a much-admired Silicon Valley company that develops applications to improve students’ learning told me, “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us”. Shoshana Zuboff, ‘The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism’, Frankfurter Allgemeine 25 May 2016. What would it mean to make a ‘portrait of contemporary life’ and the subjects who live it? Such a portrait might be conceived as a triptych: In a first scene, apparently autonomous and independent individuals, their interaction limited to discrete exchanges, participate in a performance or game which, while evidently obeying certain rules, remains enigmatic to the viewer; Elsewhere, a remote, impenetrable monolith silently processes their moves, modulates the parameters of the game, and records and tabulates its outputs; thirdly, we see the power source of this computational cortex: a vast, automated machine for harvesting energy from a sun whose cyclical path across the sky synchronises the ‘real-time’ rhythm of all three scenes. As a viewer, you are deprived of anything to identify with in these strange, abstracted scenes; yet you cannot avoid the awareness that this is somehow familiar terrain. It is precisely this hiatus in identification that should interest us here. For, in this triptych of The Game, The Farm, and The Power Source, what presides over the long circuit between infrastructural power and the choreographing of bodies and minds is a certain model and modelling of the individual, through which the recognition of contemporary subjects and their social milieu is placed into tension. The Game 2/9

In the late twentieth century, ‘gamification’ emerged as a term to designate the computational modelling of personal and social intercourse as a codified set of ‘moves’ linked to competitive goals. The use of game-like procedures to elicit engagement and motivation and to track interactions, a staple of social media and viral advertising, has recently made inroads into practices of governmentality, where accountability, quantification, and the inducements of punishment and reward are increasingly moulding political participation, education, and social policy to the axioms of capitalist economics. Here the tendency of such models to react back onto social practices themselves, so that they appear as the ‘natural’ grammar of human interaction, may mark a crucial point in the absorption of life into the real abstractions of capital. In John Gerrard’s Exercise (Dunhuang) 2014 we are invited to view the scene of gamification itself from three different points of view: from the ground where we see, plotting their paths through a bare landscape, eerily automated figures whose ritualised encounters leave only one player standing; from the overhead perspective of a surveilling power (a viewpoint not unlike that of the drone, another contemporary machine that reduces human affairs—in this case, the violence of warfare and bloodshed—to the model of a videogame); and from directly above, in a satellite view where the players become single data-points, and the game environment as a whole comes into view. In each of these positions of increasing scope and mastery, our viewpoint orbits around the player who is the current ‘winner’. This terrain is configured for machine vision. The paths trodden by the players, and the performance they present to us, are choreographed by an algorithmic game-engine. And while its shifting configurations may seem to emerge from the autonomous movements of the players, this apparent lack of global control conceals more subtle modes of cultivation. For what is designated by ‘gamification’ is not exactly playful: inevitably, the data points targeted and collated are those amenable to measurement, comparison, and the determination of value. It is these imperatives that ultimately impose a constraint on the ‘moves’ that will be registered, the variable rewards that will be enjoyed, and the stimulating signals that solicit the players’ attention and participation.2 The Farm 3/9

In the second scene we see an immense factory, flanked by columns of power transformers which attest to its productive capacity. But what is being produced here? Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) 2015, Gerrard’s portrait of a datacentre, presents a counterpoint to one of his earlier works, Sow Farm (Near Libbey, Oklahoma) 2009, which depicts an agricultural facility located in the same area, with distinct similarities that go beyond its geographical isolation and its functional architecture. In this sow farm animals are housed in a massive shed, fed by automatic feeders, and left unattended for months until they are picked up and transported for slaughter. Like the datacentre, this secluded unit exemplifies the way in which concentrated production remains invisible to the distributed world of consumption that it serves. The data ‘farm’ provides an image of concentrated capital power that is all the more perplexing, since it is largely dedicated to providing services that are ‘free’ and voluntarily consumed, but it nevertheless produces value from this consumption. This operation brings into view another dimension of invisibility: the computational processes taking place in such data centres operate well below the threshold of human perception. As such, while human subjects may interact with them, and indeed increasingly rely on their output for information, guidance, and even education, what is processed in The Farm are discrete, asignifying signals whose aggregation and analysis yields models at odds with our traditional understanding of ourselves. By harnessing social reciprocity and cognitive response patterns as their raw materials, The Farm invites us to interact with, and as, these models. This is a centralised facility for the cultivation of attention and for the rendering of human interactions into valuable data; but it also plays a part in producing a specific image of the individual as data-trail or game-history. The Power Source 4/9

The final scene yields a deeper account of this disarticulation between apparently decentralised play and the industrial scale and centralisation of its operations. As the ‘black box’ of The Farm models individuals while claiming to facilitate their increased autonomy, it also tends to veil the sources of its power behind the effortless surfaces of the ‘virtual’. Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) 2014, with its concentric array of automated mirrors, exhibits the synchronisation of these weightless interactions with the large-scale extraction that powers their electronic supports. The transcendent geometry of this gigantic apparatus gives it the air of an efficiently engineered realization of solar worship. Stripped of all religious connotation, however, it speaks of the material dependency of a global social structure on the continued extraction of energy. To the apparent horizontality of The Game, and the convergence of its data in the black box of The Farm, The Power Source adds a final, resolute verticality: tracking the path of the sun, its automated hall of mirrors focalise the intricate complexities of global networks, resolving them into mere tributaries of a burning ball of gas. On Individuation 5/9

And yet the ‘cognitive material’ necessary for this entire operation goes unaccounted for in the circuit. Where do the subjects who play the game come from? This is a question that falls outside the totalizing closed loop of the Game, the Farm, and the Power Source. Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon,3 philosopher Bernard Stiegler defines two defining traits of the individual: 1. A psychic individual is neither a stable state nor an identity but a phase in a process through which she never ceases to transform herself. 2. This process of psychic individuation is only truly accomplished to the extent that it is inscribed in a process of collective or social individuation.4 According to Stiegler, it is the cultivation of attentional forms—the gradual forming of mental capacity through interpersonal care and contact—that generates individual subjects within a social milieu: It is only possible to have this apprenticeship on one’s own that we call experience on condition of knowing how to pay attention: individual experience, which is in effect the conquest of autonomy, supposes that one has received as heritage, through education, the lessons of collective experience out of which the attentional forms are elaborated. Collective experience itself comes from what were once individual experiences that have become collective through a process of transindividuation.5 The social is therefore reproduced through the necessary process of psychic individuation, but this individuation— the realisation of culture in the singular—is also a condition for the continued growth and transformation of the social. Furthermore, these processes themselves cannot be abstracted from the modes of inscription and recording in which culture is materialised, the material techniques that enable the transmission of forms and the creation of a common space and time.6 The cultivation of individuals thus also depends upon the mobilisation of memory traces that underwrite transindividuation. Consequently, when the archives and institutions of a common culture are progressively decanted into a memorysystem that exists primarily to produce value from quantifiable data and to farm cognitive resources, and when the cultivation of attention is entrusted to this system, the process of transindividuation is transformed and the ‘game of life’ takes a new turn. This event imparts a subtle difference to the meaning of autonomy: rather than being a hardwon capacity which is inseparable from the individual’s social history, autonomy is now predicated of individuals as such, who simply do not exist prior to their entry into The Game. Such is the image of the individual that accompanies a ‘new process of psychic and collective individuation that emerges at the heart of […] a network society of planetary proportions’;7 one where the ‘rules of the game’ lead to the dissolution of politics as surely as they elide the question of individuation. Philosopher and mathematician Gilles Châtelet argues that the link between individuation and politics is precisely what is suppressed by the pseudoscientific alibis employed to naturalize ‘market democracy’. The neoliberal concepts of spontaneous order, catallaxy, emergence, and the discourses of cybernetics and networks merely extend and impart a futuristic sheen to early liberal discourses of ‘political arithmetic’ and ‘social physics’. The latter championed a naturalistic conception of the social in which order spontaneously emerges from discrete interactions between individuals, and on this basis sought to defend the economic individual against the hindrances of political intervention while stringently ignoring the inherently political and extra-economic process of individuation.8 Likewise, the ‘methodological individualism’ at the heart of neoliberal economics proceeds from the theoretical fiction of fully6/9

formed, fully independent, and equivalent agents meeting innocently and symmetrically on a level terrain. Any order that exists in the social is seen to emerge not from the historically-grounded process of transindividuation, but purely from the interplay of these atomic individuals, with the pseudoscientific figures of chaos, complexity, and emergence dissimulating the conditions under which such ‘units’ become available. Such an abstraction of course has its roots in the exclusion of social reproduction (and especially the work of mothers) from the economic field and thus from a whole model of social reality. The further extension of this model through the gamification of the apparatus of socialisation, education, and social support merely confirms this exclusion and invisibility. For Châtelet, as for Stiegler, if one can speak of a ‘social dynamics’, what marks it out from any such ‘social physics’ is the crucial role of individuation, which demands resources and modes of generosity that cannot be integrated into the ‘cybernetic vaudeville’ of transactional scenarios populated by the gamified psychology of readymade ‘rational agents’.9 If, as Châtelet argues, neoliberal economics emerges from a flawed psychology endebted to game theory,10 the concerted effort to shape the social around its theoretical model via the mediation of technical machines inevitably leads both to the internalisation of the model and to the withering away of politics. As the model gradually shapes the real it is supposed to model, politics becomes a kind of ‘photocopy’ of the economy: established as ‘natural’ units, atomic individuals can be subjected to a political arithmetic: they are statistically analysed in order to detect laws in their movements and reactions, and collective identity is redefined in terms of the modulation of these statistical masses. This depoliticisation also implies a full-on assault against the notion of a concretely singular individual, the individual who is properly psychically and socially individuated: the numerical ‘certainties’ proffered by neoliberal economics as evidence of its objectivity ‘are obtained by way of the “clarity” of the self-evidence of statistics, which effaces the conditions of the genesis of the individuals upon whom statistics does its work’.11 On the level of the individual, in the context of what is called the attention economy, the forming of attention that is a constitutive part of individuation is replaced by a mere vigilance to signals: the injunction to insert oneself into a transglobal flow of continuous alerts, calls for action, polling points, and pattern-recognitions, a machinic semiotics modulated algorithmically at infra-cognitive speeds where every interaction immediately generates yet more demands for attention, and where every response is fed back to The Farm, which now gradually absorbs the functions of political administration. According to Châtelet what emerges from this political programme in the guise of the obsolescence of politics is a ‘painless scientific management’ of the social that places its trust in automated modulation and, where it intervenes, does so only to optimize the ‘natural’ order. Against the claim that such a ‘cyberpolitics’ boasts the virtues of transparency and decentralisation, Châtelet argues that neoliberal politics continues to establish centres of administration, political analogs of the ‘Invisible Hand’ of economics: black boxes, machines of governmentality that process inputs and produce optimized outputs, with politics becoming nothing more than the supply and demand of political services (a trend now observable in the privatization and technical automation of ‘government services’, lauded as an advance in democracy and transparency). Economics and politics thus converge, entering into an apparently spontaneous immanence that is, in fact, governed by a masked transcendence. Despite their idealisation as natural principles, the Invisible Hand and Black Box belong to a model contrived and maintained by concentrated centres of power.12 The resources of individualization—care, attention, and education—thus become nothing but another ‘rare resource’, unequally distributed and optimized through ‘consensual engineering’ to ensure the ‘equilibrium’ of equal atoms of opinion. This integration is consummated by the installation of a ‘microphysics of obedience’, or what 7/9

Châtelet calls a neurocracy: the ultimate colonisation of the brain that permits the cybernetic administration of populations to close in on the ‘absolute zero of politics’. On a finer scale yet than the isolated units of atomised individuals, cybernetics extends the automated system of modulation into the brain itself through the continual measurement and fabrication of behaviours.13 At the limit, brains become nothing more than a passive surface of inscription; receptacles formed by and reinforcing a generalised econometric model which is realising itself in the organic fabric of bodies. Where Stiegler warns that a ‘being that has not been educated, whose attention has not been formed to any extent […] does not have a mind’,14 Châtelet suggests that such beings are nothing short of ‘cognitive cattle’ whose cogitations are cultivated only in so far as they can be profitably harvested: Neurolivestock: the self-regulating raw material of a market as predictable and as homogeneous as a perfect gas, a matter counted in atoms of distress, stripped of all powers of negotiation, renting out their mental space, brain by brain.15 No doubt this vision seems like a distant science-fictional dystopia; yet the contemporary figures of social gamification—not only the compulsive checking of messages, statuses, and ‘likes’, but the plugging-in of schoolchildren to performance monitoring, gamified teaching, and dynamic information resources—are indeed becoming little more than subconscious cognitive servomechanisms of capitalism, within a world in which the individual is increasingly managed by networks of automated sensors, visual media, and soft disciplinary mechanisms; in which information circulates at a speed that outstrips human cognition, tending to draw on the social body in ways that have less to do with the cultivation of attention than with a modulation of cognitive bodies as elements in an electronic choreography attuned to the production of exchange value—precisely what Gilles Deleuze called the ‘control society’.16 Three Scenes In his threefold portrait of contemporary life, John Gerrard gives us a less pointedly political vision, yet one that is more disturbing precisely because it is presented visually, in the alluring mode of this model’s own high-resolution self-representation. These are not just moving images, but scale models of a totalising global machine, rendered in the media that are its basic mechanisms (the medium of the algorithm, the digital model, and the flat display that is the screening surface for all of our social and personal play, and increasingly the window into our selves). On the horizon of these three virtual worlds, there appears our own: a world governed by an articulation between the apparently horizontal world of The Game and its atomised players, the silent centralized administration of this game and the cultivation of its players by The Farm, and the remote fuelling of this whole circuit by The Power Source. If today ‘transindividuation has become the object of industrial technology’—and the object of a ‘social engineering which aims to render […] the social relation […] industrially discretisable, reproducible, standardisable, calculable and controllable by automata’,17 such a gamification of the social implies the progressive disappearance, or at least transformation, of the kinds of subjects that once seeded it with cognitive raw material. In the circulation of continually fragmented, analysed, and reaggregated signals, the social fiction of personhood is preserved only in so far as it serves as a motivation for entering The Game: self-realisation, personal growth, learning outcomes, and social reputation, tracked and fed back to The Farm. Gerrard’s three scenes also serve to further expose the relation between power and visibility. Firstly, the quasiindividual reduced to a set of data-points is ‘incarnated’ in the figures of the players on Dunhuang’s landscape, 8/9

making their play into a performance and inducing an uneasy identification with the algorithmic choreography of their gestures (The Game). Secondly, the illusion of a quasi-natural ‘self-organization’ is challenged by bringing into the public eye the ‘more or less centralised organs which have de facto control over the circuits of transindividuation’18 (The Farm). And finally, an occult figure stands as a monument to the sublimation of energy required for the continued enforcement of this ‘second nature’—a scale-model of the social predicated in the last instance on a planetary-scale extraction and transduction of energy (The Power Source). In this triptych you may see yourself through the compound eyes of another: a vision in which your place in the game is ‘the real you’. For the vocation of the portraitist consists in condensing and rendering visible a movement of subjective life that does not reveal itself to everyday perception, yet strikes us with a shock of recognition. 9/9

readthis.wtf /writing/synthetic-listener/ Synthetic Listener - 2016 1. Into The Forest There is sound. And therefore—since what is meant by ‘sound’ can’t be adequately captured by the mere description of physical compression waves, since sound must also be perceived and recognized in order for it to be sound—there are listeners. But who, or what, listens? I ask this question here in order to inquire about the the relation between sound and the subject, and the part that sound plays in the production of the capitalist subject; and to speculate on how the possibilities of the creative use of synthetic sound might extend beyond the production and reproduction of such subjects. So it’s the world we live in now—a world of sound that is synthetic, artificial, acousmatic, technically dissected and reassembled, reproduced, and transmitted—that I want to examine. But to begin with, I want to take you elsewhere, into one of those environments to which sound theorists often turn when seeking a natural, original, or authentic world of sound with which to counter the synthetic soundscape of the contemporary world: we’ll go to the forest, where, before pitching your tent, I want you to lay down on the ground and listen. Firstly, discontinuous clusters of birdsong form the evanescent constellations of a sonic firmament, marking out a space given volume and animation by the scattering of their punctual, irregular refrains; a space which is further filled out and textured by the rustling of leaves and foliage manifesting the passage of the breeze, and the trickling of water from a nearby stream; all of these combining to produce a gently stimulating auditory texture which, while complex and unpredictable in its detail, is easily relegated to being a background ambience, relaxing and unthreatening, where the pressures of the contemporary world, sonic and otherwise, can be allowed to recede, where there is nothing out of place. A world-picture that seems whole and integrated, as does the auditory subject contemplating it. Then, repeated shockwaves, faint but palpable, pass from the earth into your body, transmitted directly into your bones, their vibrations damped by your flesh; in itself this series of physical occurrences offers little information, but, supplemented by a series of dull thuds carried through the air to your ears, it enables you to deduce the repeated swings of an axe as someone chops wood for the campfire nearby; and even to anticipate the next in the rhythmic series of blows, prompting the beginnings of a musical response. You are already between listeners separated by millenia. When the amphibians left the seas two or three hundred million years ago, with their heads resting on the ground, they relied entirely on bone conduction of vibration for hearing. The vibrations in the earth were transmitted from the bones of their lower jaws to the bone surrounding the inner ear. It was only slowly that their organs, adapted to picking up vibrations in the denser medium of water, adapted to airborne sound. 1/9

And do you think our closer ancestors, those who hunted and gathered, found the sounds of the forest relaxing? Weren’t they instead on the alert for animals, either predator or prey, always vigilant, and no doubt too attuned to the environment to perceive it as a mere generic ambience? That sylvan atmosphere that you are enjoying is the product of a very modern coding, the artefact of a collective ear belonging to a culture that has tamed and subsequently pastoralised nature. As darkness falls, suddenly behind your head you hear a scuffling that is unmistakeably the movement of a fellow animal: you have encroached upon the ecological niche of some other creature. Your listening now places you within a territorial system, alerted to a possible threat, and you instinctively use the sound to gauge the size of the animal, its exact spatial location, and its relative position in the predatory chain, straining your ears to pick up more information. But eventually the creature retreats back across the forest floor, an unknown. To calm your nerves, you reach out and turn on the radio. You easily switch to a new mode of listening, not at all bothered by the incongruity of this acousmatic emission, the sudden appearance of a remotely reproduced, heavily coded, sophisticated sonic form in the midst of the peaceful scene. A song from the early 90s is playing and, as your body performs micro-gestures synchronised to its cadences, you are flooded by memories of the first time, and every subsequent time, that you heard it: comforted, nostalgic maybe. The song ends, and the voice of the announcer now brings you to yourself, in a voice addressed to nobody in particular, activating another part of your brain that is an evolutionary latecomer, making you yet another kind of listener, an instantiation of a general type, a listener with language, but who can only receive, and whose attention is commanded from afar. And then… awareness of another human body, warm against yours, an arm sliding around you, and—as close as can be to the delicate shell of the ear, a familiar mouth shaping the syllables of your own name: a unique sound of which this specific enunciation—its singular timbre and articulation inextricable from the warm breath and the scent of the body and the intimate familiarity—may well rouse animal depths and plunge you into erotic revery, giving ‘the impression’, as Proust says, in a volume concerned both with love and with names, ‘of having been held, for a moment, in her mouth, naked’—yet at the same time, literally by the same token, it brings forth a whole host of other virtual figures: Parents, Teachers, Bosses, everyone who has ever employed your name to summon, praise, or chastise you, used this sound to secure you firmly not only within language, but also within identity, and in a relation to authority, reaffirming your proper place within yet another territorial system. A sonic marker, a unit of articulation that stitches together the I that you are here, with your lover, in the forest clearing, with every other instance of you across space and time, past and future: a call that gathers you into yourself, and which, because it plays this critical role, is at once transparent—usually not even consciously registered as a sound—and impossible for your ear to ignore: your own involuntary response to it confirms its effective designation of your place in the order of identities. But don’t let any of this consciously enter your mind now; just allow yourself to be lulled by the warmth and the caressing rustle of the trees, awaiting the intonation of another magical formula. Here it comes: I … love … DING Interrupting, cutting through this patchwork of sounds and territories, and abruptly revealing its intersection with another fabric, a friendly yet implacably firm tone shatters the calm; the sound is certainly located in physical proximity to you, indeed your hand reflexively, unconsciously gropes in the dark for the device that emitted it. But the sound has already instantaneously summoned and superimposed upon the scene yet another set of coordinates. They descend like a cage, placing you with utmost precision at a virtual point that is no less definitive of your identity than the name whispered in your ear. This emplacement brings with it a new set of duties: a demand to participate, 2/9

to represent yourself, and to enter into circulation. Regardless of the channel or interlocutor, no matter what the nature of the message—emoji fun, work email, voicemail notification, trending topic, software update, like or unfriend —your ear-brain registers the formal significance of this sound as immediately as the alert gazelle tenses at the crunching of a twig beneath a predator’s paw: it means that the network is calling you to insert yourself into it once more. Once more. This ‘once more’ is common to all these registers of sound and listening: it’s a matter of refrains, repetitions, the inculcation of response patterns: listening is a training, a discipline, and this is the case at the level of the evolution of the species, of the social, the development of the individual, and, as we’ll see, even that of the subindividual. For sound to be truly heard it has to be recognized, and to be re-cognized in this way, it must already be a repetition, even if it repeats something that one has not lived oneself—even if it triggers a phylogenetic rather than an epigenetic memory—for the amphibian, the monkey, and the hunter-gatherer within you are still listening as intently as the teenage you who first heard that song on the radio. The listener is stratified, ancient and antediluvian as well as modern and cultured, an impersonal set of responses as well as an individual endowed with a personal history, And, because what we call sound is appropriated by a whole range of instinctive and cognitive operations, listening is not whole, or one phenomenon. It’s a result of the harnessing of environmental signals by a range of neural, social, psychological, cognitive, and cultural capacities. Therefore, while of course there is synthetic sound—sound which is not produced directly by resonating bodies, but constructed according to some electronic or digital protocol—before we examine and question our response to it, we need to recognise that, composed of this multiplicity of capacities for the utilisation of physical sound waves— capacities which continue to be reconfigured and reengineered by human culture, precisely through new repetitions and new disciplines—the listener is not an analytic unity, a centre of consciousness that simply receives and processes sound. The listener is also and already synthetic, and continues to be remixed and reengineered today. 2. Integration Listening is, in effect, a patchwork of modular systems that evolved at different periods during the history of the species. In turn, they are integrated with the other senses in order to produce an integral and coherent image of the world and of the self. If, in everyday life, these modules succeed in producing such a coherent image, this is no doubt because, for the most part, our environmental miliieu was relatively stable throughout the evolution of homo sapiens, and remains relatively stable within our individual lifetimes, never straying far outside of the parameters within which our ancestors lived. There is undoubted evolutionary advantage in this integration, and our brains serve us remarkably well in harmonising the data of our senses to identify both stable, identifiable and localisable objects, and patterns of change. But, in evolutionary terms, we shouldn’t make the mistake of understanding the auditory system teleologically, as if its current configuration were, as a whole, an adaptive trait, or essentially attuned to an accurate representation of reality; rather, it results from the slow integration of multiple capacities each of which was adaptive at some time during our long history. In addition, traits that were once valuable for survival later became supernumerary as environmental constraints were removed by the development of more sophisticated social and cultural structures; they therefore became a kind of surplus, available to be appropriated for other uses. As Gary Tomlinson shows in his remarkable book 1,000,000 Years of Music, our capacity for musical perception and activity owes to a convergence of cognitive and motor system capacities that had been adaptive for entirely other reasons. 3/9

The synthesis of physical sound waves into something that is heard takes place at many different stages: of course, there is information in the sound waves themselves, but these are subject to physiological mediation, the inner ear carries out complex transformation, limitation and selection of the waveform, which is then converted to neural stimulus, and processed by many different areas of the brain. Many times the listener needs to answer a series of apparently simple problems: how many sound sources? What is their location? Are the discontinuities I hear breaks in one sound or the end of one and the beginning of another? Should multiple groups of sound be understood as one complex sound, or several simpler ones? To take just one example of research into the cognitive mechanisms that resolve such questions, Alfred Bregman’s work on Auditory Scene Analysis concerns the way in which we partition sound into separate streams that we take to be telling us about ‘the same’ environmental source or event. The experiments he presents, involve changing various parameters – separation in time or frequency, difference in timbre – in order to reveal the threshold where the perceptual allocation of some segment of the sound to one object rather than another takes place. What ASA aims at, therefore, is a ‘map’ of the allocation mechanisms that have proved instrumental to the species. Bregman’s ‘continuity illusion’ specifies conditions under which a sound is ‘heard’ to continue ‘behind‘ a louder interrupting sound when, in fact, it is not present. This is an example of default assumptions which, in general, were of value to the organism, but which nonetheless may not accurately represent the reality of environmental signals. Likewise, psychoacousticians Kubovy and Van Valkenburg present experiments which show how, in hearing, Spatialisation (whereness) is separated from identification (whatness) whereas in vision they can’t be dissociated, so that careful engineering of a signal can produce an ‘object’ that is ‘blurred’ across multiple spatial locations. What appears when we probe into the cracks between the modules that make the patchwork of listening are hallucinations: the systems begin to disagree with each other, or their inbuilt functional assumptions misfire, and hallucinatory objects begin to appear. And hallucination disintegrates not only the object of hearing, but the subject too. Our spontaneous, integrated image of the world becomes denaturalised , our stable allocation of sensory phenomena to something ‘out there’ , and our integration of sensory data into a coherent whole is challenged by synthetically constructed stimuli: it no longer appears as a natural and transparent assumption. What such effects reveal is that, within the field of what is heard, there are a whole range of experiences that fall outside of the spontaneous image of perceiver and object understood as fixed instances, and of auditory perception understood as a unified system for the re-presentation of an object that belongs to a coherent world ‘out there’. Opportunities to provoke such hallucinations grow as we investigate the structure of auditory perception, rather than trusting in the manifest, integrated image of the soundscape that we have been disciplined to accept and expect, across our own lifetimes and those of our ancestors. In this way, the technical analysis of sound and listening produce a kind of extravagant surplus: they reveal both that the virtuality of listening extends beyond the unified image of world and self, and that it contains faultlines where what is heard can no longer be attributed straightforwardly to an environmental source. In effectively turning sound into a type of electronic writing that can be manipulated and rearticulated, the technical tools of synthesis help to reveal the synthetic nature of listening itself. 3. Capitalism, subjectivation, sound So what is happening to sound and listening today, under these conditions? 4/9

What is interesting about the use of sound in the capitalist system of control is the way in which it avails itself, with the help of technical systems, of the inherently synthetic character of sound and listening, while at the same time reimposing the integrated image of the self. As Deleuze and Guattari say memorably somewhere in their magnum opus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, ‘capitalism invents nothing’. This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Capitalism is not a social system: it is, rather, the progressive disassembly of all social systems and the reassembly of their component parts according to the profit axiomatic. And for capitalism, anything goes, so long as it can be used and integrated with this primary axiom. Capitalism is cyberpunk, it uses whatever it can find to assemble itself. If we want to understand what a contemporary politics of sound might be, therefore, we have to take our lead from Capitalism, which doesn’t operate on the basis of any ‘theory’ or ‘ontology’ of sound, and doesn’t need to essentialise any of the various modes of listening: it is ready to instrumentalize without compunction any of the different registers of hearing and listening that we mentioned above: from the most primal animal response to sound, to the most high-level capacities for extracting inner meaning from subtle sonic articulations. As Félix Guattari shows in his analysis of capitalism as a semiotic system, the production of subjects within the capitalism is remarkable for its powerful articulation of two processes: social subjection, and machinic enslavement. Operating via what he calls asignifying semiotics—that is, non-referential signs which do not pass via language but instead address and direct bodies and brains on a sub-personal level—the operations of machinic enslavement (or rather, slaving: what is in question here is the use of human capacities as cybernetic servomechanisms) are indifferent to the inherited symbolic order, interfering with its functions and potentially threatening it with obsolescence and disintegration. When the cognitive capacities of the human are addressed not at the level of a whole, intact subject, but through stimuli that are processed below the level of conscious perception, doesn’t this corrode the self? It produces a world in which, rather than facing each other as personalised subjects of language and identity, humans are integrated into a cybernetic system of control with which they interact through microgestures, the emission of informational fragments, and semi-unconscious responses to stimuli. This is what Deleuze presciently diagnosed as the ‘control society’—in which human parts are integrated via processes of modulation, by way of asignifying semiotics, rather than via discipline and punishment by way of physical coercion and symbolic violence. However, since it needs to reproduce narcissist workers-consumers with a sense of self, and the concomitant social relations, the control society cannot do without a continually recalibrated complementary process of social subjection, which endlessly recycles the image of personhood. It is this process that decants decoded flows back into the readymade vessels of the symbolic order, ensuring that there are persons to desire, consume, and work. Indeed, what is notable is the plasticity that these complementary processes lend to each other: flows of decoded machinic signs that would seem to destabilise the very notion and experience of subjecthood are in fact mobilized to reinvigorate obsolescent myths of individual agency. While on the other hand, performances of social cohesion and individual expression are increasingly obtained through subscription to informatic ‘services’ for which human subjects are so many atomized content-providers. Two refrains operating on different scales yet set in resonance with each other. The ubiquitous smartphone in many ways acts as a kind of switching station between these two processes. While ownership and operation of the device operates as an index of selfhood and identity, the original function of the telephone has shifted. It is no longer an acousmatic extension of bonding and identity-reinforcement through 5/9

language. The linguistic-signifier function of the telephone has gradually been sidelined by other systems: by the injunction to insert one’s sensorium into a transglobal flow of continuous alerts, calls for action, polling points and pattern-precognitions, modulated algorithmically at infra-cognitive speeds, where every interaction immediately generates yet more demands for attention. While the ‘content’ resembles a high-octane remix of simian bonding, aggression, group dynamics and courtship behaviors, at the machinic level this ostensible content is a mere pretext for the reinforcement of compulsions that ensure absorption into the profitable circulation of data: a new kind of living that is at once consumption and labour. As we understood on our forest trip, the contrast between this multimodal harassment and the obsolete model of telephony—between the subjective intimacy of speech and a machinic enslavement to triggers and alerts—indexes different modes of audition. And this explains the shifting function of the telephone. As explored at length by Derrida and his successors, the immediacy of hearing oneself speak is the originary model for a phenomenological transparency and intimate self-presence, vouching for a subjective interiority unassailable by the empirical world, which it thus deposes into a secondary register, that of inert and lifeless space. The transparency of signification in spoken language eclipses the sonorous nature of speech, the physicality of its source and its medium of transmission. In speaking to another, this shared interiority burrows under the space where the voice sounds. As we see with the telephone, even the thickness of technological mediation does not vitiate the magical immediacy of speech. The promises of Skype and Facetime in the present day—‘it’s as if you were right there’—still promise the reinstatement of presence and the disappearance of their own artificial materiality. But the mode of listening involved in alertness to these sounds that channel subjectivity into asignifying circulation, the alerts, pings, and beeps of your smartphone, is different, and perhaps more primordial. While it is the product of the upfront, brightly-lit spaces of online communication, the effective operation of these alerts could well be qualified as crepuscular and animal, if Nietzsche is right to say that the ear is ‘the organ of fear’, and that it could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life of the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has ever been. The primordiality of this connection with fear and vigilance makes these sounds a distressed acousmatics. But once again, in capitalism, this reflex animal response is hooked up to the circuits of hypercomplex digital networks; but only so as to elicit symbolic exchanges that reinforce the most banal routines of subjectivity and signification, once again ensuring the disappearance of material operations into the phantom world of subjective interiority. The successful articulation of these two apparently disparate registers is the final measure of the achievement of capitalist subjectivation: social media interfaces mesh with unreflective compulsive behavior verging on the addictive, while on the level of ‘content’ they reinforce the cult of individual expression and identity-formation. This is a form of subjectivation that operates both through plugging bodies into technologically decoded flows and through discursive reinforcements of the symbolic order. It is a subjectivation that at once names faces, and modulates ‘dividuals’. It instrumentalizes both the manifest image of phenomenological self-presence and the scientific image of the animal body as an involuntary signal-processor. If, as we have seen, the scientific and technical analysis of sense data and its reconstruction into asignifying semiotics harbors the potential to unlock affects and experiences that escape discursive overcoding, in capitalism they become unprecedented artificial fortifications for social subjection. This is a subjectivation-machine that both subverts and reinforces the supposed polarity of inside and outside—without ever perishing from this ‘contradiction’. 6/9

No wonder, then, that social media, or mediated sociality, tensed between the two major modes of capitalist subjectivation, is now seen to induce both low- and high-level psychopathologies: nervous tics, continual vigilance, compulsive re-checking, and on the other side, a transformation of selfhood into a distressed media performance; and in the auditory realm, the lab-rat shocks of ringtones, idents, bleeps and dings, an asignifying chatter that won’t let you off the hook. For it is all of this, in a sense, that is compacted into that simple, moronic DING, into the mode of listening that it calls for and indeed produces, and the way in which that mode of listening is, at the same time, troubles and reinforces the integrated image of the human self. Sound is precisely playing a crucial role here: it is ensuring control even when you look away from the screen. Since we can never close our ears, the use of sound is a crucial means to cross that last barrier to integrate the human into the control system. The role of sound in the control society could be summed as the extension of control beyond the line of sight. In order to ensure this, sound must be mastered, both in terms of the control of sound sources and the promulgation of sound in space, but also by sound being turned into a form of illiterate, asignifying writing —‘capitalism is profoundly illiterate’, say Deleuze and Guattari—so that it can be codified, articulated, and reassembled as flexibly as possible. And here, at the other pole, we encounter the technocapitalist destiny of the voice. The voice in contemporary capitalism remains a locus of emotional labour; even in the most artificial and cynical setting, such as a call centre conversation, it retains a residual power for comfort and pacification: it reinforces the proper place of the human, for a voice always has a name and a face, and a face always signifies interiority, an interiority that is powerful enough to eclipse the materiality of the sound thorugh which it is rendered present. But we are also all-too-familiar with acousmatic voices in our environment today. Our habituation to them means that we end up reacting to them as pure control signals: these are the voices that bark ‘information’, warnings, and directions at us. With the increasing sophistication of artificial speech voice, however, we will soon go beyond this dichotomy between the human voice and the obviously mechanistic reproduction of it. The grain of the voice, and our emotional reaction to it, all of the subtle sonorous parameters that make speech such a ductile and affecting form of sound that keys into our interior selves and assures us of authentic communication, will soon enter into the loop of control and machinic slaving. We can certainly imagine a Siri that modulates its tone imperceptibly to engineer our mood, or a subscription service that not only says to you, on demand, exactly what you want to hear, in the voice you long to hear it from, but says it exactly how you want to hear it, modulating its timbre to caress those cilia in just the right places. This is what the movie ‘Her’ shows us this, in all its insinuating detail: how a cybernetic future invades the present not in the form of a Terminator-style robot army, but through the intimacy of the voice. Indeed it is quite possible, even given the current state of technology, that on the basis of an archive of voice recordings, one could assemble a virtual persona that would continue to deliver those sensual whispers in your ear even after the death or departure of the loved one. Beyond the mere reproduction or simulation of a person, though, we might ask what kinds of emotions, eroticisms, and disruptions of language could be wrought from this virtual material, made available through the technical manipulation of the voice. But within capitalism, as this process corrodes the self-evident humanity of the voice by delving deeper into the inner articulations of speech, turning it into a form of flexible electronic writing, it will always 7/9

be repurposed in order to ensure the integral image of the human is kept in place. As with the crepuscular signalling of the smartphone, what it decodes with one hand, capitalism puts back into place more effectively with the other. And yet the surplus value produced by these virtualities may begin to creep out, creating unprecedented experiences of listening that cross over, disrupt, interbreed, and clash together the modes of hearing bequeathed to us by our natural and cultural evolution. This pincer movement between the authenticity of the human, as embodied in the voice, and a slaving to the network, as embodied in machinic signalling, leaves unheard a vast surplus of sonic potential, some of which, possibly, would not conform to either the animal response to sound nor the its heavily overcoded symbolic deployment in spoken language. Rather than being used to reproduce the integrated subject, the non-functional potentialities released by our technical probing beneath the surface of sound may allow us to sense and to think a subject of listening that doesn’t yet exist: one that inhabits the interzones of the virtuality of sound, exploring sonic spaces that are not yet subject to any territorial claim. 4. Synthetic Sonic Practice And it is here that we reach the question of synthetic sound. In the performances we are about to hear tonight, what kind of listening will be activated, what kind of listener-subject will be produced? Start with the most standard club track, which in fact bears some resemblance to our forest scene: at first, you are surrounded by an ambient space padded out by a synthetic wash of sounds. An unrecognized noise emerges out of the texture, alerting you to some obscure movement, and then disappearing before it can be identified. Then the kick drum comes in, activating the sensorimotor system, thumping through your chest cavity at the same time as it reaches your ears. A voice, meticulously EQ’d to draw the maximum stimulus from its high frequencies, emits a disconnected series of eroticised, broken syllables, activating the speech centres without producing anything like meaning. The auditory system is bombarded, the activation of different strata of listening is intensified to the point of absurdity, they begin to bleed into one another, and sound becomes only sound, rather than a sign of something else. Yet at a meta-cognitive level, all of these effects are subsumed under a generic categorisation—it is, after all, only another track. That is to say, even sound freed from its human matrix can easily be recaptured. First of all by dismissal—either it is only music, mere entertainment; or it is only noise, and therefore, unworthy of attention, it can be safely ignored, exiled to a space outside of all social significance. Secondly, by being attributed to a charismatic leader, the DJ or musician, so that the sound becomes only an expression of the power of yet another authority figure, and an occasion to worship them, with the audience expecting the expected, and producers reliably delivering it. Thirdly, by museumification, where tracks and soundspaces become exhibits to be appraised, categorised, and treasured as tokens of social esteem and criteria for self-definition and social cohesion—whether you identify as a member of the analog synth club or the extreme noise club. In all of these cases, the listening mode becomes one in which sound is encountered discursively, narcissistically, or not at all. In this sense we could say that synthetic sound is also vulnerable to capture: it, also, can become a double 8/9

articulation between decoded flows and the conventions of social subjection. But the best synthetic sound work testifies to a constant struggle between the disintegration of the integrated auditory subject and its generic subsumption: Personally my favourite moments are when I sound engages me both in extreme sensory attention and in meta-cognitive reflection: when I ask myself why am I listening to this? I am aware, of course, that my listening is governed by the cultural code of its being categorised as music or sound art or noise experiment; and yet the effects it is having on me don’t answer to any known criteria. They scramble the organic functions of listening, and disturb my sense of my self and my motives for listening. The task of working with sound today, perhaps, is to contribute, in the auditory realm, towards what Rimbaud called a ‘deregulation of the senses’, by producing a synthetic delirium that activates, on both a sensory and a metacognitive level, a fuller awareness of the complexity and non-unity of listening, and experimentally opens up its faultlines rather than exploiting them so as to keep sonic intelligence sequestered from its potential. From this point of view, what has been called ‘schizophonia’, in a lament for the passing away of an integrated, wholesome sound-world, may in fact be the revelation of the inherently schizophrenic character of sound and listening. For the forest was never as simple and wholesome as it was painted. This is the schizophrenia of sound mobilized so as to dissipate the illusory figure of an ear that is ‘readymade’, passively receptive to signals that come, equally readymade, from a site that is absolutely other than it . Because when synthetic sound functions at its outer limits, the ear is always also cognitive, it’s a brain-ear that constructs what is heard. And when this process of construction is itself rendered audible, it challenges both the subject and the object of hearing, and their anchoring in a preexisting organic system. No longer subordinated to its organic role in the service of representation, the ear will mutate, engaged in a loop of experimentation and hallucination; where there no longer seems anything ‘natural’ about the referential relation between auditory object and sound source, and where our consensual hallucination of an integrated world heard by a secure subject is placed on the same plane as the heightened hallucinations of synthetic extravagance, producing, even if only momentarily, a listening subject that is the harbinger of a future human, released from both the integrated coordination of its inherited evolutionary capacities, and from capitalism’s reappropriation and exploitation of their differences. Then, the calm ambience of the forest will give way to the delirious, pullulating jungle, seething with inorganic sonic life. 9/9

readthis.wtf /writing/inspection/ Inspection (Notes) - 2016 Hecker’s sound work is just that: he’s not writing music (in any easily recognizable sense), he’s working with sound as a material, and with various techniques for analysing and synthesising sound. So, in collaborating with him, you really have to start with the sound, and what it’s doing in the piece. In this case, what you’ll hear is a progressive approximation of some original source material, which is itself has been synthesized/generated by Hecker. So he’s literally reprocessing his own work here. It’s not that it’s the same signal, degraded to different degrees throughout the piece; it’s actually being algorithmically reconstructed, it’s a resynthesis, a remaking of the original source. And this is done by analysing and coding the original sound using a set of descriptors that are intended to capture aspects of its timbre. Timbre is the peculiar ‘whatness’ of a sound—for instance the difference between an E-flat played on the cello and the same E-flat played on the trombone—and it’s something that, in research on sound and hearing, has proved particularly difficult to define and analyse. It’s something like the final frontier for the science of auditory perception. So what’s really being asked here is what you need to know, what structures you would need to identify, in order to resynthesize something from the ground up. And what it is that characterises the timbre of a particular experience of sound—something very specific and singular that goes beyond description in terms of notes, pitch, duration, and those kinds of traditional musical parameters, although of course there’s a modern tradition of composers explicitly working with timbre, probably starting with Debussy. 1/2

The title ‘Inspection’ is a reference to this process of trying to look inside, to analyze and discover, in order to resynthesize something. I am thinking here about the possibility of capturing a stilled image of ourselves, a definitive image that would almost be like looking at our own death; but how looking at ourselves always creates a further disturbance, another reflection, and changes us into someone else again, so we can never really capture ourselves in that definitive way. From Charon, the boatman who ferries souls of the dead across the styx, I take the theme of a ‘crossing’, getting from one bank to the other, achieving the perfect reproduction and then being at rest, to resonate with the technical construction of the piece. Putting these things together led me from inspection to introspection, and to the process one goes through in trying to, as the oracle said, ‘know thyself’. In the process of psychoanalysis or any psychotherapy, the patient goes through a series of episodes in which they create and recreate their own narratives of themselves and of their lives, using the limited materials available to them at each point, whatever they have managed to understand and become conscious of. Throughout this process they repeat and reiterate their story, and repeatedly remake their image of themselves and of the events they’re dealing with; and it hopefully becomes clearer, but without ever reaching that definitive final stage where everything would be fixed and understood—because then effectively you’d no longer be a living person…! So the libretto ended up in the form of a dialogue between an analyst and his patient, both of which are recited by voices which themselves are synthetic reconstructions of a human voice. The analyst basically lays down the rules, describes abstractly how the process, the crossing, is going to work—so that’s kind of a description, within the piece, of how the piece itself is constructed, and what will happen. Then the patient, or analysand, describes in more immediate and visceral terms his movement from a painful kind of disorientation and inability to discern anything certain, being adrift in this pure noise, crossing through various stages of recognition, repetition, identification of features and landmarks, toward an understanding of the self that is being revealed or constructed. I think for listeners it also becomes evident that the process of listening is also not just a passive process, it’s a constructive, or reconstructive process. Although in a sense Hecker’s work is very objective, coded, and precise, when it’s performed, because the sounds are unfamiliar and unrecognizable, it really brings into the foreground the listener’s role in constructing what’s heard, how it’s heard, and what it might mean. As listeners, when we concentrate, when we try to discern what we’re hearing, we are also reconstructing something from clues and fragments, trying to ensure that sound has recognizable structure, that it can be comprehended, that it can somehow make sense to us, maybe even trying to make it into a kind of music. The listener is also participating in the process of resynthesis here. Ultimately the libretto describes the experience of the piece itself, and dramatises the predicament of its audience. But the words themselves, and the voices they’re spoken in, obviously, also form part of the sonic fabric of the piece —in the end, although they perform this descriptive role, the words themselves are also just another sound material. 2/2

readthis.wtf /writing/return-of-the-faun-formulations/ Return of the Faun (Formulations) - 2016 1/7

These nymphs, I would perpetuate them… The work of Florian Hecker induces a state of mind verging on hallucination: unidentifiable sounds appear and disappear, coalesce and disintegrate, instilling doubt as to what has been heard. Sound is a medium that is conducive to such hallucination: the mind strives to fix and identify the source of what is heard, while sound itself is fugitive and ephemeral. What is heard is already not just sound, but always the memory of sound and the sign of something else. When, as in Hecker’s work, sounds are wholly synthetic, they tend to induce phantom sound sources whose existence owes as much to our own cognition as to the physical waves that reach our ears. As François J. Bonnet puts it, listening often has a fetishistic component: what reaches our ears solicits an active involvement, in which we try to make sense of what we hear, and mould it to our expectations and desires.1 Rather than satisfy this natural tendency to make sense of sounds, Hecker’s synthetic compositions engender doubt and uncertainty. Drawing on scientific studies into the auditory process, he creates synthetic compositions that transform along with the listener’s shifting attention or position within a space, thus producing a participatory dramatization of the auditory process.2 Removed from the laboratory and deployed in a performance space, these techniques produce fascinating, unsettling, and sometimes disorienting effects. The listener has to assume an active part in the performance, assembling an enigmatic multiplicity of elements without any narrative or image to rely on, and ultimately encountering the ‘event’ of hearing itself. A similar fostering of uncertainty appears from the very outset of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune. This strange drama first emerged in the oppressive heat of Tournon, where the poet, far away from the Paris demi-monde, would undergo the ‘crisis’ that led him to radically reconfigure his art. It is a poem in which, in Paul Valéry’s words, ‘an extreme sensuality, an extreme intellectuality, an extreme musicality, combine, intermingle, or oppose each other’. A faun, upon waking, remembers pursuing two beautiful nymphs, and longs to fix their image in his mind: These Nymphs, I would perpetuate them. Yet he is tormented by the possibility that they were merely the imaginary product of his own desire, kindled by the midday sun: Did I love a dream? Unlike that of Descartes, Mallarmé’s ‘method of doubt’ leads not to certainty but to protracted vacillation: as the faun perplexes himself with possible explanations, he becomes entangled in the tenebrous thickets of memory and perception, lost in their ramifying uncertainties: My doubt, hoard of old darkness, ends in a whole stream of subtle branches. No sooner does he wonder whether the nymphs were mere fabulations, occasioned by the sounds of the elements penetrating his dream (the trickling of water, the breeze caressing the foliage) than these elements themselves condense into 2/7

the music of his own pipes drifting through the afternoon air: not a sound of water but my flute’s outpourings murmurs round the thicket. In a series of vignettes within the poem, the faun then exhorts himself to ‘RECOUNT’, ‘REMEMBER’, and ‘PROCLAIM’ the truth of the evanescent event, telling and retelling it—only to conclude that the objects of this pursuit cannot be captured in reality, but only further intensified by his own desire, stoked by the artifices of art. Doubtless it was the enigmatic qualities of Mallarmé’s poem that led Claude Debussy, a habitué of the poet’s celebrated Tuesday evening soirées, to compose his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, first performed in 1894, and which was to divide audiences. Redolent with uncertainty and ambiguity, flouting musical convention and yet certainly not atonal, from the introduction of the main theme with its tense and questioning tritone to the last moments in which, rather than being concluded, it sinks gently back into silent torpor—an inconclusion which according to the composer ‘prolongs the last line where the faun sinks back into his slumber: Farewell, you two; I go to see the shadow you have become’—Debussy’s composition further cultivates the languorous cadences and arabesques of Mallarmé’s verse. Although Debussy described the work as ‘a free illustration’ rather than an attempt at a direct translation of the poem into music, he succeeds not only in evoking the verdant luminosity of the pastoral scene and the faun’s languid reverie, but also in conveying musically his introspective quest. On the cusp of a wave of ardour (the ‘rising movement’ Debussy noted in Mallarmé’s poem), the piece repeatedly lapses back into diffuse tonal ambiguity, only for its theme to be reprised in a new form—as if miming the faun’s perplexed examination of his predicament from different perspectives. In this series of divagations, delicate timbres and tone-colours are touched on without consummation, as the presiding motif returns, shifting, its yearning for resolution never truly satisfied. Debussy’s piece seems to have initially been conceived as a score for a stage production, comprising a prelude, interlude, and ‘final paraphrase’—a project that was never to bear fruit. But Mallarmé’s poem already had a vexed relation with the theatre: he had originally intended it as ‘a poem for reading or for the stage’, insisting that ‘it is not a work that may conceivably be given in the theatre; it demands the theatre’—an opinion not shared by the directors of the Comédie Française, who in 1865 rejected his proposal to stage the piece.3 Periodically revisited and revised by Mallarmé for over a decade, the Faune was not to see the light of day until 1876—in written form, in an edition with illustrations by Edouard Manet. In 1912, however, the Faune did enter the theatre, with Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet set to Debussy’s Prélude. This audacious choreographic debut took archaic Greek art as its model, constraining the dancers to perform strangely flattened, two-dimensional gestures, like animated bas-relief figures—a flatness further emphasized by Léon Bakst’s backdrop, a landscape compressed into a diagrammatic japonism, so that the action takes place entirely within a shallow, frieze-like space. With Nijinsky’s schematic, staccato choreography—an impossible mixture of onerous precision and unabashed sensuality—the Faun appears at once as an animal force of nature and an abstract object of art. Nijinsky thus renders the action of the poem concrete and physical—carnal, even—while retaining a dreamlike quality through the detached, schematised gestures he imposes on the performers’ bodies.4 3/7

https://youtu.be/4qjvGIMeIhU Across art forms and aesthetic dispositions, each of these variations on a theme has refashioned anew the enigmatic figure of the Faun5—a sequence to which Florian Hecker has recently added his own reformulation with FAVN (2016), a performance commissioned by the MMK and Alte Oper Frankfurt as a part of their ‘Musikfest Nachmittag eines Faunes’. With no orchestra, actors, or singers, Hecker leaves the main stage of the Alte Oper almost empty but for an upright loudspeaker (the Faun), a backdrop of bouclé-like fabric, and a coromandel screen. The piece consists of three sound movements diffused throughout the space, accompanied by a libretto recited from the onstage speaker by an electroacoustic voice which, as it cryptically describes the abstract, abrasive sounds that fill the theatre, simultaneously threatens to become itself nothing but sonic matter. 4/7

But who or what exactly is the Faun? Above all, a divided being, negotiating between higher cogitations and lower impulses, between reasoned meditation and the immediacy of the sensual, his longing tempered by doubt, his subsequent hypotheses serving to transform the status of both desire and its object.6 In truth, ‘Faun’ is an empty cipher, the name for a process of questioning whose inconclusive development is the real concern of Mallarmé’s poem, in which we, the audience to this drama, are invited to participate, and which the shifting, hallucinatory modulations of Debussy’s Prélude incline us to reiterate: What, if anything, has taken place? How might obscure sensations, once aroused, be ‘perpetuated’? Mallarmé’s Faune seems to suggest that such perpetuation is to be achieved only by renouncing all mundane determination, and elevating desire to the level of art. Nijinsky’s conclusion will be more sybaritic, and frankly fetishistic: having failed to possess the nymph, the Faun finally satisfies himself by coupling with her discarded veil. As for Debussy, his response to Mallarmé’s Faune is more subtle and difficult to decipher; but in fidelity to the poet, the languorous cadences of the Prélude furnish nothing clear or definite apart from the insistent petitioning of the Faun’s flute; and in closing, the ‘rising movement’ and the shimmering textures of sylvan light and shade seem to melt away like mirages as the orchestra lapses into silence. In responding to the Prélude, Hecker has reprocessed the common threads of this extraordinary sequence through his own electroacoustic composition practice, the fundamental concern of which may also be summed up in a question: What did I hear? Which is also a matter of ‘perpetuation’, given that it belongs to the evanescent nature of sound to continually escape us, so that what is heard is always determined once its material cause has already quit the scene. Informed by research into sound and the auditory process, Hecker’s works use a resolutely non-musical vocabulary drawn from psychoacoustic theory and experiment to probe and interrogate, disintegrate and transform 5/7

the very notion of a ‘sound object’. Although psychoacoustics proposes many different analyses and models of sound, Hecker rarely favours any one approach, instead employing them as an instrumentarium for creating unprecedented sensations. We might indeed say that, in détourning computational techniques designed to analyse sound and hearing, instead turning them into experimental modules for synthesizing new sonorous forms, often chaining these modules together, reformulating the same piece using different methods of synthesis (Formulation DBM), or juxtaposing or superposing fragments from experiments designed to demonstrate competing theories (Event, Stream, Object [2010]), Hecker is effectively constructing thought synthesizers: rather than exemplifying, illustrating, or affirming the sufficient truth of one or another theory of sound, presenting it to be contemplated or thought (as some contemporary artists might), his work uses these models-modules to break theoretical labour out of the textbook and the laboratory, rendering it productive rather than referential,7 a setting which, however elitemodern Hecker’s aesthetic might be, is constitutively impure: namely, the context of human hearing in all its breadth and complexity and multiplicity of function, reducible neither to the simplified control environment of the soundlab nor to the cultural environment, preloaded with codes and formal expectations, of the concert hall. Yet in this new context, ‘Faun’ continues to denote the will to perpetuate transient experience, and to affirm it by way of artifice: for rather than unveiling the objective reality of sound, Hecker’s compositions argue that sensation must be actively constructed in order to be experienced at all. In FAVN, the audience is invited to identify with the protagonist, questioning perceptions, considering multiple hypotheses—and ultimately reaching that irresolute state prized above all by the poet where description gives way to active (re-)creation. We must ourselves ‘integrate’ and ‘perpetuate’ a work that offers no definitive conclusion, but instead activates the contingencies of our sensory organs and exacerbates perceptual equivocation. The work thus takes place not so much on the stage of the Alte Oper (which indeed is all but empty and hosts no ‘action’) as in the intimacy of what Mallarmé called the ‘inner stage’, where ambiguity and absence serve to evoke, between the lines, in the mind of the audience, an Idea that evades explicit presentation (as Mallarmé declares in Igitur, ‘This Story is addressed to the Intelligence of the reader which stages things itself’ ). What is sought in FAVN, though, is not the Mallarméan pure intellectual Idea, but an at once sensate and conceptual grasping of the constitutively synthetic nature of sound. Indeed, Hecker’s Faun speaks in a synthetic voice, constructed by deep neural networks that have captured the specificities of a speaker’s prosody and pronunciation in order to create a chimerical player for this drama.8 Describing the scenography, detailing the movements of the piece and the sensations they excite, the voice also contributes its own ‘verbal music’ to the sonorous texture, soliciting a purely sonic apprehension of its monologue. In this ‘prolonged hesitation between the sound and the sense’ (Valéry), we respond to a voice devoid of the breath of life, a ‘movement in the air’ (Baudelaire) which, nevertheless, invokes the presence of a consciousness capable of meaning. But if, as Mallarmé claims, poetry must necessarily be ‘animated’ by being spoken (if only inwardly), then what kind of artificial life animates these lines? The text, both spoken and read in a leporello distributed to the audience, sets time and space in tension, between the sepulchral stillness of the printed page—or that of digital data —and its sonorous declamation. The complex semantic structure of the libretto, incorporating citations from Mallarmé, Debussy, and others, comprises multiple subordinate clauses folded like a Mallarméan fan, but these ramified depths are at once flattened out and rendered more gnomic by its linear enunciation. FAVN also folds Mallarmé’s insistence on the impossibility of cataloguing the Idea in plain prose onto Hecker’s concern with the ways in which sound is analytically coded, in particular focusing on the concept of timbre—certainly a matter pertinent to the work of Debussy, renowned as the first composer of ‘colours’ rather than melodies, themes, and harmonies, and whose mastery of timbre is exercised magnificently in the burnished golds and sunlit verdancies of the Prélude. The analysis of timbre—a catch-all term referring to those aspects of the ‘thisness’ of a sound that 6/7

escape rudimentary parameters such as pitch and duration—is an active field of research today, with multiple methods proposed for classification and comparison. Notably, it is a concern for commercial companies seeking to recommend music based on similarities that may seem intuitive to human listeners, yet remain opaque to formal analysis. Paradoxically, often the timbral classifications that emerge from this research refer to microsonic traits themselves inaudible to the human ear. In FAVN Hecker effectively reverses the analytical strategies devised for timbral description, using them to synthesize new sonic elements: in the first movement, a Scattering Transform with wavelets is employed to produce an almost featureless ground from which an identifiable signal emerges as the texture is iteratively reprocessed to approximate its timbre. Rather than operating via the superposition of simple tones, wavelets furnish a kind of timbral dictionary; in themselves they correspond to nothing that can be heard in isolation, becoming perceptible only when assembled en masse—at which point one hears not distinct wavelets, but an emergent overall timbre. Fully audible in the second movement, the figure that rises from this obscure ground has been generated using an adaptation of Xenakis’s ‘sieve’ method, which modifies signals by subtraction of a numerical subset—Pulsar Synthesis is used to sieve ‘grains’ of sound which, again, only become audible in multitudes. In the third movement, through the use of Distortion Product Otoacoustic Emissions—multiple tones which combine within the ear to produce an effect both auditory and tactile—sound becomes intimately physical. Where Mallarmé’s Faun was minded to ‘seize without untangling’ the two entwined nymphs, here Hecker’s siren songs penetrate the inner ear, as if to finally prove that what is heard is no external object, but a synthetic product of audition itself. In a divergence from Mallarmé’s argument, across the second and third movements the Faun must admit to being itself a sensory artifact, no different in nature to the quarry it pursues. Here again the audience is invited to identify with its predicament, to understand themselves as automaton-subjects constituted by the serial synthesis of sensations, as the enunciation of the libretto flattens out into a mere sonorous continuum recalling Mallarmé’s ‘vain, monotonous line’. Finally the Faun renounces any will to penetrate the veil of perception, instead hearkening to the play of this ‘diaphanous membrane’ for itself. In acknowledging that subject and object are alike ‘spectres’, the Faun is literally consumed by that which it desired. FAVN thus reiterates the troubled duality of Mallarmé’s ‘verbal music’, in between the sense of words and our sensual response to their sonorous materiality. Again with Mallarmé, the piece also does not shrink from demanding the mental exertion required to dispose fragmented perceptions so that they might, to an audience willing to rise to the task, evoke the unspoken Idea. Namely, far from sensation being unclothed and immediate, once the folds of the brain-ear have received, retained, and redistributed what comes to them, ⦶ it will require an effort of thought to strip bare what has been sensed and to take possession of its spectral, synthetic body. In the words of Debussy: How much must be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling…. Hecker’s works invite their auditors to experience the irresolution of the present moment of audition, as the ‘subtle branches’ of doubt ramify through the auditory cortex, setting in motion processes of retention and protention and eliciting cognitive hypotheses that will, at some future point, finally determine what has been heard. In considering this present-moment-without-presence, the question we used above to characterise Hecker’s work—What did I hear?—might be modified to read What will I have heard? : the present of audition is but the quilting point of a telefaunic future anterior….9 7/7

readthis.wtf /writing/the-fisher-function/ The Punk in the Museum - 2017 Grieving is a bleak business. But how do you grieve for someone who made it his life’s work to face up to the bleakest realities and yet to recognise joy where it existed and to forge hope for the future? A writer who himself grieved the passing of cultural and political possibilities, portrayed an utterly dismaying world populated by malign forces that reached into the very soul, but used writing to understand them, to resist them, and to project new virtual futures? I first met Mark Fisher at Warwick University in the 90s, where his overpowering enthusiasm and determination to ‘produce’ (not just ‘think about’! he would insist) within and across multiple cultural forms and disciplines—and to produce cyberpunk-style, using whatever came to hand, experimenting with high-tech, low-tech, or no-tech, without needing to seek approval from any institutional authority—was inspirational. Mark was instrumental in the formation of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which quickly became an official nonentity (but a productive one). He submerged himself in its collective endeavours, which resulted in a body of work I still find immensely compelling and intriguing, culminating in the coining of the term ‘hyperstition’ (cultural processes which make themselves real (of which the CCRU was one (or several))), the creation of the occultural Numogram, and the revelation of a pantheon of numerically-coded demons. This masterpiece of pulp theology combines a gleeful comic-book grandiosity with a diligent mapping of the space of human affect and an understanding of the human psyche as a mere switching-station for warring demonic currents. All of which continued to work beneath Mark’s writings, I think: he saw the world in terms of abstract forces and Spinozan struggles, and sought to name (demonise?) the cybernetic complexes of affect and power from which the circuitry of so-called reality is constructed; his writings continued to be populated by Katak and Uttunul, among others, as well as new conceptual personae such as the ‘gray vampire’ and malign apparatuses such as ‘business ontology’. Mark also relished CCRU’s enterprise of collaboration and collective production, keenly anticipating the emergence of ‘microcultures’ that would spring up in-between, unassignable and unattributable to any one author. This search for new modes of collectivity was something he never let go of. Yet the CCRU work also unmistakably bore the imprint of Mark’s zeal for supercharging theory with pop culture. Refusing all received cultural hierarchy, he always championed the conceptual and formal achievements of pop music, comics, fiction, TV, and film, aiming both to map and contribute to what he described as ‘pulp modernism’. Beneath all of this simmered his intense class-consciousness and sensitivity to the invisible barriers, insider codes, traps and tricks that protect high culture and academic thought from those not already endowed with cultural capital and bulletproof confidence. He was never embittered by these barriers, but made it his business to expose and diagnose them, and to openly share his own frustrations, minor triumphs, and defeats as he was dashed against them. And his refusal of the assumption that mass-consumed pop culture is necessarily of a lesser conceptual density was just as uncompromising. 1/6

As well as being fascinated by the expression of the collective unconscious in even the ‘lowest’ forms of entertainment, he celebrated the cultural achievements of those who came from outside the media establishment, had got in before its rules had been set down, or had autonomously nurtured their own microcultures, and were thus able to realise singular, subversive visions of modernity untroubled by culture cops and homogenizing ‘managerialism’. Ever more deeply captivated by the resonances of the oddball canon he had assembled since childhood, he delighted in propagating both its pulp modernist obscurities and its poptastic gems to others; many a cultural itinerary has been sent off in an unexpected direction by contact with Mark Fisher’s work. While there is a sense in which, for Mark, everything was personal, since he always gained theoretical purchase by connecting theory to his own experience, he also relentlessly attacked the very notion of the ‘person’ or ‘individual’. For many years Mark wrote about his struggle with depression; but his question was never ‘What is wrong with me?’ but ‘What is wrong with the world that it should produce such a suffering, closed-off subject?’ This conviction that ‘mental health’ is not adequately addressed as a merely personal condition, nor as a purely medical issue, led him to challenge all quick fixes that aim merely to restore the social (consumer-worker) functionality of the ‘unwell’…and entailed frustrated encounters with exasperated ‘mental health professionals’ who got more than they bargained for. He multiplied his burden by believing that he could only heal himself by reconfiguring the world, or at least by seeding a social collectivity capable, against all prevailing forces, of breaking out of the prison-house of capitalist subjectivity. That’s because he was for real, ‘theory’ was not a game for Mark. And he was right in his belief that personal affect is a tributary of social, cultural, class, and economic forces. He was also right in his unflagging faith in cultural production as a source of energising joy, insight, and understanding, and a vector for emancipation; and in his belief that writing and theorizing about culture need not mean ‘critical’ dessication, but can in fact transform and intensify its effects and propel them beyond mere aesthetics, unlocking their political charge—something he proved to readers time and time again. At a distance of twenty years, for me the Warwick era is lost in a general blur of intensity (and people talking intensely about intensity). But one trivial episode reminds me of qualities I loved in Mark: Having unexpectedly had an abstract for a joint conference paper accepted, and following a lengthy train journey, Mark and I began writing our paper the morning before the conference (of course), and a state of panic swiftly morphed into a sleep-deprived, hysterical flow state. It was hugely enjoyable, because Mark was never happier than when swept up in working on something that seemed to be building itself, soliciting further input, coalescing into some unexpected entity before his eyes, suggesting new double-meanings, puns, unexpected connections between the abstract and the empirical, Marvel Comics-style names for as-yet unnamed forces, concepts for unrecognised processes. Then the self-doubt would disappear, the anxiety would dissipate (even if the paper had to be given in a few hours!) and he would be in his element: that outside element, something beyond the strictures of the personal, that fuels enthusiasm and enthralled fascination with what is being ‘channelled’. The paper was delivered. It was messy, it was truculent, it was sarcastic, it was a bit punk. Everyone hated it. Nevertheless, relieved of our duties, we later slunk into the posh conference reception held in a grand Victorian museum, where high-flying postmodern academics chatted politely with local dignitaries. Immediately we both knew this was not ‘for us’, and there was mutual relief in realising we shared the feeling that we were not supposed to be there. For a short while before we ran away, we skulked around in corners giggling at the professors’ fruity voices, sarcastically clinking our champagne flutes, and cracking up at being served canapés from a tray—like street urchins who had sneaked themselves into a palace. 2/6

And to me, that was Mark: the accidental interloper at High Table, the punk in the museum. Even when his work was acclaimed and he was appointed to a ‘real job’ at Goldsmiths, I think he always feared he was an impostor, just one who had decoded the scam and learned how to ‘pass’. But whether or not you agreed with him, whether or not you shared his passion for John Foxx or Sapphire and Steel, whatever your opinion on the philosophical rigour of his Schwarzenegger/Kant mash-ups, he was as close to the real thing as it gets: always in earnest (sometimes dangerously unfiltered), always keen to share his excitement and to respond to engagement, synthetic and eclectic in his sources but obsessional in pursuing the themes that he knew mattered, modest in person but passionate, ambitious, and vehement in thought. It felt good to know that he had finally ‘made it’, that he fought through, unable and unwilling to adapt his work to the requirements of academic tedium. Following the publication of ‘Capitalist Realism’, it was heartening to see his unique style and aptitude for rendering ideas dynamic, accessible, and connected to pop culture finally break through and create its own audience. The path from anger and sadness to collective joy has taken a terribly wrong turn here—we have lost someone who painstakingly sought to construct and communicate hope, for himself and for others. There are many who can attest to his innate passion for thinking and creating, his positive influence, and his unaffected, sincere, and generous character. Realising at this moment that I assumed he would always be there, it’s hugely painful to think that he is no longer among us. * In speaking in memory of Mark I can only speak for myself. But I feel a responsibility to speak openly, just in case my feelings, my questions, and my pain, are not merely my own. Because that’s the risk Mark chose to take: wagering on the potential of shared experience and shared understanding, sometimes at the cost of a self-exposure that was perilous for him, where others would have retreated into safety; he remained true to his own thought despite his personal fragility; indeed, in exposing and examining that fragility, he transformed it into a discursive force to be reckoned with. A life, each unique life, is a problem. Like an equation from a schoolboy’s examination nightmare, it contains an overwhelming constellation of variables, inherited from the cascade of environments within which a life crystallizes— terrestrial, political, national, cultural, social, familial, biological, neurochemical. Without them, a life would not even coalesce: they provide the complex field of tensions that produces a life together with its world. Sometimes abiding within that field of conflicting forces which, inherited from elsewhere, have shaped the bounds of our life and our world, can be unbearable. It can feel like the problem they’ve bequeathed you is as hellishly inescapable as a prison cell: you continually try to find a solution, but there’s always a remainder. Of course, if there weren’t, there would be nothing left to work with; but sometimes knowing that isn’t enough to attenuate the distress. And then to believe that the problem is in you and entirely within your power to solve; to feel that your distress is your personal responsibility, and to then judge it against others’ apparent happiness and adequacy—in other words, to buy into the model of the autonomous, self-determining, competitive individual, the fiction of capitalist subjectivity —renders this predicament all the more agonising. From his blog to much of his recent work, this is precisely where Mark focussed his efforts. We have to look outside the supposed ‘individual’, to the social, class, macro- and micropolitical environments in which it takes shape, in order to understand the personal, and personal distress, in its true dimensions; an effective therapeutic discourse requires a political genealogy of the origins of unhappiness. And Mark’s work in this direction offered not just comfort and hope, but understanding and a fierce will to throw off guilt, responsibility, and shame, and instead to think and to join and to fight. 3/6

Although it’s secondary to the immediate sense of loss, and to our profound sympathy for Mark’s family, who have lost a son, a husband, a brother, a dad, I think that many of us, Mark’s friends, colleagues, and students, and especially those of us who have shared Mark’s struggle with depression, find ourselves disturbed by the apparent disparity between this analysis and the fact that his own suffering, in the end, isolated and overwhelmed him. Of course there’s no essential paradox in the fact that someone can fight valiantly, bring aid to others, and still, ultimately, be defeated. But I think it’s crucial that we don’t repress our disquiet, our bewilderment, and that we address it as carefully as possible, together. In his work, Mark achieved a great deal, but demanded even more of himself. I have to ask, even though I’m afraid to: what did he succeed in doing, was it worth the struggle, what are we to think about his work now, where did it go wrong, what does it mean for us to carry on…all painful questions. Sometimes it seemed like Mark had found within his own life experience, examined with honesty, humility, and humour, and with forensic precision, some kernels of common truth that could be shared. And sometimes it seemed he was liable to project his own mood, whether vibrantly optimistic or bleak and despairing, onto a political, planetary, or even cosmic scale. But perhaps that division isn’t quite so clear: what happened in Mark’s work, I think, ever since he started writing his blog, was a continual process of calibration that becomes necessary when one attempts to breach the barrier between one’s writing and one’s life. And he succeeded in doing that. He refused to retreat into any ivory tower. Having suffered the blows of authority, he had no interest in becoming a detached, professional author. And his refusal of the all-too-easy dignity of a distance between his life and his thinking made him a teacher who freely gave the gift of his own sensitivity and vulnerability to others who, like him, didn’t necessarily come equipped with an automatic entitlement to the world of ideas, a resilience to the institutional demands attached to it, or a mastery of the ‘correct’ references. Mark’s own reference points were as unique as he was. By some he was accused of overintellectualising what was only entertainment; by others of dumbing down the theorists whose work he remixed effortlessly, entertainingly, inventively, with references drawn from pop culture. But for Mark this wasn’t some kind of intellectual game: he used to say, I can’t help it: I can only think through popular culture. He always said he learned about theoretical writing not from school but from reading record reviews in the NME. And that’s how he worked, faithful to the peculiar collection of cultural touchstones—TV shows, books, comics, films, music—that he’d grown up with, continued to seek out and discover, and which he inhabited as his true homeland, into which theory was shipped only to be reprocessed and exported in new, synthetic forms. Pulp philosophy. In this sense, it could be said that Mark transformed the traditional working-class virtue of ‘knowing your place’ into an adamant, defiant methodology. He knew where he came from and he demonstrated incontrovertibly that that place mattered. And it worked both ways: I remember listening to a Wu-Tang Clan album with him and saying, this is such an amazing creation, people like us can never do something like this, and he said, Well, we’re not from the street, we’re from the living room. We’ll do something else. And he did. In short, I can’t think of another writer who sought with such determination the integrity of life and thought, and for whom it was so absolutely necessary to do so. He dug inside himself for the abstract keys to decode the world, and he drew on every theoretical resource that world had to offer in order to decipher his own predicament. But a life is not just a symptom, a crystallization of environmental conditions, a key to unlock something else. It’s also a singular presence to be cherished, and which we become all too aware of when it’s suddenly gone. A life is a reservoir of potential for unknown futures: future conversations, future works, future memories—and the loss of those futures is what we’re grieving. 4/6

I remember once Mark recounting how a therapist had told him that each of us is to be valued for what we are, quite apart from what we do—to which Mark retorted, outraged, that you only are what you do, what you produce. Mark’s vehement polemics were always entertaining, and I enjoyed this one; I also recognised the manically productivist credo instilled during the intense years we spent together during the 90s as part of the CCRU. But valuing the part of us that is of no measurable utility, and believing that others can value it, is maybe a pragmatic condition for any kind of sustainable production. The primary support of a life is an organic body that needs care and occasional respite from demanding the impossible. As Bifo wrote in his tribute to Mark, ‘happiness is not something of the intellectual mind, but of the corporeal mind’; and inversely, ‘the deep nucleus of depression consists in [a] physical contraction’—one, I would add, whose corrosive effects may eventually be elucidated by intellectual analysis, but will not be healed by it, in the real, urgent time of the body that they demotivate and immobilize. At the heart of Mark’s work I sometimes glimpsed what I think is a crucial question: How to challenge the primacy of the human—how to despise all of the constraints and exclusions, the shutting down of possibilities, the dogmatic control, entailed by the sanctity of what’s held to be ‘properly human’ in this or any other historical period—how to be an antihumanist then, and to imagine instead new forms of life—while also maintaining, right now, solidarity with and compassion for actually-existing humans, already compromised, weakened, and isolated by those constraints. To either espouse an imperious, stern theoretical antihumanism, or to make heartfelt calls for practical compassion, was not enough. To integrate the two was more difficult than it seemed. But Mark took on the task, a task that required great resolution and rendered him vulnerable to attacks from safer, more ‘pure’ theoretical positions; it was a task that required inventiveness, sensitivity, and a constant circumspect movement between the conceptual and the affective, the political and the personal. What he had begun to construct, I think, was not just a body of theory, but a collective program of self-help in which the self is precisely what’s in question: a humanitarian antihumanism. Maintaining compassion for actually-existing humans also means finding compassion and care for oneself. Balancing the infinite demands of thought with those of its finite vessel isn’t easy: neither is safe so long as the other is in view. Again, Mark took the difficult path, because, being Mark, he couldn’t do otherwise; and he did so with absolute truth to himself. I respected that unstinting integrity, even when I didn’t agree with him, or when, I’m sorry to say, I didn’t share his hope. But I understood all too well how much energy it took, what impossibly high standards he held himself up to, and how the weight of what he experienced as the crushing inadequacy of his own performance of self could still sap his energy and shake his conviction, despite the increasingly positive reception of his work. All I want to say here, at the risk of inappropriateness and of exposing my own bewilderment, is that for me these are all questions that require that I hold fast to the acuteness of this pain, and find in it an impetus to continue, in a way that will have to be informed both by his life and his work, and by his death and the solution he chose—if it can really be called a choice, I don’t think it can. Mark wrote about the spectre, ‘understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing’. Even though I didn’t see him enough, a realisation that comes too late: I assumed he’d always be here, that one day there would be time, that we would maybe work together again—haunted by a future that will now never arrive—the spectre of Mark Fisher was always with me. So many times his incredible perceptiveness and insight have sent me back to films or songs or books that I thought I knew, and intensified them, made me see more in them than I could have ever made out with my own eyes or ears. I’ve written whole essays based on short conversations I’d had with Mark ten years previously, remembering not just his exact words but the gestures, the tone, the mordant humour that accompanied them. He became a part of me, as he became a part of so many. 5/6

And over the past few weeks as I went back to the projects we’d been involved in together, and picked up their loose threads, now indelibly marked by his absence, at the same time I felt that spectre at my side again, I felt his passion, his humour, his enthusiasm for experimenting and constructing; I was drawn once again into the complex of references, concepts, emotions, visions, that whirled around him like a conceptual tornado. Sometimes over the last few weeks it’s felt like a force of nature has been abruptly cancelled. But sometimes I felt the wind blowing again. So I’ve been trying to think of what remains after the physical body’s gone, when the singularity of a life can no longer rely on that frail support and needs other carriers. I try to think about it in a way I think he’d appreciate: in terms of an abstract, impersonal force acting in the present tense. The spectre isn’t a matter of pretending he’s still here in person—as if the notion of a ‘person’ wasn’t precisely what was at issue—or of commemoration or superstition, but—to use a word of his own invention—a question of hyperstition: What is the Fisher-Function? How did it make itself real, and how can we continue to realise it? Many of us naturally feel a need to ensure this is a moment when the force he brought into our world is redoubled rather than depleted. And to do so, to continue his work and our own, we have to try to understand his life, and the consequences of his death, at once horrifying and awakening, as a part of the Fisher-Function. And I don’t simply mean the intellectual contributions that we can appreciate, extend, take forward into the future; I also mean what we need to learn in terms of looking after ourselves and each other, right now. The last conversation I had with Mark was about depression. In fact, I was asking for his advice. And the week before his death, I’d been terribly depressed and had thought every day of calling him. But I didn’t. My impression was that he’d largely overcome his difficulties, that he was enjoying a welcome and well-deserved success, and that probably he wouldn’t want to hear me moaning about my bleak outlook. To think that we were stuck in the same impenetrable fog, with our backs to each other, is a terrible confirmation of the isolating nature of the forces he tried to diagram for us. Those that propel the descent of a life into the cramped cell of individual, suffering subjecthood. But whether or not he was able to believe it himself, Mark really did triumph: for himself, for the readers he inspired, for others who, like him, weren’t automatically endowed by their social background with the capital and confidence to feel like ideas belonged to them by right. For others whose joyful passions and cultural experience he intensified and amplified by putting them into words. In the unreasonable demands he dared to make. This life brought us joy, love, laughter, hope, understanding. We’re still gauging, in the wake of his loss, the full extent of his success. In an email Mark wrote to me last year he talked about the need to feel like one can find time to do one’s own work, about finding the space to pursue what really matters. While acknowledging that life will always place obstructions in the way, he seeemed to be saying to me that he finally felt, after a long struggle, that he was about to arrive, that the spectre of a future that truly belonged to him might finally come to be realised. Characteristically he included me in this too: he didn’t say ‘I’, he said ‘we’. Then he says: ‘but I think the next few years are crucial.’ I think they are, and I think we need to keep that spectre by our side. 6/6

readthis.wtf /writing/hyperplastic-supernormal/ Hyperplastic-Supernormal - 2017 This Isn’t Normal, Not At All. The appearance in the mid-twentieth century of the first general-purpose computers, a new machine species germinated in the steam-haze of the industrial revolution and hothoused by two world wars, portended an unprecedented plastic control of nature and an extreme transformation of the human environment. During the same period, the discipline of ethology was blossoming. This new field of biology reported on the manipulation of animal response patterns, charting the receptive latitude of inner space to artificial stimulation—an endeavor apparently far removed from the first stirrings of digital culture. Yet these early ethological studies provide valuable indications as to how the fabric of human affect would be distended by the ingress of increasingly sophisticated technologies.1 1/9

In his 1950s work on instinct, Nikolaas Tinbergen defined the notion of supernormal stimuli—artifacts which release species-typical action patterns, but which, by exaggerating the trigger stimulus, elicit a hyperbolic response.2 Tinbergen found that birds would sit on an oversized plaster egg with heavily defined markings and saturated colors, preferring this supercharged model to their own pale, dappled eggs. Male butterflies would attempt to mate with gaudily painted cardboard dummies in preference to real females. Gull chicks would attempt to feed from a redstriped vertical dowel, ignoring their parents’ beaks to the point of starvation. Geese would ignore their own eggs and tirelessly strive to roll a volleyball into their nest if it was adorned with the appropriate markings. A stickleback would attack a painted wooden model in order to defend its nesting territory, so long as the model had a schematic “eye” and a red underside. Tinbergen discovered not only that the instinctive action patterns of animals could be activated by artificial stimuli, but that these responses could be heightened to the point where they might lead to reproductive failure—making them potential “evolutionary traps” in which instinctive actions developed during the evolution of a species become detrimental to survival or reproductive success. In placing their subjects into these maladaptive predicaments, ethologists short-circuited the hardwiring of unlearned action patterns. And what enabled them to do so was the particular mode of abstraction that governs such instinctive responses: Although they are triggered by stimuli that are indicators of health, vitality, danger, or reproductive advantage, the unlearned actions of animals respond not to an exhaustive assessment as to whether an object satisfies these criteria, but to abstracted perceptual cues (blueness, egg size and shape, red underbelly) with which those assets or threats were consistently associated over the evolutionary period. It is these abstract cues that the ethologist’s schematic simulacra isolate and accentuate. The genes that coded responses to these stimuli were selected and perpetuated owing to the role played by their phenotypical expression, within this relatively fixed environment, in assuring the reproductive success of individual animals. In Tinbergen’s ersatz models, the stimulus is disjoined from its invariant fitness consequences: By artificially manipulating the perceptual shorthand of these ethological releasers, the correlation between phenotypic response and reproductive success is broken; plunged into a new, rigged environment, the behavioral instincts become potentially indifferent or unfavorable to mating and longevity outcomes. Such supernormal responses are in fact observed outside of experimental protocol. Tinbergen himself incidentally discovered that the sticklebacks in his study would also savagely attack the edge of their glass aquarium when a red postal van passed the window. More recently, male jewel beetles (Julodimorpha bakewelli) in the Australian desert have been observed copulating with beer bottles because the golden-brown color of the vessels and the nodules on 2/9

their base present an exaggerated version of characteristics specific to the female of the species.3 When animal instinct encounters manmade objects, a whole range of bizarre and unproductive couplings emerge. The tragicomedy of supernormal behavior release is played out even in the absence of human intervention—as in the case of the cuckoo, whose egg is brighter and larger than that of its unsuspecting host species, the mouth of its chick wider and redder, so that the host pays more attention to the alien interloper than to its own young.4 Richard Dawkins suggestively describes the host as an addict whose nervous system has been hijacked by this supernormal ruse.5 Similarly, the orchid displays to the male wasp a supernormally vivid simulacrum of the visual and olfactory attributes of the female in order to recruit it into its own reproductive system. Such cases are rare in the natural world, yet are suggestive of the way in which evolved responses to stimuli always harbor the potential for encounters that fall outside the straightforward regime of intraspecific sexual reproduction. How I Feel, So Unreal. The ethologists’ deliberate exploitation of the supernormal does not merely break the invariant correlation between a stimulus and the fitness outcome of a “hardwired” response to it. It also charts new spaces of affect, revealing how the sensations that accompany a response pattern narrowly channeled by survival imperatives are fringed by a latent virtual space that may be activated through experimental interventions. And it is this surplus-value that is pertinent to our understanding of human culture. For if Tinbergen’s experiments in avian caricature, for example, reveal an implicit map of the bird’s neural “beak space (e.g. the neurons in the gull’s brain might embody the rule ‘the more red contour the better’),”6 the disparity between the modern technologized media environment and that of the Savannah where human response patterns were stabilized over millions of years exposes a panoply of such virtual spaces, whose farthest reaches we traverse as we reengineer and remix instinctive responses for pleasure and profit. Indeed, the conquest of these latencies is constitutive of human culture, itself indissociable from the development of technology. The production of technological artifacts, as memory supports allowing social production to be transmitted intergenerationally, creates a secondary stability that liberates humans from the imperatives of survival, freeing up traits and behaviors for exaptation and recombination; and the leisure to seek out and create supernormal stimuli to oversatisfy instincts in turn engenders new behaviors whose link to evolutionary mechanisms becomes ever more oblique. From the Savannah to the mall, by the late twentieth century humans had constructed for themselves an almost entirely supernormal environment. Modern human culture could be described in terms of a general inversion of the relation between instinct and object: In manufacturing objects to trigger, explore, and heighten exapted response patterns, humans experiment with their own environment and responses, both researchers and subjects in an ongoing ethological explosion, a massively ramified and diffused pattern of mating errors or evolutionary traps. We Just Fit, You and I. This expanded artificial landscape wherein the abstracted markers of instinct satisfaction, fitness, and sexual selection are grafted onto inanimate objects may be what J.G. Ballard was surveying when, to explain his famous equation “the future equals sex times technology,” he added: By sex I mean the whole organic expression of our personalities in terms of our bodies and our responses to life. I think all kinds of intimate junctions are going to be made between sex and technology, between life and technology, that will reverse the sort of logics that we accept today.7 Ballard’s favored example, of course, concerned the parasexual cues presented by the curves, front snouts, scallops, and swage lines of automobile design: 3/9

American automobile stylists have been exploring for years the relationships between sexuality and the motor car body, the primitive algebra of recognition which we use in our perception of all organic forms.8 The increasingly sophisticated manipulation of this “primitive algebra” yields the advanced calculus of our supernormal environment: we launch accelerated probes to feel out and unfurl undiscovered regions of the phase space of human affect, often discovering novel responses to combinations unprecedented in the evolutionary environment—as emblematized by Ballard’s famous hypersexual fascination with the twisted metal and crushed flesh of the car-crash, which seems “to pull at all sorts of concealed triggers in the mind.”9 Not only is the supernormal an indispensable concept when addressing the human in evolutionary terms, then, but in considering the predominant role played by the supernormal in human culture, we soon depart from the facile explanations of evolutionary psychology. Artifacts produced by the endless ramifications of techno-cultural development do not merely represent redundant new ways to trigger stereotypical responses and behavior already present in early homo sapiens; they realize latent affective and phenotypic potentials that may have no evolutionary bearing or valence whatsoever. Neither are these strange attractors, these hitherto “concealed triggers,” a matter of brute amplification. As Tinbergen discovered in experimenting with the parameters of his models, in general supernormalization functions only within a limited range, outside of which the stimuli lose their potency, and are disregarded. Likewise, within the space of human culture, the cues that release a particular affect (large eyes and neotenous facial features for cuteness, for example) can only be intensified to a certain point, beyond which they appear merely grotesque. Accordingly, a whole series of formal and informal research programs have emerged, both in the lab and in popular culture, for the systematic mapping of the borderlands and sweet spots of territories such as potato-chip-mouthfeelspace (conduct a Texture Profile Analysis to determine the effect of additives on rheological attributes of fracturability and crispness), zettai ryōiki space (an ideal ratio of 4:1:2.5 between length of miniskirt, area of exposed skin, and overknee section of stockings, with a tolerance of 25%), or cute-space (determine the limits within which cardioidal strain on the morphology of facelike stimuli elicits nurturing instincts). The twenty-first century has seen these experimental disciplines rendered more efficient and systematic by new technologies of attention capture and response monitoring which make the process collective and interactive, often allowing it to stumble upon and develop uncharted spaces of stimulation. The capacity to construct, deliver, select, and measure response to stimuli in ever more fine-grained ways effectively extends Tinbergen’s modelling protocol into a fully modulated experimental environment. And it is the hyperplasticity afforded by computing technologies which, whether in audio processing, color printing, industrial food production, or cosmetic chemistry, has enabled the exponential intensification of supernormal culture, in what philosopher JeanFrançois Lyotard dubbed the age of immaterials,10 an era when coding technologies allow matter to be manipulated and recombined freely as if it were a language. The more that matter can be articulated, controlled, and modulated, the more meticulously we can process, test, and attune new supernormal responses. Every Day Euphoria. But what is the nature of the human response to this engineered hyperplastic matter? We can’t know just how maternal a volleyball makes a goose feel, yet we have some introspective access to our own responses to the overcompressed aural scintillation of a synthetic pop song, the salt-and-sugar bombardment of a fast-food meal, the tactile titillation of tugging off the lid of an iPhone carton, or the compacted concupiscence of a lurid animated GIF cycling endlessly on the illuminated LCD. 4/9

Far from being “close to the genes,” it would seem that, since humans are not simple creatures of instinct, our responses to such compounded supernormal phenomena are cognitively mediated; certainly, unlike Tinbergen’s wooden sticklebacks, they do not trigger discrete instinctual behaviors in any straightforward way, but rather occasion acute affects: Instead of innate behaviors, it seems likely that we have innate affect as an evolutionary program for behavior, and the affect is subject to “cognitive override” and modification by past experience […] Thus, we would expect humans to have few innate behaviors, but many innate affects.11 What is released in humans when they encounter supernormal stimuli is not so much motion, as in the reflex gestures of Tinbergen’s specimens, as emotion: complexes of internalized animal response patterns checked and interpreted by higher cognitive functions. The more supernormal the stimulus, the more its reception will be experienced as a peculiarly intense state of consciousness, its powerful concoction of releasers endowing it with a special status likely to occasion an overriding compulsion to repeat the experience, along with a tendency to interpret it in culturally mediated ways, often ascribing to it a status verging on the transcendent. Existing cultural associations are drafted in to express the ineffable mysteries of these intrapsychic events; they are, in turn, commemorated and celebrated in collective culture; and new products and technologies will be developed to tweak their supernormal charge yet further. Marketing merges with the artistry and science of materials in the search for the exact parameters to be attuned in order to produce the transcendent moments which punctuate contemporary life and form its codex of desire—a quest to refine and heighten dazzling new sensations. Thus the inner shadow cast by immaterial manipulation lends its shifting shape to further experimental interventions, in a cycle that requires constant alchemical translation between the incompatible registers of euphoric phenomenology and material science, between their associated languages: The marketing department’s hyperbole produces new transcendent qualifiers, while research and development strive to isolate the material attributes capable of producing them in their “purest” form. Supernormal culture, then, is a prosthetic extrapolation of the landscape of human affect, itself a ferment of suppressed and internalized response patterns; its phenomenological language is the backdraft of prefrontal cortex intervention on the garbled tripping of hindbrain reflexes by technologically articulated immaterials. Know What I Want Before I Say. Maximizing the supernormal requires a fine modulation of sensory cues. In turn this makes stringent demands upon the engineering of materials in the different media through which these cues will be communicated. A sophisticated approach to product and retail design demands that multisensory cues are harmonized into a consonant whole that communicates ineffable “values” elegantly and coherently (the damaging effect of incongruous pairings that run counter to consumer expectations about the relation between sensory platforms is documented, for example, in the case of the clear cola, TaB Clear). This is achieved by ensuring the consistent production of the same harmonized set of olfactory, visual, auditory, and tactile phenomena. The “pure” aesthetic stock yielded by supernormal engineering (i.e., an ensemble of synthetic materials capable of delivering a heightened multisensory gestalt) seems to be endowed with transparency, in the sense that it gives us nothing more to think about or see than its own apparent radiant, elementary simplicity. Yet on the side of its material constitution, this simplicity is nowhere to be found. Although the language of such products may appeal to the natural, the elevated, the transparent, and the pure, they are precisely as natural as the concupiscent encounter of a beetle and a beer bottle in the Australian desert. 5/9

This forked tongue, the twofold register of supernormal culture (im/material, supernatural-transcendent) is not unrelated to the double-bind of capitalist subjectivation described by Félix Guattari and Maurizio Lazzarato.12 According to these authors, in the capitalist socius, machinic slaving (the immanent harnessing of subpersonal cognitive mechanisms directly to technical machines) is invariably complemented by social subjection (the discursive reinstantiation of traditional models of subjecthood, individuation, and personal transcendence). That is to say, although the contemporary subject is addressed by its technological environment no longer as an individual but as a set of attention mechanisms and stimulus reflexes (a “dividual”), with technical machines and products informed by cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and digitally enabled captology (“attentionology”) selectively targeting reflex neural responses, the language of personal experience and transcendent selfhood remains prevalent, overcoding these molecular intrusions into the brain, reinscribing deterritorialized flows back into traditional and easily managed social forms. In fact it is the maintenance of the complementary functions of these two subjectivation processes that keeps capitalism in stable crisis. The autonomous and aspirational “person” must still be promoted as a figure of faith even while the products to which it aspires proceed to burrow under its skin. “Machinic slaving” proceeds here via the capture and recombination of internalized response patterns (emotions rather than motions) through habitual interactions with technically modulated sensory stimuli; but also through the production of new gestural cultures (in particular those associated with handheld devices) as means to satisfy them. (What is the “swipe” if not a manual servomechanism of capitalism?) The delivery of supernormal stimuli is crucial for the ratcheting of these circuitries into inescapable, socially distributed compulsions that operate below the level of the “subject” yet are continually reinscribed within the discourse of the self, of personal aspiration and satisfaction, and of social adequacy. Just as we are less than ourselves without makeup or stimulants, we no longer feel “connected” to others or even to ourselves unless the candy-colored icons at our fingertips are sprouting red buds to notify us of our existence, and the continual cascade of illuminated images and scanned headlines lifts us into a supernormal state of hyperwakefulness that stokes the pursuit of our goals and dreams. It’s Just Like We Don’t Try. Whereas the overheated alloy of sex and technology forged by the heroes of J.G. Ballard’s tales, in fidelity to their supernormal obsessions, serves to crack open the brittle carapace of reality so as to realize the manifold perversions suggestively implanted by the media environment, in reality hyperplasticity and the supernormal innovation it enables has funneled our access to these virtualities into narrower channels. Ballard belongs to the professional demographic, as do his heroes, and what prevails in his fables is an appealing yet somewhat dated (Nietzschean) conception of human creativity: The protagonist is a sovereign agent with the heroic capacity to conduct controlled experiments on himself through deliriously instinctive détournements of the technological media environment. In actuality, the position of the laborer-consumer-drone may have been a more suitable perspective from which to anticipate the way in which machinic slaving would isolate and manipulate neurological responses operating below the conscious cognitive grasp of “users” conceived as generic bundles of fixed action patterns (FAPs…), extend them supernormally, thus creating an environment riddled by compulsion, addiction, and the monotonous domination of the same few stereotyped supernormal stimuli.13 After all, what incentive is there for capital to enter the labyrinth of the virtual when it can scavenge the redundancies of the actual for suitable drivers to boost production and consumption? Rather than a human liberated to explore the virtual realms of human sexuality, we are closer to William Burroughs’ machine junkies, or Samuel Butler’s vision of humans serving as deterritorialized parts of a machine sexuality, like bees for flowers. An array of browser tabs flushed with pixelated epidermis are foliated tips of an alluring bloom exciting the reproductive instincts of its prosthetic partner, the screen an openmouthed cuckoo feigning hunger for his sex; the dopamine hits of social media implant a compulsion to enact our instinctual social instincts through a machine intent on recording the imprint of its hotheaded prey as it smears its informatic pollen, swipe by swipe, 6/9

further afield, drawing off a surplus for its own ends. The future, sex × technology, no longer belongs to lone pioneers of virtuality, triumphant aristocrats of perversion, latter-day des Esseinteses achieving self-realization by following the vectors of art and artificialization to their most outrageous conclusions. There has been no Ballardian odyssey from the capillaries of the conventional through the deltas of the phylogenetic unconscious toward the great ocean of the virtual. Instead we have embarked on a collective drift away from behaviors vectored toward the executive function of procreation, out of the territories policed by evolutionary imperatives, toward zones of virtuality defined instead by the polar magnetism of least resistance and maximized financial return, cross-tabulated with ever-increasing efficiency by attention-monitoring systems. Shifting the bounds within which animal affect had been lagooned by its genetic inheritance, hooking up basic procreative and survival instincts to machinic reproductive apparatuses from elsewhere, contemporary supernormal culture rechannels them into a series of disappointingly conservative compulsions and conventional transcendences: clinical skin displays, hyperbolic invocations of nature and purity, hyperactive ecstasies and infantile boutique comforts; an elaborate range of adornments to enhance the status and competitiveness of the individual. In opening up the new fitness landscape of phenotypic plasticity, hyperplastic industries unfold new affects and capacities for new behaviors; but they must also play a part in ensuring social reproduction: Some beetles must choose other beetles rather than beer bottles; likewise, even the most supernormal delirium or debauch must eventually steer its way back toward social subjection, otherwise supernormal consumption would die along with the human species, in an orgy of machinically slaved jouissance (although this particular limit of capitalism is clearly coming into view with the generalization of an otaku lifestyle and the age of supernormally enhanced robot sex). You Gotta Believe In Me. Now, if it is inevitable that the phenomenological language of supernormal culture tends to invoke the supernatural, what is crucial for capital is that its powers of excessive fascination can be captured, commodified, and, most of all, branded. In order for a set of supernormal stimuli, together with the supernatural reverence which they elicit, to be commodified and profitably reproduced en masse, they must also become invariably associated with a name. To be consistently chosen over the raw stimuli whose responses it hijacks, supercharges, and packages, a supernormal product must be captured by a single identifiable marker that will index it as a financial concern; and the market extension of a brand’s products is tied to the intension of its name, operating as both magical invocation and proprietary protection. Indeed, the phonic matter of the name itself forms part of the supernormal package: Prozac, Olay, L’Oréal… who knows what ancient motor memories are obliquely strafed by the verbal music of corporate nomenclature? So it is, perhaps, with our own name. After all, personal identity is constructed as a selection of brand preferences, the curation of a singular compound of supernormal affects. As we peruse the dense, overlit information environment of the department store we continually ask ourselves: Which one am I? An increasingly complex and refined sense of personal identity is coupled with a product-rich environment in which we define ourselves through product assignments and choices on many scales (from personal preferences of household staples up through gender, race, demographic, and regional belonging). From the selection of a house paint (Elephant’s Breath, Feather Grass, Lamp Room Gray, Cinder Rose) or nail polish (Miami Beet, Samoan Sand, Big Apple Red) to identification as tourist or resident with a national brand (Bolivia—The Authentic Still Exists, Greece—The True Experience, I Feel SLOVEnia, Switzerland—Get Natural), inner space is enriched and consolidated by sensory abstractions complemented by semantic suggestion. Personal identity is a nest of brand identifications, their transcendences fused into a singular portfolio that reflects and projects, defining me and elevating my sense of self, and whose radiant, elementary simplicity mirrors that of its component parts. Individuality, as well as shared identity, is not given by nature but is our product, a collection of sophisticated cues which, by way of commoditized immaterialities (at once technical-material 7/9

yet putatively disincarnate and transcendent), determine the relation we have to ourselves and to each other. In the endless race to complete our product, we buy ever more of ourselves: More natural, more healthy, more powerful, more me. Pour yourself with yourself.14 The brand leader against which all Others must be measured is the European “us,” figured by a local and contingent set of stimuli widely imposed upon the rest of the planet through globalization. Adapted from phenotypic responses tuned by the Northern European environment and machinically worked over continuously for centuries, it has been successfully exported worldwide, overwhelming regionally specific supernormals and generating a global monoculture, a planetary standard of desiring-production, an industrial product which certainly once communicated with instinctual responses, yet which in its iteratively refined supernormality no longer has any but the most tenuous connection to something that could be called “natural” and which, in its monstrous genericity, corresponds to no empirically existing human being. We Are Supernatural. Following her interrogation of Yves Klein’s prescient mimicry of the double-articulation of the material-machinic and the subjective-transcendent—chemically formulating International Klein Blue in order to consistently deliver immaterial aesthetic euphoria, while also insisting that it bear his trademark, reserving his rights15—here in the citywide department store of contemporary art, in the city that gave birth to modern capitalism, Pamela Rosenkranz unveils a product that is the result of extensive research into materials at the molecular level, yet whose primary function is to deliver an immaterial experience at once rhapsodic and disturbing. Our Product reproduces, incarnate, through chemical, auditory, olfactory, and photonic manipulation, as a series of bodies and fields that our own bodies traverse, the molar transcendence that we produce and consume every day—a product she signs not with her own name, but with “ours.” Overcoding the materiality of the molecular multisensory experience, a semantic nebula teems with pseudoscientific compounds, the magical properties and authoritative brand names of which are recited within the installation by a synthetic voice whose comforting cadences are every bit as synthetic as the heavy dermal mass that undulates within the pavilion’s walls—a perfect abstraction rendered physical, palpable, yet still just out of reach, a dream substance delivered on a nightmarish industrial scale. This is either a privileged view into the factory where global supernormal stock is amassed prior to its distribution, or a deliriously logical extrapolation of the products into which it enters as an immaterial ingredient. As if those products were finally subtracted from the particularities that anchored them into everyday life, their tantalizing promise of superabundance finally consummated and thus discharged. A ground without a figure. Yet to eliminate the figure and return to monochromy (here not just visual but olfactory and auditory) no longer implies purity. The dream of “[a]bolish[ing] the denotative functions of color,” “liberat[ing] color from all spiritual, emotional, and psychological associations […] and transcendent meaning in general […] in favor of the pure materiality of color” or “a rationalistic transparence”16 has been definitively abandoned. We are no longer on the firm territory of the modern, and perhaps not even still within the realm of art, whose auratic and esoteric functions commoditized consumer culture has directly democratized. Abstractions are no longer ideations at all—or else, if there are “ideas,” they are not “ours” in 8/9

any simple sense. The stimulus cues from which supernormal culture is extrapolated are abstractions that emerge from the biosphere, wet with contingency, to be industrially refined and amplified in the laboratories of capital. This preternatural milk psychically nourishing faith in the aspirational purity of modern western human corporeality is a synthetic pulp, a by-product of our compulsive collusion with machine sexualities. In momentarily untethering them from the capitalist search engine, the hyperplastic literalism of Our Product may risk extending its supernormal components to the point of the grotesque, extrapolating them so far as to escape the compulsive circuits within which they ordinarily circulate. Yet far from inviting ironic distance or disinterested contemplation, immersion in Our Product launches new vectors of supernormality: Even as their sheer physicality is rendered unavoidable, even as their transparency converges with the opacity of their material production, the uncanny glamour of these immaterials still enchants those visitors who are truly ready to enjoy themselves, traversing a full-spectrum product environment that takes us on a supernormal-hyperplastic trip through the convoluted core of inner space. 9/9

readthis.wtf /writing/image-invasion/ Image Invasion - 2017 The benign propaganda fed to me as a child in the early 80s by my anti-nuclear-campaigning parents was a perfect introduction to nihilism. I’m not sure of the intended effect of encouraging a child otherwise diligently shielded from violent images (especially the then newly-imported American TV shows) to watch films such as Threads, The Day After, and When the Wind Blows—visions of pre-nuclear terror and post-nuclear devastation which supplemented the ominous warnings of the Xeroxed pamphlets often scattered about the house, both anti-nuclear campaign tracts and helpful state advisories on the appropriate action to be taken in the event of a nuclear attack. Its actual effect was to focus my imagination on those precious minutes after the warning was sounded, an ultimate holiday during which all rule and law would be null and void, the conventions and strictures of society would crumble, nothing would matter any more, and everything would be permitted: schoolmates who taunted me every day could be dispatched with the sharpest kitchen knife, the sweet shop could be raided with impunity, we could set huge fires to burn down school and home alike…and so much more, as quickly as possible, while the siren wailed, in those precious minutes before the bomb dropped. 1/8

‘Now the Inner Refuge’… pages from Protect and Survive pamphlet, UK government, 1980. The absoluteness of the threat relativized everything; and when environmental crisis began to loom in the 90s, with increasingly cataclysmic scenarios mooted, I suspect I was not the only 70s baby for whom the sentiments of doom and visions of a devastated planet were familiar and comfortingly bleak. Threads (BBC, 1984) The Cold War, that nebulous awareness of the great power poised for attack elsewhere, unknown and alien, and its threatened punctual incursion into reality—the Bomb—heralded transcendent objects. Yet these gargantuan abstractions immanently infused everyday life with dread…and surreptitious nihilistic thrills. And they did so through cultural forms that triggered, fast-forwarded, and dramatized the latent threat into transformed images of the everyday world—X-rays penetrating the surface of normality to set aglow the skeletal lineaments of its immanent, and imminent, ruin. The more compellingly the virtuality was imaged, the more its psychic effects had already taken hold. This miscarried domestic propaganda perpetrated on me by my leftist anti-American parents mirrored earlier efforts ‘on the other side’, as it were, to mobilise Americans against the communist threat. 2/8

Publicity still (a devastated New York) for Invasion USA (American Pictures Corp., 1952). The Alfred E. Green movie Invasion USA (1952), with its promise to ‘scare the pants off you’, on one level serves as a straightforward piece of ideological programming—revealing the horror of a full-scale invasion (by an unnamed but obviously Soviet army) so as to remind the American populace of their responsibilities as citizens. At the same time it is a piece of entertainment in which we get to thrill to the spectacle of destruction and chaos. Let’s take a look at some of the overwhelmingly visual promises the trailer makes to its audience: An electrifying look into the enemy’s plan of conquest! See New York Disappear! See Seattle Blasted! See San Francisco in flames! See paratroops take over the capital! In addition to these promises of spectacular satisfaction, though, Invasion USA exhibits a reflexive awareness of cinema’s ideological functioning as a form of collective dream or hypnosis, and as inception. Poster for Invasion USA, 1952. A cross-section of American society meet in a New York bar, all full of gripes and grumbles about their lives, and more interested in the next beer than in the vagaries of international politics. They pay lip service to the good fight 3/8

against the evils of communism, but for them the threat is far away, and they don’t appreciate its being used as an alibi by the government to make additional demands on them: price controls, commandeering of factories for military production, high taxes—each of them has a complaint. A mysterious customer who has been listening in on their conversation, Mr Ohman (he is lugubrious, he has a strange accent, and, worst of all, he is reading a book; he describes himself gnomically as a ‘forecaster’) berates them for wanting it both ways: they want to be defended from the communist threat, but they also want to retain their easy lifestyles and to maximize their individual liberty and freedom from government predations; they expect the protection of the nation, but they are unwilling to go out of their way to help the state. Dan O’Herlihy as the mysterious Mr. Ohman. Ohman goes on to issue a sardonic warning to them about their complacency: Mr. Ohman: Yes, I’m against [war]. I think America wants new leadership […] I suggest a wizard, like Merlin, who could kill his enemies by wishing them dead. That’s the way we’d like to beat communism now. The manufacturer wants more war orders, and lower taxes. Labor wants more consumable products, and a 30-hour week. The college boy wants a stronger army, and a deferment for himself. The businessman wants a stronger Air Force, and a new Cadillac. The housewife wants security, and a new dishwasher. Everyone wants a stronger America, and we all want the same man to pay for it. George. Let George do it. Tractor Manufacturer: I disagree with you—I don’t want to let George do it! Mr. Ohman: Then you must be the exception? Tractor Manufacturer: No—I’m George! Mr. Ohman: A very good joke, but a war is not won with jokes. To win a war, a nation must concentrate. Distracting the assembled audience from Ohman’s cryptic hectoring, the TV news now begins to report the breaching of US borders by an unknown air force. As the scale of the invasion rapidly escalates and US power bases are destroyed one by one, transfixed by increasingly horrendous dispatches, the bar-room acquaintances are galvanized into action; they separate and return to their respective lives finally determined to do their bit for the now all-too-real struggle against the red terror—but one by one their efforts founder: it is too late. 4/8

As Carla Sanford (Peggie Castle) plummets to her doom, the nightmare scenario is revealed to be the product of Ohman’s collective hypnosis. The culmination of the action comes when the dame of the piece, assaulted by one of the boorish, drunken foreign troopers who have now entered the city, jumps from a high window to her death…. But in a final revelation, the whole catastrophic scenario is revealed to have been a collective hallucination, its accelerated collage of violent images receding back into the cognac glass that Mr. Ohman had been hypnotically swirling before them. Now he is gone, and they stand shell-shocked at the visions they have shared. And truly, the trance has been an awakening—the hypnotism of the image conjured onto the TV screen by Ohman’s sorcery had been necessary in order for them to appreciate that the apparently distant threat of communism was in fact already effectively in their midst, that the war was already here. The movie ends with the cast springing into action, determined to avoid the fictional scenario they have witnessed, to do all they can for the quotidian fight for freedom before the nightmare becomes reality—ironically, they finally realise that, in order to stave off communism, they must to put aside their individual interests and align themselves with state imperatives. Footage of ‘enemy’ paratroops, in Invasion USA. 5/8

Invasion USA is thus a movie that thematises its own ideological function, using the small screen of the TV as a diegetic deputy for its own enterprise of image-hypnosis. But what is additionally interesting here is that all of its unprecedentedly graphic violent images of the enemy war machine in action, the entirety of the dramatic destruction of the US, was pasted together from real footage of US forces in action: that is, in order to bring the latent peril spectacularly to life, the filmmakers drew on the media made available to them by the state. At one point, when this thrifty technique threatens to become overly conspicuous to the audience, the screenwriter even introduces the conceit that the invading army, now closing in on the White House and the Pentagon, have clothed themselves in American uniforms as a deceptive tactical measure—a plan that, in one of the most memorable scenes of the movie, is thwarted by an attentive American guard as one of the invading troops attempts to pass undetected: –– Halt, who goes there? –– Company B, von hundred eighty-sird Infantry. –– 183rd, that’s an Illinois outfit, ain’t it? –– Yezz…. Yezz, Zhicago Illinois. –– D’you ever go see the Cubs play? –– Cubs… [confused] … a cub iz a young enimal, a bear. [Blast-out ensues] The dissimulation, of course, is in fact in the other direction: it is the reality of the violence of the US war machine that is got up in Soviet drag in order to dramatize, in heated images, the unknowable and imageless coldness of the alien threat. Immanent Cold War dread feeds, and feeds on, its virtual cinematic culmination, its simulated irruption into reality through the image: the transcendent unknown is projected into speculative scenarios by cobbling together resources drawn from the domestic imaginary, the relation to the outside assembled from the image-banks available on the inside. * Today, the inhuman machine that looms over us, in certain respects taking up the vacated place of Cold War menace, produces its own cinema—or rather, various forms of machinema: from drone footage to awe-inspiring data visualisations to cognitively intractable image overload (even the tumblr sublime can provoke dread). Whether it concerns distant threats or intimate psychic pathologies, the sense of immanent threat here is both more diffuse and more ubiquitous: What to do with these images, which are not just seductive calls to the imaginary but also signs, icons, signals, false news, memes, machinic triggers, the asignifiant semiotic arsenal of an immanentized war? And what are they doing with us? Not images of apocalypse but an image-apocalypse. Often these images are re-presented pointedly to us in contemporary art in order that they might be deliberately contemplated rather than passively processed. In this register, which attempts at once to strip them of their machinic function and to concentrate our minds on it, they are rendered hypnotic in a new way; ripped out of the Google search gallery and cooled by the ice-white of real gallery walls, they become images once again, and are rendered newly unfamiliar—perhaps in the hope that spending slow time in their company will galvanize us against the immanent threat, shake us out of our zapping complacency. Even when, instead, artworks instead attempt to plug directly into the accelerated circuits of the contemporary image-world, decanting an indigestible torrent of imagery into the gallery, the intention is still, invariably, in framing them in this unfamiliar context, to cool it. The aim is to frame and evaluate the threat, whether by forcing the images back into an indexical mode in order to counteract the 6/8

uncontrollable sliding of unmoored images flush to the neural substrate (this is still an image of something that matters) or by presenting their unmanageable multiplicity as such (something that matters is happening with the image). Indeed, many artists, whether in person or in their works or both, if not elevating themselves to the level of a saviour Merlin, affect the prognosticatory tone of a Mr. Ohman, glancing up lugubriously from his cognac and his weighty reading matter to offer his services: it is already happening, everywhere, to all of you…but you will need me to show you—I will use the trickery, the hypnosis of images to help you see the truth…. But this time, rather than whipping up an ersatz spectacle of destruction, what we supposedly need is for images to be arrested in order for their meaning to be patiently assessed and extracted. To win the war against images, with images, a nation must concentrate. What image of knowledge and of the object of knowledge does this imply? Images are always specific, and for an image (even one that is already a multiplicity) to stand for a transcendent unknown diffused immanently into generalized dread requires the complicity of the viewer. You are only seeing one piece of the puzzle, extracted from its functional role in a neuro-machinic network; its mode of presentation solicits you to conjure up the sublime horror of the whole; but you have to agree to be edified in this way—and indeed, despite its air of discursive overcomplication, to enter into the context of contemporary art is largely to submit to this simple synechdochic mesmeric protocol. Today the stock footage continually churned out by the machine itself—of which we ourselves are effectively servomotors—is too easily passed off, from inside the gallery, as the image of an alien invasion, and thrilled at (with due gravitas) as such; but it doesn’t seem like we have come so far from the clunky conceits of Invasion USA; which is all the more problematic given that the machine that threatens us today is not just contingently, but intrinsically unimageable, making such a mode of indirect and collusive representation increasingly obsolete. This is how art proposes itself as the practice of making images that image the yet-to-be-known, the knowledgebomb that has not yet exploded but whose immanent latency must be crystallised into a galvanising proposition. Ohman’s hot images reveal the truth of the all too easily ignored latent threat—the alien monster—by rendering it through found images as a violent fiction of assault. Today the cooling of images seeks to reveal the truth of the all too easily ignored Cold World that lies behind the apparent (social, sexual, informational, futural, memetic) hotness of the image apocalypse: that unknown agent that coldly manipulates the fevered participatory creation of a constantly evolving image culture, delegating its operations to the steely prowl of algorithms and the calculative capture of attention—an equally alien, equally cold creature. But ultimately this is about encountering ourselves as machine parts, as programmable neurobots as passively obedient to the black box of the digital media machine as the communist populace depicted in Cold War cautionary tales are to the commandments of their red masters. In Invasion USA the hot shock of violent hypnotic images leverages citizens out of their own complacency about, and complicity in, an individualism that has gone too far—calling citizens to subordinate themselves to the state in order to hold communism at bay. In the cooling of machinematic or algorithmically distributed images in contemporary art, a dual purpose is served: art at once wants to reinstate the referential power of the image and its delivery of meaning: disconnected from its cybernetic circuits, this is, after all, an image of something, and in the context of art its indexical relation can be recemented; but at the same time, it wants this to constitute a revelation of our everyday alienation and complacency: to mesmerise us so as to offer us another chance once we walk out of the gallery door; to persuade us, before it’s too late, that the immanent apocalypse today is an extinction of the human and of the human ability to engage properly or meaningfully with images. Not an extinction in the heat of the nuclear blast or in the slow death of radiation sickness, but an extinction from within, as human and social interaction itself is 7/8

decanted into a system of control and circulation that machines individuality and alienates the subject. If this threat is something like a transcendent (non-)object, though, it is one that is already inside: we are face to face with what Kant called the transcendental subject: the thing that thinks for me but to which ‘I’ have no experiential access, a thing which today is formatted by and plugged into cybernetic systems of control. One might therefore wonder about this effort to use hypnosis to bring us back to ourselves, to awaken us from our complacency in order that we might take up civil arms against the immanent threat: for rather than unveiling the real of the image, as it claims, it simply presents us with a hypnotic collage that offers the thrill of the real, itself a media artefact and a form of benign manipulation, innocently unselfconscious about its own ideological and indeed economic function, and liable to fail or misfire in its ethical mission to use a privileged mode of vision to save the children of the Cold World from the image enemy. An electrifying look into the enemy’s plan of conquest! See subjectivity disappear! See agency and identity blasted! See liberalism in flames! See algorithms take over the capital! 8/8

readthis.wtf /writing/stages-plots-and-traumas/ Stages, Plots, and Traumas - 2017 Our hero stretches taut the last strand of scarlet twine, pushes the pin home, and steps back to take it all in: the sprawl of facts, the network of inferences, evidence, mugshots, locations, everything almost tied up, but in waiting for a synoptic overview to coalesce, affording the pivotal insight that will reconfigure this data into a coherent whole, and close the case. The frustration, the pressure, and the dogged working of cognition are palpable. In this scene, familiar from countless televised police procedurals and thrillers, it’s as if the closed chamber of the detective’s office serves as a proxy for the internal operations of his mind: a kind of camera obscura within which the network of relations between things, people, and places is refracted, projected onto a surface where it promises to finally come into sharp focus. The operation does not feature in any policing manual or private detective’s handbook; there has probably been no instance of any professional dedicating working hours to a crafting pastime of such dubious value. This fictional in camera exists only on camera: it is a diagram of a diagram of thought in action. The function of the yarnwork is to provide us with a static two-dimensional image of thought, itself embedded within visual narratives which themselves are moving images of the construction of knowledge.1 If proof were needed of the popularity and power of the trope, we need only note that the term itself (more Etsy than homicide division) is drawn from a fond parody. In the high-school farce 21 Jump Street (dir. Phil Lloyd, 2012), presentation of the ‘yarnwork’ sets the scene for a revealing joke. For the failure of communication between two enthusiastic yet incompetent amateur sleuths played by Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum and a disgruntled police captain played by Ice Cube harbours a rather profound truth about the relation between knowledge, art, and the (dis)orientation of the subject in search of truth: Schmidt: Okay, so we stayed up all night making this. It’s awesome, you’re really gonna like it. All yarnwork was done by Jenko. 1/11

Captain Dickson: Who put this together? Are you autistic? Schmidt: It is artistic, sir, because the thing is, the yarn actually indicates…. Indeed there is an art involved in the construction of the yarnwork, in the sense that there is no self-evident or conventional procedure for stringing together the elements of a case—like the cognitive process it diagrams, the yarnwork is a matter of invention, construction, and perhaps individual talent; usually the result of one individual’s more or less competent, distressed, sometimes desperate attempt to gather, connect, and map information. In itself the yarnwork asks the methodological question: How to proceed? And in so far as it figures this predicament, there is also something potentially autistic about the yarnwork, too: rather than accurately diagramming reality, the yarnworker is always in danger of projecting onto the blank wall his own preoccupations, vendettas, personality flaws, and, when things get really murky, sheer delirium. There is always the looming possibility of apophenia, of creating patterns where there are none—a charge with which the detective will inevitably be confronted, when time is short and tempers are high, whether by an impatient superior or by the pen-pushers down at City Hall. What does the trope of the yarnwork give us to think as far as the construction of knowledge is concerned? Firstly, in general, plot-driven genre fictions boast this peculiar feature: they are epistemological dramas, dramatisations of the process of obtaining and configuring knowledge. The international thriller, the police procedural, and the detective story present fictional inquiries couched within a framework where empirical data are assumed to be causally linked in a way that is subject to rational deduction. As Guy Lardreau observes, ‘in so far as such narratives present a search for the truth, how can they not envelop a theory of knowledge?’ They therefore hold a particular interest for the philosopher in so far as they ask many questions familiar to him or her: ‘What is a clue, a sign, a proof? What is the status of evidence? What marks allow us to recognise the truth? […] the questions that govern the detective novel are those that we philosophers have always posed’ (Lardreau 1977: 16–17). Such fictional scenarios present us with a localised object or event (the clue) that stands out from the ground of normality (the everyday crime scene), suggesting forces as yet unaccounted for (unknown accomplices, missing links); at the same time they imply an arsenal of reliable procedures (evidence-gathering, elimination, deduction) and perhaps scientific techniques capable of making objects speak (forensics)—methods capable of uncovering those unknown forces. As mentioned in many studies of detective fiction, it is a form that emerged, and could only emerge, in the modern scientific world, since it reflects the predominance of empirical evidence and rational deductive methods (see Boltanski 2014). Indeed, the classic predicament of the detective outlined above is similar to that which, according to Jean-Réné Vernes, lies at the origin of the very possibility of scientific knowledge (see Vernes 2000). For Vernes, what is called ‘Hume’s problem’ (the fact that reason alone does not allow us to validly posit the existence of laws of nature, or to account for the regularities of empirical experience) constitutes a break in the history of philosophy whose consequences the discipline has yet to fully work through. Since, after Hume’s intervention, reason could no longer provide a grounding for the assumption of the existence of independent matter and natural laws, philosophy came loose from its mooring to the scientific spirit, and resigned itself to the examination of perception and the habitual structuring of phenomena within the mind. In response to this disaster, Vernes insists that our perceptions themselves force upon us the hypothesis of a causally–determined ‘external world’. In his example, the concept of matter emerges when perceptually identical objects prove to have unaccountably different properties: if we have two coins that look and feel exactly the same, yet turn out to be of different weights, or if an apparently symmetrical die turns up a six on every throw, the probabilistic assumption that ‘all things are equal’ is upset, and one is then compelled to cut open the coin or die in order to ascertain the reason for this departure from equilibrium. According to Vernes, the very meaning of ‘matter’ lies in the enigma of the loaded die, in the disparity between apparent 2/11

behaviour and an a priori model of the ‘ideal’ die—the probabilistic assumption that ‘what is equally thinkable [viz. that the die will fall on any one of its faces] is equally possible’. This assumption, which becomes evident through its apparent infraction in privileged situations such as that of the loaded die, is identical with the hypothesis of matter, since it posits that any apparent anomaly must stem from our incomplete knowledge of an ulterior, causally consistent reality. This hypothesis ‘imposes itself upon thought’, and it alone can save philosophy from its postHumean free-fall. Readers of Quentin Meillassoux’s work will easily comprehend how it proceeds from a confrontation with Vernes (see Meillassoux 2008)—indeed, Meillassoux has credited Vernes’s earlier work (Vernes 1982) with waking him from his dogmatic slumbers and inspiring his thinking on contingency (see Meillassoux 2008). Meillassoux precisely refuses Vernes’s attempt to reestablish scientific rationality on the basis of this probabilistic assumption, which he also sees tacitly inscribed in Kant’s argument on the transcendental necessity of the lawfulness of nature. Instead he chooses to accept the consequences of the reasonlessness of natural phenomena: nothing is necessarily as it is, even the laws of nature. Therefore we can have no sure knowledge of phenomena; the only certain knowledge we can possibly have is that deduced rationally from this very principle of ‘absolute contingency’. It would be an interesting exercise to extend Meillassoux’s inquiry into the possibility of a coherent ‘extro-science fiction’ (one in which the laws of nature are themselves contingent and subject to change at any moment) (see Meillassoux 2015) to the hypothesis of an ‘extro-scientific detective fiction’. Surely the sleuth’s powers of deduction and evidence-gathering would be rendered utterly ineffectual in a universe (whether religious and magical, or ‘hyperchaotic’ like Meillassoux’s) where victims could disappear, or be struck down by god, or where ‘clues’ could simply materialise from nowhere, for no reason? For in the background of these fictions is a conception of knowledge founded on a stable causal framework, and their basic narrative device responds more to Vernes’s approach: the empirical presence of a salient feature that acts like a sort of mental grit, a cognitive irritant, impelling the protagonist to cut through the surface of things, to dig deeper, to slice open the die and find out why all things are not as equal as they ought to be, why the equation doesn’t quite add up. We could therefore say that the narrative motor of these fictions is fuelled by scientific epistemology; and that, philosophically, what they demand of us is to elaborate, not a strictly rational, but a problematic and procedural epistemology, one where knowledge is constructed in the attempt to restore equilibrium by cutting deeper and deeper into a situation in order to discover the unknown elements that continually throw it off-balance. The figure of the yarnwork is precisely a visual representation of this problematic cognitive state, one where the pieces, when connected systematically, still refuse to ‘add up’, where the die still seems to be loaded. And this brings us to the second intriguing feature of the yarnwork: in its onscreen versions, this form of fiction poses the interesting problem of how to render the cognitive reconfiguration of information visible, and visually compelling as image—a problem to which the yarnwork is a reliable and now classic response. Indeed, the yarnwork figures a most crucial moment in the plot: the moment when everything is almost in place, a moment of the highest tension for protagonist and viewer alike. As a kind of provisional summation, a pause in the narrative, the yarnwork moment invites us to join with the protagonist in experiencing this threshold moment, and in readying himself to make the final push toward resolution. The yarnwork binds together local empirical data in order to make it visible to the concentrated gaze, so that it might reveal what it owes to, and what it might contain of, some wider scheme of things, some more profound, hidden cause. But let us make a further observation about the way in which this information is pursued: rather than cutting into a problematic object such as the loaded die, in this kind of fiction the action of ‘cutting’ moves outward, cleaving from the local to the global. As the typical situation would have it, arriving on the crime scene, what at first appears 3/11

as a routine investigation will throw up some anomalous element, inspection of which will provide ingress into a broader intrigue. The ramifications of this anomaly will continue to unfold, with the episodic return of the sentiment that something doesn’t add up, and perhaps ultimately leading us to the yarnwork moment—both the cumulation of these episodes and the anticipation of all the missing pieces finally falling into place. There is also a narrative of the encrypted expression of power in play here: the local configurations are only corrupted and partial expressions of some ulterior plot, and the actors of the original crime scene may be mere puppets of a more nefarious crime. In this respect, the nature of these fictions can be clarified by comparing their narrative schema to a model drawn from elsewhere—namely, the quest for self-knowledge pursued in the therapeutic process. In his early model of hysteria, Freud employs a metaphor for trauma that combines geology, cryptography, and a theory of psychic defence (Freud 1895): At the core is trauma—the Thing that drives you but which, at the moment of consulting the analyst, you can neither access nor afford to touch. Around the core there are strata, hardened layers that are at once an expression of the trauma—like cooled lava—and an encryption of it, since it cannot be read clearly in these secondary residues. Their opaque, perplexing folds both block the way to the truth of the analysand’s symptom, and serve as protection against the trauma (like the crust of the earth, upon which the heat of the core can still be felt, and even keeps you warm, but cannot harm you). Yet (as both the geologist and the analyst must assume) these strata contain clues. Symptoms, indeed, are behaviours which, because they are apparently causally unconnected to their immediate context, seem to allude to some unknown factor. During the process of therapy, as the patient attempts to move through these layers to reach the core—i.e. to understand themselves and their trauma—on attaining each subsequent layer they are obliged to assemble a self-narrative using the materials at their disposal, which are always partial and incomplete; and it is the incompleteness of these narratives— something is always missing or not quite right—that continues to drive the meta-narrative of the therapeutic situation. Freud writes of: the linkage made by a logical thread which reaches as far as the nucleus and tends to take an irregular and twisting path, different in every case. This arrangement has a dynamic character […] the course of the logical chain would have to be indicated by a broken line which would pass along the most roundabout paths from the surface to the deepest layers and back, and yet would in general advance from the periphery to the central nucleus (Freud 1895: 289). It is in following this winding thread that one hopes to reach the truth, which will reconfigure both what is known and the knower. This does not happen in a single revelatory moment, but over the course of a tortuous journey during which, episodically, the available data will resolve themselves into new patterns, each time providing a more comprehensive picture of the real source of the power that has a hold over the analysand. In the process of psychoanalysis (also, let us recall, inspired by the will to forge a ‘scientific’ model of the psyche) as in the political thriller or detective drama, only at the end does one discover the power-source, that Thing that was driving the whole complex, the kingpin, the ultimate villain of the piece. In this sense, the original crime scene, that local, circumscribed and apparently trivial everyday scene which contains some worrying anomaly that doesn’t quite fit, is akin to the scene of the symptom, which, whether debilitating or merely peculiar, seems to have no reason, and therefore, within a ‘scientific’ framework, must testify to the influence of some ulterior power—and thus compels continuation of the work. 4/11

The question, of course—one to which each fictional detective, and each brand of therapy, provides a different answer—is how to find the thread from one to the other, or how to target the anomaly correctly and make the correct cuts in order to inspect it, further opening up one’s perspective from the local to the global scene. And this is, above all, a question of epistemology, one might almost say the question of epistemology, and of the yarnwork too: that of how the subject of knowledge can confidently pass from the gathering of piecemeal bits of information and observation of their asymmetries, to a configuration in which they are rendered coherent from a global point of view. In this sense, apparent departures within the crime genre are in reality only variations on a theme: CSI, for instance, gives us a diagram of contemporary modes of knowledge, but remains concerned with this connection between local and global. In CSI one proceeds from the crime scene inward to discover an ultra-local anomaly that will, in turn, allow one to ascend back to a reconstruction of the crime scene, and thereby to its place within a more global context (the chemical composition of soil particles recovered from the crime scene matches with the land around the corporate headquarters where the victim worked until he was fired for insubordination for calling attention to suspicious financial transactions…). In forensic drama the implicit scientific framework of the narrative form is literalized, and it is the microscopic object that provides the symptom, the grit in the otherwise smoothly-functioning machine, that will be forensically inspected to reveal the broader scene. * The concept of ‘plot’ provides a framework within which we can clarify such an epistemology and its attendant drama; and it is precisely the centrality of plot to these kinds of narratives—easy to denounce from a ‘literary’ perspective as its weakness or debility, as in the faintly derogatory term ‘plot-driven fiction’—that explains their peculiar interest as epistemological dramas, or dramatisations of epistemology. Beyond the conservative gesture of countering the supposed poverty of this ‘minor’ and all too ‘generic’ form by the appeal to majority, perhaps through the hackneyed reference to Oedipus Rex as the ‘first detective story’, we can flip this literary denunciation of the supposedly downmarket craft of plotting by taking our lead from an historical account of the notion of plot that concerns not literature but theatre—which then will bring us back to the question of how the construction of knowledge is staged and narrated in visual forms of storytelling. It is immediately obvious that ‘plot’ is a semantically rich word. Perhaps uppermost for us is plot in the sense of narrative, but not far behind it would come the conspiratorial sense of the word—the manipulation of affairs by some shady agent or agents behind the scenes. Also current, if less prominent, we find the senses of ‘plot’ as territorial (a plot of land), graphic (plotting a graph), and geometrical or projective (plotting one space into another). All of these, as we shall see, are etymologically interlinked in a rather satisfying way, all the more so because this is not a case of returning to a single eytmological origin but also (as is in fact common in etymology) one of accidents, convergences, and semantic superpositions. * In his work on the history of design, Benedict Singleton has identified a set of perennial suspicions relating to the practice and the very notion of ‘design’ and its related terms, all of which have connotations of complicity, connivance, deviousness or intrigue: craftiness, having designs on something or someone…and plotting (see Singleton 2008). Singleton links these misgivings to a well-founded fear concerning the primary act of design: In delimiting a plot—that is to say, in this context, carving out a chunk of material for use to a certain deliberate end— given that the material is never entirely neutral or lacking in its own history and energies, one also invites into one’s 5/11

project forces from the outside; thus design is a constant negotiation with preexisting plots, an attempt to steer and mobilise them in the service of one’s own design for the materials at hand. Design has been seen as suspect, then, according to Singleton, because it deals not with not the orderly marshalling of a passive matter—the hylomorphic schema whereby form is impressed upon matter—but with materials whose own proclivities and powers cannot be suppressed, but are to be harnessed and set to work for other purposes. Design is denigrated because the designer does not use her own prowess to tame matter, but colludes with nonhuman forces; which also means that the designer herself is subject to these ulterior plots that pre-existed her intentions and interventions. Design marks an acknowledgement of the designer’s own complicity in plots that may exceed her instrumental goals—for using already-existing energies to cunningly achieve your own ends suggests that other agencies may possibly have designs on you, and that, in selecting a plot to work on, you are merely further complicating twisted plots that existed long before you. The history of the word ‘plot’ itself furnishes some evidence for this nexus of suspicion, intrigue, and spatial material practice. In The English Renaissance Stage Henry Turner argues that the modern concept of plot emerged between the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries in the context of the dramatic arts, with the advent of a new kind of theatre, and in the attempts of its proponents to define their nascent profession (see Turner 2006). This involved the physical and cultural construction of a new type of theatre, a spatially enclosed building specifically marked out for dramatic use, and with a platform stage (the word platform here already hinting at a connection with plot). This is the movement from an open-air theatre with journeymen actors and a porosity between players and audience (mystery plays) to an enclosed performance space to which an audience pays for entry, to watch the unfolding of plays whose action often spans more than one setting. What arose at this moment, as Turner explains, was the need for playwrights to conceptualise for themselves, and to explain to their audiences, the mechanisms of this new theatrical situation and its peculiar powers. The extraordinary nature of the theatre and the platform stage, as a space that ‘can manipulate space, time, and the conventional properties of bodies’ (Turner 2006: 32) was a crucial problem for the playwrights of the time not only intellectually but also commercially: to bring in an audience, they needed to justify the artificial construction within which they were to present their narratives. In plays of the period, therefore, we find lengthy defences or apologies which attempt to justify the theatre as spatial device, and to enlist the audience’s imaginative powers to make it function. In constructing these apologies, playwrights turned not to neo-classical literary theory or poetics, but to the conceptual resources provided by what Turner calls the ‘spatial arts’: that is, the practices of an emergent artisan class with whom they had daily contact, and with whom they seem to have identified (playwright, after all, refers not to writing but to materials that have been wrought, as in wheelwright)—and this is where plot enters the scene. Plot and plat, and the verb platting or later, emplotment, are connected with the notion of a groundplat: a diagram or working drawing used in practical geometry—for instance in surveying, carpentry, and building—involving measurement and reduction to a two-dimensional representation. The plat, plane, or flat, in technical manuals of the time, forms a part of the geometrical triad of a pricke, platte forme, and a body—what we would call today point, area, and body. The plot or plat, then, is a schematic geometrical projection, originally a chart or diagram included in a book for the purposes of demonstration. As Turner shows, playwrights conceptualised the capacity of the theatrical situation to achieve startling ‘imaginative projections’ in terms of a power of ‘translation’ or ‘projection’ borrowed from these geometrical diagrams: ‘an artificial means whereby the viewer may see a series of particular places—remote 6/11

in time as well as space—that could never be grasped by the naked eye alone’ (Turner 2006: 8). A scene of a battle in France, a scene in the royal castle, temporal and spatial ellipses, all contained within the closed space of the theatre…none of this is natural, nor can it be taken for granted that audiences will accept it. So the playwrights forewarn the audience by using the analogy of the ‘plot’ as a rhetorical device to justify the new narrative and spatial form: the action on the stage is ‘like’ the plot of a piece of land or a house, it schematises a more complex reality. In the following examples given by Turner, dating from the end of the sixteenth century, we see the playwrights overtly petitioning the audience to use their power of imagination in order to become complicit in the function of this projective plotting [here see also the Ultimate Yarnwork video]: And for this small Circumference must stand, For the imagind Sur-face of much land, Of many kingdoms, and since many a mile, Should here be measured out: our muse intreats, Your thoughts to helpe poore Art, and to allow That I may serve as Chorus to her scenes She begs your pardon, for sheele send me foorth, Not when the lawes of Poesy doe call, But as the storie needes… The world to the circumference of heaven, Is as a small point in Geometrie, Whose greatness is so little, that a lesse Cannot be made: into that narrow roome, Your quicke imaginations we must charme, To turne that world; and (turn’d) again to part it Into large kingdoms, and within one moment, To carrie Fortunatus on the wings Of active thought, many a thousand miles (Dekker, Old Fortunatus) …But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraisèd spirits that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cock-pit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O pardon: since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to this great account, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high uprearèd and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder. Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: 7/11

Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance. (Shakespeare, Henry V) ‘Plot’ eventually came to mean a diagram of the spatial arrangement of the stage and the various entrances and exits during a play, which was hung on the boundary between off- and on-stage, and ‘subdivid[ed] the narrative action of the play into the entrances and exits of the actors, all within carefully ruled columns and boxes’ (Turner 2006: 23). And indeed, the pivot of theatrical emplotment, as it came to be called, is the boundary between offstage and onstage. This is effectively where the risky business of plotting, the reductive projection of the detailed developments of the story into the limited space and gestures of the theatre, takes place. Emplotment was understood as a kind of projection from the dense complexity of an underlying story into its staged schematisation, in a concept adapted from the popular literature of practical geometry used in the work of the playwrights’ fellow artisans, and this trope from the ‘practical spatial arts’ become hybridized with the inherited traditions of poetics. The history of the word ‘plot’ therefore testifies to the emergence of an epistemological model from a body of professional knowhow and its transfer to the spatial device and narrative forms of the theatre—that is, poetics and its reception understood as ways of knowing. As Turner says, what takes place here is an ‘adapt[ing] [of] a practical knowledge of geometrical form to the realm of aesthetic form, using the methods, habits of thought, and even the economic formations of these technical fields to produce a device—a theatron or “beholding place”’ (Turner 2006: 81). The last piece of this history falls into place with the convergence, in the late sixteenth century, of plot with the French word complot, originally meaning ‘dense crowd’—a word that brings with it the connotations of intrigue, strategy, possibly with devious or harmful intent. Complot related to a mode of practical intelligence (such as in military strategy) in which deliberation about human action involved the consideration of the spatial disposition of the actors. To the notion of a projection or translation from one space to another, it adds the sense of an ulterior agency controlling the space and players of the theatron (here, possibly, a theatre of war) from outside—the one who pulls the strings and directs the action while keeping the full story hidden backstage. As the designs and devices of a character in a play become assimilated to the projective plottings of the strategist, and to the directing of the play itself, this enriches the concept of emplotment as ‘the formal decision to represent some events onstage while withholding others from view’ (Turner 2006: 213)—as an incomplete, schematic revelation. According to this developed sense of ‘plot’, as Turner argues, at the limit ‘all modes of ordering perceived experience […] could be said to constitute a preliminary level of emplotment’ (Turner 2006: 24)—plotting, then, as a general epistemological model. If we make the simple gesture of moving beyond a simple binary model of offstage and onstage, what arises as a speculative surplus from the nexus of the ‘spatial, geometrical and topographical’ and the ‘strategic, deliberative and pragmatic’ senses of plot is a very distinctive schema: that of a potentially endless series of points of view, beholding places—theatrons—each one an information environment coupled with a perspectival orientation, stabilised by a closure which, however, is compromised by its ultimate contiguity with a (manipulative) outside. Which brings us back to the territorial sense of ‘plot’ as an incomplete circumscription of material, and to Singleton’s understanding of design as involving the carving-out of a block of material which may be suspected of carrying with it germs of the outside, ulterior powers that will possibly compromise one’s intentions. In short, what plot suggests is a circumscription made for the purposes of gaining knowledge of some situation, but one that is always incomplete, and thus brings with it introjections from the outside.2 8/11

This in turn suggests the schema of the yarnwork, the in camera projection of the investigator’s predicament. The detective seeks to move from a particular ‘beholding place’—the inside of a limited ‘theatre’ in which his perception of events remains constrained by the data immediately available—to a wider field where he would uncover, progressively, the ‘real story’. But the question here is the inverse of the playwright’s: how to move the other way, from the projected diagram—the plot—to that of which it is a projection. As if thematising their own mechanisms, in yarnwork scenes detective shows visually stage this infospatial drama in which the protagonist is constantly trying to escape the local theatron, to discover the way ‘backstage’ so as to reveal the broader global story. What is really required here—as will be confirmed by any dedicated viewer of such shows—is to maintain a thread between these different mappings of the information-space. Our detective has the local situation, with elements that do not fit, and which solicit her to follow the thread further, or to find the resources to cut into some anomalous clue so as to cut herself out of her current epistemological constraints. She cannot try to read the outstanding clue in terms of the local site, for this is precisely what it isn’t: the statement that shows that the dead man was moving millions of dollars into a Swiss bank account obviously is not a part of the local story about a hapless clerk who had split from his girlfriend and may have been suicidal. But the detective also cannot reformat the local plot entirely in terms of the global story she discovers: to see a homicide as ‘merely’ an incidental effect of the movement of global capital also fails to capture the situation, which of course is also a local—human—tragedy! Either of these paths would dissolve the tension that drives the narrative forward. What is achieved by the most skilled plotters3is a kind of stereoscopic—or multiscopic—way of looking at things, one that is able to shift between different information-spaces, different theatrons, while maintaining their delicate coherence. Knowledge then becomes a form of navigation, a shifting of perspectives or a movement across transformations, across contexts or through a staggered series of theatrons (and what is navigation, if not plotting?). Plot twists are the turning points in this navigation. Marrying the spatial, topographical, or graphical sense of the word plot with the temporal sense of a narrative progression, plot twists are the points in the narrative at which one discovers that something which seemed anomalous or counterintuitive at the local level can be explained as the importation or introjection of an element of the wider environment into the local context (what the victim tried to scrawl in blood on the hotel bathroom mirror wasn’t her killer’s name, but the access code for a restricted-access Department of Defence computer account). Having previously achieved temporary stability with a provisional configuration of the available data, as we shift focus, as we change the mode of projection, this data is entirely reconfigured. As in a kaleidoscope, all of the elements shift in relation to one other, but this gives onto a new stability. These moments of disorientation and reorientation are what constitute, for the reader or viewer, the pleasure of the plot. In the best fictions, as they take place we feel our sense of ourselves as subject of this knowledge-process shifting along with the protagonist’s. Here, Jason Bourne provides the missing link between our fictional and therapeutic models, for the entire conceit of the Bourne series relies on traumatic dissociation. The locality of Bourne’s own psyche bears traces of a wider context of which he has no conscious knowledge—so Bourne’s brain is both theatron and complot. Each discovery of an external fact is also a discovery about himself, a reorientation. But in a more general sense, ultimately ‘trauma’ is simply the condition of locality or contingent sitedness as such. Trauma is an epistemological condition, or the condition of epistemology itself: an incomplete cut between a local site and an outside that has already affected it in some way. It is the introjected traces of the outside, clues betraying the emplotment of a deeper story, which at once provide the constitutive disequilibrium that drives the investigation, and promise the possibility of knowledge. 9/11

The plot twist, then, comprises both a stability, a new reconciliation of local and global, and a kind of panic that results from the impossibility of achieving this reconciliation in a single image: there is an oscillation between different orientations in which we find it difficult to grasp one without losing the other. This subjective state can of course be ‘resolved’ in a certain sense, and this is the goal of Bourne’s quest and the aim of any therapy: to reach a level at which one finds a thread, manages to integrate most of the elements so as to become ‘functional’ again. But in a more essential sense it is never resolved, or at least it could always go further. For the concept of plot makes things more complex and more twisted than reaching a ground, finally discovering the kingpin and closing the case. There is not simply a figure and a ground, but an infinite abyss of ‘offstages’, a constantly shifting relation of ungrounding, a potentially endless series of plot twists and complicities which, as in Bourne, tend to draw the investigator himself into their kaleidoscopic maelstrom. This is a question of affordance: how many revelations can the subject of knowledge afford before the grounds of his own self-knowledge are eroded, transformed, shifted, twisted so much by the plot that he becomes a patient rather than an agent of the investigation? In some of the best detective fiction this predicament itself is dramatised, as the investigator realises, on the edge of madness, that they themselves are caught up in the plot-threads they are trying to untangle. A peril which is, in fact, inseparable from the pursuit of knowledge, as evidenced in the sometimes agonising upheavals of the therapeutic situation. * The plot twist is the moment of cognitive reorientation in which the protagonist replots available data according to a new distribution whose principles were lacking in the situation or theatron within which he previously laboured; or rather, all but lacking, since precisely what these fictions show us, once again, is that there is never absolute discontinuity. But the yarnwork marks the moment prior to the plot twist, a moment which, within the drama, overtly thematises and figures, in the form of a diagram, the effort of thinking through the plot. If the plot twist is the moment of cognitive disorientation, a moment of the replotting of the available data, then the moment that directly precedes it, figured in visual media by the yarnwork, is a moment of perplexity. The yarnwork scene dramatizes the anticipation of reorientation, of an incipient plot twist. Relating this back to the theatrical origins of the word ‘plot’, we can think of a yarnwork as the inverse of emplotment: where the plat was the diagrammatic avatar of the craft of emplotment—the management of the boundary between onstage and offstage, between story and plot, the projection of a dense unseen outside (complot) into a theatron, a beholding place, then conversely, in the yarnwork, the viewer—thus far trapped in a limited theatron—is given to overtly ponder, through the eyes of the protagonist, an incomplete reconstruction of its connection to another space: a diagram which, if completed, would enable navigation the other way, from a local situation to the dense multitude of which it is but a partial projection; to the next moment in the investigation, when the implication of the previous action within a wider plot will become clear. The yarnwork moment logically precedes the unveiling of this ulterior space, the passage ‘backstage’. * Given all of this, one is tempted to say that the ‘extro-scientific detective story’ is after all an impossibility. For, from this point of view, Meillassoux’s insistence, contra Vernes, that philosophical knowledge demands the jettisoning of all empirical detail in favour of an a priori ‘intellectual intuition’ of the principle of absolute contingency, would leave us with a global with no consistent connection to any locality, thus denarrativizing knowledge, discarding information on every side, dropping every thread, and abandoning all reliable possibility of navigation. 10/11

Instead, the universe of the detective story is that of a problematic, not a rational-speculative materialism: one that combines the assumption of universal causal coherence with the drama of incomplete (local) cognitive purchase by way of a plot into which anomalous traces of the outside insinuate themselves, drawing the disoriented investigator into ever-widening vistas where his map of the world and of himself will be transformed, twisted, and replotted, across a series of moments whose diachronicity is constitutive of the nature of knowledge itself. There is always something that stands out from the ground, something that ‘doesn’t add up’ and which cannot be accounted for by local principles. What drives investigation is the theatrical introjection or emplotment of data from the global environment, the clue, the index of plotting at work behind the scenes, the element that doesn’t fit but will be leveraged in order to drive further plotting. The dice are always loaded, continual navigation and reorientation is inevitable. The essential tools of the detective and the therapist alike are the scalpel and the compass. References Boltanski, Luc (2014). Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies. London: Polity. Freud, Sigmund (1895). ‘The Psychotherapy of Hysteria’, in Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, tr. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1957). Lardreau, Guy (1997). Présentation criminelle de quelques concepts majeurs de la philosophie. Arles: Actes Sud. Mackay, Robin (ed). (2015). When Site Lost the Plot. Falmouth: Urbanomic. Meillassoux, Quentin (2008). After Finitude. Trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum. Meillassoux, Quentin (2015), Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction. Trans. Alyosha Edlebl. Minnesota: Univocal. Singleton, Benedict (2011). Subtle Empires: On Craft and Being Crafty. PhD thesis. University of Northumbria. Turner, Henry (2006). The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580– 1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vernes, Jean-Réné (1982). Critique de la raison aléatoire. Paris: Aubier Montaigne. Vernes, Jean-Réné (2000). The Existence of the External World: The Pascal-Hume Principle. Trans. Mary Baker. Ottowa: University of Ottawa Press. 11/11

readthis.wtf /writing/swim-with-me/ Swim with Me: Éliane Radigue’s Apprenticeship in Sound - 2018 When a body combines some of its own distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves the Other—involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted – Gilles Deleuze1 I needed to work with each musician one-by-one in order to check that they were producing the sounds properly. The first question I asked all of them was: please, make some waves. Just waves. – Eliane Radigue2 Éliane Radigue describes her work as essentially unchanging. “I always made the same music,” she insists. “I dreamt of an unreal, impalpable music […] that always eluded me. Each attempt ended in seeing it come closer and closer.”3 This ongoing quest for a music yet to come involves a paradoxical combination of intimacy and alterity: absolutely singular to Radigue yet in no sense a personal choice, the dream seems to have come uninvited and unexpected to shape her lifework. And its realisation remains problematic and incomplete—always under construction, and always a matter of experimentation: “In the same way that I didn’t choose the colour of my hair, I didn’t choose the music I was drawn to. I always just knew when it was wrong, and I knew immediately. I cannot explain why!”4 In the course of this “long journey through uncertain lands,”5 Radigue’s path has obliquely crossed many others, including the highways of musique concrète, minimalism, and drone music, but her work has consistently resisted assimilation into any major movement or genre. Across more than half a century she has developed a series of intense working relationships with various collaborators both human and machine: from the gradual desynchronization of multiple tape loops to the plaintive wavering of controlled feedback, from the rich harmonics and partials made possible by the sensitive filters of the ARP 2500 to the extraordinarily subtle shifting overtones 1/6

coaxed from cello, horn, or electric bass, in each phase of Radigue’s work she learns and unlearns, always in the service of realising the same vision, and always with an ear for new means and materials. This lengthy career has also been punctutated by periods of apparent withdrawal (years dedicated to motherhood, and then to an immersion in Buddhism). Yet the secrets of those “lost” years also insinuated themselves into her work without appreciably changing its essence: the maternal transduction of Transamorem-Transmortem and Biogenesis, the invitation into the inner and outer landscapes of Tibet in Songs of Mila Repa….In short, everything seems to confirm Radigue’s argument that her musical journey has consisted in a peculiarly immobile movement. Radigue tells us that the life-cycle of a work begins with a vision or an image: “I must always have this vision, the primary image that serves as a score.”6 The entire piece will develop from this mental hieroglyph, which must be painstakingly unfolded, materialized, in an expository process that can take years: selecting and experimenting with suitable sonic materials, determining the proper relation between them, assembling them (“the first year is collecting sounds, the second year is putting it together […] fade in, fade out, cross fade…”).7 The transmission of these image-ideas forms the esoteric core of Radigue’s practice, a secret she declares impenetrable to Western thought: the projection of ideas that inhabit the spirit of the work and which determine the work’s structure; images projected either by words or intuitively/abstractly, transported as if by magic in a way that Eastern thought calls “heart to heart” (the location of the spirit in these cultures), which here in the West we have had the tendency to situate after having mentalized, stripped of affect, in the brain.8 Although each of the compositions may in fact be associated with a particular visual image or personal memory, these seem to be secondary expressions of a more abstract idea the work aims to “project.” A personal sensory encounter or memory may have provoked the guiding image, but precisely only in so far as it stirs up, with a vague yet powerful urgency, some more profound idea that requires the artist’s assistance in order to materialise. In the twenty-first century Radigue opened up her studio, putting an end to her long “marriage” to the ARP in order to share her practice with a number of musicians. In collaborative pieces composed “for the instrumentalist, not the instrument,” she develops a guiding image together with the musician, and then invites them to materialise it. Musical code and convention are set aside, in favour of a subtle and patient exploration of the overtone structure of each instrument. During an intensive preparatory period during which musicians must “forget everything to learn again,” they become not merely performers, but something like “living scores” for a piece. A music that is impossible to write down, therefore, can in principle be passed on; Rhodri Davis compares his experience of collaboration with Radigue with participating in a tradition, a kind of synthetic folkway that flows directly from her own practice, and is entrusted to her collaborators in the form of an embodied knowledge.9 But as listeners we already know Radigue as a teacher who initiates us into an intimacy with the strange element she has made it her life’s work to explore. Radigue presents us with vast soundsigns, slowly evolving complexes of tension, consonance, and difference whose movement prepares the ground for an idea to be projected. Each time, listening is a problematic encounter, a challenge to recognition, a call for sensitization and the development of new habits of attention. Every time there must be a reactivation, a reconstruction of the idea, and so Radigue’s work always also involves a transmission of her aural practice to the listener. The “magical transport” is a lateral repetition that relies on the heterogeneity of the sign—a difference relayed from listener to listener. 2/6

* There is no apprentice who is not “the Egyptologist” of something. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood, a physician by becoming sensitive to the signs of disease. Vocation is always predestination with regard to signs. – Gilles Deleuze10 I am not even speaking about what I have done with these sounds —that’s another story, the way in which I organized them. But above all I did listen to them with the greatest respect, trying to understand what they had to say. Here, you’re saying this; oh, there you’re saying that. Do you get along well together? Yes, that seems to work. So we can go on. – Éliane Radigue11 Over the course of her life Radigue has discovered, expanded, and become profoundly familiar with the interstices where musical objectivation is momentarily suspended. Early in her musical training she was fascinated by short moments of intermodulation in which what is heard no longer conforms to any specific mode or tonality.12 In such pregnant moments, a density of potential appears in-between the lattices of conventional musical determination. Subsequently, during her time working with musique concrète pioneers Schaeffer and Henri, Radigue recalls being attracted to those sections of tape recordings where the attack of a sound had been excised, leaving a continuous resonance whose complexity only lengthy repeated listening would unfold. On flights between Nice and Paris, during the period when she was collecting the sounds that would be used in Elemental I, she remembers constructing a “symphony by simply listening,” “mak[ing] her own music” out of the sound of the airplane engines (“some of which were more musical than others”) by “strolling among” the frequencies;13 she has even likened the experience of her own music to the throb of the airplane engines when one awakens, disoriented, in the cabin on a transatlantic flight.14 To take such moments of suspense and develop them into a new form of music, Radigue took as her basic tools slowness and change: “by nature slowness is expansive, yet it allows us to hear up close.”15 Across the vastness of her compositions, persistent fundamentals fade into the background to become nothing more than “carrier waves” for the micro-details that Radigue’s assiduous adjustments cause to emerge and wane imperceptibly, to flicker, stabilise, interfere, and merge with one another. Affording greater precision and latitude in her divagations, from the 1970s onward the ARP offered Radigue “access within the flesh of the sounds.”16 The strict condition for this new episode was that the synthesizer’s keyboard was left behind,17 so that the vicissitudes of experimentation would not lure her back into the musical known: “when I was disheartened, it would have been extremely tempting to allow myself to choose the easy way in using a keyboard. I decided to forget about it so as to only have this direct contact with potentiometers.”18 Direct contact, the mastery of a potentially unstable physical coupling, the “pleasure of a work made with the fingertips,” is the vital core of Radigue’s work. At the time of feedback pieces such as Usral and Vice-Versa, by inserting herself into potentially hysterical circuits Radigue cultivated a gestural discipline that is inseparable from a highly developed auditory acuity; a tactile sense for the tender points when things could go too far, prematurely conclude in chaos, or diffuse into indeterminacy, and a passion for those minute thresholds where new differentiations could be opened up within the sound: “I just respected the behaviour of moving very slowly, not going 3/6

too near or too far to the loudspeaker because that would make it blow up. I loved testing the limits. Believe me, you only had a hairbreadth to play with.”19 Poised, listening for signs of life, physically interacting with the body of sound, this “challenge to keep [the sounds] under control while maintaining the correct distance”20 allowed Radigue to develop “not only […] the ability to listen, but gestural patience.”21 Evidently, this is a process of sensitization that Radigue’s work must also encourage in its audience, if there is to be an audience at all. Short of simply not noticing the music at all, passing over it entirely incognizant of its organization and its subtle details, every listener must adjust their auditory habits to the micro-variations of a sonic environment which at first may seem non-musical (either overwhelming or featureless). As Thibaut de Ruyter says, it is “as if one enters a dark room and, little by little, ones eyes become accustomed to seeing very delicate things that one would not see in full light.”22 In Radigue’s own words, we must attune ourselves to “a certain slight beating, there in the background, pulsations, breath”23 if we are to receive her image-idea, and it is in this way that she invites us to join her in her lifelong apprenticeship. * Rehearsing his argument that learning, as a type of repetition, is never a matter of representation and imitation, Gilles Deleuze returns to the example of swimming: We learn nothing from those who say: “Do as I do”. Our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me”, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce […] The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave, in particular, the movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping these movements in practice as signs.24 Genuine learning implies a transformation in one’s perception of, adjustment to, and conduct in the world—to learn is to cultivate a sense of the relation between one’s body and sensory signs that herald an unfamiliar environment, and to inhabit the problematical field that conjoins them as a field of tactile disparities in search of a new equilibrium. Swimming coach Terry Laughlin developed his “Total Immersion” technique from the principle that, rather than pushing against the water, as conventional swimming technique teaches us to do, one should move through it as efficiently as possible. Observing that “the fastest swimmers took the fewest strokes,” Laughlin concluded that “shaping and positioning the body sleekly, rather than trying to pull powerfully, is the easiest way for humans to become more fishlike”—“reshaping the vessel” rather than “building the engine.” Confirming the pertinence of Deleuze’s example, what Laughlin emphasizes in his yoga-like practice is that, although a teacher may spell out the precepts, what is crucial is that the learner makes a “conscious decision” to invest in “foreign sensations, alien commands traveling along your nervous system, movements that feel funny at first.” This is a “training that targets the nervous system” and involves “feelings, habits, movements that feel awkward at first and must be made to feel natural.” For this aquatic asana, , representation and mimicry are of no help (“looks are hard to mimic”). TI’s “sensory skill practice” aims instead to “heighten the kinesthetic, or sensory, experience of how ‘right swimming’ feels,” “‘feeling feedback’, letting your nerve endings be your coach.”25 The apprentice becomes sensitized to the minutest of disparities: how much water is flowing above or below one’s fingertips, the slightest deviation from a position of 4/6

balance, the drag of the water over the “hull” as it parts the water. Demanding constant attentive psychomotor calibration, physical discipline, and adaptation, the technique promises the reward of effortless movement (what Laughlin calls the feeling of “swimming downhill”). Adapting to Radigue’s music presents its listeners with similar challenges of concentration, recalibration, and attentional adjustment—and can procure us comparable meditative rewards. It allows us to become a creature of greater finesse and grace of movement within the sonic element, but only by presenting us with perturbing signs that pose a problem, compelling us to adapt responsively: Learning takes place not in the relation between a representation and an action (reproduction of the Same) but in the relation between a sign and a response (encounter with the Other).26 It is tempting to note here that water plays a predominant part not only in many of Radigue’s works, but also in her description of the audience’s role in completing a composition. Alluding to the attentional strategies of the listener, she suggests that “it’s like looking at the surface of a river [or] a swimming pool: you can see the reflection of the ripples on the bottom or have a vision of the whole and let yourself be carried away by what I call “dream gazing’, or fix on a detail and make your own soundscape.”27 She speaks of the “course of the sounds” in Adnos as a “conch shell” from which “the ear filters, selects, privileges, as does a gaze cast over the glimmering of the water.”28 The emblem of L’île re-sonante suggests a similar visual correspondence: “an island in the waters of a lake that reflect her face […] both a ‘real’ image and an optical illusion.”29 And the title Occam Ocean also perfectly reflects the circumscribed plenitude, the expansive reduction, the vast depth and beguiling surface of Radigue’s music. Yet it is not really a question of the oceanic (feminine) imaginary here, but of immersion in an medium which, although it inevitably suggests this kind of associative image, is fundamentally of another kind. The truly cosmic, abstract element to which Radigue’s idea-images (island, sea, womb, plateau, storm) act as heuristic gateways is the non-organic life of the wave continuum itself. Of course, not every listener becomes as deeply absorbed as the instrumentalists with whom Radigue works intensively. Yet in so far as we listen and learn, we all become apprentices and carriers of the tradition, developing for ourselves some of the stealth and nuance with which Radigue navigates the sonorous element, aspiring to the grace of her continuous exploratory adjustments, and bringing them to bear not only when listening to music, but in our everyday perception. If “to learn […] is to immerse oneself within an alien element and thereby open oneself to an encounter with signs,”30 Radigue is an exemplary learner and a precious teacher. Her apprenticeship in the art of sound is an invitation for listener-collaborators to join a young tradition that enlivens the senses, couples us to novel disturbances, and propagates waves of becoming through and beyond us. 1. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone, 1994, 23. 2. Quoted in Kate Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean”, third edition-festival for other music, <http://www.edition-festival.com/?p=252>. 3. Éliane Radigue, “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal”, Leonardo Music Journal 19 (2009), 47–49. 4. Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean.” 5. Radigue, “Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal,” 49. 6. Julien Bécourt, “Éliane Radigue: The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal,” <https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/specials/2015-Éliane-radigue-feature/>. 5/6

7. Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean.” 8. Radigue “Pour répondre à le demande de Julien.” 9. “Éliane Radigue, Virtuoso Listening,” dir. Anais Prosaic, 2012. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (London: Athlone, 2000), 4. 11. Ben Ratliff, “Éliane Radigue, Mining Wisdom from 11th-Century Buddhism”, New York Times, August 20, 2015, < https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/arts/music/Éliane-radigue-mining-wisdom-from-11th-centurybuddhism.html>. 12. Chuck Johnson, “Empty Music: Éliane Radigue’s L’île re-sonante”, < http://www.chuckjohnson.net/wpcontent/uploads/Empty_Music.pdf>. 13. Julien Bécourt, “Éliane Radigue”. 14. “Éliane Radigue, Virtuoso Listening.” 15. Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean”. 16. Richard Glover, “Minimalism, Technology, and Electronic Music”, in Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, Pwyll Ap Siôn (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 161–180: 171. 17. Ibid. 18. Cited in Chuck Johnson, “Empty Music.” 19. Quoted in Kate Molleson, “Éliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean.” 20. Radigue, “Mysterious power of the infinitesimal”. 21. Bécourt, “Éliane Radigue” 22. Quoted in Virginie Jux, “Une oeuvre singulièrement musicale”, Revue TenTen, <http://revuetenten.com/uneoeuvre-singulierement-musicale/>. 23. Radigue, “Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal”. This rare discursive text tells of the evolution of the ear as an organ that selects a “miniscule zone” from the “immense vibrating symphony of the universe.” Following this initial curtailment, the cultural processes through which sound is codified and becomes an object of conventional and symbolic communication leave abandoned a whole unlistened-for realm where the “breath, pulsations, and beating remain.” It is on this untapped reservoir that Radigue stakes her hopes of realising her dream music—and then waits: “The years where the techniques were not available, I still carried the idea of this one music in my head.” 24. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 23. 25. Terry Laughlin, Total Immersion: The Revolutionary Way to Swim Better, Faster, and Easier (New York: Fireside, 2004). 26. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 23. 27. Tom Johnson, The Voice of New Music: New York City, 1972–1982 (Eindhoven: Het Apollohuis, 1989), <http://www.editions75.com/Books/TheVoiceOfNewMusic.PDF>. 28. Michel Chion and Guy Reibel, Les musiques electroacoustiques (Paris and Aix-en-Provence: INAGRM/Edisud, 1976), 135. 29. Daniel Caux, Liner notes for Éliane Radigue, L’Île re-sonante, Shiin, eer1 (2017). 30. Ronald Bogue, “Search, Swim and See: Deleuze’s Apprenticeship in Signs and Pedagogy of Images,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 36:3 (2004), 327–342: 337. 6/6

readthis.wtf /writing/towards-a-transcendental-deduction-of-jungle-interview-part-1/ Towards a Transcendental Deduction of Jungle (Interview) (Part 1) 2019 CH: Would you be able to say something about your background, and when you came to Warwick and came into contact with Nick Land? RM: In terms of my background, I was into music, I’d been in bands, and I’d also been an early adopter of home computing—I got my first computer, a Sinclair ZX81, when I was six or seven. So I was very aware of programming —in a way that children now tend not to be, even though they’re very familiar with the use of digital devices. With those early home computers, you had to learn to program it in order to make it do anything at all. There used to be magazines you could buy with programs you could copy out into the computer. So that was an early interest. When I was sixteen and came to do my A Levels, I wanted to choose computer science, but because of a timetabling problem I wasn’t able to do it, and I ended up taking philosophy although I didn’t really know what it was. Thanks to two really superb teachers at sixth-form college, I discovered that it was something that I’d been waiting for in some way, something that really grabbed me. I ended up applying to the University of Warwick, not for any specific reason—I didn’t have particularly pushy strategic parents or anything, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I didn’t have any knowledge of the department, as a lazy teenager I was just choosing randomly. I arrived there in 1993, I think. In the interim, the main things I’d been reading that were influential on me were Nietzsche especially, as well as some Freud. So my concept of philosophy involved its being integrated with how you live your life—you know, existential questions—and of course, as a teenager reading Nietzsche, it also clicks into your instinctive feeling for how disgustingly banal and conventional the world is, and that there must be something more interesting than this, there must be a way to aim higher; and the idea that one can analyse, disintegrate, and remake oneself. Unfortunately, having arrived at Warwick, the first year I found very difficult, taking the first year courses was kind of appalling because…well, I kind of enjoyed logic, since it was something akin to programming and so I was good at it. I’d already done Plato at sixth-form college—we used to actually read out the dialogues in class—and I enjoyed that. But the generic exposition of epistemology, metaphysics, analytic philosophy, that didn’t exactly appeal to a student hyped up on the prospects of Nietzschean self-overcoming. I’ve talked about some of this before, but it was only in the second year that I first encountered Nick Land. And I was taken by the very open and enquiring personality of Nick and the fact that he seemed to be someone who was actually doing philosophy rather than reporting back secondhand on others who had done it, assessing and finessing what had gone before. There was an exciting energy about what he was doing and also the thinkers that he then introduced me to, or who I discovered through going to his classes. There were two good courses, one was called Recent Continental Philosophy, at that time taught by Keith AnsellPearson, and the other one was Current French Philosophy. And, you know, the very idea of there being ‘recent’ or 1/20

‘current philosophy’ seemed exciting and somewhat unexpected, even though it was not really that recent, it was post-Heideggerian and then post-’68 thinkers, in CFP mostly Deleuze and Guattari—but certainly, those were the exciting courses to be on. But I wouldn’t like to overstate the importance of the official academic curriculum because, for me at least, that wasn’t what was important. At that time, there was already a coterie of people loosely aggregated around Nick. And one thing that was really good about Nick was that he didn’t just come in, do his job, and go home. He would always be out at the bar; he would mix with graduates and undergraduates. And he always wanted to talk and to listen to what other people were doing. I think that helped create a certain kind of community. I don’t know if that’s specific to Warwick, but it’s something that I have noticed doesn’t exist, really, in universities I’ve been to over the last decade: there was this sense of community in the philosophy department whereby the undergraduates, people doing PhDs, and some of the staff, would mix; and among those on the CFP course there was a sense that there was a common intellectual project that extended beyond the teaching hours, which is something I haven’t seen much in university departments since then. That may partly be to do with the fact that Warwick is a campus university, out in the middle of nowhere, so it’s kind of insulated, you see the same people all the time, and it’s an effort to go anywhere else. Who’s going to make an effort to go to Coventry or Leamington Spa anyway?! So, it had a kind of hothouse vibe about it. All of this was before CCRU happened. But there was already this group gravitating around the CFP course. In part it would be people like me who were possibly in some way slightly psychologically damaged or desperate, or disgusted with the world, and looking to philosophy to address existential questions; and obviously, Nick, in his book on Bataille, had offered some extravagant answers to those questions…well, perhaps not answers, but a certain way, at least, of talking about them. And although I don’t think he would ever indulge self-pity or existential melodrama, he took those problems seriously as problems, so it felt that it wasn’t just a pathetic teenage whim to want talk about nihilism, and that you could turn it into a positive enterprise of philosophical enquiry. In addition to this, Warwick was one of the first places to have a philosophy and literature course, so there were also people who were studying things like Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari’s Proust or Kafka, but also science fiction, cyberpunk, various things like that. And then there was a contingent who were into the kind of stuff covered in Wired magazine, getting excited about the early internet, neural nets, nanotech. Of course the web was in its infancy. In my first year at Warwick, you would need to go down into a dark basement where there was a big cavernous computer room full of geeks, and that was where all the computers in the university were and you could get online from there. I remember discovering through a very early browser how to access what there was of the web at the time, and downloading texts and books. At the time, for me that in itself didn’t necessarily seem like a huge deal, but through contact with these ideas that were circulating in the department, it became linked to a whole stream of theoretical speculation and became an indicator of something much more expansive and future-oriented. So, there was already a series of crossovers happening here because Nick was into all of these things, he would always be interested in what was going on in nanobiology, quantum computing, and so on. Between ’94 and ’97 at Warwick there was this series of conferences, Virtual Futures, originally organized by three postgraduates, Eric Cassidy, Dan O’Hara, and Otto Imken. It was a coagulation of that whole mixed group of students and their different interests, and also brought in people from farther afield who shared those interests. In the early years it leaned more toward the Wired side of things, speculation about the future of technology, but also 2/20

with a strong current of cyberfeminism and interest in the interference space between fiction and philosophy. The conferences featured a lot of speculation about cyberspace, the link between technology and social change, and so on. The first one was a small-ish academic-style event with papers and panel discussions, but the event exploded to ten times the size in ’95. You had people like Manuel DeLanda who were doing syncretic work bringing together complexity theory and bold sociological or political theses about technology, and essentially, a whole lot of crossdisciplinary fertilization was going on. I think from the Warwick side a lot of this was already coming out of the realisation that in Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia they were presciently addressing a lot of these questions around complexity, cybernetics, economics, desire, and the social in a way that anticipated the knotting-together of those things that was becoming increasingly relevant as we approached the twenty-first century. Those events were, I think, quite pioneering and unique at the time. I think the feeling that there was some kind of homegrown way of approaching and talking about these subjects and bringing something different to them was there from the beginning and, although it wasn’t overt at first, there was an emerging underlying scorn for the naivety of the Californian cyber-optimist ‘technology will free us’ discourse. Notable was what became the traditional star turn by Stelarc, this kind of bawdy semi-masochistic cybernetic bricoleur….and a scattering of artists, performance artists, cyberpunk novelists, people talking about electronic music, all helping inflect things more toward the wild side, as well as academic theorists. And the conference was accompanied by a club night. From ’94 to ’95 the whole thing grew massively, and began to recognisably gravitate more around a cyberpunk vibe than any recognisable academic agenda—or the agenda of tech evangelists. Imported from the thinkers who were taught on the RCP and CFP courses, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, and reinforced by artists’ explorations into the new cyperspace environment, there was more of a dark side to the whole thing, more discussion of the idea of an abolition, or at least derangement, of the human that wouldn’t be some kind of angelic migration into cyberspace, but a disintegration of human society into its own machinic infrastructure, which was bound to cause a massive disturbance to our sense of ourselves, rather than just being a kind of transcendence. Sadie Plant had been a presence at Virtual Futures, and it was ’96, I believe, that she was employed by Warwick, to found the CCRU. Sadie brought with her a number of her students from Birmingham. I’d already encountered some of them because they’d given presentations at Virtual Futures and at other events. But that’s when I properly met the group known as SWITCH, which was Mark Fisher, Rob Heath, Steve Metcalfe (who didn’t come to Warwick), Tim Burdsey, and Angus Carlyle (who was at Manchester). Suzanne Livingston was also one of those students who came with Sadie, and she became a member of CCRU proper and did a lot of the graphic artwork used in publications and such. I don’t think she was a ‘member’ of SWITCH at that time… they were more of a boy band! SWITCH was really cool because they’d turn up and do these presentations together, against a backdrop of intercut video clips from Terminator and Predator. I think already at that stage they sometimes used a soundtrack as well. That was something I hadn’t seen before. They had attitude. SWITCH were all coming from a cultural studies background, because most of them had studied with Sadie at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. So they were all people who were very well versed in the visual culture of movies, music, popular science fiction, horror, etc. In the UK the preceding decade had been the era of the scandal of ‘video nasties’, this invasion of the home by supposedly disturbing and even socially deleterious violent moving images, as the video market grew massively, conspiring with the technological sophistication of special effects to create an escalation in the speculative weirdness and violent scenarios that were being portrayed. SWITCH used all of that, trying to imbue theory with the energy of that popular culture and the fears and delights it tapped into, and also with the energy of the music they were listening to, electronic music, rave, hip-hop, hybridising all of these forms. 3/20

Earlier on, when I was doing my A Levels, I’d had something of an epiphanic experience when I read Simon Reynolds’s book on ‘shoegaze’ bands, Blissed Out. That had been one of the first theoretical books that had really got me excited because I thought, wow, you can take all of these (what seemed to me at the time) exotic French philosophers smoking their pipes in Paris, you can take their sophisticated jargon and use it to talk about the kind of music I’m listening to—you can talk about My Bloody Valentine using Derrida, or whatever. The name for the zine that I published around ’95-’96 at Warwick, ***collapse, a distant forerunner to the journal published by Urbanomic, actually came from a chapter in that book, on the band Loop. Just the chapter title for me was emblematic of this pioneering spirit of applying maximally portentous philosophical language to pop culture, something that would totally be a part of the spirit of CCRU later on. Not only was the chapter entitles ‘Black Mysticism of Transcendental Collapse’, it was about one of my favourite bands too! People ask me about the name Collapse and think it’s some kind of reference to quantum theory but no, that’s the real reason behind it! So, I understood immediately that SWITCH were extending this kind of practice, and meeting them was a renewal of the realisation that it’s possible for theoretical work to be part of what Mark Fisher always called, simply, ‘cultural production’: you’re producing something that’s aesthetically stimulating, that involves narrative drive, images, sound, perceptual stimulation, but it’s also theory, it’s also cognitive intensity. CH: And the students actually shifted institutional affiliation as well? RM: Yeah. Some of them may have been on the MA at Warwick, I think, before they did a PhD, I’m not sure. What I do know is that there was a lot of weird institutional politics around Sadie being in the philosophy department and a lot of grumbling, ‘That’s not philosophy. Why is she here?’ Probably, I think, she had already gained a certain notoriety and been in the press, and so there was maybe a business case made in Warwick, ‘Get this person who is going to create a reputation for being “innovative” and “cutting edge” and install her here.’ I don’t know whether that’s why it happened or not but… but there was certainly uneasiness about it which was made clear to her at the time. I know that the students also had difficulties, in particular Mark, he had a really hard time having to go to meeting after meeting and to the PhD review sessions and justify what he was doing, you know, Toy Story and Baudrillard, ‘that’s not philosophy! That’s not rigorous. You haven’t read this; you haven’t read that.’ I think that was a formative experience for Mark, in a negative sense, in terms of his critique of intellectual authority, guilt, and class—and once he had finished his PhD, it probably drove him further into wanting to create some kind of ‘pop theory’ that would function via other channels and without encountering those kind of institutional barriers. There was a kind of mutual education that went on where, you know, I certainly remember Mark introducing me, for example, to Paul Gilroy’s work, The Black Atlantic, the kind of stuff which was canon for Cultural Studies in Birmingham, but which I hadn’t really encountered before. And we talked for hours about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason…So there was a kind of cross-breeding of two fields, with Deleuze and Guattari increasingly becoming a common language as we all read and re-read Capitalism and Schizophrenia constantly. RM: There was a group who were older than me, who were doing PhDs when I arrived. But as I was saying, there was a quite a lot of mixing so you did get to know people. I remember Diane Beddoes, who was doing a PhD on Deleuze and feminism, Justin Barton, who later did the audio essays with Mark and who was certainly there doing work on Deleuze and Guattari. And then there were people who I think may have been from other departments or who were kind of working across departments. I know there was Michael Eardley, who was doing some kind of research spanning philosophy and computer science. There was Martyn Amos, who was from the biology department, who was interested in nanotechnology. Eric, Dan, and Otto who ran Virtual Futures—these were all 4/20

people who would regularly turn up at the bar. I remember seeing Hari Kunzru around too. Undoubtedly there are many others I’m forgetting, there was a kind of shifting hard core and then a fringe of other characters who came and went. But it was a kind of strange, heterogenous group of people, really. And I guess the common language they were able to talk was this kind of Deleuze and Guattari argot of complex systems, deterritorialization, strata, and so on, at a maximally abstract level—a weird kind of abstruse machinic Esperanto. Once CCRU was installed, there was another iteration of Virtual Futures in ’96, subtitled ‘Datableed’, which I ended up being one of the organisers of. Basically, there was a schism during the planning of the event, between those who were into hard science and wanted to talk about complex systems and cybernetics in a strong technical sense, and biotechnology and whatever—and a contingent around CCRU who were very outspoken, and who were more interested in this idea of cultural production, maybe looser with the ideas but arguably more energetic and creative— obviously, at the time, led by Mark Fisher at his most vociferous and sometimes borderline malicious! That confrontation was perhaps based also in the fact that they had arrived in Warwick in the philosophy department, they weren’t really versed in philosophy, and it was felt they were trying, in some way, to take over Virtual Futures to make it into something else, like to make it into some kind of weird Goth-Deleuzian post-punk performance art meltdown! Which was true. So that was an interesting time. And I guess probably only the presence of Nick was able to hold all those things together, but the schism was evident, most of the original organisers of Virtual Futures having left, myself and a couple of other people trying to pick it up, and the CCRU with a kind of evangelistic fervour trying to steer it in their direction. CH: And Virtual Futures, was it an independent conference or was it associated with Warwick and the department? RM: It was always officially sponsored by the philosophy department in some vague sense, but I have no idea how that played out in reality. In ’96, when I was involved in organising it, there was a lot of financial irregularity, just because no one knew what they were doing and I think that ended up getting the philosophy department in trouble, which is why it didn’t happen again. Things were looser then…I also used to steal the departmental photocopying card to print ***collapse, or I just took it to the print shop and told them it was for the department, although for the second one I got called back in because they considered some of the images to be pornographic and refused to print the cover. But yeah, it was always connected with the philosophy department and tolerated by them, I suppose. Certainly in ’95, where they had people like Stelarc and Orlan, it was getting media attention and that may have been something that seemed positive to the university authorities, if not to the philosophy department—that it was somehow connecting with that whole Wired culture and getting publicity for Warwick. But I’ve no doubt the whole scene and the publicity it got did in fact bring students in to the philosophy department. CH: Outside of Sadie Plant and you mentioned Keith Ansell-Pearson, was Land mostly ostracised within the department or were there other allies or part-allies? Was Andrew Benjamin there? RM: Yeah, Andrew was there. I don’t really know that much about the internal politics. I know all the time I was there Nick was definitely on good terms with Keith. I know that they planned to write a book together during a certain period, with someone from the business school…it was going to be called Machinic Postmodernism. It’s not as if Nick was deliberately abrasive to the other members of staff, I don’t think, but he would maybe say what he thought sometimes injudiciously, and probably was not so keen on keeping up with the bureaucratic side of the job. I would 5/20

say from my observation that the older Continental Philosophy staff were slightly condescending to him and to his students. And then the more analytic philosophers in the department, I think he had a good relationship with Greg Hunt, for example, who worked on computation. And I think Nick brought a lot of students into the department and they couldn’t argue with that. It became more of a problem when it became obvious that the activities of Nick and the students connected with him weren’t merely academic, and didn’t fit into any known definition of ‘philosophy’. I’m not really that clear on what happened and how the situation deteriorated or even, really, how the official existence of the CCRU ended, except I got the sense that Sadie didn’t feel welcome and she was the kind of person who would just say ‘Why would I stick around and take shit if I’m not wanted?’ But during the time she was there and for about a year afterward, CCRU existed, virtually. And physically—there was, for a certain period, a room where people just used to meet and discuss stuff. CH: This wasn’t at Warwick? RM: Yeah, yeah… CH: Oh, it was? RM: In the philosophy department, yeah, there was a room at one point, apart from Sadie’s office. Sadie somehow managed to make that happen, and then for a while after she left even, the room was still there, and it was used as a kind of common room for us—but CCRU was never really an officially acknowledged entity. CH: Didn’t it move to above a shop? RM: This is after I left, but in 1998, some of the CCRU decamped to that flat in Leamington, and then afterwards to a house which, apparently, is where Aleister Crowley used to lived. I had done my degree and an MA and then I started doing a PhD at Warwick. And I think by that time I was probably a bit directionless and stifled by being at Warwick for too long and I was not really clear about what CCRU was doing, where that was going, or what I was doing. So I left before the point at which all of them ended up detaching themselves from Warwick, because everyone was finishing their PhDs, Sadie was no longer there, Nick left or lost his job, and CCRU just became this free-floating group unattached to an institution. I was there up until the period just before Nick left, during the extreme number mania period, which was pretty disturbing, worrying to see it happen. I wrote about this before, but I remember Nick giving this seminar… at that time, Current French Philosophy was still an entity. And Nick used to give this seminar in a bar which was called The Airport Lounge, I don’t know why they built it to look like an airport lounge but it had windows all the way round, and it was snowing, the snow was swirling round us. And this is at ten in the morning, Nick hands out these sheets of paper, these diagrams of the keyboard with the initials of the chapters of A Thousand Plateaus with lines drawn between them—they’re reproduced in Fanged Noumena. You know, there was something rare about that just because it was really beyond the bounds of any kind of social and intellectual propriety, beyond the bounds of embarrassment at not being intellectually rigorous or socially acceptable, it’s taking exploratory thinking beyond all of that, you know, something genuinely strange is happening to this person and we’re participating in it. I probably followed as far as anyone could into this question of intensive numbering because it was something I’d tried to work on too, and it was actually connected to the whole question of jungle in certain ways, but eventually I couldn’t follow it any further either. 6/20

So that was worrying but it’s not something you can… we did say to Nick, ‘We are actually worried about you, people care about you’, but you can’t say that kind of thing to him. He’d just be like, ‘There’s no need, the entity has something for me to do…’. Because there were various entities around at that time, acting through people, that was really something we all cultivated as a more precise way of talking about processes of production without referring it back to persons—I guess something that became more and more central to CCRU later. The Current French Philosophy course became Cur, this entity that puppeted all the people who had been on that course. And then there was Vauung…. That period was the direct precursor to the material that’s in the CCRU Writings book, the work they did postWarwick, which is actually practising that kind of practical abstraction, that depersonalisation where, by approaching things from an external, detached position you end up dealing with these cybernetic hyperstitional entities or egregores that you treat as if they exist and by virtue of doing that consistently in a group, in some sense you summon them—that’s a core part of what CCRU called microcultural production. The best way to understand what the programme was behind all of this is by understanding the two words, ‘cybernetic culture’ as a double proposition: on one side, yes, it was about the fact that computational, cybernetic machines were playing more of a part in the generation of culture, in the shaping of the cultural imagination. Of course we are living in ‘a cybernetic society’, a ‘cybernetic culture’ in that sense. But then also, on the other hand, it was about projecting the cybernetic understanding back into the very content of culture: trying to understand cultural production itself as a cybernetic system, grasping how ideas, images, words and sounds are synthesized and generated, how they spread and propagate, are taken apart and resynthesized. And I think that dual perspective was unique at the time. It’s very easy to see a lineage, isn’t it, between what we were seeing in Wired in the ‘90s and today’s TED Talks. You know, there’s always been this kind of very optimistic discourse, which is essentially humanist, even when it’s talking about escaping from the human body. It’s still humanist in the sense that it doesn’t really question any of the fundamental conventional ideas of what it is to be human and what is to be valued. CCRU was something different from the beginning. And I think that that emphasis on popular culture is important because popular culture is the culture that is engineered to travel through whole populations, to propagate itself through machines and mass-produced commodities, and that produces waves of collective affect and stimulates social change. That was something brought from their Cultural Studies background but then mutated and developed in new directions in the new environment. CH: So, can I ask you what cybernetics you were reading? Was it the only Wiener and the Americans or was or was there other stuff…? RM: There was always that historical background, Wiener and so on. Gregory Bateson. There was also autopoiesis, the work of Maturana and Varela, that generation of cybernetic thinking. But I think mostly the excitement came through this kind of syncretic activity of people like DeLanda who, following Deleuze and Guattari, used cybernetics as a framework with which to view anything and everything. And more out-there stuff like Burroughs on addiction. The central part of that, via Nick, was the question of positive and negative feedback which, again, is really important in the sense of what today we would call memetic production: How do you produce culture machines that propagate themselves? So the cybernetics always had those cultural questions attached to it. As I mentioned, at Warwick there were these different factions. So there would have been some who really were going home and carefully studying scientific papers on the cybernetics of fruitfly cell reproduction or whatever. And then there were people who were just kind of picking up… I’m not saying this disparagingly but, just picking up 7/20

buzzwords, getting a general understanding of it, and getting excited about it and connecting it to all sorts of other things. I’m happy to admit I was more in the latter camp. But both of those things were a part of what was happening, and that’s something that continues to this day, you know, there’s always a contingent of people who are not scholarly about what they’re doing, but they also contribute to the production of new syntheses and combining different disciplines and different subjects and different approaches. What’s interesting to me is that a group of people who have now revived the Virtual Futures name, including one of the original organisers, it does have the appearance of something more like the TED Talks. It seems cleansed of some of the wilder elements that I found most interesting. And then on the other hand, CCRU now has become something that people are increasingly into and trying to find information about, but it seems like people are most interested in playing up the occultish aspects of it. CH: The cybernetics stuff is just really interesting to me because it really feels like the intellectual waters in which so much of contemporary technoculture swims nowadays. You cannot really avoid cybernetic ideas in talking about technologically mediated culture. RM: You know what the absolutely crucial missing link is here, though? Cyberpunk. Obviously, in the sense that everyone was reading William Gibson, also Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadigan and others—but really Gibson was the central reference—and that seemed to feed into this darker vision of the kind of networked, technologically enhanced future, artificial intelligence and so on. But more important than that was cyberpunk as a concept derived from punk, in the sense of culture not being the domain of any authority, and technology not being about magnificent, gleaming, perfectly-built corporate robots but about sticking components together in a basement that you’ve picked up off the street and just, you know, doing it yourself, even if in a very crude way. And that’s absolutely how Switch and CCRU operated in real life. I mean, I remember sitting on the floor with Mark with two VCRs, copying the same two seconds of Terminator over and over again from one tape to another to make one of these presentations, or filming the TV screen with a camcorder and solarizing it, or whatever. And that was the attitude to the theoretical work as well: plug things into one another, stitch stuff together. The Deleuzian/Guattarian term ‘assemblage’ is key to that cyberpunk understanding of materials: that there’s no privileged level of theoretical or practical treatment, that everything plugs into everything else on different planes, on the ragged edges. That conception of doing cybernetics prevailed in CCRU over the scientific or rational exploration of the concepts of cybernetics, because CCRU was always more concerned with doing enough theory to enable cultural production. Something I still try to stay true to myself is finding the correct balance between these things: yes, you have to do a certain amount of theoretical work and know the coordinates within which you’re working. Yes, there’s knowledge production going on; but it’s always within the framework of cultural production, in which you’re not standing above the thing that you’re talking about, you’re a part of it, you’re participating in it and examining the effects, the feedback. That’s also I think an antidote that Mark and myself arrived at in order to counteract the kind of impostor syndrome you can get when as someone socially ‘unqualified’ you venture into an area like philosophy, and you always know someone haughty is going to tell you you’ve got this or that detail wrong or that you haven’t taken something into account. Deleuze and Guattari in a sense give us permission to do this, to just plug theoretical machines into other machines and see what happens, see what works. So that’s exactly the kind of attitude CCRU had towards music, probably conditioned by their prior involvement in Cultural Studies: there’s nothing interesting about just theorising about music. What you want to do is somehow plug 8/20

writing into the types of operations that are going on in the musics that excite you. If you are compelled by the kind of cybernetic operations, the types of synthesis that are happening in a certain music, whether it’s hip-hop or jungle, and if you think that music expresses something crucial about contemporary reality, then somehow work out how to plug writing into that and participate in it rather than analysing it or writing about it. CH: Yeah. I mean, that really comes across in the CCRU material that you sent me. What was so interesting is the DIY cottage-industry style production aesthetic across the Abstract Culture zine, the events you were putting on etc. I didn’t realise that Collapse was originally a sort of fanzine. RM: Yeah, the original one. I was doing ***collapse at Warwick before Sadie and SWITCH arrived. And that was, for me, a kind of personal release from academic work…. you know, I have spent my whole life now dealing with books and quasi-‘academic’ materials, but I have just never really liked universities that much, and I’ve always had this other kind of energy that doesn’t fit there—basically what we were just saying, ‘cultural production’: I just want to make stuff. I didn’t really know what I was doing and I wasn’t even immersed in zine culture or anything, I just started making it, together with another student in the philosophy department, Robert O’Toole, after meeting Nick and being involved with this mini-community in the Warwick philosophy department. ***collapse became the expression of the most rabid punk side, the least academic side, of what was going on at Warwick. I should also mention Michael Carr, a peculiar chap who apocryphally, had been ejected from Warwick for telling the then head of department David Wood to fuck off, in Latin, but who used to still turn up every now and again, and who would make these unsolicited insane photocopy posters for ***collapse. There was a whole cottage industry aspect to ***collapse. I used to get hundreds of stickers printed up and plaster the whole campus with them, and go and leave copies of ***collapse in the University newsagent shelves—‘surcapitalism’, I called it…. And somehow, I guess through Nick, then through Sadie, the SWITCH crew had seen ***collapse and they thought it was cool that these things were going on at Warwick. 9/20

Similarly, when the CCRU kind of existed as a semi-official entity, Mark and I would be the ones being annoyingly impatient about the production of some external object. I think that was something that I always shared with Mark, this impatience, always saying, ‘We’re talking about it but what are we going to make? Let’s make something.’ So within the CCRU, subsequent to ***collapse, that gave rise to the Abstract Culture journal, which I designed and which carried on after I left, with the Digital Hyperstition issue. Abstract Culture was far more together content-wise, where ***collapse really had just been an eruption of delirious technoid nonsense made for the sake of making something. 10/20

CH: There was also an actual CD release by CCRU. RM: Nomo, yeah. CH: Could you just tell me about that? 11/20

RM: That was quite a bit later. First of all, to set the scene: Mark, obviously, was totally into music writing and immersed in post-punk music. While he was in Birmingham, or before that in Manchester, he was in this band called D-Generation, which was a kind of nihilistic, electronic punk or something; I don’t know how to describe it. So, it was Mark and his friend Simon Biddell, I believe. I don’t know if they ever actually played gigs or anything, but they put out one record. And then on the first issue of ***collapse, myself and Ben Greenaway, who was also part of this circle of people around Virtual Futures, had done this tape, which was a reading of Nick’s text, ‘Meltdown’ by one of the early Apple powerbook system voices, on top of some ambient techno done by Alan Boorman, who was someone I knew from my home town, he was part of the local music scene there, he’s now in the dada-esque band Wevie Stonder, but in those days he was doing techno. So I think I had really come to this idea of combining theoretical text and music 12/20

myself in some way. I don’t think I’d had any discussions with anybody about the idea of putting theory with music. It was just something I did, again, out of this compulsion to make something. But it was obviously an idea that was very much reinforced later. In that first year of CCRU, other students came to study with Sadie including Luciana Parisi, and Steve Goodman, later to become Kode9. At the same time Anna Greenspan, who would be one of the core members of CCRU, began an MA. I think Steve’s presence ended up being galvanizing not just in reinforcing the importance of music, but in the possibility of communicating with actual practice and the scene itself. Steve wasn’t yet producing then, but he was a DJ and knew what he was doing. He actually came from playing funk and then hip-hop, I think, but by that time he had been closely following the evolution of jungle for a few years and was an avid collector. So, you know, he was the cool one who dared to go into a record shop and knew which were the right records to buy. During that time I helped Steve learn Cubase because the year before I’d started making really bad happy hardcore and pseudojungle tracks on a Sound Blaster sound card on my PC. I was making mostly really terrible tracks pretty much continuously throughout ’96 and ’97, and I used to record them onto tape and make everyone listen to them. Steve and I also ran a jungle night at the Warwick Student Union, which was called Ko::Labs. So I think once these new recruits had arrived, the music side of things intensified further, we basically had our own club night that was effectively a testbed for jungle phenomenology. There were also several CCRU productions, produced either for Virtual Futures and other events, or made afterwards out of the materials. The track Gray Matter is a good example of that integration of music and text, I’d taken a recording of a paper co-written by CCRU and spoken by Anna Greenspan, and I took samples from that and integrated them in to a jungle track. There was a lot more of that stuff than is actually extant today, although we’re 13/20

turning things up every now and then. Essentially, every time anyone was invited to give a presentation, we would try to turn it into one of these multimedia things. Swarmachines is an even better example. I think the story behind that one is that in January 1996, Sadie had been invited to give a talk about situationism at this conference at the Hacienda in Manchester, and we all produced Swarmachines, which was a cut up-text where everyone contributed and then I mixed a jungle soundtrack and we recorded the vocals and laid them over the top. That must have been before Steve was around, because I did that by mixing it by using the varispeed on a Tascam 4-track portastudio! It was early on, the production is credited to ‘SWITCH/***collapse/CCRU’. When we were sitting there writing the text together, we were just passing stuff round and saying, ‘The bit you wrote could go here… no, move that bit there’. It was a kind of collective cut-up method, it was literally taped together on the floor of Mark’s flat in Birmingham. And then we read the text, recorded the voices, and I remember me and Mark sitting at my PC, putting different effects on all the different voices. Eventually, after four hours or so, we were so bored of it we were just saying, ‘Yeah, just do like a molar time-stretch on that one. Next…’. We were doing all this as fast as possible the day before the conference. And the voice track was then laid down on the 4-track on top of the music and mixed down onto a cassette to take to Manchester. That wasn’t just cyberpunk, it was totally inept cyberpunk—but just using whatever we had, including our weak technical skills. Steve was someone who was more sophisticated than that, he was far more embedded in music culture and confident in how production should be done, more than any of us were. But yeah, there were quite a lot of these experiments in text, music, and then in putting the two together. The Afrofutures event happened during ’96, organised by CCRU, with Kodwo Eshun, and that now seems very much a pioneering event, thematically. My memory is a little fuzzy on that but I know Steve DJed and I remember I got to play at least one of my more experimental tracks called ‘Dread Afriq’ which was in effect a kind of musical exploration of certain aspects of my Wildstyle piece. Then there was Katasonix at Virtual Futures ’96, which I did the music for and Nick did the text with the artist collective Orphan Drift, who became heavily involved in CCRU in the latter years. Now, that’s VF ’96 so this is the one where CCRU semi-‘took over’. It was really a performative testbed for all of these ideas. There was a series of four or five presentations, all of which were someone speaking their text over a musical background that had been specifically shaped, produced for the occasion. 14/20

So, Angus Carlyle, who was in SWITCH… CH: Is he a sound artist? RM: He is now, yeah, and he teaches sound art practice. He gave a talk about corporeality and boxing, that text is in one of the issues of Abstract Culture I think, and for that we mixed this loop out of Wu-Tang Clan, put it through various filters, so the talk was given as a kind of performance over that. Rohit Lekhi did a piece called Black Bedlam, which I also made some kind of atmospheric audio texture to go behind. There’s also a remix I did of one of his papers called ‘Futureloop’, that was done around the time of ‘Gray Matter’. Katasonix was the most sophisticated one, probably, it was a proper track that I made out of breakbeats, with an ear to this question of the acoustic correspondence between the beats and the components of speech. I really liked that track, but I’ve never been able to find a copy of it since, or any footage of the event. So, VF96 was an opportunity CCRU used to try out that mixture of theoretical text and sound, music, and use it as a performance—and to morph what was a conference into a rudimentary kind of theory gig, I don’t know if it was ‘successful’ and probably that’s not really the point. But, reflecting this schism that had taken place during preparation, the audience response was very much mixed. There were people who had been coming to Virtual Futures since the first one in ’94 who were like, ‘What’s this? There’s no one talking about cyberspace. What’s any of this got to do with the future? What’s any of this got to do with the virtual?’ And then maybe there were others who got into it. There are a lot of people that I’ve met ten years, fifteen years on who were there and who remember it. CH: So when did the Nomo CD happen, and was it actually released in any form? RM: In 1999, the group who had more or less held together as CCRU—Mark Fisher, Anna Greenspan, Nick Land, Suzanne Livingston, and Steve Goodman—Mark, Anna and Nick having been largely responsible for most of the material that appears in CCRU Writings, the real core pandemonium/CCRU mythos stuff, they moved from Leamington to London, or gradually people ended up in London. And they were somehow offered the opportunity to do this show at Beaconsfield Gallery. And the Nomo CD was produced for that. It was the first and only time, I suppose, that CCRU had been funded to do something. But that was preceded by Steve and Mark’s KataJungle EP, which was this kind of weird Gothic-nihilistic-UK-garage genre. I think that was the first record Steve put out, one of the tracks is credited to Kode9. And that must have been around the same time. Along with the Nomo CD, there was also another CD, Radius Suck, and a catalogue/booklet that they made with Orphan Drift. And the show also included there were also the diagrams that are at the back of Fanged Noumena, they were all in the exhibition as well blown up into poster size, they were pages out of Nick’s notebook, basically. I remember going to that show and feeling there was something not altogether convincing about how it was working, or that the setting was unsuited to the material. Part of it was that I was then at quite a distance from it all, I hadn’t participated in the preceding intense period of productivity and insanity, I’d just gone and got a job and forgotten all about it…but another thing was the importation of CCRU into the contemporary art gallery context—What do you do with this white room?—and there were people wandering around nonchalantly and not really knowing what was going on or how to deal with it except in a vague respectful art-spectator way. It was a very different environment to the CCRU collective as I remembered it, which was always a compact working environment, and, as I said, I was always the one interested in producing replicable products rather than performance. 15/20

I think also that show happened at the time when things were falling apart—or it contributed to them falling apart. I know it was a very stressful, difficult time for everyone involved. The CD seems like a kind of continuation of what we were doing in those earlier years. I think it was interesting in terms of Steve’s later work as Kode9, his theorisation of the hyperdub continuum, and the birth of dubstep, that what you hear on that CD is very much the idea of the beats being there virtually, there’s this kind of pulsing through it, which is at jungle speed, but the beats are hardly ever there, they just emerge from this murk every now and again. You don’t have theoretical text over the top, it’s almost like the theory’s kind of putresced into a few remaining elements that surface every now and again from the sea of slime. So it’s almost like the digestion of theoretical activity by sound has been consummated in those pieces. To be honest, it’s not something I listen to often—but it’s an interesting further stage in that whole process. CH: Whose are the voices on Nomo? RM: Usually there was a preference for female voices, partly because the affect of the female voice always was more effective in that context, just as an empirical observation that seemed to hold true; partly because sonically it just works a lot better. On Nomo you hear Anna Greenspan and Suzanne Livingston most prominently, but Nick is in there too. At the time when it was a quasi-official entity, the people active in CCRU would have been Mark, Nick, Sadie until she left, Anna, Suzanne and Steve and Luciana. That would have been the core group I think. But there were never really like membership cards or anything so it was always fluid…Rohit Lekhi, Tom Epps, Iain Hamilton Grant, Kodwo Eshun and others were associated at some time. The weird thing is, you know, we’ve all been in touch more since Mark died, it’s a sad fact that it took that, but it’s been interesting to talk to others who were there and realise they have the same feeling about it: ‘Something really important happened and then it just totally disappeared and I’ve been wondering ever since what it was’. CH: To what extent was music deemed to be something special or significant within this assemblage of different references that includes cyberpunk theory, cybernetics? And could you tell me a bit about this relationship that music had to the future in CCRU? RM: I would say music really entered as an important element with the birth of CCRU and the arrival of Sadie and her students. That’s when we all began to formulate more attentively the way in which it could play a role. Before then, I think, there was a kind of vague thing about, you know, ‘We’re interested in cybernetics and the future, therefore, we listen to electronic music’. And as I mentioned there had been a club night associated with Virtual Futures. But that was as far as it went. What arose with the CCRU was this understanding, firstly, that as a subject of analysis, highly synthetic electronic music was interesting particularly in so far as it was a futuristic form that emerged out of a cultural process largely unplanned by any overarching narrative—a process that was not part of a mainstream self-conscious modernism, for example. Read through the framework of works like Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, there was also the idea of black music as resulting from a forcible virtualisation of culture, which then reinvented itself with whatever happened to be at hand— in a cyberpunk way—the idea of hybridisation in hip-hop, Kraftwerk being transplanted into the Bronx and turned into something else…all of this fitted well with kind of the idea of the assemblage and so on. So, there was this idea that 16/20

this lineage of music was exemplary for a cybernetic cultural analysis, precisely in these two different senses that I’ve mentioned, a culture of the cybernetic age, and culture as cybernetics. But then there was also a second thing, which was that this music and the experience of this music in what was, I guess, by that time, the post-rave scene, the actual bodily experience of the music, was seen as acting like a kind of antidote to ‘white-man-Reason’, you know, all of the classic enemies of post-’68 thinking. There is the Nietzschean idea that the philosophical exercise of reason is intimately linked with a kind of repressive body posture, a way of holding the body, a way of not experiencing the body—and that’s something that is inevitably blown apart by the experience of music, and especially with the kind of bass engineered specifically to induce rhythmic dance and to shake up and disrupt the body. So there were those two senses in which, as something to analyse or as a model, the latest electronic music seemed particularly promising, and as something to experience, it seemed to disintegrate theoretical structures or it seemed like something that you could use as a meditative aid to find new lines of thought through bodily experience. So, that’s why, in particular, jungle became important and at that point it was almost as if techno became the enemy because of its 4/4 rigidity and its lack of syncopation and polyrhythm. You know, there’s a certain amount of caricature in that: you could say that those two factions who were fighting over Virtual Futures were also fighting over a model of music: druidic trance techno on the one hand, as a kind of representative of the great monorhythmic priesthood of metric regularity for the purposes of transcendence, and jungle on the other hand as this kind of weird multitemporal hybrid entity dedicated to picking apart the body and disrupting it with polyrhythm and with bass. So, there was that kind of ideological level to it, as well. As in all these things, you can’t overstate the importance of Mark’s polemical character in this—that played a big role—when Mark became an advocate of something, true to the spirit of musical tribalism, he was inevitably fiercely against something else. And I think Nick also had and still has this belief if you can produce a schism, then you should. So there were perhaps a lot of cartoonish ideological divides being drawn with this hardline partisanship for jungle, it became emblematic beyond just the music. But I think what’s interesting is that this kind of idea of the experiential, the idea of blackness and hybridity, the idea of virtualisation, this whole complex around the experience of music that is on what Steve calls the ‘hyperdub continuum’, i.e. polyrhythmic bass-heavy music which is, in a sense, a part of the evolution of an engineered system, a collective evolution of effective technologies for mobilising the body. That’s all part of the discourse today, right? There’s a lot of writing and thinking about that now. As I said, CCRU were doing Afrofuturism back in ’96! But what’s really interesting here is the counterpoint between that and a philosophical analysis coming from the other direction and looking into what these cultures of sound are doing, the fact that their computational and acoustic engineering is driven by practical imperatives—the music has to perform in a certain way in a club—and what the technical operations consist in. At a theoretical level we can see the operations happening in jungle in terms of the type of thinking we were looking at then, and in particular that chapter in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘Geology of Morals’, where D&G try to produce a model of immanent materialism that escapes from hylomorphism by using Hjelmslev’s theory of linguistics, which is already a bizarre hybrid of geology and linguistics whereby, rather than having form and matter, you have a proliferation and ramification of stratification processes—expression of content, content of expression, content of form…the essential idea being that there’s never a transcendent mechanism that imparts form to matter. There are always two series or two types of matter, which interact to produce a plane of consistency. 17/20

Now you have this idea of double articulation. The classic model would be geology, where you have particles that are formed in a certain way and are then selected, compacted and sedimented into a plane of consistency. So one thing I tried to expand on, and which we talked about a lot, was the sense in which the sonic technologies deployed in jungle served to break apart the double articulation of sound. Basically, if you think of the stave, that’s a heavily coded obvious double articulation, because you have the notes as pre-packaged entities which become inviolable units that can be arranged along the stave. And in a sense that constrains your access to the matter, the virtual matter (what Hjelmslev calls ‘purport’) of sound, and the two articulations—packaging sound into notes, arraying notes on the stave—are inseparable and in a relation of reciprocal presupposition. But in the same way, going ‘further down’, even a waveform as a conventional way to represent sound, is double-articulated, if you think about the classic two-dimensional display of a waveform, you have samples of amplitude against time, and again the matter of sound—which basically is intensity, displacement, what happens ‘between samples’—is in a sense screened by this operation of double articulation. The crucial thing is that the double articulation, in actual fact, is not ‘perpendicular’ as it seems to be. It is produced by a kind of folding of temporal perception (at the point where rhythm becomes tone). And it seemed to us that the operations that were happening in jungle tended to kind of collapse this double articulation and open up access to an extended immanence of sound, and therefore promised new ways to construct and experience sound. One sense in which that is the case is when you’re exploring the territory between percussive units and waveforms. So, if you have a snare and you repeat it and bring it closer and closer and closer together, until you produce a kind of buzz, you know, that becomes a tone. And you can pitch the sample up and down and create these elastic runs of percussive samples that become tonal glissandi. This is something that regularly happens in jungle, a slippage where encapsulated units of sound freighted with a semantic status are ‘melted down’ and used as sonic particles to forge some other fluid sonic phenomenon. So essentially in this music there are produced spontaneously certain methods of problematising the objectivity of the sound object. Most importantly there is the use of timestretching endemic to jungle, and the idea that timestretching is a fundamental diagonalization of the double articulation of acoustic time itself as expressed in the waveform, whereby, given a recording on a physical medium, you usually can’t speed up its playback without making the pitch higher. In violating this principle by using digital sampling, it’s almost as if timestretching breaks time itself. That’s the affect of timestretching, that’s how it feels when you listen to it, but also there’s a deeper kind of truth to it. The score of Steve Reich’s 1967 conceptual piece, Slow Motion Sound consists only of the command: Very gradually slow down a recorded sound to many times its original length without changing its pitch or timbre at all. You can see the later piece 1970 piece Four Organs as a realization of this idea, but only in so far as the rigour of the instruction is essentially compromised, because one can immediately hear that the difference between Reich’s original plan and this realisation corresponds to a radical difference in register; that between a musical operation and a sonic operation. Instead of the elongation of a sound (sound as material object of the operation), Four Organs now elongates notes (notes as preformed sonic structures, upon which the operation will be carried out). In fact, a realisation of Reich’s piece would now be quite feasible using timestretching, which was born in the 1960s with tape technologies, but only became realistically viable for music production from the 1980s by virtue of rapidlyaccelerating processor speeds; because timestretching achieves this impossible goal of slowing down a recorded sound without altering its pitch, violating the reciprocal relation (double articulation) between duration and pitch. 18/20

The crucial thing here is, just as, in a sense, ‘below’ all geological stratifications, all different rock formations, there is the same virtual material (what D&G call ‘the body of the earth’), beneath all organised sound we can similarly postulate a sonic virtuality. The ‘line of flight’ out of sonic articulation is achieved precisely to the extent that one is able to access that virtuality, which is the ultimate material basis of all sonic organization. The terms ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ are generally understood in a rather vague way by commentators on Deleuze and Guattari’s work. In fact, ‘molar’ derives from the mole, an international standard term of measurement which identifies the number of particles in a given amount of matter. For any given atomic system, a mole is the amount of substance of that system which contains as many elementary entities as there are atoms in 12 grams of carbon 12. In the same way, we might say, a ‘note’ or a ‘sample’ presupposes a convention that is an arbitrary and externallyimposed statistical fiction in relation to the virtual matter of sound. What we were looking for in jungle is moments when instead, a molecular relation to sound is achieved—so to speak, an experience of sound from the inside of matter. But isn’t timestretching just a kind of trick? It’s never perfect, and all it really does is cut up a recording more or less finely and duplicate and splice waveforms to make it longer. Moreover, that process always produces weird artefacts —which early jungle made a virtue out of, in the same way that people now use autotune. Reich’s specification was to lengthen the piece ‘without changing its pitch or timbre at all’, and whereas you can easily cut up and stretch out a simple sine wave, ‘timbre’ implies that the sound in question is more complex than this. and the problem with which digital pitch-shifting or timestretching algorithms always have to deal, is that they operate by slicing up a sound and duplicating and splicing its parts; and it is impossible to find a ‘slicing’ frequency that will leave all of the overtones intact; some will be sliced at the wrong point, producing artefacts in the stretched sound. That’s what produced those metallic, shimmering effects so characteristic of the timestretched samples in early jungle tracks. But what is the criteria for judging the success of a timestretching operation, for it not being ‘just a trick’? It could only be a comparison with a non-existent, transcendentally impossible reality. The question, whether a timestretched sample of a piano chord really is what a piano chord would sound like were it stretched, seems a nonsensical one, unless we understand it to mean ‘were the pianist to sustain the chord for longer’, in which case we have missed the point and are back with the compromise of Four Organs. In reality, to elongate a note has no meaning outside the reciprocal relationships of speed and pitch, i.e. inside sonic time. You simply cannot make ‘the same’ sound longer except by slowing it down. Talking about it as artificial assumes a standard of reality we do not have. So I would say that those artefacts are in a sense the audible indication of a straining against the limits of sonic time. What if instead of timestretching just being a ‘trick’, time itself was just an artificial capture mechanism imposed upon perception by the evolutionarily contingent folding of the sonic continuum…? It’s not that timestretching is a ‘cheap trick’ because it lacks the profundity of the form of time it claims to subvert; instead, that form of time itself never had anything profound about it, it was simply a matter of foldings, double articulations. So, in short, it seemed like there was this whole set of operations which were breaking apart the double articulation of sound, the way in which sound is packaged and is expected to be delivered in certain types of units, if you like. In that sense then, jungle also became a kind of model for diagonalizing. How do we escape from double articulation? How do we escape from the strata, at all scales? We looked in these new sonic operations as kind of exemplary models for how one can operate this destratification, this return to the potential of virtual matter, called for by Deleuze and Guattari. 19/20

The notion of diagonalization involves producing some machine within the double articulated system—because we’re inside the strata, that’s where we start—something that slowly breaks it apart or, to put it another way, disinters the material continuum beneath the double articulation. That notion was hugely important. I remember being at a party and talking to Nick, and Nick scribbling in his notebook about this. And, being dedicated Kantians, we were like, ‘It’s the transcendental deduction of jungle.’ But yeah, I think what’s interesting to me once more is this cybernetic/culture thing: how it’s come from both of those angles. The experience of the music enables you to start thinking in certain ways, but you can also do a theoretical analysis of what’s going on inside the sound that you can then transfer to other realms. [TBC] 20/20

readthis.wtf /writing/yuji-agematsus-clump-spirit/ Yuji Agematsu’s Clump Spirit - 2021 Text on the work of the artist Yuji Agematsu, for his show at Secession, Vienna, March-June 2021, in the book Four Seasons. 1/7

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Are you also puzzled, Socrates, about cases that might be thought absurd, such as hair or mud or dirt or any other trivial and undignified objects? Are you doubtful whether or not to assert that each of these has a separate eidos distinct from things like those we handle? Not at all, said Socrates. In those cases, the things are just the things we see; it would surely be too absurd to suppose that they have an eidos. All the same, I have sometimes been troubled by a doubt whether what is true in one case may not be true in all. Then, when I have reached that point, I am driven to retreat, for fear of tumbling into a bottomless pit of nonsense. Plato, Parmenides 130c–d The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum. Philip K. Dick, VALIS In Katamari Damacy (2003), the strange and beguiling creation of Keita Takahashi, a trained sculptor who defected into videogame design, the player controls a five-centimeter-tall cylinder-headed cartoon prince tasked with rebuilding the heavens after his peremptory and all-powerful father King of All Cosmos carelessly destroyed them in a drunken transport of cosmic beatitude: A sky full of stars…We broke it. […] So, so very sorry. But just between you and Us, It felt quite good. ♥ Not that We can remember very clearly, but We were in all Nature’s embrace. We felt the beauty of all things, and felt love for all. That’s how it was. Did you see? We smiled a genuine smile. Did you see? The stars splintering in perfect beauty […] now there’s nothing but darkness. 3/7

Like a little dung beetle, the prince must push around a ball to which items in the game environment adhere, forming a tumbling clump whose unevenness lends the gameplay a peculiar tactility and physicality. As the katamari grows, it becomes capable of ‘rolling up’ larger and larger items: from coins, matchsticks, and batteries to furniture, trees, farm animals, pedestrians and policemen, cars, buildings, and finally whole cities. In the closing scene, the tiny prince, now dwarfed in scale by the katamari, rolls it across the globe, picking up continental landmasses as it goes. We might imagine placing the contents of Yuji Agematsu’s ‘zips’ at the opposite end of the scale, in a prequel level prior to the initial 5 centimeter diameter domestic-scale katamari capable of gathering thumb tacks, candies, pachinko balls, hairpins, postage stamps, and chestnuts until, upon attaining 10 centimeters, it can roll out into the yard. Perhaps they make up the sticky stuff that forms the original core and lends the katamari its adhesive power? In any case, Agematsu’s daily assemblages of detritus, each exhibited in a cellophane packet, partake in the ‘clump spirit [katamari damashii, 塊魂]’ that imbues Takahashi’s game—a cosmic disposition which places great hope in the obsessional collecting of heterogeneous stuff. A clump is less than a set, in so far as it is subject not to the selectivity of the concept, but to a principle of universal adhesion (fundamental glomtology) combined with a situatedness and a tempo of accumulation which dictate its singular composition. The clump emerges as a kind of abject eidos, a quintessence via processes of material selection and agglomeration rather than conceptual purgation and generalization—something like the piles of moss, litter, and animal bones that fall through a fissure to cluster on the floor of a cave, invisible except to the most intrepid speleologist capable of fathoming such a ‘bottomless pit’. 4/7

While the objects agglomerated in Katamari Damacy are counted by category at the end of each round, those in Agematsu’s zips have tumbled through the pachinko of categories and straight out of the bottom into the streets of New York City, formless anonymous materials, orphans of the Platonic eidos. And yet each presents a moment in the city’s idea of itself, an ulterior distillate, the final product ground out of a multi-scale machine, a snapshot in which the city dreams itself in microcosm. Most children at some point make the precious discovery of this magical domain invisibilized by the regime of school, home and family, consisting of stuff that obeys none of the rules by which domesticated objects come to know their place. But the child who, inspired by clump spirit, brings home a mossy twig, some stones and a dead beetle in a discarded cigarette carton, reclaiming materials through which they’re able to express that part of themselves for which there is no place at home, will surely be punished. Don’t play in the gutter is an edict disobeyed only by wayward urchins and chronic flanêurs, for whom the street is not a purposeful route from A to B, but an infernal machine entered into with unparalleled pleasure: becoming-anonymous in a transmission channel that traffics bodies and things, pooling, buffeting and sorting them in huge, heaving collective tides of anonymity. As the great ideologues of this urban Paradise maintain, within that order, every nature has its bent, according to a different station, nearer or less near to its origin. Therefore, these natures move to different ports across the mighty sea of being, each given the impulse that will bear it on.1 There is no need to ‘demand the impossible’, no need to find a beach beneath the street, because the sidewalk is already a shoreline where jetsam is stranded, ready to be rolled up. Identities are lost and found in this gran mar de l’essere which takes in everything, even the ‘wretched refuse’, chews it up, and spits it out at the place its destiny allots, meaning that everything always ends up in the right spot at the right time, along with its consort. But at the eleventh hour Agematsu overturns the cruelty of this fatal ordinance whereby everything tempest-tossed by the city gets what it deserves: the bum in the street, the trash in the alley, the banker in the tower, and the artwork in the gallery. Doesn’t Duchamp say that the readymade is an object that has ‘changed direction’? The zips are undoubtedly a kind of second chance saloon, a last-minute change of fortune for the lowest of lowlife. Unlike the antiseptic Duchamp, however (there was always something too pristine about his lucky finds), Agematsu is not window-shopping for ‘proof of the existence of the outside world’—a world outside of art, which the readymade folded back into art. His gaze is lower, and he remains unperturbed by the ‘inevitable response to shop windows’— having to choose, purchase, and finally pay the ‘penalty’ of ‘cutting the pane and […] feeling regret as possession is consummated’.2 Everything he rolls up and bundles in, all those finds he describes as ‘desirable debris’, have already been consumed and consummated. Every element has been bought and sold, has been contiguous with mouths, sleeves, ears, hands, pockets, and worse. Used, fingered, chewed, discarded, spat out. In their assembled form they continue to testify to the unending flow of de(bri)siring-production and consumption. Even the container doesn’t manage to stand apart to politely display its contents: they glom onto its cellophane panes, making it at once support, podium, and picture plane. These are the readyconsumed, duckrabbits of the idea, calendrical packets of confatality which, even when set primly into their monthly cabinets like exclusive clutches arrayed in the window of a pop-up Dérélicte boutique,3 flicker between ignoble intimacy and distanced contemplation. Two ostinati impart recognizable structure and style to the zips, by virtue of this existing street-level distribution rather than by artistic design. Extruded keratin filaments whose varying tensile profiles offer an abbreviated portrait 5/7

of New York’s multicultural inhabitants trace arabesques through volumes of chewed gum, that nutritionally-void oral shock absorber, chomped into formless saliva-softened embryos by legions of stressed-out molars. Absorbed in contemplating these microsculptures, one can easily begin to hallucinate parodic masterpieces, as if hair and gum made up the essential armature of art history: Is that tiny twist of newspaper poised atop segments of multicolor gum a Lilliputian Calder? Do Miro’s mobile elementary forms recur, suspended from hairs, within the trash stratum? Could that precarious parallelogram of oily stuff propped on stiletto-like points be a remake of Dalì’s Premonition of Civil War—or is it that Dalì’s melting forms mimic chewed gum…? Anticipating a world in which a masterpiece will be praised by saying that it is ‘as beautiful as the meeting of a ring pull and a toothpick on a lump of Juicy Fruit’, in becoming monolithic, the diminutive parodies the exalted. Or perhaps there already is a world down there where everything fine and elevated finds its guttersnipe döppelganger. But which is the model and which the copy? Which way does the traffic really go? And at what speed? Superimposed on the order of the street, there is the order of discovery. Although ‘each thing has its own rhythm’, the tempo of the zips’ syncopated heterogeneity-in-isomorphy is that of the everyday. The most modest vitrine possible, the cellophane wrapping from a cigarette packet, reminds us that their production is connected to daily habit and the perennial newness of repetition.4 No action could be more symbolic of this than the ritual breaching of this pristine synthetic caul for the first smoke of the day. Each evening’s walk adds a level of selectivity since, even in the same environment, depending on the route taken, the resulting clump will always differ. (This acute path-sensitivity, charted by the maps and notes accompanying Agematsu’s zips, also plays its part in the compulsive gameplay of Katamari Damacy, a game made by a fugitive sculptor in which, each time you play, you create an original sculpture.) In the ’60s and ’70s, the period most crucial to Agematsu’s artistic development, contemporary art, especially in New York City, moved into everyday life, into the street, and into the realm of consumer goods so as to get a breath of fresh air, but also, perhaps more secretly, to drive the quotidian to excess. In serialist work, the imposition of strict protocols employs humorous repetition to overturn the law of modern life,5 to break through its stereotypies and Sisyphean accumulations in search of a ‘more profound repetition’, in the hope that ‘in concentrating on this boundless monotony we find the sudden illumination of multiplicity itself’.6 Agematsu joins the infernal production line of contemporary existence ‘in order to make the two extremes resonate—namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death’.7 ‘I became an artist to be like a machine’, he says: without contempt, without judgment, and with monotonous regularity, processing the readyconsumed to find within it a residual energy of transmutation. A sky full of stars, we broke it…. Each inorganic vivarium presents an absolutely singular world: fused hypercolor asteroids of boiled sugar candy, hair, fur and nails, grime corals, extraterrestrial fauna, and every so often a stammering shard of lettering or fragment of an image jutting out from the detritus like a billboard from the ruins of a devastated city, overshadowed by the dark chitinous claw of a giant insect bristling with cilia. A new world every time. At the end of each round of Katamari Damacy the clump of items that have been rolled up are hurled into the void where they finally coagulate, fuse, and explode, giving birth to a new star. And in the zips something is being reconstructed too, from whatever comes to hand. The serialist in the street is not just ‘a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise’. He is also an inchling Prince and King of All Cosmos rolled into one, forging new Ideas from whatever filters down to gutter level, stuff from which ‘a beautiful or mysterious object’8 may yet come forth…. Oh! I 6/7

feel it, I feel the cosmos!9 With these lowly constellations Agematsu rebuilds the heavens, clump by clump, day by day. 7/7

readthis.wtf /writing/cryptolithic-passions/ Cryptolithic Passions - 2021 Text on caves, mines, and other underground experiences—for the collection Subtexts. Hoffmann’s retold fable ‘The Mines of Falun’ gives us a portrait of a double figure: two miners, one whose worldly thoughts remain above-ground as he prospects for profit below, and another whose plutonic heart betrays every bargain and contract he might make on the surface. Slowly, inexorably, the socialised agent of commerce, contributor to the collective enterprise of extraction, party to the commerce of matrimony and social success, yields to the questing miner of the soul, compelled by obscure promptings awakened in him by the strange sights and sounds of the underworld, in thrall to some inexplicable deeper passion that draws him into complicity with the mute, insensible, creeping growth of mineral organism. In this telluric tale as in others, Romanticism looked to the sublime and secret places of nature as occasions for the recovery of a deeper self slowly losing ground to the mechanical regimens of the Industrial Revolution. In a cosmos conceived of as a graduated system of development radiating from inorganic to organic, from unconscious to conscious, entry into the subterranean realm could be imagined as a healing return to the matrix of an allencompassing earth-process and thus to a more profound soul, dark double of the self condemned to surface dealings. But such a notion arose precisely in parallel with those other compulsions that were beginning to exert their cosmetic dominion over the face of the planet. It is the shaping and hauling and scraping and digging and layering of infernal machines that opened up new breaches and passageways through which the other soul could pass. Whether it be a cave, a chasm, or the riddled workings of the mine, in modern geopoetics passage into the heart of rock is a dynamism that both undoes and consummates the troubled psychic displacements wrought by global navigation, extraction, and colonialism. Tracking across the rift that separates worldly from mythical time, it recovers, wittingly or not, ’[t]he initiatory pattern of the perilous return […] a descent that brings the hero to the other world.’1 And isn’t it quite natural that ‘the essence of the non-appearing’ be ‘made available’2 to the initiate in those places 1/7

where appearance itself is lulled by duplicitous gloom, where otherworldly desires are excited by the prospective gleam of half-glimpsed ore? It is also a passage of time: movement into the rock ‘always coincides with a regression to an anterior stage of chronology’; or rather, from chronology to a vertical time. The deeper it is, ‘the more it resembles myth’,3 and the more the descent takes on the character of a disturbed dream or a progressive intoxication in which objective facts can no longer be reliably distinguished from fevered hallucinations or from the return of memories that are no longer those of an individuated subject. This is an ordeal that will never be documented in the account-books of science, yet it does offer a weird parallel with the emerging notion that earth history is written in the depths, that ‘the exposed depths of our own existence’ can be read in the ‘cipher language’ of the subterranean realm.4 As Novalis remarked, geology is an inverted astrology, a divination. In ‘The Mines of Falun’ Elis reads in the caverns intimate messages engraved by the ‘Queen of the Mines’ for him alone. Progression and return—both phylogenetic and ontogenetic—become confused down here. The dark world where shining things bloom slowly over millennia, to be disturbed only on pain of awakening avarice, war, and conflict, is also the telluric womb, but the path of healing coincides paradoxically with the radical violation of the earth by industrial man and his machines. And the happy miner, accepted by the Queen, who ‘measures her depths and forgets every complaint in her womb […] and is enflamed by her as though she were his bride’,5 courts danger: perhaps, as in the case of Hoffmann’s cautionary tale, he is destined for the only marriage possible with this stony lover—loss in the depths, crystallisation, petrification. Parting the folds of superficial time accreted on the surface, the ‘sick animal’ travels back into the inorganic past, but the path it walks may coincide, at the limit, with death. * On the surface, administrative time is continually reinforced by the presence of architectural structures as an archive of the social, concrete and constraining in the present. The operation of colonisation is a perpetual struggle to impose these stays, under circumstances whose absurdity cannot be separated from their brutality. The enforcement of the present is naturally subject to a certain slippage, inevitable but warded off by all possible means: from official document to timetable, calendar, typewriter and clock, the instruments of administration are mechanisms of escapement, of a regulated passing, a control parameter. Time can’t be allowed to happen all at once, and the slightest egress threatens generalised collapse. The most minor fault-line in the collective psychic armature threatens to destabilise the whole precarious edifice, catalysing institutional breakdown and political revolt. A decolonising vector operating not as retrospective judgment and condemnation but as an integral machine part, an immanent line of flight that must be constantly checked by the colonial machine. The colonist has entered a world where ‘[e]verything seemed cut off at its root, and therefore infected with illusion. […] Nothing was explained, and yet there was no romance.’6 A dissociative hiatus is always opened up by the experience of geographical and cultural displacement, and the implanted institutions and administrations continually build over this creeping chasm. But a whole lineage of fictions present to us those who are conscripted yet not fully invested in the enterprise, those who secretly feel the burden of the oppressive, loathsome and petty colony as a mere continuation of the lie of civilisation. For them, on the contrary, a line of escape projects outward, toward pathological encounters with what lies beneath the already-rotting compounds, stations, and offices of temporal power. 2/7

Welcomed rather than warded off, the dissociative state induced by the encounter with these ,‘immemorial’, ‘prehistoric’, ‘unspeakable […] outposts’ where one can touch the ‘flesh of the sun’s flesh’7 favours the delirious discovery of the markers of fatal predestination. Rather than dutifully helping fill in the ‘blank spaces on the map’, there is a certain art to bathing in their indifference, drifting languorously out from the administrative theatres in which the amateur dramatics of the civilised are played out. Such are the journeys of Miranda and Marion in Picnic at Hanging Rock (facilitated by the libidinous Mme. de Poitiers and, in the ‘missing’ chapter, by the uncanny clown-crab-woman),8 and that of Adela Quested in A Passage to India (with Mrs Moore as spritely prodrome: ‘A new feeling, half languor, half excitement, bade her turn down any fresh path’).9 A plutonic valentine, an initiation that involves the choice of one kind of marriage over another, the cryptolithic passion draws bodies down a luminous path which denies them to the circuits of superficial commerce. ‘[O]bviously about women escaping’,10 both of these texts involve an ordeal, an initiatory passage to a womanhood that escapes coding: something other than either integration via matrimonial contract, or scandalous victimhood (‘quite intact’; ‘never actually touched’).11 For desire is perverted by the fatal passage. Even for Elis Fröbum, the miner of Falun, it was a flight, a fugue, an irresponsible throwing off of civilised duty, inglorious to the empire, unproductive from any human point of view, responding to a force that pulled at him from the inside, ‘as though invisible hands were drawing him down into the abyss’, ’suddenly gripped by an ice-cold hand’, his ‘inner being […] intertwined with the wondrous branches [of minerals] that rise up out of […] the midpoint of the earth’. But while Elis remains torn, duplicitous, and ultimately perishes, Miranda and Marion go easily with the same compulsion (‘The monolith. Pulling, like a tide. It’s just about pulling me inside out’),12 dancing, even. In the ‘missing’ chapter of Picnic at Hanging Rock Marion and Miranda slip inside the rock of ‘indecent’ age13 having jettisoned their ‘absurd’ undergarments, the ‘stays’ which are left behind, ‘stuck fast in time’ as the girls squirm, animal-like, one by one, into a hole (‘it wasn’t a hole in the rocks […] it was a hole in space’).14 Miss Quested, having been led through a labyrinth of disorienting chasms similar to those through which the Appleyard girls made their ascent, wanders listlessly into the Marabar cave, a ‘black hole’ into which humans are ‘sucked […] like water down a drain’. What happened? On one scene, the clock will continue to tick-date its imported ordinances with the grim persistence of institutional synchrony, its incipient collapse telling upon the authorities: the headmistress Miss Appleyard, more tenuous with each second yet somehow not yet quite unraveled. While elsewhere, on the outside, the whole negligible anomaly will already have been absorbed, polo ground and boating lake included, as if it had never existed, a whimsical porcelain miniature dissolved into a vaster dream. Perhaps like all latecomers into ‘new worlds’, the girls of Picnic at Hanging Rock are suspended between two timefaults which from the start ruin any unproblematic present-ation, any rendering present. Appleyard College is a colonial incongruity squatting absurdly in a landscape whose only anthropological time is that of myth and thus of the mutual coexistence of times. Imported from a foreign land with a shallow history,15 the building stands besieged by a climate utterly indifferent to its survival, a landscape over which broods that frozen plutonic anomaly, ‘the monolith— a single outcrop something like a monstrous egg’.16 3/7

In the cinematic version of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the tension between these two scenes is relayed sonically by setting the politely insistent tick of the school clock against a subsonic rumbling (a slowed-down recording of an earthquake) designed to trigger the audience’s own archaeopsychic responses17—as if in the dark cavern of the movie theatre, the audience, mesmerised, could also be pulled inside out. But already in Joan Lindsay’s text, the girls’ solar trance brings with it an echo that resounds from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Ballard’s Drowned World, ‘a rather curious sound coming up from the plain, like the beating of far-off drums,’ resonating with ‘the separate beating of their […] hearts like two little drums’.18 An insistent pulse that signals at once the incipient synchronisation of the body with ulterior ungovernable outsideness (‘flesh of the sun’s flesh’) and the unacknowledged rumblings of native political discontent (‘Those drums are merely the festival, of course…’.)19 The dread rhythms prefigure a faltering of mastery and self-mastery, as does the unrelenting resonance which, in A Passage to India, proceeds to undo Miss Quested, ‘touched by the sun’, having undergone some unspeakable ordeal in the Marabar caves, the exact nature of which will never be resolved: The sound had spouted after her when she escaped, and was going on still like a river that gradually floods the plain. […] the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life.20 These sonorous geopoetic devices21 imply and reinforce the unsayability of the event. The implacable density of rock exerts a preternatural gravity on the spirit, and in the darkness that it embraces, strange worms flourish. Something will certainly have happened down there, but its illegibility in the language of the surface (‘“Say, say, say,” said the old lady bitterly. “As if anything can be said!’)22 ensures that it will subsist only as a traumatic gap, as a locus of contention (Callendar vs. Quested: the call of social synchronisation against the seeker’s serene-blind compulsion). The event is an absent centre which sends out the very signals that will have drawn them toward it: [L]ike dropping a stone into the water […] the thing that happened on St. Valentine’s day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles, from that first thing that happened, and it went on and it affected so many lives […] before and after…but anyway, I’m getting a bit complicated….23 Hanging Rock’s magnetic reverberations and A Passage to India’s ‘ou-boum’ both echo ourobouros, the looping singularity in which time coils itself into a tight pocket of darkness—the confined space of the rock into which they pass in pursuit of the prodrome: Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. ‘Boum’ is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or ‘bou-oum,’ or ‘ou-boum,’—utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce ‘boum.’ Even the striking of a match starts a little worm coiling, which is too small to complete a circle but is eternally watchful. And if several people talk at once, an overlapping howling noise begins, echoes generate echoes, and the cave is stuffed with a snake composed of small snakes, which writhe independently.24 What happened in there was deafening, a recession of reason: ‘“In space things touch, in time things part,” she repeated to herself […]—her brain so weak that she could not decide whether the phrase was a philosophy or a pun.’25 Unspeakable, carnal, senseless, vulnerable, and innocent: My body felt impossible. Touching my face, I encountered only the features and limbs of a little girl. Below the waist, however, all was confusion, snaking endlessly into itself, or rather, into depths beyond sense, traversed by languid 4/7

spinal waves that culminated in the distant hint of a tail […] I was dissolving […] a labyrinth had opened up.26 During the descent he started to lose it and couldn’t go on. The men refused to turn back, and told him to stay put in some coffin-sized space while they went on to get the bats, and as long as he didn’t move they would pick him up on the way back. Think of it. He said that after they left him, the absolute blackness, the stagnant air and the silence just swallowed him into a different dimension. With increased volume, his consciousness turned on him suddenly and severely. Like some nightmare out of Beckett. Five minutes became so many hours, and that was the least of his hardships. You know how your tongue’s spatial knowledge of your molars never corresponds with what you see in the mirror? Shifting his body even slightly felt like he’d moved into a different chamber—he reached out with his arm expecting the air of the crevice through which he’d crawled in by, and finds instead a bar of cold stone. Haha, plummeting fear. So what does he do? Among other things, egged on by his treacherous consciousness, he masturbates repeatedly.27 The blackness in which he was enveloped turned to white. He was floating in white shadow, like a lump of cream in a bowl of milk. And had he not been forced to rub his body in milk in order to penetrate to this depth? […] In this deep place the feminine nature of Speranza became wholly maternal, and because the weakening of the bounds of time and space enabled Robinson to plunge as never before into the forgotten world of his childhood, he was haunted by the memory of his mother.28 * The modern figure of homo duplex summarises the broader sense of this splitting of psyche into administrative and subterranean dimensions: [M]an is twofold. Within him there are two beings: an individual being that originates in the organism and whose sphere of action is strictly limited by this fact; and a social being that represents the higher reality of the intellectual and moral order […] by which I mean society.29 Durkheim here repeats what the great naturalist and pioneering geologist Buffon had written a hundred and fifty years earlier: The internal man is double. He is composed of two principles, different in their nature, and opposite in their action. The mind, or principle of all knowledge, wages perpetual war with the other principle, which is purely material. The first is a bright luminary, attended with calmness and serenity, the salutary source of science, of reason, and of wisdom. The other is a false light, which shines only in tempest and obscurity, an impetuous torrent, which involves in its train nothing but passion and error.30 Those unable to attain, or disbarred from, the civilisational dignity of ‘Man’, those attached to the ‘purely material’ or to ‘the organism’, may end up enrolling on the wrong side of this war. In temperance of the cryptolithic passion, those recovering from the ‘impetuous torrents’ of Romanticism will argue that, through obedience to such inner biddings at the expense of participation in the conventions of the surface, one merely trades ‘broadly shared societal illusions’ for an embrace of ‘personal delusions’.31 And indeed, Mrs Moore’s advice to Adela that ‘India forces one to come face to face with oneself—it can be rather disturbing’32 suggests we view her ordeal as an indulgent exercise in negative narcissism on the part of the coloniser. But who would dare hear in the Marabar caves, where ‘[w]hatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies’, their own self? Who would gaze into the ‘enormous gulf […] colossal work of destruction […] monstrous abyss’33 of the Falun main-shaft or the ‘gray volcanic mass’ of Hanging Rock34 in 5/7

search of a looking-glass reflection of their own face? This would be to assume that the fugitive ‘light of obscurity’ leads to the kernel of the individual, rather than outward, via that which is contained in me that is not me. A subtle point can be found in the metanarrative that frames ‘The Mines of Falun’ in The Serapion Brethren. Hoffmann’s book tells of a group of friends attempting to determine what it is that makes a truly compelling narrative. One ‘brother’, Cyprian, tells of meeting in the forest a hermit who earnestly believes himself to be the early Christian anchorite Serapion. This delusional man’s tales, Cyprian observes, are all the more powerful in that, in his madness, he mistakes inner for outer sense, and so has in effect virtually experienced the fictional events himself. In response, his fellow brother Lothair maintains that ‘duplexity’ is the essential condition of our earthly existence. There is an inner world; and a spiritual faculty of discerning it with absolute clearness, nay, with the most minute and brilliant distinctness. But it is part of our earthly lot that it is the outer world, in which we are encased, which is the lever that brings that spiritual faculty into play. The things of the inner world appear to us only inside the circle which is formed round us by the objects of the outer world […].35 Serapion’s only fault lay in his failure to acknowledge this catalytic role of the outer world as trigger for the discovery of inner sense. But in shifting the locus of duplexity, this ‘Serapiontic Principle’36 suggests what binds together colonial commercium and plutonic noumenon, calendar and quest, as parts of the same integral plot. The privileged sites where one who is not quite ‘Man’ finds egress—the Mines of Falun, the colonial outposts of Africa, India, or Australasia, laid bare by the very machines that scar the earth and beleaguer the spirit, are discovered by the subject of desiring-production, a strange subject […] with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines, being defined by the share of the product it takes for itself, garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state […]. And if ‘the earth […] is a body without organs’37 as well as the ‘primitive, savage unity of desire and production’,38 then this wandering is synonymous with the movement of the deracinated human across the face of the earth, where the fresh wheals left by digging machines open up new tunnels into the psychic underworld and lever open passages to rebirth. * A contemporary geopoetics will find its own uses for these cavities, climates, and gradients. Of course, however politically disavowed they may be, there are still dark and forbidding mines where men risk their lives in search of metal; there are still colonies where absurdity vies with brutality under a cloak of administrative politesse. And to deal with the despoliation wrought by the machines, there is greater devastation, there are huger machines, vaster construction sites, and deeper holes. In Into Eternity, Michael Madsen’s 2010 documentary about the Onkalo nuclear waste facility under construction in Finland, experts explain that ‘[t]he world above ground is unstable’: We have to find a permanent solution […] We have come to a conclusion that the Finnish bedrock, 19 billion years old, is the medium that we can predict far to the future, at least 100,000 years ahead. […] conditions down in the 6/7

rock will be stable and won’t change, but on the surface you never know what’s going to happen—it could be wars, it could be economic depression—on the surface the clock runs very fast, while in the rock it goes very very slowly. From the point of view of those dealing with the toxic slag ejected by industry, the division between the realms of clock-time and mineral, lithic, or planetary time is a matter of relative safety, while for the volatile matter of the soul, the journey into the rock is a descent into a moral ordeal, a struggle of the soul or a struggle of different forms of desire over the soul, and an entry into unconventional perversions and couplings. Since there are many ways in which this passage can be lived, many possible detours, divergences, and divagations, many failings and fault-lines, there are innumerable tales of depths and surfaces to be told: geopoetic amplifications, Serapiontic relays, of anomalous encounters. Each will attest to the fact that the displacements and delirious wanderings of the modern subject cannot be separated from continual processes of extraction, translation, transformation, mediation, and ejection whose administrative coordination and progressive march is in every case doubled by occult workings and cryptolithic passions. The function of myth is not to conserve the remembrance of the primordial event, but to project the sick […] to where that event is in the process of occurring.39 It is happening now […] it is always acted out in the tepid twilight of a present without a past.40 7/7

readthis.wtf /writing/notes-4-saps/ Notes 4 Saps - 2021 Somewhere between joining the moral outcry over the ecological footprint of NFTs, and hailing the collision of contracts and culture as an untroubled new dawn for cultural producers, it may be productive to see the technology as generating a new and instructive increase in tension between economics and our inherited concepts of art andculture. The reference that immediately springs to mind is of course Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, where Benjamin asks what happens to the inimitable glow of the here-and-now of a unique object’s making—when artworks can be mechanically copied and distributed ad infinitum. 1/6

NFTs force a decision upon artists making digital work: to affirm the nature of this work as reproducible, aura-less, and thus a vexation to all regimes of property, or to decant it into a container that allows it to take on an enhanced existence as Art, understood as a unique auratic experience—at the expense of making its content secondary to its ownership coordinates. Furthermore, rather than being a moral failing, the excessive energy consumption of this operation points us toward the most problematic aspects of and culture in their relation to economics and ecology. Nowhere or Everywhere at Once Benjamin is nothing if not ambivalent about technology’s erosion of aura: he addresses it as a ‘salutary estrangement’, and draws attention to the uses that fascism finds for the aura. Indeed, he seems to agree that, rather than spelling the end of art, the waning of aura makes way for a different kind of art. But it is clear that the art market has long been dependent upon aura. Its institutions are set up to safeguard, officiate, and certify aura, since the here-and-now is what guarantees that value remains anchored in objects that can be owned. This is a business that is in no immediate danger of disappearing, but for some time it has been confounded by the slipperiness of digital objects. From this perspective, the ‘radicality’ of NFTs consists in exploiting blockchain technology to re-install into the realm of the digital all necessary requirements for the traditional art market to perpetuate itself: aura, authenticity, uniqueness, certification, and property rights. The Cryptopunks trajectory is exemplary of the alliance: a hacker discovered at a Christies conference gets together with a Zurich gallerist, and ends up as an artist selling NFTs for millions at…Christies. It’s hard to be convinced by the idea that this represents a huge shift of gravity in the art world (or, indeed, that it is ‘punk’ in any recognisable sense). My suspicions about this operation were further reinforced when I came across the phrase ‘enabling digital scarcity’, which suggests the strange kind of retrograde innovation involved here. Benjamin’s ‘here-and-now’ may be absent from the content of a digital artwork, which cannot be prevented from being nowhere and everywhere at once, but the blockchain allows us to attach a ‘here-and-now’ securely to its certificate of sale. Isn’t it likely that the first NFTs sold over the last few torrid months will be endowed with a special aura precisely by virtue of their date of transaction, rather than their content? From now on, the value-adding power of the here-and-now adheres to the artwork only via the intermediary of an infrastructure accepted as authoritative, its transactional aura reflected in images which are indeed mere tokens, and may as well just be so many animations of shiny spinning 3D objects. Hence the decision faced by artists working in digital media: affirm the simulacrum, or operationalise the aura. What reason could there be not to take the second path? Simulacra and Cope Part of what was glorious and riotous about Web 1.0 was precisely its uncontrolled swarms of simulacra—copies without originals, infinitely duplicable, impossible to control or to own. Together with all the disruptions of personal identity, aesthetic propriety, and communicational taboos that went along with the net, this was a part of what reconfigured the way we thought about the world. It was undoubtedly these dynamics that gave rise to the delirious futuristic speculations that fuelled nineties cyberculture, but my vision of culture goes back a little further: it is based on something more like the postmodern idea of the simulacra—the distributed mechanically-reproduced object. The paperback book, vinyl record, or video 2/6

game cartridge is a mass-produced simulacrum. It allows many people to inexpensively enjoy the same cultural work, of which there is effectively no ‘original’. This to me is a more connective, potentiated, vital culture machine than that of the traditional art market, with its privileged access, its gatekeepers, and its objects that accrue massive value because they can be owned by one person only. The arrival of digital culture made the effects of simulacra culture more extreme, and the pressures it exerted on producers more complex. For decades now, in a world where no labour whatsoever is involved in duplicating a work, cultural producers have been living in a world of cope. Without ‘originals’, monetising work that is essentially virtual has required a great deal of inventiveness, the patchwork construction of provisional systems, and various makeshift compromises between virtual and physical reality. We have witnessed the music industry in particular squirm and mutate under this pressure. We have seen many attempts by makers, individually and collectively, at finding ways to monetise digital art without relying on uniqueness and exclusivity. I find these struggles interesting because, as a publisher, they affect me too. Essentially virtual works such as texts cannot be secured as digital objects, and lovingly rendering them into fetishisable physical objects to be shipped around the planet is no more of a long-term solution than relying on the goodwill of enthusiastic fans to voluntarily paypal you a fiver when you need it. But suddenly this all looks like it was an interim moment. As if the partly monetised passion economies of ‘Web 2.5’ were just a kind of muddling through, and we are now finally within reach of a complete and definitive solution. We will probably not be able to gauge the long-term effects for cultural producers and whether this infrastructure will furnish a more reliable way to survive than improvising methods for parlaying likes into cash for some time. But having been a dedicated promoter of accelerationism, I felt it would be remiss not to be engaging positively with an actually-existing disruptive technological unknown…except that the more I stared at those shiny rotating 3D objects, ruminating about aura, the less enthusiastic I felt. The idea of participating in tidying up the glorious mess that was the Internet, so that everyone would know who owned what and when, lacked libidinal charge. At this point I remembered something my friend the artist Jake Chapman had told me, when I asked him whether, as a confirmed celebrity britartist with his delightful children, well-groomed Land Rover, cutesy house in the country and fleet of Shetland ponies, he had moments of doubt about continuing to make yet more scabrous and expensive art. He said: you just pour all the doubt, resentment, disenchantment and loathing back into the work and pack it down hard—that’s how you keep making stuff. Useful Works So I began to think again, starting with the energy question. Denunciations of the energy wastage built into the Ethereum ecosystem by design are not as uncomplicated as they may at first seem. Our entire cultural sphere is increasingly based on digital infrastructure that haemorrhages ‘unnecessary’ energy. For this very reason, there is something fascinating about seeing artists rush in their hundreds to inhabit this new, super-energy-intensive platform with memes, screencaps, glamour shots, renderings of alien landscapes, specular geometries, and animated optical illusions, only to end up tying themselves in knots to prove that their work is responsible, earth-friendly, ‘neutral’ or even net-beneficial to the planet. What kind of virtual eco-Big-Other is being conjured up by this carbon-aware art activism? An omniscient legislative body constantly judging whether your cultural production or consumption is ‘useful’ or merely extravagantly wasteful and how many trees you must plant to regain virtuous artist status? 3/6

Blockchain technology anticipates a major reconfiguration of time, money, culture, and power, and NFTs are only one facet of this. But they serve to highlight how quickly, given an infrastructure where information, money, and energy are mutually fungible flows, the question of the ecological and economic function of art comes to the fore. This is where Georges Bataille comes in. A philosopher as well as a professional librarian and author of intellectual pornography, Bataille was a part of a current of European thought in the postwar years which was able to turn the gaze of ethnology and structural anthropology back onto ‘advanced Western societies’ traumatised by the ravages of two world wars, and wonder whether they were not just as ‘barbaric’ and ‘irrational’ as the ‘savages’ they had spent decades refining their analyses of. Bataille is notable for taking this thought to a truly cosmic scale. In The Accursed Share—originally entitled ‘Attempt at an Economics on the Scale of the Universe’, he argued that any restricted economy structured so as to maintain stability and utility is always embedded in a general economy, one of excess and unreason, whose prime exemplar and ultimate source is the wanton energetic expenditure of the sun. What a Waste Human societies, despite their diversity, are all founded on the repression of their participation in this solar economy of excessive and purposeless expenditure. What distinguishes one society from another is the techniques and rituals it discovers to release this repression in a controlled manner, by temporarily suspending utility and the orientation toward survival, and aligning with the solar holocaust during carnivals and festive rites—one of Bataille’s examples is the Aztecs’ human sacrifices to the sun god Huitzilopochtli. Scarcity, for Bataille, has always been secondary and synthetic. He completes this social thermodynamics with the claim that even modern technological societies, which imagine themselves as efficient machines governed exclusively by utility and perseveration, don’t escape the need to expel this accursed share of excess energy. Heavily repressed, this necessary reconnection with the economy of the Sun nonetheless makes itself known through aggression, war, eroticism—and art. Art is ‘wasted energy’. The extravagantly irrational way in which our unconscious reminds us what lies outside economic systems of accounting, rationality, sustainability and prudence. A form of shamanism, in the sense that the shaman is the figure who is both inside and outside the tribe, the invaluable interface between its internal political economy and the nightmarish holocaust of sense beyond. On one side, then, art, as excess and wastage, salutes the inevitable thermodynamic destiny to which even the biosphere, all the flora and fauna of the Earth, human civilisation included, are but a temporary and fleeting exception. On the other, its entanglement with economic and monetary systems is a source of tension and ambivalence. To say that art is not a utility obviously goes against a generation of contemporary artists’ attempts to merge art with politics, community service, and collective therapy. The good news is that these reflections reveal another possible approach to NFTs as neither a neutral channel nor a panacea nor a moral outrage, but as a vehicle for tension—for distilling the volatile compound of regulation and expenditure that humanity is perpetually strung out on. According to the brilliant Bataillesque image of modern humanity presented by Alan Weisman in his book The World Without Us, ‘by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s’. The fascinating thing about the NFT form is that it aligns humans’ congenital tendency toward the senseless expenditure of energy with their most ambitious attempt yet to construct a universal regime of accounting, the ultimate restricted information economy sheltered from all possible corruption, 4/6

contingency, and entropy. Blockchain is a synthetic monadology, with each block reflecting and confirming the unchanging truth, harmony, and stability of the whole, forever. And yet all it succeeds in doing is stoking the volcano. Non-Functional Trees While struggling my way through these thoughts, I had been putting the finishing touches on a cabin I had built to be used as a residency space for authors and associates of Urbanomic at End of the World Garden, an area of land in the Southwest UK developed by my friend Paul Chaney, an artist who has more recently started working in sustainable agritech. Paul’s work—which drew on and at some points became indistinguishable from his decade-long struggle to tame this small patch of land and live self-sufficiently on it—had often engaged with Bataille’s thought, and in particular the idea that the plant kingdom, and hence the biosphere as a whole, was nothing but an ill-fated insurgency against the solar economy, waged by temporarily locking sunlight into foliage. This, of course, gives one a somewhat different perspective on permaculture, and the ironic and humorous entertaining of such ideas had set limits on Paul’s potential success as an eco-artist. We began to think about how to decant all of these tensions and problems raised by the existence of NFTs into an NFT work—how to create a work that takes the NFT seriously as a medium rather than just using it as a platform or conduit for pre-existing works. It seemed both inevitable and desirable, however, that it should also take the form of a joke. Bataille, after all, counted laughter among those experiences that reconnect us to unknowing and dissolution, ‘those sudden openings beyond the world of useful works’. We had just planted four sapling fruit trees at End of the World Garden, which I was watching from the cabin as they came into their first bloom. Following some trial and error experiments, we decided to make a series of four NFTs consisting of sparkly 3D models derived from photogrammetrically captured offcuts of the new arrivals. The energy wastage incurred by the minting and sale of these NFTs would then serve to offset the ecological benefits of planting the trees, helping combat biospheric insurgence, and placing art back into the service of the solar economy. What followed was a formidable accelerated apprenticeship as I learned a great deal about point clouds, ballpivoting surface reconstruction, render engines, UV wraps and texture maps among other things, and bumped up against the limitations of amateur photogrammetry and solar-powered desktop rendering. In my attempt to master a raft of complex software packages, I gained greater respect for the work involved in crafting shiny spinning 3D objects. By packing all of these tensions back down into the work, by treating the NFT as a problem rather than a solution, the project became an even more quixotic time- and energy-consuming endeavour than we had expected. It’s still a joke, but one calculated to exacerbate the contradictions of human culture to the point of irritation, and hopefully waste enough solar power on extravagant computation to appease Huitzilopochtli. The most curious mystery within laughter comes from one’s rejoicing in something which places a vital equilibrium in danger. — Georges Bataille My thanks to Amy Ireland, Anna Greenspan, Rhea Myers, John Gerrard, Paul Chaney, and Shaun Lewin for the conversations that got me here—and to Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon’s Interdependence podcast for providing open discussion of many of these questions. 5/6

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readthis.wtf /writing/9397rewind/ 93–97 Rewind - 2021 What time is it? What time was it? Was it, Even? Strung out across two decades, possibly more, ‘untold eldritch millennia’, I should think. To be back in a city that’s almost unrecognisable as the one in which I spent an important period of what suddenly I realise I have to call my youth, and to be asked to locate Ccru in a history of radical cultural movements in Coventry as a city of culture, is something that induces perplexity and templexity. The Warwick Philosophy Dept.’s dictum that ‘Ccru does not, has not, and will never exist’ points to an enigma which this event threatens to exacerbate into cognitive trauma. Because, in spite of this timeless prohibition, Ccru exists today more than it did during the short period during which it was a name on a door in a corridor in a university campus in the dying years of the twentieth century. For two decades Ccru has been more invisible, even to itself, than we can now imagine. Despite the importance of the episode in my own life, at the time of republishing the Writings, in the wake of Mark Fisher’s death, I had no expectation that it would mean anything to anyone else. Like all former ‘members’—a word that in itself feels absurd to utter—I have the weird feeling of not knowing what happened, or whether I was even actually a part of it or not. The reality of the Ccru who produced those writings was that of a small group of people with no real official status, no resources, no visibility. And was always a question of obscure compulsion rather than programmatic intention. * One of the reasons why Ccru thought is being taken up with uncanny enthusiasm twenty years later, not just as a historical curio but as an abstract map of the contemporary, is the model of culture mobilised in its work from the very beginning—which is contained in the very phrase ‘cybernetic culture’. Yes, it was about an analysis of what happens to human culture when it is mediated through technical machines, but it was also about understanding culture itself as an immanent meshing of overlapping processes—biological, cognitive, libidinal, social, economic, artistic, technological—a complex understandable only in terms of cybernetic machines. Cybernetic culture. The understanding of cultural tendencies and products as the objects of cybernetic processes. 1/6

+ the emergence of bizarre quasi-archetypal expressions out of the autonomic processes that result when the collective unconscious begins to lock into technological codes and speeds. + the assumption that cultural dynamics are impersonal, authorless, distributed, the property of no one, and may even be parasitical entities that propagate by locking onto the human nervous system. Today’s cultural technology, or technological culture, is deregulated and fluid enough, has fast enough feedback loops, for the kinds of cultural processes extrapolated by Ccru to become visible to all but the most myopic of observers. If we look at the media landscape today—but already, we can’t just say media landscape. technology, media, microcurrencies, identities, mental illnesses, digital infection, fear spirals, millenarianism… For example, how could you understand the connection between memes, social media, and NFTs as anything other than the product of cybernetic ecosystems that are technological, social, libidinal and economic all at the same time? Cultural processes, inseparable from machines, that spin off in directions oblique to any human intention, as the result of the spontaneous emergence of little bundles of aesthetic tics, copied like viruses, and which exert some kind of compulsive remote-control grip over millions of human brains, without anyone really understanding why, or being able to control it, or knowing how it is altering human minds. And we are now seeing the significant reinjection of those curious little cybernetic-cultural storms into the economy via technologies in which currency is difficult to distinguish from content, and synthetic distributed time enables a new economics. Lastly, as many have observed, whether they see it as a welcome object of fascination or as a deadly threat, many of these operations also have a great deal in common with magic, with sorcery. Which is not yet to get into the whole question of time, the time hole. Hyperstition implies a non-chronological model of time. A great deal of the Ccru’s compulsions were, let’s say, related to a ‘classically radical’ impulse to escape, to get outside of the box that happens to be labelled ‘human life’, ‘being human’, or just ‘being’, at this particular point in history. At the ultimate level of what keeps us in a box, chronological linear time is a kind of transcendental cover-up, and nothing short of a cosmic struggle is afoot. By all means necessary, discover or design weapons to break out of what William Burroughs would have called the ‘reality studio’. Cybernetic culture is where that happens. Cybernetic systems hook the unconscious up to technology, the integrity of time is breached, viral cultures give rise to runaway processes that reengineer the human sensorium with things that can only be made sense of from the future. Sorcery, machines, positive feedback, cultures that are only quasi- or part-human, weird entities from outside. Today perhaps it no longer seems so bizarre to collapse excavations of the deepest sources of sacred thought— time, desire, the outside, the collective unconscious, human fate—onto the vicissitudes of the technological 2/6

environment. But at the time this model of culture was largely out of place and out of step with reality. Where music and sound comes into this is that it was in the realm of what was happening in popular electronic music that, in its early years, Ccru discovered one of their advance models for this future cybernetic culture, and located a cache of soft-weaponry for fighting the time war. * In the circuit of nightclubs, pirate radio, and the bedrooms of young producers using consumer electronics to make new forms of music, in the mobility and mutation of samples, breakbeats, and new audio technologies, in the type of innovation that was happening particularly in the accelerated development phase of jungle between, 1993 and 1997, sonic forms were subjected to a period of particularly intense selection and mutation—broadcast on pirate stations, tested at full volume in the club, endlessly recombined and hybridised in the bedrooms of teenage producers that went by cryptic sawn-off codenames…the principle of selection being sheer intensity, or the ability to challenge the human senses and human sense. * In general, theoretical readings of media had mostly focussed on mass media, broadcast media—McLuhan, Baudrillard, etc. The media of modernity. The lineage of cultural studies which came out of Birmingham and was particularly attentive to subculture, tended to read it in terms of the meanings attached to it by the participants, and from a traditional leftist point of view. Sadie Plant and her students who founded Ccru had left Birmingham to come to Coventry because they could see how that approach struggled to address rave culture which was a kind of biosociotechnocybernetic machine. Jungle wasn’t mass media, and in some senses it was a folk culture, like an accelerated oral culture in which a series of vernacular forms developed and were shared. But more than that, in between the shiny high-tech media landscape and the grimy circulation of street knowledge, the culture of jungle responded to what is called cyberpunk. It was a machine for producing massive distributed intensity with minimal means, assembling its own increasingly robust infrastructure from what was available to those black and white punks of the suburbs dreaming the future through sequencers and headphones. Ccru is not interested in theorising music but in channelling the intensities that emerge from this culture into writing, and fuelling thought on the new conceptual configurations produced in the factories of this bodily and auditory experience. Over a very few years the mutation of rave elements produced unprecedented, almost esoteric, rhythmically and tonally complex works that somehow always remained keyed into body response, to rhythm. But as your body responded, it changed you. How far can you abstract? We are dancing to something that doesn’t yet make sense, sounds that have no established place in any existing conception of music. 3/6

Escape, getting outside. Jungle felt like a transcendental training montage, a militant program of reconditioning to produce a new type of human. A hallucination of a future that twisted time. First templex at the level of the culture as a whole, where it produced a kind of temporal gradient: Pirate radio: the dub plate is a track that doesn’t yet exist. The white label removes a track from official circulation in the semiotic economy. With an antenna you could reach out and grab something from the future right out of the air. For the duration of that track you’re living in the future. You might never hear it again. When in 1994 Goldie’s ‘Inner City Life’ went mainstream, I remember mainstream Radio 1 DJs stuttering, struggling to say anything: cue Alan Partridge voice: ‘I think someone’s been sick on the drums!’ Those who listened and relistened to Rufige Kru’s ‘Terminator’ in 1992 had already had their ears stretched, been reprogrammed…. embracing time-sickness…liquid metal rewind That’s accelerationism: virtual participation in the future. As Sadie Plant said, ‘The future is a feeling’; as Kodwo Eshun said, we are dealing in ‘sensations that we don’t yet have a name for’. In pop music, new aesthetic phenomena always temporalize, setting individuals in different relations to time. Pop has—at least until recently, but that’s a different question—always served to place the last generation, behind in time. But this was a more complex, shifting, multilevel. Timeless, Goldie said, and, as Mark Fisher said, he was wrong. Time more, more time, timefull or templexical. Second and third templex at the level of the tracks and then the samples that they were built out of: a stretching, shifting, and breakage of musical time through the sampler, emblematised by the needling metallic affect of a voice strung out over a rattling flow of plasticised breaks. A liquidation of music that followed the impossible diagonal between pitch and duration +melody and percussion +breaks and flows—beats chopped and manipulated so hard that cuts make liquid. +breakbeat science, breakbeat dialects, such a fluency that sometimes i thought it was speaking to me in a language I couldn’t yet understand—virtualised talking drums. Sound smeared across the overlap between pitch and rhythm, between sound and physical pressure, between black and white, between feminine pressure and masculine hypercontrol, ecstasy and darkside, endless simultaneous pressure and release. Can you feel it? Nothing can save you. Enjoyment is synonymous with alienation. Alongside these compounded transdiagonals, in Jungle 93-97 sound translated into concept by following a vector of abstraction. Hybrid and bastardised, jungle miscegenated, diagonalised and united not through common humanity but always by way of the alien and the abstract. To a large extent, and from increasingly ‘dark’ perspectives as the 90s rolled toward the millenium, the scene pursued the collective construction of what Eshun would call ‘sonic fiction’. 4/6

Remember: no hundreds of online music magazines revealing the real names of the producers, where they lived, their favourite sandwich, and a picture of their mum. No. To become a junglist was to dive into a pool of swarming intensities tagged by depersonalised ciphers continually circulating and recombining so fast you could hardly keep up. Twisted Anger, Lemon D, Dillinja, Asylum, Trace, Dom & Roland, Krome and Time….a moving cartography of multilevel codings—producer names, track names, sample names … ciphers for intensive machines of unknown origin, with a hidden agenda, into which a human could plug themselves—a sonic ecology and fiction in which the culture was always visible and tangible before individuals and meanings, without them. If the western model of music is an index of the Western model of time and therefore of what it is to be a human, then the unrationed euphoria engineered by the Akaiberpunk massive already mobilised all the operations needed to spring the timeline, take down arborescence limb by limb, and free up the seething potential of virtual matter. * We all have our own compulsions. If you must write, you want to avoid representing the sound and somehow plug writing into its operations. It flows both ways. 1/ The experience of sound—not least the impossibility of being a Cartesian disembodied thinking head once the bass grabs your stomach—excites thought. What can’t be immediately processed is an encounter 2/ Thinking about what’s going on inside and around the sound gives you new ways to listen, and a model to think other cybernetic cultures. From theory-jungle mashup conference gigs to transcendental deductions to click/hiss rhythmic assemblages to sheer pandemonium, CCRU tried it from every direction. Not thinking about but sharing a culture with sound, to produce another microculture. Coventry and the midlands in general were a flashpoint for jungle. Some of you in Coventry will remember what if was like to be on The Edge. I promised I’d try to put together a ‘representative’ sample of tracks showing the chronological vector of abstraction from 93–97, and quickly realised it’s impossible. – precisely because of these infolded, complex temporalities. No one will ever be able to tell with any precision what came first. There is no timeline, only a time tangle. Luckily it was never about representation or chronology anyway. All I can do is give a practical demo of how words and sounds co-intensify each other—and let you judge whether it works or not. Although, if you have to judge, then you weren’t there. Maybe hear something of the fluency, abstraction, freeing of beats from regular metrics, the complex polyrhythm cutting and cutting and fluidizing until you’re no longer sure what you’re listening to… 5/6

Something took the sounds that once simply made humans move, and moulded them into a language that reprogrammed the body, and which our minds still haven’t deciphered. Which is why, even if jungle as a genre is history, the machinic event of jungle remains a source of conceptual energy, perplexity and templexity. Stay locked. 6/6

readthis.wtf /writing/an-additional-note-on-departure/ An additional note on Departure - 2022 I removed this note from Paths of the Sea as it seemed to wander too far into my own research rather than directly addressing Gilles’s work—but it indicates for me some important convergences or syntheses to be made. * In relation to a gnosis which, without seeking to wield it and bring it to bear in a dialectical struggle, silently bears witness to a dissidence inaccessible from the inside of language and society, another figure of the post-’68 diaspora who deserves mention here is the French anti-psychiatrist and filmmaker Fernand Deligny, whose respect for solitude and incommunication was extraordinary. Deligny’s sustained radical experiment in (de)subjectivation through his decades-long deeply humane work with ‘unmanageable’ non-speaking children in rudimentary encampments in the mountainous Cevennes region of France distanced his practice from any simplistic conception of resistance as nomadology or escape. However he continued to see in these children the hope and the resource of a silent, unilateral refusal of the world that had busied itself trying to ‘cure’ them. Living with these children described as ‘outside-language’, in what he described as his ‘raft’ in the mountains (an alternative to the overly-administrated prison-ship of the asylum where they would otherwise be ‘psychiatrised’), Deligny’s practice was characterised by a refusal to try and assimilate, educate, or integrate; instead, his life and that of his volunteer colleagues changed modes, becoming anchored to the reference points (repères) around which the children spontaneously organised their lives and the wander lines (lignes d’erre) of their erratic daily walks (distinguished from any ‘line of flight’ by their close relation to territorial circumscription and reiteration). ‘Through the presence there of kids who have / no history / we unceasingly / recommence / history / from zero’ (Ce gamin là): do Deligny’s silent non-companions belong to the ‘“amnesic humanity”, a humanity without historical memory’ that Lardreau thinks will be left behind after the absolute revolt that ‘splits the world in two’ 1? Across the chasm Deligny and his companions patiently watched, without attempting to narrow the disparity or reach a reconciliation, ever attentive to possible crossing points or fords between the human ‘customary’ and the wander lines that might afford access to a real shared with the hors-langages, or allow it to touch them—something like the human-nothing-buthuman real of which Laruelle and Grelet speak? ‘[T]he human is there / perhaps / quite simply / without there being any “someone” there as a point of reference’ (Cahiers de l’Immuable I [1975]); ‘By dint of tracing / the wander lines / […] we managed to see a little / of that which is / regardless of us […] / that which the blind gaze of the speaking / has great difficulty in seeing […] we / to tell the truth / quite distraught / but tenacious / they would surely end up perceiving / that we were / there / […] made of flesh and blood and / of something other than language’ (Ce gamin là). Tracing out the errant lines of his silent companions whose mode of being, he insists, bears the trace of something anterior to the socialised human, Deligny found that the wander lines continually returned to…running water. None of this is to assimilate Grelet’s solitary endeavour to (a now overmedicalised) autism, but it may suggest that the understanding and advocacy of ‘neurodivergence’ as something other than pathology is one contemporary 1/2

avatar of the radical refusal of the world. 2/2

readthis.wtf /writing/notes-on-faciality/ Notes (on Faciality) - 2022 The Face is a Horror Story. Twenty-three hours in, Vaughan finally lost control of his bodily functions. What made it all the more galling was that they had almost made it. His particular detachment of the creeping horde had just made its triumphant entrance onto Lambeth Bridge, on the far side of which, under police supervision, the broad stream of human slurry was being extruded up and down Tower Gardens through a series of crowd-barrier leats into a six-lane security marquee, the final processing module before the Inner Station. Vaughan’s bowels had liquefied as he watched the masses shuffling boustrophedon through this makeshift intestinal tract, while at the same time his depleted brain became overrun by unanswerable questions concerning the drab cavalcade percolating obediently across the bridge. What did they all want? What manner of cultural catastrophe, what mutation in the collective unconscious, could have triggered this mass urban migration? Of what was this vain exodus the vanguard? Or, if it was a symptom of decadence, the mere tail end of something, then what was wagging it? Dr. Chapman had warned him that, once the device had been deployed, there was no going back. But perhaps it was time, if it was not already too late. In any case he could no longer hold it. Everything would have to come out. New Body Plan. After the explosion came a slow slide. Sensory organs and neural cells aggregated, sinking imperceptibly in a direction that would come to know itself as forward once the alliance of creeping and gobbling had been consolidated. The one-dimensional oceanic preorient of time parted to let in something nightmarish, a terrible asymmetry unleashed upon the beatific radial sleep of ages. A new vector sallied forth, already shaping an unready world around its predatory axis. ‘The catastrophe of the post-Cambrian—bilateral symmetry and cephalic trend: sensory organs and neural cells concentrated at the anterior extremity of the organism. Neuronic-sensory-alimentary migration yielding antero-posterior-directed mobility. Back and front, heads and tails…’. But the involuntary audience of Dr. Chapman’s impromptu lecture were becoming increasingly impatient with his so-called explanations. ‘When do we get our money back?’ The Worm Turns. In the measured tone of a physician delivering an unwelcome diagnosis, Fuckface enumerated its recommendations: sterile, contactless, faceless action at a distance. As the biofinancial consultant explained patiently, everything had been in place already, infestation merely furnished an accelerative alibi. The Programme was done. Paper cotton was out but polymerization didn’t go far enough. Viral sickness piggybacks on value circulation; fomites are passive vectors, as effective in spreading sickness from hand to hand as they once were in disseminating the sovereign’s image across the colonies. Well, good news, the latest developments had rendered both unnecessary. Currency had freed itself from face and hand alike. From here on in, it was not so much the plague that threatened us as our own imminent obsolescence. One imagined this last observation delivered with a wry smile, but behind the pointed plague-mask it was difficult to tell for sure. Does the Angle Between Two Faces Have a Happy Ending? O hideous phylum, atrocity heaped upon another trocity! Dip far enough into the past and the storied ramifications of trauma bulge and pop one by one, anal beads of convulsive realisation. But there is worse ahead, or at least an inverse revulsion. A cold, bright, shadowless fear like pixelated metal. Something’s tacking backward, coming the other way. Goading, impermeable gaze inscribed in a circle of accomplished perfection. Two dots above an arc, a leering formalism from the protracted end of humanity. 1/5

Who can say what it wants? And then, strung out between the ideogrammatically pellucid cheer of that abominable abstraction and the flatworm’s feebly probing translucent stump with its lenseless eyespots, equidistant between arche-ancestor and synthetic neonate, halfway between slimey and smiley, dead centre, the dream’s umbilicus, there she is, the most recognisable face in the world, eyes twinkling like black holes: Everyone’s Granny. Chairman Ma’am’s Long March. Containing multitudes yet possessed of a single rudimentary design, the sinuous thing haltingly pursued its obsessive trajectory, worming its way through the capital in the crepuscular gloom, slinking thirstily toward the pool of overlit corpse juice at its sepulchral centre. Vaughan again wondered at how the sullen masses had been mobilised like this, against all odds. Heaved out of a terminal stew of indifference, compassion fatigue and all-consuming apathy, countering the bilious gravity of a billion oily Greggs’ pasties, it had taken nothing less than total mobilisation to establish even the secondhand consensus that a national mood needed to be had. Intubated by 24/7 full-spectrum mournfesting, simstimmed into reflex response patterns appropriate to the last-ditch simulacra of a historic event, across the land subjects had downed Playstation controllers and slouched forth to undertake their final mission: twelve hours, fifteen, twenty-four, thirty-two…. What, after all, is time in the face of death? A festival of death, without souvenir T-shirts even. But what a buzz when you file past, knowing that she’s in there looking out at you, that enigmatic sidelong glance, those eyes. Home Taping is Killing Music. ‘Gentlemen, we have a problem. Truth is, we always had a problem. The doubledealer is on the loose again.’ A murmur of disapproval swept the Operations Room. ‘The Byzantine Genitals? That Two-Faced Cunt again? Terminate with extreme prejudice.’ The General bowed his head. ‘That…hasn’t worked too well. Strategy has shifted from latent threat of violence to subtle intimidation to visual complexity and even… copyright.’ The Governor of the Bank of England avoided his gaze, as if to acknowledge the absurdity. ‘Recall, gentlemen, that when it features a fair face such as that of our late lamented Elizabeth, a poorly copied note (never mind a Boggs-standard drawing) can be identified immediately by the naked eye, so well attuned is that fine appendage to the minutest alterations of the expressive powers of the human face, the balletic variations of mimetic muscle across craniofacial skeleton…’. The General checked himself, hoping no one had noticed the faraway look which had momentarily softened his features. ‘Of course, this is just one method in our arsenal, but it was our last organic hope, and it’s been thoroughly undermined. So we pushed the constraints all the way into the infrastructure. Chapman’s publisher couldn’t print one page without the printer driver calling the cops. But it’s a losing battle, a futile arms race. Once the proles get a hold of the means of reproduction…’. One by one the distinguished faces around the table began to drop in recognition of the inevitable. ‘This was never going to work, we can’t keep patching it up by brute force.’ ‘But, with respect,’ piped up the reedy voice of the Archbishop, ‘counterfeiting is one thing, this dreadful defacing is quite another, bespeaking a want of compassion that cannot be countenanced. The device must be stopped.’ Nothing Like Having Your Face Cut Off to Disturb Your Sleep. ‘Every single one of them, I guarantee you—and it’s those dreams we’re interested in. Yes, yes, they’ll want to open the box when they arrive,’ insisted Dr. Chapman enthusiastically. He made a plausible case. To see the vacant uncrowned head dancing with putrefaction, to confirm it for oneself, to achieve optimum grieving—wasn’t it only natural? And if the powers-that-be were determined to refuse them their right as loyal subjects…. Slowly but surely, Vaughan was coming around to the idea. He thumbed the brochure again. Unique opportunities for controlled observation that will surely open up new vistas in psychopathological research. In private the doctor had been less circumspect: ‘Rather than merely intervening in ideological circuits, the true student of the unconscious must rip them a new one. Or three, or more. Again and again. Ad nauseam ad infinitum. Match them repetition for repetition, note for note. More and more. Drop after drop. Line ’em up. Form a queue.’ 2/5

New Order. The pattern that had been forming over the aeons-long polar migration snapped into place and some gaseous abomination leapt out like a ghost. Seeping out from the organic stratum, the curious excrescences that had formed on the surface of the creatures’ heads started to get protracted ideas. Meatspace collapsed into a constellation of subsident internalities, invisible to the eye but irresistibly betokened by those eager little buds. And there seemed no limit to the gravity of what they could be entrusted with—freighted with uniqueness and spontaneity, willing vehicles of ethical demands, portals for mutual recognition, beyond the reach of organism or object, bright as a button, sole site for the sighting of what can never be seen but would soon oversee all…all just too glorious for words. The General tossed and turned in his sleep. Please, never let me wake up. Production of the Face is Necessary in Order for Certain Assemblages of Power to Be Actualised. In an abortive attempt to capitalise on his own chronic repetition compulsion, Dr. Chapman had at first marketed the device to psychiatric clinics as a sort of extreme art therapy for paranoid schizophrenics, but after the initial police raids its extralegal aspects had become clear enough and he had resorted to hawking it online to unsuspecting dupes, industriously producing copy after copy at lightning speed and shoving them into envelopes before they were even dry. He met the police officers at the door brandishing a dentist’s invoice, a dollar bill, and a badly drawn onesided pound note. The prosecution ran its course. As a pompous art historian explained to the Daily Mail’s chief is-itart correspondent: ‘Supposing that the primary function of art in modernity was to reassure oneself of the possibility of extracting objects from the mere commerce and repetitive homogeneity of mechanical reproduction, releasing them into a unique “here and now” in which subjective sovereignty and the uniqueness of the oeuvre, if you will, stood as mutual guarantors. Then surely Chapman’s experiment was quite exemplary.’ The Financial Times, more pragmatically, noted its effectiveness as a pricing mechanism for this auratic transcendence: £200 (coincidentally, the modest fine levied against Chapman under the Currency and Banknotes Act 1928) minus £10 equals exactly £190 worth of art. Upon receipt, a number of disappointed buyers, including notorious halfwit quibbler Andrew Gaston, challenged the valuation, but legal fees had already swallowed up all the ostensible profits. Upriver. ‘Colonel Kurtz, you must understand, here in the strife kolonies, out on the edge of empire, there is no coin of the realm. Everything runs on promises passed from hand to hand, paper-thin indices for deposits encrypted deep in the white capital.’ Black Hole Sun. The worms raced one another deeper into the black hole as Fuckface watched impassively through the microscope, increasingly bored with the whole protracted affair, even though there had been new developments. Originally poked into the world in order to feel things out, gather information, peep and creep, the faces, as a side effect of neural-sensory concentration and positive feedback, had begun to transmit as well as receive. Those curious little wigglers would spend days locked onto one another’s facile gazes, mesmerised as if peering into another dimension. The experiment had only served to prove the point. Retrospectively, it was indeed as if everything had taken place solely in order to arrive here. But of course, it would look like that if the Programme was designed to secure the future absolutely (which they must have known was impossible). If it looked like all of this had been put together by design, that was but one of the effects of its startlingly momentous contingency. Don’t You Open That Trapdoor. Surely entities without faces have no right to economic agency. But in the terrible hours before dawn, as the wilting General tinkered fruitlessly with the newfangled machine, he had caught a helpless glimpse of the inevitable, and the inevitable had not looked back at him. The whole goddamned beautiful structure would crumble into this pitiless lattice coordinated by no one, and although value would be preserved, there would be no saving face. He recalled bitterly how he had laughed it off when, during his final days of service, Chapman had burst into his office to harangue him in that peculiar shrill robotic monotone: ‘Disable currency-function while increasing exchange value. Rescind fungibility by serially debasing functionally identical units into non-fungible 3/5

tokens through rectificatory defacement. Exterminate! Exterminate!’ A rather theatrical way of going about it, but Fuckface had been dead right in its analysis of the situation. It was the end. Even if the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. The General puffed and wheezed as he reclined into his high-backed leather armchair. His pendular jowls drooped yet lower, his distinguished eyebrows quivered, his angular jaw fell, and the bloodshot eyes that had seen so much spun up into his skull like cherries on a fruit machine. Me Name Smiley Culture. The hole hadn’t always been there, Fuckface reminded itself. At a certain point it had all been off the hook, so much had been let loose that anything could have happened. But of course as usual it hadn’t. Instead, what emerged after the explosion was a blind spot around which everything had gravitated. As soon as the heads had detached themselves from the bodies and become meat-platforms for that simpering, dribbling, doe-eyed front-end, everything had begun to resonate around it in ever-depressing circles. One side of the same coin: Old Gods usurped by monotonous archons as the imperial territory was patched together. Let there be cash…the vermicular fiat of spontaneous generation relayed, in a higher dimension, into the transcendent guarantor for a whole social reality, at once iconographic propaganda for and infectious agent of empire. Decode and deterritorialize as much as you want, you’re not getting out of its gravity field—even ASCII got dragged back to the face eventually, evacuating the oral on the way, since no one knows how to pronounce ‘:-)’. Back, Fuckface wondered…or through? sheeR–stim–poetRi–when–iou–pUll=AwAi–the–fACe. In the United Cringedom of Grand Brexit, perhaps extreme queuing was the most revolutionary gesture one could hope for. And yet, up on the podium, Dr. Chapman had worked himself into a frenzy, and Vaughan couldn’t deny the arousing undercurrents of the fanatical project into which he was being conscripted. Ending the conceptual car crash of a lecture on the apocryphal phrase of Robespierre only served to reinforce its remorseless consistency. It had reminded Vaughan of the forthright directive printed on old Chinese banknotes: Counterfeiters will be beheaded. That was the spirit, In God We Trust WTF FFS! But it seemed Chapman wasn’t finished yet. ‘Doesn’t every school kid with a felt-tip have the correct instinct when they encounter a face, especially a face of authority, which is all of them? Fuck waiting around for power to be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. The hatred must be inscribed rigorously, repetitively, relentlessly, with raging Rotring: a right royal parade of ravenous atrocity: orbits evacuated, necrotized skin peeled like a satsuma, blackened gums rotting away, horns ripping through festering scalp, fat moustaches sprouting from lips plus dicks from heads, waxing cheeks wrinkled and shrivelled and seeping purpled ectoplasm, lips bleeding diseased pus, probosci sprouting from pimpled meatheads implanted on spiny-limbed swastick figures, faces masked and hooded ready for the chop, faces pustulating, dripping venom like gripe water, auricles stretched and knotted around the chin, eyes waggling on stalks, prolapsed sinuses, grub-ridden cancerized nasal meatus, scabby lips emitting black bile radiation…the ultimate facial…’. Dr. Chapman’s own eyeballs alternately bulged and receded, his face repeatedly sinking back into an almost featureless fleshy glob before abruptly pinging back into focus, its perfect flat circumference adorned with an immemorial glyph: two dots above an arc. Vaughan wondered what it looked like in profile. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ A single slow clap from the back of the lecture hall. By this point the rest of the audience had already defected. Fuckface waved its clipboard in the air nonchalantly, keen to bring proceedings to some sort of conclusion. ‘The face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled….’. Two Minutes to Midnight. The face of Vaughan’s Swatch glinted in the silvery light. Round as a coin, old moonface, dead sky-rock, sphere of futility…as the line slithered its way down the Thames—a shrivelled cauda, the servile tail-end of an overfeatured planarian guidance system gone nova and imploded (but this news takes a long time to reach us)—the satellite had risen furtively behind the Houses of Parliament to mock the whole participative performance piece. Its bright yellow visage glowered at him, raked by borrowed light, revealing an unmistakeable 4/5

physiognomy: two dots above an arc. Vaughan was momentarily startled. Perhaps some kind of advertising stunt— in rather poor taste, he reflected. Or maybe it had always been like that. He couldn’t remember any more. Moreover, there was a certainty to it that comforted him, a fresh, quiet confidence evacuated of all the boring neuroses of the past. Its beady pupils spoke mutely of the promise of freedom. The benign disc beamed its message of hope down to the waiting crowds below. Jiggle the puppet strings on the corpse of history as much as you like, the future belongs to me. All doubt melted away. Chapman was right. Vaughan knew what was expected of him. Robin Mackay (RIP) 2022 5/5

readthis.wtf /writing/omnicide-ii/ In Praise of Perpetual Imminence – Foreword to Omnicide II - 2023 Foreword to the second volume of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s Omnicide, published by Urbanomic. We’re all doomed. Every morning it looks more certain that the world will end badly in one way or another, and imminently so. Once in thrall to the cackling fanatic who unwound dusty scrolls to disclose portents and prophecies, we now furtively peer into our private scrying tablets where ceaseless foretellings silently unfurl, personalised to our own predilections yet expressive of a collective malaise of apprehension. Terminal catastrophes that were once the purview of bombastic prophets have been brought under the regime of probability and management, existential risk is now the business of expert panels, thinktanks, and mitigative public policy. Their relentlessly pessimistic findings are transmitted daily, and still the feeds only stimulate our appetite for the end. Omnicide II challenges this terminal mode of Western contemporaneity by opposing to the generalised dread and despair induced by ‘doomscrolling’ a hyperfocalised mania, by setting against the dull paralysis of a condemned present the unbearable lightness of no future. A series of controlled combustions fuelled by fragments drawn from the poetry and literature of the Middle East, Omnicide II introduces us to a cast of manic visionaries, from the Selamaniac to the Crystallomaniac, from the Bibliomaniac to the Aeromaniac—all the parts listed in the Mania Tabula that were left as intriguing promises in the preceding volume. Whereas Omnicide charted the many ways in which a micro-obsession can ripen into the desire for all-encompassing annihilation, this second collection—but needless to say there is no order in this disordered treasury, one could start anywhere, we are always in medias manias—is placed under the general heading of doom, and highlights how the most vigorous campaigns of intensity sometimes flourish exclusively under the shadow of certain extinction. 1/3

To be doomed is to enter into a relation to time in which one is by definition too late, but does that necessarily mean that in the last moments we are condemned to craven contemplation, merely looking on as everything crumbles? What might the phenomenological tonality and the aesthetic timbre of such moments be, were they entered into with wholehearted will? What abilities might they confer upon one who, in losing all hope, gains in acuity of perception, perhaps even developing new sensitivities and preternatural capacities for action? Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh’s wager is that fully opening the ‘exceptional window of consciousness’ afforded by the prospect of inevitable demise exposes us to an anticipative form of mania that reaps analeptic quickening from certain doom. The last moment is of course the very space within which unfold the Thousand and One Nights, whose yarns measure out the space between now and the end, postponing execution of the inevitable, buying time at the price of learning to live at the limit of the perpetually condemned. And like Sharhzad, Mohaghegh is a consummate storyteller—here you will encounter fantastic fates and magical curses, assassins and emperors, murders and suicides, falconers and luxury Persian Gulf hotels, cat-octopuses and bleeding lions, retellings of Mesopotamian fables and urban legends…the common thread being that the ending never arrives, but is always infinitesimally deferred by the telling of some other anecdotal detail. Such is the secret of Mohaghegh’s mad method: it is by insistently worrying at an ultraparticular fixation that the maniac produces an entire alternate regime of being and a renewed thirst for life. The tiniest crack in the order of things expands to reveal a new world, another night passes without the Vizier realising he has been fooled again—and then another, and another…. Looking beyond ‘doomscrolling’ to other new entries into the common lexicon, we draw closer to the oblique contemporaneity of this technique, for the devices of Mohaghegh’s ‘book of wonders’ operate like dark twins of the clichéd forms of the doomed present. Where enumerated ‘listicles’ and punctual ‘factoids’ target the time-poor with their optimised rundowns and digests of must-have info, arresting shallow attention with definitive but soon-forgotten data, Mohaghegh’s tales-within-litanies-within-tables-within-lists extract inexhaustible riches from the tiny sliver of time remaining by employing a single empirical detail as a prism through which a vain reality, on the other side of a narrow defile, can blossom into an expansive polychromatic sheaf illuminated by the unreasonable intensity of the incurably obsessed. In pulling one singular bouquet after another from the same black hat, >Mohaghegh resumes the offensive of those writers, artists, and thinkers for whom the fiercest blooms open only in the shade of certain doom, those whose creativity flourishes on the brink of imminent catastrophe, whether that of a condemned individual or that of a whole people, whether in personal intimacy or collective political struggle (the two of course being indistinguishable when it comes to Forugh Farrokhzad before her ‘Window’ or Mahmoud Darwish speaking of ‘A Lover from Palestine’, for example) Scanning the cut flowers of his chosen array of Middle Eastern poets, Mohaghegh examines their vocabulary, metaphors, and images as if they were omens or signs: a literary radiologist spreading out the spectra of their ambiguities before us, analysing it to procure models for the maniacal inflammation of an isolated poetic gesture. Mobilising the narrative, the conceptual, the phenomenological, the poetic, and the associative, proliferating meanings through multiple readings, hyperparaphrasis and interpretosis, molecular decomposition and nuclear fission, his precision instruments reveal every verse to be a stem of latent budding-points, with alternate universes or parallel dimensions bifurcating at the juncture of every line and sometimes even within one word. Multiple conclusions drawn from a single interpretation of an image or phrase; an enumeration of alternative readings each harbouring its own dire consequences; a series of oblique associations that lend vastly different colourings to one and the same image…each a glimpse of a potential new madness, the germ of a new mania. 2/3

All of these riches once laid out before them, there is no question of commending any one interpretation to the reader as the ‘truth’. Instead, we are given to understand that in these last hours what is most important is to muster the strength to lie realities into being (what has been called ‘hyperstition’). Hence the importance of deception, of those operators—crafty, cunning, duplicitous, underhand—that permit writer and criminal alike to slide imperceptibly from one thing to another, to equivocate, to forge instrumental alliances and conduct illicit commerce, to mesmerise others and even themselves—in short, to do everything possible to forestall and repel truth’s tendency to nullify in advance the capacity for further play. To we the truly doomed, then, this work says: Deceive! By whatever ruse is necessary, by seizing upon whatever inessential trifle seizes you and pursuing it through the prism of mania, continue to exacerbate the extravagance that characterises what is most essential to the intensity of the life of thought, however long it has left to live. Although the entry of ‘doomscrolling’ into the dictionary indexes a certain collective jouissance in our mesmerised contemplation of the end, this dissolute inward-spiralling pathology is really remarkable only for its dilution and its pale democratic character. We have each become our own prophet of a miasmic terror at once anxiety-inducing (the urgency of multiple insoluble predicaments) and etiolated (the scrolling never stops, the feed is continuous, no one figure holds the attention). It is something different to open these pages and to experience in each of them the infinitely expansive and infinitesimally condensed time of omnicide, its rhythm beat out by the music of stanzas sampled, transformed, fanned out into manifold possibilities. To enter the variegated terrain they project, in search of ‘the intense, the impossible, the delirious, the no man’s land’, is both to finally unshackle the potency of last-days thinking, and to discover an unexpected antidote to the oppressive paralysis and lethargy of the chronic doomscroller. 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/accelerationisms-in-the-plural/ Accelerationisms in the Plural - 2023 A short preface to the Korean translation of #accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Galmuri Press, 2023) #Accelerate was first published in English in 2014. Since that time, across a period during which politics has been in continual crisis, as apocalyptic thinking of various types has become the norm, traditional left/right dualisms have been scrambled, and meme culture has rescinded any limit on the extent to which formerly esoteric notions can leak into public discourse, the term ‘accelerationism’ has seen a startling increase in currency. At the time of publication it was a recondite, little-known term of uncertain meaning—and even something of an in-joke, since the title #accelerate came from a hashtag attached to the humorous online repartee of a small group of friends. It has now appeared in news headlines, academic papers, art shows, think tank reports, government memos, and more. It seems that the book succeeded in its aim of assembling a history for accelerationism so as to propel the term into existence for the future. While avoiding any dogmatic definition of the term, the introduction to #accelerate sought to challenge certain misconceptions about accelerationism that were already emerging at the time. These have persisted, and have birthed new monsters. In particular, at a certain point around 2017–18 the mainstream Western media seized upon accelerationism as a ‘dangerous idea’ inviting moral panic.1 Following the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, alarming reports about ‘militant accelerationist subcultures’ circulated following discovery of the word in the killer’s manifesto; the confused media whispers only served to further promote this particular version of accelerationism as a credo attractive to desperate youths looking for a way to overcome their sense of disenfranchisement.2 1/3

It is a significant episode, and is not mentioned here in order to protest or bemoan the hijacking of the term. Words have their own destinies, and this particular self-fulfilling prophecy is, in its own way, indicative of a certain dismal relation to the future. Happily, it does not represent accelerationism’s sole fate. In fact, it is testament to the concept’s robustness and pertinence that, despite such demonisation, almost ten years later accelerationism remains alive, multiple, and unresolved. In presenting accelerationism as a theme, the publication of #accelerate exposed it to another danger: that of becoming a new theory trend, spliced opportunistically into academic papers for a few months only to be superseded by whatever came next. But the term appears to have been irretrievably tainted by its media associations, not to mention the continuing provocations of the latter-day Nick Land (no amount of intellectual subtilisation was going to save his emetic polyalloy of accelerationism, ‘scientific’ racism, and Fox News shitlording from general anathema). These factors seem to have largely prevented the risk-averse worlds of academia and contemporary art—the usual vectors of conceptual banalisation—from fully adopting accelerationism as a ‘new big thing’. It was therefore elsewhere, largely in online communities, that more inventive and nuanced interventions appeared, informed in part by the reconstructions and projections presented in the book, but also drawing upon broader subcultural themes and urgencies of the moment. A thousand acceleration­isms bloomed—enough to fill another volume, which however would risk being out of date before it was printed. Among these ‘/acc’ offshoots and sub-brands we could mention Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto, n1x’s ‘Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper‘ (g/acc), Aria Dean’s ‘Notes on Blacceleration­ism’ (bl/acc), Vincent Garton and Edmund Berger’s discussions on ‘uncondi­tional accelerationism’ (u/acc), recent efforts to rustle up an ‘effective accelerationism’ (e/acc) movement,, a[lignment]/acc (Grimes), “>d[efensive]/acc (Vitalik Buterin), bio/acc, and even, exponentiating the apparently unstoppable conquest of the human psyche by magical girls, kawaii, and cat videos, ‘cute accelerationism’ (cute/acc). All of these form a mutating field of thought and cultural production in which the question of accelerationism continues to provoke excitement, dread, enthusiasm, and apprehension. And let’s face it: as Mark Fisher was already reminding us in ‘Terminator vs. Avatar’, we are all de facto accelerationists. There are certainly decels and doomers among us, but very few of them actually log off, ditch their phones, and go to live in a hut in the woods. There is certainly no shortage of calls to return to a simpler way of being, complaints about the intensity and complexity of always-online life, warnings about a crisis of mental health, and protests about the inequitable outcomes of the algorithmic society. But if we are to judge by revealed preference rather than stated preference, humanity at large has clearly opted to plunge further into a web of technical mediation that disrupts our relation to ourselves and our sense of what is human, rendering us economically, politically, personally, and even emotionally and sexually reliant upon machinic networks whose operations no one any longer fully understands or controls. We are well beyond the question of being ‘for’ or ‘against’ accelerationism, since the question of whether this process is emancipatory merely begs the question: emancipatory for what, exactly? It is more a question of whether we disavow our de facto accelerationism, or actively invest in an exploration of it. Rather than simply careering downward in confusion and fear, accelerationists actively seek out the steepest slopes, and get on one. In light of the various accelerationisms enumerated above, the question is: Which slope? Given that we cannot control or slow down the process, what is most likely to take us over a significant threshold? Which cultural vectors have the most traction in drawing the human and its cultural environment into unknown territories? And how can you participate as fully as possible in the futures they promise, even if that involves losing what you once thought of as your identity? For accelerationism is nothing if it is not also a risk of self. 2/3

The ebullient proliferation of /acc microbrands channels the restlessness of the terminally online into an endless proliferation of anticipative apocalypses: speculatively envision the singularity, give in to the vibe, accelerate the process. And their plurality reveals the fundamentally libidinal character of accelerationism. The privileged entry points for participation in the future that each /acc prises open are so many indices of singular sensibilities or perversions of desire, each of which radiates its own ultimate horizon. Accelerationism champions such obsessive libidinal intensification at the expense of any given image of the human, and is therefore always going to be in excess of any reasoned and reasonable management of human affairs. Since the publication of #accelerate, Left Accelerationism’s attempt to parlay it into a deliberative, responsible, and constructive politics has condemned its advocates to scale down their speculative visions to the proportions of party policy and measured proposals for reform—to the point where today the tendency has more or less faded away, or can hardly any longer be meaningfully described as an accelerationism (an inevitability which Land clearly foresaw in ‘Teleoplexy’). In contrast, the online speed tribes are simply doing accelerationism, with little interest in legislating for others and no pretence to be piloting the processes they celebrate. Is accelerationism thereby reduced to a form of aesthetic appreciation? Does this mode of activity perpetuate the romanticism of which accelerationism has sometimes been accused, satisfying nothing but a crypto-religious yearning for participation in cosmic process or planetary telos? Although a certain romantic desire for self-abolition has always simmered within accelerationism, the romantic flight from social illusion into inner rapture is the province of the isolated individual, and millenarianism requires the concept of an endpoint fixed in advance. It is something quite different from the collective and anonymous experimental construction of microcultures whose intensifications gradually seep out into the wider culture. Here, in the hands of users largely uninvested in majoritarian social forms inherited from the past whose incongruous obsolescence is self-evident to them, accelerationism becomes productive. With all the means of communication available to the terminally online, their joyful speculative excesses propagate the certainty that there is more to gain by loosening the grip of humanist norms upon processes of technically-enabled exploration than by deluding oneself that stability is a plausible goal.3 Although it would be foolish to issue any predictions, today accelerationism is some kind of cultural and political force, which was certainly not the case when the book was first published. But with apologies to those who wanted to make it into a political platform, it seems fairly clear that it does not ask, and has no answer, to the question What Is to Be Done? Which is not to say that the praxis of accelerationism cannot be effective, indeed transformational. Perhaps it is best viewed in light of its occultural roots in the writings of Ccru: as a mode of divination and hyperstition; as a practice of the detection and actualisation of as-yet incompletely deployed virtualities; as a discipline of enthusiasm, a passion for welcoming the flow of nameless currents; as the reckless integrity to submit to the future early enough to play your part in making it too late to turn back. 3/3

readthis.wtf /writing/accelerationism-retrospective/ Accelerationism: A Retrospective History (with Amy Ireland) [English+Korean] - 2023 A straightforward introduction to accelerationism and a brief review of its history, as presented at the launch of Galmuri Press’s Korean translation of #accelerate. Thanks to Galmuri Press for the Korean translation. Youtube videos of the presentation and Q&A included below. 0. Introduction The book #accelerate was published in English almost 10 years ago. It’s a pleasure to see it translated, and we are fascinated to see what kind of impact it has in Korea, and how an East Asian accelerationism might differ from a Western one, given that the West, having hosted the explosion of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, has for some time been slowing down and falling behind. Why did we originally want to publish #accelerate and bring the concept of accelerationism to the foreground? The idea was not to introduce people to some kind of unified position or ‘movement’. In fact, such a thing didn’t exist at the time. The point was to present a constellation of different positions which, in their interactions and tensions, outline a set of problems and trajectories of exploration that we think are crucial for understanding the contemporary world. The texts in this book ask a series of questions that are still relevant today, about our relationship to the rapid processes of technological and social change underway across the globe, about whether politics still has a role to play, about intelligence, technology, and human agency. And above all, about the future. 1/16

The way in which the book came about was quite unusual. What we did by collecting these texts was to piece together a history for the concept of accelerationism. You could say that we ‘discovered’ this history, scanning through the twentieth century all the way back to Marx and Samuel Butler. Or, you could say that we ‘invented’ this history, as a speculative exercise. What if accelerationism really was ‘a thing’? Since the book was published, the concept of accelerationism has, surprisingly, become quite mainstream, entering into art, culture, and politics, and as such it has been subject to many interpretations. Some of these interpretations have been very fruitful, some less so. Some we would class as misunderstandings, and these misunderstandings are very persistent. Very few people today would openly class themselves as ‘accelerationist’, and it’s interesting to reflect that it is still seen, in some sense, as a ‘dangerous’ idea. In the end, I don’t think anyone can claim ownership over the idea of accelerationism, or dictate what is or is not accelerationism. The word has its own destiny now. All that we can do is tell you about our involvement in its history, and our own conclusions as to the most coherent way to think about accelerationism. 1. ‘Accelerationism’ is an insult If we can essentially blame ‘accelerationism’ on one person, then it would be the left-wing academic Benjamin Noys, who first used the term in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative. Noys identified accelerationism as a trend in post-marxist, poststructuralist philosophy. The key text here is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s books on Capitalism and Schizophrenia, where they ask whether emancipation calls for the destruction of capitalism, or whether instead we should ‘accelerate the process’. For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism consists of a paradoxical tendency: on one hand, it schizophrenically decodes and deterritorialises human society, while on the other hand it paranoiacally recodes and reterritorialises it. The basic idea of ‘accelerationism’ here, then, is that capitalism houses a set of liberatory tendencies which can be accelerated to the point where they transform the social fabric, what it means to be human, etc. 2. Accelerationism was never called ‘Accelerationism’ Noys quite rightly connected this to a small group of British thinkers in the 1990s who picked up this line of thought and developed it, foremost among them Nick Land and Sadie Plant. Although the word ‘accelerationism’ was actually never used in this context, it is this group that has become the most identified with the term. Their position was that conceptions of the human and human politics (what Nick Land calls the ‘Human Security System’) are exclusively repressive. They are a ‘drag’ on the process of the self-development of intelligence, and on the planetary mutation that is capitalism—both of which in fact are the same thing, because Capital is Artificial Intelligence. As Deleuze and Guattari said, capitalism tends to dissolve hereditary social forms and restrictions. It is not a social system but the negative of all social systems. It can therefore operate as an engine of exploration into the unknown, it harbours the possibility of escaping from the repressive inheritance of the human. 2/16

At the core of Land’s thought—inherited from Bataille—there is indeed a reckless, even romanticist, desire for abolition, a desire to explore the outside of the ‘prison of human being’ at all costs. According to Land, to be ‘on the side of intelligence’ is to totally abandon all caution with respect to the disintegrative processes of capital and whatever reprocessing of the human and of the planet they might involve. Meanwhile, Sadie Plant—influenced by postructuralist feminism—saw in these mechanisms of disintegration and dissolution an emerging alliance between women and machines, both of which had constituted the repressed outside of the patriarchal-humanist economy of the subject. It was also a question of style: In the 90s the small group that would later become the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, developed a style of writing that tried to collapse theory into the aesthetics of cyberpunk fiction and electronic music—in particular the late stages of rave, darkside, and jungle. They tried to bring writing together with those abstract, synthetic, futuristic sonic spaces, and the science fiction narratives that were intertwined with them: those tracks commonly sampled from SF films. Writing, it seemed, needed to be a part of that cultural complex which was at the same time the site for new conceptualisations of human and inhuman futures. So the idea of acceleration was now formulated in a kind of accelerated, libidinal writing that didn’t just describe, but produced the feeling of acceleration. Accelerationism, here, becomes a call to participate as fully as possible in the processes that are taking apart the human. A kind of participation in the future before it arrives, and in order to accelerate its arrival. Noys’s fierce criticism of all this is that it was, ultimately, nothing but an aesthetic that served to promote the neoliberal politics of the time—Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. Therefore it is a kind of abdication of thought, and particularly of marxist thought. For Noys, it’s merely a confused championing of capitalism, which in its science-fictional aestheticisation, mistakes the oppression of capital for a kind of liberation. 3. ‘#Accelerate’ is a joke One of the interesting things about the emergence of accelerationism has been a revival of interest in this work of the CCRU and Nick Land. But in fact, I think it worked the other way around: Urbanomic published Fanged Noumena, a collection of Nick’s writings, in 2011, and having those texts available undoubtedly had an effect on the emergence of ‘accelerationism’ as a positive term, in defiance of Noys’s attack on it. The arrival of Fanged Noumena turned the works of Nick Land from a derogatory footnote about a brief episode in philosophy, into a cultural force in the present, and Noys’s mention of accelerationism took on an importance that it otherwise wouldn’t have had. In the wake of this untimely return of Land’s work, one of the earliest people to use the term and positively advocate for it was Mark Fisher, an ex-member of CCRU, in the text ‘Terminator vs Avatar: Notes on Acceleration’ (included in #accelerate). Between 2011 and 2014, a small group of us on Twitter took up the term ‘accelerationism’, and would spot items in the news or cultural products that seemed ‘accelerationist’, and post them with the hashtag ‘#accelerate’. This meme began to spread in the online environment. As jokes often do, it developed into something more: a number of philosophers and political thinkers started to develop different lines of thought on accelerationism, and the #accelerate hashtag began to take on real consistency. 3/16

The real turning point was when Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published the ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’ in 2013, which kickstarted the idea of ‘Left accelerationism’. This manifesto was a kind of beacon at a time when leftwing politics was doing a lot of soul-searching, and became surprisingly popular and broadly read. The manifesto argued that, where revolutionary politics had once been passionate about the emancipatory possibilities of technology, the transformation of the human, and the unleashing of productive forces, in the contemporary moment it seemed to have abandoned that kind of thinking to the neoliberal right. What the manifesto calls for is essentially a reclamation of the ambition and vision that progressive politics once had. It seeks to combat the Left’s preoccupation with what Srnicek and Williams call ‘folk politics’. In a world that is irreversibly abstract and global, left politics cannot simply consist in pleas to return to the local, to the organic, to the human. Rather than advocating degrowth, progressive left politics must take an affirmative stance towards the reformatting of human society by technology, and the constant process of change and complexification that has taken over the planet. The slogan of a politics that seeks equity and progressive thinking should not be ‘slow down’ but ‘speed up’. An accelerationist politics, according to the Manifesto, would need to build alliances across different practices – design, computation, logistics, information processing, etc., as well as political theory and political debate. Beyond the hopeful horizontalism of movements like Occupy in the US, it would need to be serious about complex organisational strategies and access to power. And it would need to operate by means other than the traditional democratic party system. So there is an attempt here—which may seem rather paradoxical—to meld accelerationism with a more traditional set of concerns about social and political justice. On one hand it consists in a realism: the historical product of capitalism must be positively factored into any possible liberatory politics. You can’t pursue a localist agenda against globalisation, you can’t just organise happenings where you gesture symbolically towards ‘other possible worlds’ without engaging in the concrete questions about the construction of new platforms for trading, communication, etc., and the legacy of the existing ones. That sort of activisim is just a feelgood politics that has no actual impact. There is a kind of realism here about left politics facing up to the aspects of capitalist development that are effectively irreversible and indeed have been beneficial. But Left accelerationism refuses a reckless abandonment to the deterritorialising and decoding—or reformatting— aspects of capitalism. There is an idea that we can strategically redeploy and reuse the technological advances of capitalism against capitalism. In this way left accelerationism combats the hopelessness that is sometimes characteristic of left-wing critique: the idea that all of human life is absorbed by capitalism and there’s no way out except by looking backwards, or dreaming of a miraculous transformation that would enable us to start over. In this way, then, drawing on the legacy of accelerationism provided a way to rethink and reconfigure a leftwing political stance. The extremely difficult task of Left Accelerationism, however, is to prove that there can be some motor for acceleration other than consumer capitalism. What would that be? Isn’t any instrumentalising of accelerationism just a compromise with the ‘human security system’? The question is whether left-accelerationism ultimately looks like another species of leftist wishful thinking. 4. Accelerationism has no History…yet 4/16

With the return of interest in the CCRU and Nick Land and Sadie Plant’s work, and with the emergence of Left Accelerationism and the success of the manifesto when it was published online, it began to seem a good idea to publish something. Although we hesitated for a long time, wondering whether it was redundant to publish a paper book, since the discourse on accelerationism had so far been entirely online. When we decided to compile this book in 2013, we decided it had to be more than just a compilation of contemporary texts. We wanted to see whether we could piece together, more coherently, a history for accelerationism. Beyond Benjamin Noys’s brief mention, this history didn’t really exist…or it hadn’t up until this point. However, as the ‘#accelerate’ trend had emerged as a constellation of positions coming from various quarters (theoretical and political philosophy, art and design) it had often referred back to diverse previous moments: not just the thinkers referred to by Noys—Nick Land, Sadie Plant, CCRU, Deleuze and Guattari—but Marx, Veblen, Firestone, Russian Cosmism, etc. The first aim of the book, then, is to sketch out this genealogy, to take note of all the different nuances and disagreements possible within a broadly accelerationist position, and above all to see how, at each stage, new accelerationisms tend to adopt some features of their forerunners and reject others. The second aim is to ask what accelerationism could mean now, whether it is or could be a coherent theoretical and/or political position. 5. Accelerationism is Scandalous The publication of #accelerate helped to promote the idea of accelerationism, and it became a topic of debate. There ensued an increasing polarisation of accelerationism into what were seen as Left and Right political strands. In some ways this was a productive period, in which the basic tenets of accelerationism were debated. Left Accelerationist concepts such as ‘fully automated luxury communism’ became current memes, and accelerationist ideas—if not the word itself—seemed to be entering the thinking of left wing political parties. But by 2015, when Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams published their book Inventing the Future, which in essence continued the left accelerationist project, they did not use the word ‘accelerationism’ at all. Media use of the term had taken another turn. Picking up on a common misunderstanding, think-pieces and media reports online started to talk about accelerationism, spreading the idea that it consisted in the doctrine that ‘capitalism can only be defeated by exacerbating its worst tendencies until the system breaks down’, or simply, that ‘in order to make things better, they must first be made worse’. This idea then seemed to flourish in the febrile climate of the culture wars until eventually we were seeing mass media headlines and think tank reports on ‘militant accelerationist subcultures online’, and ‘the dangerous new ideology of accelerationism’ conflating the ‘accelerationism’ coined by Noys with an unrelated use of the term to refer to a terrorist tactic in a series of neo Nazi pamphlets mostly penned in the 1980s by a man named James Mason. This conflation of an experimental philosophy joyfully engaged in dismantling the repressive strictures of the human subject, or a doctrine of large-scale leftistist techno-leftist political transformation, with the idea that ‘public acts of violence should be used to ‘accelerate’ the collapse of decadent liberal social forms with the goal of inciting race war’ was made possible by the existing misconception that ‘accelerating the process’ meant ‘making things worse to 5/16

make them better’ and the fact that Nick Land had recently publicly allied himself, through Neoreaction, with elements of the Alt-Right. Having turned the concept of accelerationism from an insult to a hashtag and then to a field of thinking and study, having built a history for it, there was struggle ahead here for anyone who wanted to maintain the word accelerationism and the concepts that had been gathered around it. Should we fight for it? Should we continue to advocate for its complexity and its potential for thinking? Or did it have to be abandoned? 6. No one Knows what Accelerationism Is This indicates quite well that there is no consensus on what accelerationism is. And that’s still the case today. There are however a number of common misunderstandings, some of which we made an effort to dispel and which already dealt with in the introduction to the book, along with others that continue to be perpetuated online, and lead to both superficial dismissals and celebrations of accelerationism. It’s not about accelerating contradictions. Capitalism thrives on crisis, it ‘works by breaking down’: ‘Nothing ever died of contradictions.’ Accelerationism does not propose that ‘the only way to make things better is to make things worse’.1, This is a dumbed-down version of the previous point. ‘With later Marxism you get the slogan about “intensifying the contradictions” [tendency of the falling rate of profit] which Marx himself saw as something capital itself does but later becomes attached to various types of political tactics.’2 It’s not about ‘the singularity’. ‘Capitalism has no exterior limit. (Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between an absolute limit and a relative limit: ‘the relative limit is no more nor less than the capitalist social formation, because the latter engineers (machine) and mobilizes flows that are effectively decoded, but does so by substituting for the codes a quantifying axiomatic (une axiomatique comptable) that is even more oppressive. With the result that capitalism—in conformity with the movement by which it counteracts its own tendency—is continually drawing near the wall, while at the same time pushing the wall further way. Schizophrenia is the absolute limit, but capitalism is the relative limit.’ 3 It’s not about speed (grasped independently of intensity). 7. We are all Accelerationists Meanwhile, the world continues to accelerate. Mark Fisher had remarked, very early on, that in fact we are all accelerationists in terms of our actual actions. We might complain about the velocity of contemporary life, but very few of us are really engaged in creating some kind of decelerated alternative. There are calls to return to a simpler way of being, but in fact, humanity at large has clearly opted to plunge further into a web of technical mediation that disrupts our relation to ourselves and our sense of what is human, rendering us economically, politically, personally, and even emotionally and sexually reliant upon machinic networks. We don’t even any longer fully understand how these machines work, never mind control them, and their ultimate consequences run beyond even the most extreme SF. Remember that, when #accelerate was published, there was no ChatGPT, no CRISPR, etc….—and it has to be said that 90s ‘accelerationism’, with its occultism, addiction, its electronic viral plague, now looks quite prescient… 6/16

Accelerationism, from this point of view, is simply the honest way to understand our current condition and to reflect upon our actual participation in the future. 8. Accelerationism is, and is not, a Paradox (Time and Intelligence) There is something apparently paradoxical about the very idea of accelerationism being an ‘ism’: as if it is something you could decide to do… For the ‘classic’ accelerationism of the CCRU and Nick Land, it was about participating in the future. But if these inhuman processes are inexorably taking place and we, as mere humans, have no choice in the matter, what does it mean to ‘accelerate the process’? There is a kind of temporal paradox here… A kind of ‘time-loop’ in which we can access pieces of the future (‘the future is unevenly distributed’) and put them to work on ourselves now—so that the future brings itself about by infecting the present. The crucial thing here is to understand the political role played by fictions and what CCRU called ‘hyperstitions’. This is why science fiction has always been important in accelerationism. In Land and CCRU in particular, it was the Terminator series, in which an agent from the future returns to the present in order to program themselves into the future… And at this point, it’s revealed that at its deepest, perhaps accelerationism, ultimately, is neither a politics nor an aesthetics but a philosophy of time, agency, and fate. And then the question of intelligence: if we want to be ‘on the side of intelligence’. If what we want to do is to tap into future intelligence, bringing it to bear on the present by opening up epistemic, technological, and social paths to change… where does intelligence reside? And do we need to take into consideration that intelligence is not necessarily ‘our’ friend? Does intelligence reside in the blind cyperpositive feedback loops of capital, which only seeks to intensify, and has no regard for the human (Land)? Or can intelligence come forth through a collective practice of rationality (Negarestani, Left Acc)? Is the future a constantly churning abyss of possibility that we can voluntarily participate in by throwing off dogmatic constraints on our thinking, but can never bring under control for the purposes of a political programme (U/Acc)? This is accelerationism, the philosophical question of futurity, intelligence and politics. 9. Accelerationisms in the Plural It should already be clear that accelerationism is not a unified position, any more today than it was 10 years ago. As I emphasise in my preface to the Korean edition, the most interesting thing since the publication of the book has been the emergence of many new accelerationisms. The proliferation of these plural accelerationisms is an expression of the collective thinking of the terminally online, and perhaps it’s also an antidote to passive doomscrolling. What has been shown in the years since the crisis over the popular meaning of the term, is that accelerationism continues to produce its own discursive history completely independently of any theoretical or academic intervention or concern. It seems that you can generate as many 7/16

accelerationisms as you want. Just identify features of the present that seem to indicate unprecedented futures; give in to the vibe; accelerate the process. We could mention: Laboria Cuboniks’s Xenofeminist Manifesto, n1x’s ‘Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper‘ (g/acc), Aria Dean’s ‘Notes on Blacceleration­ism’ (bl/acc), Vincent Garton and Edmund Berger’s discussions on ‘uncondi­tional accelerationism’ (u/acc), recent efforts to conceive of an ‘effective accelerationism’ (e/acc), and even a ‘cute accelerationism’ (cute/acc) which takes kawaii and aegyo as markers of the future mutation of the human. All of these form a developing field of thought and cultural production in which the question of accelerationism enables us to audition alternative versions of the future, and continues to provoke excitement, dread, enthusiasm, and apprehension. This proliferation points to the fundamentally libidinal character of accelerationism, something that can be lost when accelerationism is discussed as if it’s a critical theory. Each accelerationism opens up an entry point for participation in the future. And each of these entry points is an index of a sensibility or a perversion of desire, a particular stance about what is most intensely futural, which is then accelerated to its ultimate conclusions. Accelerationism champions such obsessive libidinal intensification at the expense of any given image of the human or of nature, and is therefore always going to be in excess of any reasoned and reasonable management of human affairs. Left Accelerationism tried to turn it into a deliberative, responsible, and constructive politics. But today even its advocates have given up the word ‘accelerationism’, and have instead turned to party politics and reform. In contrast, what we see today is the spontaneous emergence of online microcultures which are not (or not just) theorising but simply doing accelerationism. And it is worth remarking that this often happens in communities who have been in one way or another written out of the narrative of ‘being human’, and who decide to accept and accelerate this. https://youtu.be/-A9vPkkehcc 8/16

https://youtu.be/NgoFw-Khgso 가속주의 : 회고적 역사 『#가속하라』 한국어판 출간 기념 강연 원고 강연자 : 로빈 맥케이, 에이미 아일랜드 번역 : 김효진 (『#가속하라』 옮긴이) 강연 일시 : 2023년 11월 4일 토요일 저녁 7시 ZOOM 0. 서론 『#가속하라』라는 책이 영어로 출판된 지 거의 10년이 지났습니다. 이 책이 한국어로 번역된 것을 보게 되어 기쁩니다. 게다가 이 책이 한국에서 어떤 종류의 영향을 미칠지, 그리고 산업 혁명과 그 여파의 폭발적인 전개를 주도한 서양이 한동안 둔화되고 뒤처지게 된 상황을 고려하면 동아시아의 가속주 의가 서양의 가속주의와 어떻게 다를 수 있을지 보는 것이 흥미진진하다고 느낍니다. 왜 애초에 우리는 ‘#가속하라’를 출판하고 가속주의 개념을 전면에 내세우기를 원했을까요? 사람들에게 어떤 종류의 통일된 입장이나 ‘운동’을 소개하려고 생각하지는 않았습니다. 사실상 그 당시에는 그런 것이 존재하지 않았습니다. 요점은, 현대 세계를 이해하는 데 우리가 중요하다고 생각하는 일련의 문제와 탐구의 궤적을 상호작용과 긴장을 통해 개관하는 다양한 입장들의 성좌를 제시하는 것이었습니다. 이 책에 수록된 텍스트들은, 전 세계에서 진행되고 있는 급격한 기술 및 사회 변화 과정과 맺은 우리의 관계에 대하여, 정치가 수행할 역할을 여전히 지니고 있는지에 대하여, 지능, 기술, 그리고 인간 행위성에 대하여 오늘날에도 여전히 유효한 일련의 물음을 제기합니다. 그리고 무엇보다도 미래에 대한 물음을 제기합니다. 이 책이 나오게 된 과정은 매우 특이했습니다. 우리는 이 텍스트들을 수집함으로써 가속주의라는 개념에 대한 역사를 정리했습니다. 우리는 맑스와 사무엘에 이르기까지 거슬러 올라가면서 20세기 전체를 조사함으로써 이 역사를 ‘발 9/16

견’했다고 말할 수 있을 것입니다. 혹은, 우리는 이 역사를 하나의 사변적 실천으로서 ‘발명’했다고 말할 수 있을 것입 니다. 가속주의가 실제로 ‘존재’했다면 어떨까요? 이 책이 출간된 이후 가속주의라는 개념은 놀랍게도 예술, 문화, 정치에까지 영향을 미치며 주류가 되었고, 그리하여 그 자체로 그것은 많은 해석의 대상이 되었습니다. 이런 해석 중 일부는 매우 유익했고, 일부는 덜 유익했습니다. 일부 는 오해로 분류할 수 있으며, 그리고 이런 오해들은 매우 끈질기게 지속되고 있습니다. 오늘날 공개적으로 ‘가속주의자’로 자처하는 사람은 거의 없으며, 그리고 어떤 의미에서는 가속주의가 여전히 ‘위험한’ 관념으로 여겨지고 있다는 점을 되새기는 것은 흥미롭습니다. 결국, 저는 누구도 가속주의라는 개념에 대한 소유권을 주장하거나, 혹은 무엇이 가속주의인지 아닌지를 규정할 수 없 다고 생각합니다. 이제 이 낱말은 독자적인 운명이 있습니다. 우리가 할 수 있는 일은 가속주의의 역사에 우리가 관여 한 활동에 대하여 말씀드리고, 가속주의에 관하여 생각할 수 있는 가장 정합적인 방법에 대한 우리 나름의 결론을 말 씀드리는 것뿐입니다. 1. ‘가속주의’는 모욕적인 용어입니다. ‘가속주의’를 본질적으로 한 사람의 탓으로 돌릴 수 있다면, 그는 2010년에 출판된 『부정적인 것의 지속』이라는 책 에서 이 용어를 처음 사용한 좌익 학자 벤저민 노이스일 것입니다. 노이스는 가속주의를 포스트맑스주의·포스트구조 주의 철학의 한 경향으로 규정했습니다. 여기서 핵심 텍스트는 ‘자본주의와 정신분열증’에 관한 질 들뢰즈와 펠릭스 과타리의 저서들인데, 여기서 그들은 해방 을 위해 자본주의의 파괴가 필요한지, 아니면 오히려 ‘경과를 가속’해야 하는지를 묻습니다. 들뢰즈와 과타리의 경우 에 자본주의는, 한편으로는 인간 사회를 정신분열증적으로 탈코드화하고 탈영토화하는 한편, 다른 한편으로는 편집 증적으로 재코드화하고 재영토화하는 역설적인 경향으로 구성되어 있습니다. 그렇다면 여기서 ‘가속주의’의 기본 착상은, 자본주의에는 사회적 얼개, 인간임이 뜻하는 것 등을 변환시킬 정도까지 가속될 수 있는 일단의 해방적 경향이 있다는 것입니다. 2. 가속주의는 결코 ‘가속주의’라고 불린 적이 없습니다. 노이스는 꽤 올바르게도 이것을 1990년대에 이런 사유 노선을 받아들여 발전시킨 어떤 영국 사상가들의 소규모 집단, 그중에서도 특히 닉 랜드와 새이디 플랜트와 연관시켰습니다. ‘가속주의’라는 낱말은 사실상 이런 맥락에서 사용된 적이 전혀 없지만, 지금까지 그 용어와 가장 많이 동일시된 것은 이 집단입니다. 그들의 입장은 인간과 인간 정치(닉 랜드가 ‘인간 보안 체계’라고 일컫는 것)에 대한 구상들이 전적으로 억압적이라는 것이었습니다. 그 구상들은 지능의 자기 발전 과정과 자본주의라는 행성적 변이 과정의 ‘장애물’입니다. 자본은 인공 지능이기에 사실상 그 두 과정은 동일한 것입니다. 들뢰즈와 과타리가 말했듯이, 자본주의는 세습적인 사회적 형태와 제한을 해체하는 경향이 있습니다. 자본주의는 하 나의 사회적 체계가 아니라 오히려 모든 사회적 체계를 부정하는 것입니다. 그러므로 자본주의는 미지의 것들에 관한 탐구의 엔진으로 작동할 수 있으며, 자본주의는 인간의 억압적 유산에서 벗어날 수 있는 가능성을 품고 있습니다. 바타유로부터 물려받은 랜드 사상의 핵심에는 사실상 폐지에 대한 무모하고 심지어 낭만주의적인 욕망, 즉 어떤 대가 를 치르더라도 ‘인간이라는 감옥’의 외부를 탐사하려는 욕망이 자리 잡고 있습니다. 10/16

랜드에 따르면, ‘지능의 편에 서는 것’은 자본의 해체 과정들과 무엇이든 그것들이 수반할 수 있는 인간과 지구의 재가 공에 대한 모든 경계심을 완전히 버리는 것입니다. 한편, 포스트구조주의 페미니즘의 영향을 받은 세이디 플랜트는 이런 해체와 용해의 메커니즘들에서 지금까지 주체 의 가부장적-인본주의적 경제의 억압당한 외부를 구성한 여성과 기계 사이의 신흥 동맹을 발견했습니다. 또한 그것은 양식의 문제였습니다. 1990년대에 훗날 <사이버네틱스 문화 연구단>(CCRU)가 된 소규모 집단은 이론을 사이버펑크 픽션과 전자 음악, 특히 레이브, 다크사이드, 그리고 정글 음악의 후기 단계들의 미학에 녹여내려고 한 글 쓰기 양식을 개발했습니다. 그들은 추상적이고 합성적이며 미래주의적인 음향 공간들 및 그것들과 뒤얽혀 있는 과학 소설 서사들 – 흔히 SF 영화에서 샘플링된 트랙들 – 을 글쓰기와 결합하고자 시도하였습니다. 글쓰기는 인간 미래와 비인간 미래에 대한 새로운 구상을 위한 현장이기도 하는 그 문화적 복합체의 일부가 되어야 하 는 것처럼 보였습니다. 그리하여 이제 가속에 관한 관념은 단순한 묘사가 아니라 가속의 느낌을 산출하는 일종의 가속 된 리비도적 글쓰기에서 명확히 표명되었습니다. 여기서 가속주의는 인간을 해체하는 과정에 가능한 한 온전히 참여하라는 요구가 됩니다. 미래가 도래하기 전에, 그리 고 그 도래를 가속하기 위해 이루어지는 참여의 일종입니다. 이 모든 것에 대한 노이스의 격렬한 비판은, 그 모든 것이 궁극적으로 영국의 대처와 미합중국의 레이건이 실행한 당 시의 신자유주의 정치를 촉진하는 데 기여한 미학적인 것에 불과했다는 것입니다. 그러므로 그것은 일종의 사상의 포 기, 특히 맑스주의 사상의 포기입니다. 노이스에게 그것은 과학소설적 미학화를 통해 자본의 억압을 일종의 해방으로 착각하는, 자본주의에 대한 혼란스러운 옹호에 지나지 않습니다. 3. ‘#가속하라’는 농담입니다. 가속주의의 출현과 관련하여 흥미로운 점 중 하나는 CCRU와 닉 랜드의 이런 작업에 대한 관심이 다시 살아났다는 것 입니다. 그런데 사실장 저는 그것이 정반대로 작동했다고 생각합니다. 어바노믹 출판사는 2011년에 닉의 글을 모은 선집 『독니가 있는 본체Fanged Noumena』를 출간했고, 이 텍스트들이 공개되면서 노이스의 공격에 맞서 ‘가속주 의’가 긍정적인 용어로 부상하는 데 영향을 미친 것은 확실합니다. 『독니가 있는 본체』가 등장함으로써 닉 랜드의 저작은 철학의 짧은 에피소드에 대한 경멸적인 각주에서 현재의 문화적 힘으로 바뀌었고, 가속주의에 대한 노이스의 언급은 그렇지 않았더라면 그것이 품지 못했을 중요한 의미를 띠게 되었습니다. 랜드 저작의 이런 반시대적 귀환의 여파로, 이 용어를 가장 먼저 사용하고 그것을 적극적으로 옹호한 사람 중 한 명은 (『#가속하라』에 수록된) 「터미네이터 대 아바타 : 가속에 관한 단상」라는 글을 저술한 CCRU의 전 멤버인 마크 피 셔였습니다. 2011년과 2014년 사이에 소수의 트위터 이용자들이 ‘가속주의’라는 용어를 채택했고, 뉴스나 문화 상품에서 ‘가속주 의적‘인 것처럼 보이는 항목들을 발견하곤 했으며, 그것들을 해시태그 ‘#accelerate(#가속하라)’와 더불어 게시했습니 다. 이 밈은 온라인 환경에서 확산하기 시작했습니다. 농담이 종종 그렇듯이, 그것은 더 이상의 것으로 발전하였습니다. 많은 철학자와 정치사상가가 가속주의에 관한 다양 한 사유 노선을 발전시키기 시작했고, #accelerate 해시태그는 실재적인 일관성을 띠기 시작했습니다. 진정한 전환점은 2013년 닉 서르닉과 알렉스 윌리엄스가 「가속주의 정치 선언」을 발표한 시점인데, 그 선언은 ‘좌 파 가속주의’에 관한 관념의 시발점이 되었습니다. 이 선언은 좌익 정치가 많은 고민을 하고 있던 시기에 일종의 횃불 이었으며, 놀랍게도 널리 읽히는 유명한 글이 되었습니다. 11/16

그 선언은, 한때 혁명 정치가 기술의 해방적 가능성, 인간의 변형, 그리고 생산력의 발휘에 열광했던 반면에 현재 국면 에는 그런 종류의 사유를 신자유주의 우파에 내준 것처럼 보인다고 주장했습니다. 그 선언이 요구하는 것은 본질적으로 한때 진보 정치가 가졌던 야망과 전망을 되찾자는 것입니다. 그것은 서르닉과 윌 리엄스가 “통속정치”라고 일컫는 것에 대한 좌파의 집착에 맞서 싸우고자 합니다. 돌이킬 수 없을 정도로 추상적이고 전 지구적인 세계에서 좌파 정치는 단순히 지역적인 것, 유기적인 것, 인간적인 것으로 돌아가자고 호소하는 것에 자 리하고 있을 수 없습니다. 진보적 좌파 정치는 탈성장을 옹호하기보다는 기술에 의한 인간 사회의 재편과 지구를 장악 한 끊임없는 변화 및 복잡화 과정에 대하여 긍정적인 자세를 취해야 합니다. 공평과 진보적 사유를 추구하는 정치의 슬로건은 ‘감속하라’가 아니라 ‘가속하라’가 되어야 합니다. 그 선언에 따르면, 가속주의 정치는 정치 이론과 정치적 논쟁뿐만 아니라 설계, 계산, 로지스틱스, 정보 처리 등 다양한 실천에 걸쳐 동맹을 구축해야 할 것입니다. 미합중국의 ‘점령하라’와 같은 운동들의 희망적인 수평주의를 넘어 그것은 복잡한 조직 전략과 권력에의 접근에 대해 진지하게 고민해야 할 것입니다. 그리고 그것은 전통적인 민주주의 정당 체 계가 아닌 다른 방식으로 운영되어야 할 것입니다. 따라서 가속주의 정치에는 다소 역설적으로 보일 수 있는 시도, 즉 가속주의를 사회적 정의와 정치적 정의에 대한 더 전통적인 일단의 관심사와 결합시키려는 시도가 있습니다. 한편으로 가속주의 정치는 현실주의에 자리하고 있습니 다. 자본주의의 역사적 생산물은 모든 가능한 해방적 정치에 적극적으로 편입되어야 합니다. 여러분은 지구화에 반대 하는 지역주의적 의제를 추구할 수 없으며, 거래, 소통 등을 위한 새로운 플랫폼들의 구축과 기존 플랫폼들의 유산에 관한 구체적인 물음에 관여하지 않은 채로 ‘다른 가능한 세계’를 향해 상징적인 태도를 취하게 되는 우발사건들만 조 직할 수는 없습니다. 이런 종류의 행동주의는 실제 영향력이 전혀 없는 기분 좋은 정치일 뿐입니다. 이런 [비판적] 생각 에는 사실상 되돌릴 수 없고 지금까지 실제로 유익했던 자본주의 발전의 측면들을 직시하는 좌파 정치와 관련된 일종 의 현실주의가 있습니다. 그러나 좌파 가속주의는 자본주의의 탈영토화 및 탈코드화, 즉 재구성 측면에의 무분별한 포기를 거부합니다. 자본주 의의 기술적 진보를 자본주의에 대항하여 전략적으로 재배치하고 재사용할 수 있다는 관념이 있습니다. 이렇게 해서 좌파 가속주의는 때때로 좌익 비판을 특징짓는 절망감, 즉 인간의 삶 전체가 자본주의에 흡수되어 뒤돌아보거나 우리 로 하여금 다시 시작하게 할 수 있을 기적적인 변화를 꿈꾸는 것 외에는 탈출구가 없다는 생각에 맞서 싸웁니다. 그리하여 이런 방식으로 가속주의의 유산을 활용함으로써 좌익 정치적 입장을 재고하고 재편할 방법을 찾을 수 있었 습니다. 그런데 좌파 가속주의의 대단히 어려운 과업은 소비자 자본주의가 아닌 다른 가속의 어떤 동력이 존재할 수 있다는 점 을 증명하는 것입니다. 그것은 무엇일까요? 가속주의의 도구화는 ‘인간 안보 체계’와의 타협에 불과하지 않을까요? 문 제는 좌파 가속주의가 궁극적으로 좌파의 또 다른 종류의 희망적 사고처럼 보이는 것은 아닌지 여부입니다. 4. 가속주의는 역사가 없습니다 … 아직은 말입니다. CCRU와 닉 랜드 및 세이디 플랜트의 작업에 대한 관심이 다시 높아지며, 좌파 가속주의가 등장하고 그 선언이 온라 인에 게시되어 성공을 거두게 되면서 무언가를 출판하는 것이 좋을 것 같다는 생각이 들기 시작했습니다. 지금까지 가속주의에 관한 담론이 전적으로 온라인에서 이루어졌기에 종이책을 출간하는 것이 중복되는 행위가 아닌 지 고민하며 오랫동안 망설인 끝에 이 책을 출간하게 되었습니다. 2013년에 이 책을 편찬하기로 결정했을 때, 우리는 그것이 현대 텍스트들의 모음집에 불과한 책 이상의 것이어야 한 다고 생각했습니다. 우리는 가속주의의 역사를 보다 일관성 있게 정리할 수 있는지 알고 싶었습니다. 12/16

벤자민 노이스의 간략한 언급을 제외하면, 이 역사는 실제로 존재하지 않았거나, 혹은 지금까지는 존재한 적이 없습니 다. 그러나 ‘#가속하라’ 경향이 (이론과 정치 철학, 예술과 디자인 등) 다양한 분야에서 비롯된 입장들의 집합체로서 출현 했을 때 그것은 종종 이전의 다양한 순간들을 다시 가리키게 되었습니다. 노이스가 언급한 사상가들(닉 랜드, 세이디 플랜트, CCRU, 들뢰즈와 과타리 등)뿐만 아니라 맑스, 베블렌, 파이어스톤, 러시아 우주론 등을 말입니다. 따라서 이 책의 첫 번째 목표는 이런 계보를 간략히 묘사하고, 광범위한 가속주의 입장 내에서 가능한 모든 다양한 뉘 앙스와 불일치에 주목하며, 무엇보다도 각 단계에서 새로운 가속주의가 어떻게 선구자들의 일부 특징을 채택하고 그 밖의 특징들을 거부하는 경향이 있는지 살펴보는 것입니다. 두 번째 목표는 가속주의가 현재 하나의 정합적인 이론적·정치적 입장인지, 혹은 그런 입장이 될 수 있는지를 묻는 것 입니다. 5. 가속주의는 스캔들입니다. 『#가속하라』의 출판은 가속주의의 관념을 널리 알리는 데 도움이 되었고, 그리하여 그것은 논쟁의 주제가 되었습니 다. 이후 가속주의는 좌파와 우파의 정치적 갈래로의 양극화가 심화되었습니다. 어떤 면에서 이 시기는 가속주의의 기본 신조들에 대한 논쟁이 벌어진 생산적인 시기였습니다. ‘완전히 자동화된 화려한 코뮤니즘’ 같은 좌파 가속주의적 개념들은 현재 유행하는 밈이 되었고, 그 낱말 자체는 아닐 지라도 가속주의적 관념들이 좌익 정당의 사상에 편입되고 있는 것처럼 보였습니다. 그런데 닉 서르닉과 알렉스 윌리엄스가 본질적으로 좌파 가속주의 프로젝트를 계속 수행한 『미래를 발명하기』라는 책을 출간한 2015년에 그들은 ‘가속주의’라는 낱말을 전혀 사용하지 않았습니다. 미디어가 그 용어를 사용하게 됨으로써 또 다른 전환이 이루어졌습니다. 가속주의에 대한 흔한 오해를 채택한 논평과 언론 보도는 온라인 상에서 가속주의에 관해 이야기하기 시작했는데, 요컨대 가속주의는 “’자본주의는 단지 그 체계가 붕괴될 때까지 그 최악의 경향들을 악화시킴으로써 패퇴시킬 수 있을 뿐이다” 혹은 “상황을 개선하기 위해서는 먼저 상황이 악화되어야 한다”라는 신조에 해당한다는 생각을 퍼뜨렸습니다. 그 당시에 이 관념은 문화 전쟁의 열띤 분위기 속에서 번성하는 듯 보였지만, 결국 우리는 “온라인의 전투적 가속주의 하위문화”와 “가속주의라는 위험한 새로운 이데올로기”에 대한 대중매체 헤드라인과 싱크탱크 보고서에서 노이스가 고안한 ‘가속주의’라는 낱말을 제임스 메이슨이라는 사람이 1980년대에 주로 작성한 일련의 신나치 팸플릿에서 테러 리스트 전술을 지칭하기 위해 사용된 그 낱말과 무관한 용법과 융합하는 사태를 목격하게 되었습니다. 인간 주체의 억압적 구속을 해체하는 데 즐겁게 관여하는 실험 철학, 혹은 대규모의 좌파주의적인 테크노-좌파 정치적 변혁에 관한 신조를 “인종 전쟁을 선동하기 위해 퇴폐적인 자유주의적 사회 형태의 붕괴를 ‘가속’하는 데 공적인 폭력 행위가 사용되어야 한다”라는 관념과 융합하는 행위는 “경과를 가속하는 것”이 “상황을 더 좋게 만들기 위해 상황을 악 화시키는 것”을 뜻한다는 기존의 오해와 최근에 닉 랜드가 신반동(Neoreaction)을 통해 공개적으로 대안우파(AltRight)의 요소들과 연합했다는 사실에 의해 가능해졌습니다. 가속주의라는 개념이 일종의 모욕에서 해시태그로, 다시 사유와 연구의 한 분야로 전환되고 그것에 대한 역사가 구축 된 다음에는 가속주의라는 낱말과 그 낱말을 둘러싸고 모인 개념들을 유지하기를 바란 모든 사람에게 투쟁이 기다리 고 있었습니다. 우리는 그것을 위해 싸워야 할까요? 우리는 그것의 복잡성과 그것이 사유에 대하여 지닌 잠재력을 계 속 옹호해야 할까요? 아니면 그것은 포기되었어야 했을까요? 13/16

6. 가속주의가 무엇인지 아무도 모릅니다. 이것은 가속주의가 무엇인지에 대한 합의가 없다는 점을 잘 보여줍니다. 그리고 오늘날에도 여전히 사정은 마찬가지 입니다. 그러나 몇 가지 일반적인 오해가 있습니다. 그중 일부는 우리가 불식시키기 위해 노력했고 그 책의 서론에서 이미 다 루었지만, 온라인에서 계속해서 존속되고 가속주의에 대한 피상적인 기각과 찬사를 낳은 그 밖의 오해들도 있습니다. 가속주의는 모순을 가속하는 것이 아닙니다. 그것은 “상황을 개선하기 위해 상황을 악화시키는 것”이 아닙니다. 그것은 ‘특이점’에 관한 것이 아닙니다. 그것은 (강도와 무관하게 파악되는) 속력에 관한 것이 아닙니다. 7. 우리는 모두 가속주의자입니다. 그런데 세계는 계속해서 가속하고 있습니다. 일찍이 마크 피셔는 사실상 우리가 모두 실제 행동에 있어서는 가속주의 자라고 진술했습니다. 우리는 현대 생활의 속도에 대해 불평할지 모르지만, 어떤 종류의 감속된 대안을 만드는 데 실 제로 관여하는 사람은 거의 없습니다. 더 단순한 존재 방식으로 돌아가자는 요구가 있지만, 사실상 인류 전체는 우리 자신과의 관계와 인간임에 대한 감각을 파괴하고 기계 네트워크들에 경제적으로, 정치적으로, 개인적으로, 심지어 감 정적으로, 성적으로도 의존하게 만드는 기술적 매개의 그물망 속으로 더 뛰어들기로 선택한 것이 분명합니다. 우리는 더는 이런 기계들이 어떻게 작동하는지 완전히 이해하지도 못하고, 제어할 수도 없으며, 그리하여 그 궁극적인 결과는 가장 극단적인 SF를 뛰어넘습니다. 『#가속하라』가 출판되었을 당시에는 ChatGPT, CRISPR 등이 없었다는 점을 기억하세요 …. – 신비주의, 중독, 전 자 바이러스 전염병 등을 갖춘 1990년대의 ‘가속주의’는 이제 꽤 선견지명이 있는 것처럼 보입니다. 이런 관점에서 가속주의는 우리의 현행 조건을 이해하고 미래에 대한 우리의 실제적 관여를 성찰하기 위한 정직한 방 법일 따름입니다. 8. 가속주의는 하나의 역설이면서 역설이 아닙니다(시간과 지능). 가속주의가 하나의 ‘주의’라고 간주하는 생각에는 분명히 역설적인 것이 있습니다. 마치 그것이 당신이 행하기로 결심 할 수 있는 일인 것처럼 말입니다… CCRU와 닉 랜드의 ‘고전적인’ 가속주의의 경우에 그것은 미래에 관여하는 것이었습니다. 그런데 이런 비인간적 과정 들이 불가피하게 진행되고 있고 한낱 인간에 불과한 우리는 그 문제에 대해 선택의 여지가 없다면 ‘경과를 가속한 다‘는 것은 무엇을 뜻할까요? 여기에는 일종의 시간적 역설이 있습니다… 우리가 미래의 조각들(“미래는 불균등하게 분포되어 있습니다”)에 접근하 여 그것들을 현재의 우리 자신에 작용하게 함으로써 미래가 현재를 감염시켜 자신을 이끌어낼 수 있게 되는일종의 ‘시 간 루프’가 존재합니다. 여기서 중요한 것은 CCRU가 ‘하이퍼스티션’이라고 일컫는 것과 픽션이 수행하는 정치적 역할을 이해하는 것입니다. 이런 까닭에 과학소설은 언제나 가속주의에서 중요했습니다. 특히 랜드와 CCRU의 경우에, ‘터미네이터’ 연작이 그러 했습니다. 그 연작에서는 미래에서 온 한 요원이 자신들을 미래로 프로그래밍하기 위해 현재로 돌아옵니다. 14/16

그리고 이 지점에서, 어쩌면 가속주의는 그것의 가장 깊은 곳에서는 궁극적으로 정치도 아니고 미학도 아니라 오히려 시간, 행위성, 그리고 운명의 철학이라는 사실이 드러납니다. 그리고 지능에 관한 물음이 있습니다 : 우리가 ‘지능의 편’에 서고 싶다면, 우리가 원하는 것이 미래의 지능을 활용하여 인식적·기술적·사회적 변화의 길을 열어 현재에 적용하는 것이라면, 지능은 어디에 존재할까요? 그리고 우리는 지능 이 반드시 ‘우리의’ 친구는 아니라는 점을 고려해야 할까요? 지능은 오직 강화만을 추구하고 인간을 도외시하는 자본의 맹목적인 사이버포지티브 되먹임 고리에 자리하고 있을까 요(랜드)? 아니면 지능은 집단적 합리성의 실천을 통해 도출될 수 있을까요(네가레스타니, 좌파 가속주의)? 미래는 우 리의 사유에 대한 독단적 제약을 벗어던짐으로써 자발적으로 관여할 수 있지만 정치 프로그램의 목적을 위해 결코 통 제할 수 없는 끊임없이 변화하는 가능성의 심연인가요(U/가속주의)? 이것이 바로 미래성, 지능, 그리고 정치에 관한 철학적 질문인 가속주의입니다. 9. 복수의 가속주의 가속주의가 10년 전이나 지금이나 하나의 통일된 입장이 아니라는 점은 이미 분명해졌습니다. 한국어판 서문에서 제 가 강조했듯이, 이 책이 출간된 이후 가장 흥미로운 점은 새로운 가속주의가 많이 등장했다는 것입니다. 이런 복수의 가속주의가 확산되는 것은 ‘말단 온라인’이 지닌 집단적 사고의 표현이며, 어쩌면 수동적 둠스크롤링에 대한 해독제일 수도 있습니다. 가속주의라는 용어의 대중적 의미를 둘러싼 위기 이후 몇 년 동안 나타난 것은 가속주 의가 이론적 또는 학문적 개입이나 우려와는 완전히 독립적으로 자체 담론의 역사를 계속 생산하고 있다는 것입니다. 가속주의는 얼마든지 생성될 수 있는 것 같습니다. 전례 없는 미래를 예고하는 것처럼 보이는 현재의 특징을 파악하 고, 그 분위기에 굴복하고, 그 과정을 가속화하기만 하면 됩니다. 우리는 다음과 같이 언급할 수 있습니다: 라보리아 큐보닉스의 ‘제노페미니스트 선언’, n1x의 ‘젠더 가속 : 하나의 흑 서'(g/acc), 아리아 딘의 ‘흑인 가속주의에 관한 단상'(bl/acc), 빈센트 가튼과 에드먼드 버거의 ‘무조건부 가속주 의'(u/acc) 논의, 최근 ‘효과적 가속주의'(e/acc), 심지어 카와이와 애교를 인간의 미래 변이의 지표로 삼는 ‘귀여움 가속 주의'(cute/acc) 등을 꼽을 수 있습니다. 이 모든 것이 가속주의라는 질문을 통해 미래의 대안적 판본들을 심사할 수 있 고, 흥분과 공포, 열광과 불안을 지속적으로 유발하는 사고와 문화 생산의 변화하는 영역을 형성하고 있습니다. 이런 확산 현상은 가속주의가 마치 그것이 비판 이론인 것처럼 논의될 때 잃어버릴 수 있는 가속주의의 근본적인 리비 도적 성격을 가리킵니다. 각각의 가속주의는 미래에 관여할 수 있는 진입점을 열어줍니다. 그리고 이러한 각각의 진입 점은 감성의 지표 또는 욕망의 왜곡, 가장 강렬한 미래에 대한 특정 입장을 나타내며, 그후 궁극적인 결론에 도달하기 위해 가속화됩니다. 가속주의는 인간이나 자연에 대한 모든 주어진 이미지를 희생시키면서까지 그런 강박적인 리비도적 강화를 옹호하기 때문에 언제나 합리적이고 이성적인 인간 문제 관리를 초과하게 될 것입니다. 좌파 가속주의는 그것을 신중하고 책임감 있는 구성적인 정치로 바꾸려고 노력했습니다. 그러나 오늘날에는 그 옹호 자들조차도 ‘가속주의’라는 낱말을 포기하고 그 대신에 정당 정치와 개혁으로 돌아섰습니다. 이와는 대조적으로, 오늘날 우리가 목격하는 것은 이론이 아니라 단순히 가속주의를 실천하는 온라인 미시문화의 자 생적인 출현입니다. 그리고 이런 일은 어떤 식으로든 ‘인간임’에 관한 서사에서 배제되어 왔고 이것을 받아들이고 가속화하기로 결정한 공 동체들에서 종종 발생한다는 점을 언급할 가치가 있습니다. 15/16

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readthis.wtf /writing/apparatus-of-capture-or-how-to-make-yourself-an-artificial-cow/ ATP Image Sources I: Apparatus of Capture, or How to Make Yourself an Artificial Cow - 2023 Not least among the many remaining undecrypted peculiarities of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus are the images preceding each of the plateaus. While the sources of some of them and their relation to the content are clear enough, others are rather more oblique and take some serious detective work to track down. The image for Apparatus of Capture, it turns out, is more literal than may appear at first sight, but also more bizarre than you might expect. It is in fact a diagram from an eighteenth-century household and agricultural manual, illustrating the construction of an artificial cow for the purpose of catching birds. First published in 1709, Noel Chomel’s Dictionnaire Œconomique, contenant divers moyens d’augmenter son bien, et de conserver sa santé went through many editions, all of which are full of fascinating diagrams. The figure in question, which forms part of a subsection of the entry Perdrix (Partridge), seems to appear first in the 1740 edition (Lyon: Bruyset), and also features in the 1767 edition printed in Paris.1 1/6

What the figure shows is a ‘tunnel’ (or ‘arbour’) method for catching partridges,2 which involves the fabrication of an artificial cow with peepholes through which the farmer watches the birds while stalking them and attempting to maneouvre them into the net tunnel. One can appreciate why the authors would have found it an amusing example of an apparatus of capture—it is certainly a strangely laborious way to catch a partridge (Aha!). Translation of the full entry is below.3 I’m now looking into some of the other less obvious plateau images and will report back… * 2/6

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Fabrication of an Artificial Cow for Tunnelling The cow is shown in the figure on the following page. It should be made from a piece of cloth XYGH, four feet square, the colour of a cow. At the four corners XRHG from the middle of the top, at the places marked with the letters EF, small pieces of the same cloth, two inches square in size, should be sewn to hold and stop the ends of the sticks OP, which cross over, and the top of the fork. The two sticks must be long enough to hold the cloth well stretched out and taut when they cross over, as shown in the figure. The fork must be at least four and a half feet long with the tip 1 cut into a point, which passes through a small piece of cloth K sewn into the middle of the base of the large cloth. This fork, and the two sticks OP, are tied together with a rope which is attached to the middle of the canvas at the letter L. On the side marked Y is sewn a piece of cloth QY made in the shape of a cow’s head, of the same colour as the rest of the cloth, with an eye Q and two horns made from some pieces of hat, and on the other side X is a tail made from oakum or something other suitable material. 4/6

I advise placing a stick at the top, from X to Y, to keep the head QY and the tail X in place, and to make sure the other sticks and the entire body of the cow hold better. The tail should not be attached to the very edge of the canvas, there must be a little space between, so that when walking the tail can swing. Make two holes MN in the middle of the canvas, a foot from the top, to look through so as to keep in view the partridges or other birds you wish to approach. Farmers and others who are nervous in hunting do not use dogs, but go out into the country at daybreak to listen for the partridges singing, for there are always some. Once the person who is to make the tunnel is sure of the place where they last sang, he puts on the cow, and as soo as he can see clearly enough to spot them, he gets ready, as you will see in the following figure, which I mean to represent a whole field of wheat, and the spaces between the dotted lines marked with the numbers 123, the bases of the strips or the gaps between the wheat, through which the partridges run unhindered. The Driver, with the tunnel and stakes on his shoulder, takes the cow with both hands by the middle L, where all the sticks are tied together, and, looking through the two holes MN, moves slowly from one side of the field to the other until he has found the Partridges, and, having spotted them, approaches and backs away, circling them, when he sees that they are confident and unafraid; he works out which way they are more inclined to go. When he knows this, he moves far away, and sticks his cow straight down into the ground in order to unfold the tunnel, starting with the tail, sticking the end A in the middle or the bottom of a strip of wheat; walking towards the partridges, he spreads out the whole net AF, then plants the two stakes b and d, which hold the circular entranceway, so that the tunnel is becomes taut, and then, putting the cow back on, he unfolds the hallier-nets and stakes them with from one end a, right up against the tunnel joining stake b, and, taking the cow in one hand, he moves sideways staking out the links of the hallier-net PONM, immediately sideways, slanting a little toward the partridges, as can be seen in the figure, where the birds are marked with the letters QRSTV. In the same way, he stakes out the other hallier-net, CHIKL. When the whole is finished, the tunneller moves aside and goes round behind the partridges, toward numbers 123, as can be seen in the figure, which represents the cow, behind which he must place himself. Still looking through the two holes MN, he approaches them little by little, not straight on, but moving from side to side. If he sees them stop and raise their heads, this is a sign that they are afraid, and in that case he must pull back to one side and lie down on his back with the canvas over him, sometimes moving as a cow or horse does when it is calving; then, getting up again, he walks slowly from side to side like a cow grazing; this comforts them, since they think it is a real cow. If they go looking for food, it is a sign that they are secure, so he approaches them and gradually leads them into the nets. If he sees one of them wandering off, he will turn it round and bring it back with the others, as with a flock of sheep. When they come close to the hallier-nets, they bump their heads and breasts against them, and as the farmer is pressing them, they want to move on; so that, following the hallier-net, which brings them inward, as I have said, they find themselves at the entrance to the tunnel, where the bourdon,4 who is the head of the company, stops, not wanting to let them in until he has considered it carefully; the tunneller keeps on pressing them, until one enters and runs to the end of the net, then the others will believe that the way is clear and will follow the first to enter. At this point the tunneller must throw down his cow and run as fast as he can to close the tunnel entrance and catch the partridges. Then, having folded up the tunnel and dismantled the cow, he returns home, or goes to attempt a further capture. See the article on NETS for instructions on how to make the tunnel to catch partridges. 5/6

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readthis.wtf /writing/atp-image-sources-ii-the-dogon-egg/ ATP Image Sources II: The Dogon Egg - 2024 1/7

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Most readers will be aware that this image comes from Marcel Griaule and Germain Dieterlen’s famous anthropological study on the Dogon people of Mali, The Pale Fox (1965). In both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari allude directly to this work. Without pretending to master all the details of Griaule and Dieterlen’s extensive account of Dogon cosmogony and social organisation, in the following—an excerpt (eggcerpt?) from a lengthy endnote on myth, embryology, egg_irl, cthulhu, and more in Cute Accelerationism—I explore how this myth of creation, along with the ritual practice of drawing itself in Dogon culture, is a factor in the heterogenesis of Deleuze’s philosophical understanding of what he calls ‘dramatisation’—that is, the production of the actual from the virtual via spatio-temporal dynamisms, without a relation of resemblance or preformation. The dynamic of the Dogon egg therefore converges with Deleuze’s interest in embryology (specifically, the work of Albert Dalcq— see Cute/Acc pp54–68), with myth and science providing convergent models of the BwO and the process of production. Dogon cosmogony as documented by Griaule and Dieterlen presents an elaborate account of the birth of the world from the cosmic egg. The ‘descent and extension of the world’ is schematised in a four-stage hierarchical typology of diagrams that prefigure Deleuze-Dalcq’s embryological schema: ideal field of difference—gradients and fields— spatio-temporal dynamisms—actualised form. The Dogon ‘egg with signs’ (M. Griaule and G. Dieterlen, The Pale Fox, tr. S.C. Infantino [Chino Valley, AZ: Continuum Foundation, 1986], 118) at first consists of 266 undifferentiated dots or dashes (bummo) which represent primordial essences, the ideal elements of Amma’s thought. After this first series of abstract signs comes the seeding ‘mark’ (yala), which is ‘like the beginning of the thing’ (ibid., 33) expressing ‘the future form of the thing represented’ (ibid., 95). Next, the tonu (outline, sketch, foetus, germination) ‘focuses on the organs or elements essential to that being’: it includes ‘its internal organs at the rough draft stage’ and ‘the “putting into place” of these elements’ (ibid., 98). Finally there is the representational drawing, the toymu (the thing in its reality, the child) which now has a relation of resemblance to that which it will become in the profane world (ibid.), unlike the bummo which were autonomous, prior to and independent of the things they produce (‘the independence and autonomy of the sign in relation to the drawing representing the formed being are […] emphasized’ [ibid., 98]; ‘the sign precedes the thing signified’ [ibid., 92]). In the first creation Amma had made the seed of the first plant from the substances of his own body, superposed the four elements, and made them spin. This creation did not hold together, however, and a second creation was achieved through blending, using the seed left over from the first creation, into which Amma had infused the four elements. With these primordial traces (the bummo), Amma first draws the marks (yala) of a new universe inside his ‘egg’ or ‘womb’ (‘traced within himself the design of the world and of its extension’ [ibid., 83]; the ‘distribution of intensities’ [Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 149]). After the yala of the egg, with its 266 abstract signs, in a second yala we see Amma’s eye open into a star-shape tonu that prefigures the four cardinal directions of space (‘permitting the recognition of the basic elements which give rise to the thing’, Griaule and G. Dieterlen, The Pale Fox, 92; see ibid., 127). The seeds within the egg exit through the eye, spiralling, also becoming tonu, participating in the production of the space in which the toymu will be deployed, ‘ejected’, ‘thrown into space to manifest things’ (ibid., 88). Thus in a ‘series of signs which repeat the successive stages of all Things’ (ibid., 103), the entire cycle of existence is recalled in the progression from the bummo to the toymu which mark the budding of extensive development and by the same token ‘the first step toward destruction’ (ibid., 99). 3/7

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[…] The production of these drawings, a ‘system of archives’ (Griaule and Dieterlen, The Pale Fox, 100) itself constitutes a ritual reenactment of and social participation in the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction they schematise. ‘The ritual execution of successive graphic designs is effectual and active: it promotes the existence of the thing represented, “re-edits” it by having it pass through its successive stages of formation’ (ibid., 99). Drawing on this ‘vast system of references in which all human activity is inscribed’, ‘[i]n his gestures and speech man relives myth and it is precisely this reactualisation that makes techniques, institutions, and prayers effective’ (M.P. Marti, Les Dogons [Paris: PUF, 1957], 56–57). The hierarchy of diagrams also spans an esoteric-exoteric order: bummo are made by priests at the founding of an altar in a totemic sanctuary: ‘the abstract sign, executed in a profane manner, but in secret (in the image of the “secret” of God’s bosom where it was formed), is done for the initiate’; toymu may be drawn in common dwellings: ‘the actual drawing, which all may see, is for the neophyte’ (ibid., 100). According to Mircea Eliade, myth never functions as conservative remembrance of primordial time; it serves to actively project into primordial time once more the human sick with chronology, confined to the mundane. Continual remembering reinserts Dogon society back into mythical egg-time, ‘the contemporaneousness of a continually selfconstructing Milieu’ (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 165), reinitiating all the cascading process that continually flow from virtual to actual by way of the complex series of ‘transformations and elaborations’ which the drawings depict (Griaule and Dieterlen, The Pale Fox, 92). Furthermore, the diagram is immanent to the reality of the earthly cycles it both precedes and invokes: the bummo are drawn with po pilu grains laid out on the floor, and will eventually be swept away into the field when the rain falls: ‘the drawing is washed by the rain, which “carries along (to the outside)” its form and force to “give it to man” and to promote that which it represents into reality’ (ibid., 100). The Dogon egg no less than Dalcq’s embryology (‘the embryo […] functioning as a sketch’, Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 25) […] functions as a model for ‘dramatisation’. In both, ‘[t]he egg destroys the model of similitude’ while revealing a dynamic which goes beyond any specific domain because it ‘expresses something ideal’ (ibid., 214, 250–51). The pluripotent egg before development, qua embodiment of undeveloped morphogenetic potential (the field of the Dogon bummo) exhibits ‘the strict contemporaneousness of the adult, of the adult and the child, their map of comparative densities and intensities, and all of the variations on that map’ (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 164); it invites the would-be initiate to the amniotic anamnesis—both dis-organisation and re-membering— of an intensive ‘past’, a time which is ‘not “before” the organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself’ (ibid., 164), a time accessed via induction into the embryonic state. Myth, inseparable from ritual, confers upon its participants the ability to access this immanent mode of nonchronological ‘beforeness’ in which everything participates, and to emerge from it transformed. 5/7

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Who cares. It’s hard to explain. M[…]’s been mentally outlining a zine about this stuff that will lay it out clearly and solve everything since, like, before she started transitioning. […] When you are trans, you are supposed to know everything about men and everything about women and the way they interact […] And when you first transition? You totally think you do […] And you just want to talk about it, all the time, because it feels like such a revelation […] Then, after you have felt very smart and insightful for a long time, you start to realize that all your insights are kind of stupid […] There are so many variables that it’s like, you see all the constructions, all the conections, and you kind of understand them, but if you ever plan on trying to make sense of them, you’d better be doing it in a cave on a mountain someplace far away from other people […] All of this gender stuff is stupid and it’s so complicated that it’s impossible to make sense of. Imogen Binnie, Nevada Terrestrial instruments become families of topological invariants (varying according to size and elasticity of materials); and outside their multidimensional, infinite yet circumscribed zone, lurk instruments with which we are by rights, as Leibniz would say, incompossible. The ‘stretching [of] variation far beyond its formal limits’ precipitates a type of cosmic regression to the embryonic state of music—before music was born, there was the great vibrating cosmic egg, the organ-without-organs: ‘Embryology already displays the truth that there are systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them.’ Robin Mackay, ‘Blackest Ever Black

2 This text is based on a presentation I gave at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre on 26 October in the year 2023 be (before estrogen) at the SSTRAPP event ‘Sonic Disruptions’. Although it has been freely edited, and part three is a later addition, it is a record of a particular moment, and of ideas that emerged from my trans- experience and discussions with Amy Ireland that subsequently found their way into our book Cute Accelerationism. 1. RIGGING AND GENDER SYNTHESIS I am the agent, patient, and product of a research project on gender accelerationism. I think of myself as being a synthetic person at this point. This has become really my main project in life. I’ve always understood philosophy as being something to do with how you live, something that has consequences. The philosophy that I care about has always been something that moved me and made me think about and live life in a different way. Doing philosophy is about both escaping yourself and producing yourself anew. It’s also to do with the body. You have to make a philosophy that actually fits your body, or adapt the two mutually to one another. Not because it’s All About You, but because that body is your relation to the real and if what you’re doing in philosophy is to have any possible traction it needs to be checked against every body part and every sensation. Do a fit check on your philosophy. And don’t start with flat patterns. Did you ever see that most beautiful of topologists Alexander McQueen moving around a model with his scissors, cutting and folding and adjusting, continually adjusting and moving and looking and touching and looking? That’s how you should make philosophy. Otherwise, like Henri Bergson said, you’re sure to end up with ill-fitting concepts that are too baggy to be of any use. After that, you can move on to cutting a conceptual couture to make your cute ass cuter. Anyway, I want to talk, firstly, about how gender is or isn’t a synthesis. A very basic meaning of synthesis is just putting two or more things together to make something new; you’re taking certain processes or operators and combining them. And then the second question is, What happened? Is something happening when you transit within gender, when you reconfigure gender? What kind of synthesis is it, and what kind of elements does it involve? What

3 are the processes that you’re playing with and what are you recombining? I want to talk to you about this in terms of euphoria and joy, but also I feel anxious talking about it here because the whole process has also involved impostor syndrome, which in part is just my personality, but in part, I think, stems from the fact that no one knows what gender is. In recognition of that fact, this is not going to be a well-informed review of gender studies literature. My ambition is merely to say something about this which is not just my personal little story, but is also not a Big Theory of Gender that I am trying to impose upon others. The question for me is how to stay close to this body, while drawing from it some diagrams that might be reusable for others. To transition is a very precarious personal process which is also a kind of social provocation. It very obviously suggests wider social transformation, but it also verges on a kind of personal madness where you don’t really know whether what you’re doing is real or not. That’s why, when I ask the question How do we synthesize gender? it’s accompanied by this question What happened? Did anything actually happen to me, have I actually done anything? Because the source of anxiety and impostor syndrome is that what I’ve been through feels momentous, but it can also sometimes feel silly. Has it actually made any difference or not? How do you gauge difference? At times it can feel fake, self-indulgent, narcissistic, or hopeless—and of course there are people in the world who will take delight in telling you that’s exactly what it is. Something seismic has happened, and yet what I’m talking about may seem quite trivial. How could it be so momentous, isn’t it just all imaginary? Can even just changing gendered cosmetic and presentational aspects of your existence make a significant difference, and what is that difference and what does it tell us or make us question about what gender is? The recognition that to transit, explore, or navigate within the space of gender is at once trivial and momentous is reflective of the fact that gender is quite obviously a fundamental structuring social category that’s massively constraining for everyone, and yet the rules that apply to it are utterly arbitrary and contingent. Even from a historical perspective there’s no good reason why, at present, some people wear skirts and some people don’t; we all know that these things are arbitrary, and yet it’s extremely difficult and apparently perilous to step over the line. Once you actually have gone out in public e.g. as an AMAB wearing female-coded clothing and the world doesn’t end, you may well feel that

4 something huge has shifted. It will probably be easier than you thought, in general no one really cares that much, it’s not like you go out and everyone’s pointing at you, like in a nightmare. (I would actually compare conquering this particular stage of transness to an altered version of the classic anxiety dream: it’s like you’re out in public and you realise that, rather than covering up your shame, protecting yourself and your vulnerability, you’re just naked, yourself, with nothing protecting you from the gaze of others….and it feels great!!). The fact that in principle it’s that easy is one reason why transphobia has to be so violently vigilant: people realise it would actually be possible to disrupt this fundamental category of social existence, it wouldn’t really take much, and then so much would become uncertain, which is a source of fear, so we have to imagine it is really hard or even impossible to do. The great psychoanalytical thinker Jacques Lacan says that binary gender is to the logic of the subject what the principle of non-contradiction (It is impossible for anything to be both A and not-A) is to classical logic. It’s that fundamental. And yet the components that make it up are, it seems to me—and will seem to anyone who starts tinkering with them—all material and can be altered, so this transcendental impossibility is, in fact, a construction. Exploring gender is a weird transcendental experience of how these norms are both all-pervasive and powerful but also totally contingent and breakable. From ‘that side’ of gender, it looks like a huge binary that structures everything and you can’t possibly get beyond it. It seems as if there’s a hard and fast line. Once you cross the line, you look back and you realise the line wasn’t even there, and that what is there is in fact a very complex variegated field of material assemblages, possibilities, blockages, and prohibitions. It really is a kind of transcendental breakthrough because you see everything from a new perspective and you can’t rely on those structuring categories anymore (although they are liable to crash back down on you at regular intervals). I also think of this as a kind of initiation. Today transgender culture is becoming mass culture for the first time, and that’s obviously because of the internet. ‘Crossdressing’ and ‘transvesticism’ in various forms have always been present in culture, but that is a different category altogether. Historically and even today that is a practice freighted with a transgressive charge; it’s generally something that people perform at home in secret and then feel bad about and then get rid of the stockings and bras and then buy some more and so on, like an addiction and/

5 or fetish. Transgression can only move in cycles because it is fixed in place: you cross the line and then where else is there to go? There are only two sides of the line, so you have to go back again and then cross it and then go back… there is no transformation. Now, being transgender is of course not a fetish, precisely because it is not a sublimated expression of something sexual, but it can often emerge in the form of apparently fetishistic feelings and behaviours, and there is no reason why it cannot or should not coexist with fetishism. After all, by strict definition, every aspect of human sexual conduct is ‘fetishistic’, apart from 100% functional reproductive behaviour, if such a thing exists. But more importantly, being transgender is not transgressive—or rather, in so far as it feels transgressive, that is because someone or something is stopping it from happening (maybe yourself). For me, to wear female-coded clothes in a public setting was a huge thing because very soon, it wasn’t to do with crossing that line anymore, and what I had fearfully apprehended as being fetishistic very soon lost that kind of charge. You’ve gone beyond that behaviour and you’re in an open field where new things can happen, and it’s absolutely not about transgression any more. The transgressive fetishistic charge gradually falls away and it’s no longer a matter of the excitement of crossing a line; you become gradually able to perceive and understand more subtle changes to how you experience your own physical, social, and emotional existence, and what then opens up, beyond dysphoria, is an exploratory space of the tactile and sensual pleasure of simply allowing yourself to notice and enjoy your own body. What happens when you get into this field of possibilities and you’re interacting in a new way with your own sensory and somatic experience of your own body? Weirdly, I’ve found that people don’t really want to talk about that much. I wanted to understand this whole thing as being a sensory exploration, a somatic process, to do with the body. But I found that in many trans forums people don’t really want to talk about that, what they want to talk about is their identity, and trans politics. A part of this I think is that talking about bodily pleasure and sexuality in relation to transness can seem dangerously close to ratifying the ‘gender-critical’ idea that we’re all really just dangerous criminals on a perverted sexual spree. But giving in to that fear means that too much trans discourse is about dysphoria and the management of fear, and euphoria becomes afraid to speak its name.

6 What resources are there for thinking about this experience, then? Coming from a philosophical background, the one thing it always made me think of was Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of ‘becoming’: when you become, it’s not like you’re going from one identity to another or copying the thing that you want to become; a becoming is a something in itself, a substantive, something that happens in-between two or more elements, producing some third element that isn’t identical to them. One of their examples, from Vladimir Slepian’s story Fils de chien, is about being a dog: if you decide to be a dog then you have to get down on all fours. But then because you’re also still a human and you’re going to have to walk around, you have to put shoes on your hands; then, because you can’t use your fingers anymore, you can’t tie your shoelaces, so you have to do it with your with your mouth so then you’ve got a muzzle like a dog…becoming is the in-between emergent process, the dog with shoes, it’s not about trying to get from one identity to another, and it’s not about acting or pretending or mimicking, the character in this story is not pretending to be a dog. The point is that, in moving from one point to another you transform the map itself and produce yet more possibilities for becoming, and this process can go on and on and on. Becoming has no end goal and identities are the betrayal of becoming. I put on a skirt and I felt a certain way and that made me want to try something else and then that made me feel a certain way and I ended up producing a body that was not the one I started with. But I wasn’t interested in ‘passing’ as a woman any more than I wanted to be a man. I would say trans- is about being in motion, and this motion is driven by attention to and responding to sensation. Again, I found that very few people wanted to talk about gender transition in these terms. What I found was, very broadly speaking, two positions. The first one, the ‘gender-critical’ position if you like, is that there’s a pyramid: you’ve got all the ‘real’ stuff at the bottom, DNA, hormones, anatomy, and then you’re officially registered and socialised into being a certain type of person because of your anatomy, and then because of that you wear certain things, and so on. There is a system of strata going from the real and the immutable to the trivial and changeable. If I was to give into my impostor syndrome and look at it in this way, I would just say, okay, I’m just messing around with this stuff at the top, I’m just dressing differently, nothing’s actually happening: the government still thinks I’m a man, and quite rightly because that’s what my DNA or my skeleton or whatever says.

7 And then the other position, espoused by some trans people—no doubt in some cases because this is the right kind of story, the story they are required to tell others—is the idea that in transitioning they discovered the real person who they always were: I’ve always been a boy not a girl, but now I’m able to actualize that, to become the boy I always was. But where is that person? I just don’t really comprehend what it means. It seems to be a kind of metaphysical construct: somewhere, this person has ‘always existed’ inside you, and now you’ve dug them out. It’s a way of thinking that’s so different to how I experienced it that I can’t really connect to it. It’s to do with time. In the first model, the strata relate to different temporalities: you have the planetary biosphere producing dimorphous sexuality, a millennia-long process that produced the system of sexual reproduction. Then you have ontogeny, the production of a single human being, in the process of which they are usually determined unambiguously as being one sex or another. Hormones then continue to program the body throughout the individual’s life. And then you have socialization, which is drawing on all of these ‘lower’ strata, but operates at the speed of cultural evolution. And then you have your own personal individual life, which is just a tiny little blip in the scheme of things. Note that there is no feedback from the higher to the lower levels at all, everything is one-way. In the second model, this idea about the real person inside seems to relate to some kind of eternal immutable identity that’s always been there, and that one is recovering. While it seems to me that the first way of looking at this in terms of these strata makes gender transition seem superficial, this second way makes it very very deep, it appeals to a type of depth that I don’t feel I have in me because I feel like I’m a becoming, not a vessel for an identity. Ultimately, I don’t want to be superficial or deep about it. I want to be broad about it and to say that gender involves many different machines that interlink to each other, that it’s a continual process of becoming which can be intervened in or disrupted at various levels. So I was dissatisfied with these other models, and also, I don’t want to deny anyone’s suffering or adverse experiences but it seemed to me that too much trans discourse is shaped by dysphoria and transphobia. Can we start with euphoria? With the process and the becoming, not identity and its discontents and its defence? For sure there are existential stakes to the trans experience, but it is also a kind of pleasure and play at the same time as being

8 a labour and a process of becoming. That’s why it’s so powerful and why some people, joyless people, hate it so bitterly. I decided the only way to think about it is in terms of a gender pragmatics. What does pragmatics mean, as a philosophical attitude? Pragma just means handling things really, it means constructing, manipulating the things around you. Philosophers have always asked questions like What is this? What is that? What does this mean? The pragmatist’s answer, broadly, is that what something is or means, is defined by what its effects are in the world. Another definition is that the meaning of a proposition consists in the conduct that would ensue if it were to be accepted. So if I give you a definition of gender, you don’t ask Is that true or not? What you say is: What would our behaviour around gender look like if that was the case? And then there is a further extension of pragmatism in philosophy, a more social form of pragmatism, in which what’s important is commitment. The real meaning of a concept becomes clear when people commit to acting as if it described reality, and that commitment produces results in reality. One thing entailed by this is that, in fact, we can be committed to a concept without thinking that concept explicitly, just through our practices. We may have unconsciously picked up practices that commit us to concepts we have not yet thought. So, what would the effects in the world be if we as a culture committed to a certain understanding of gender? Obviously we’ve already done that! We’ve committed to a binary understanding of gender and our practices reflect that, and we’re living in the results of what that produces. Now pragmatically speaking, what would it mean to start breaking that down? It would involve practices and commitments. Pragmatism, then, has this double meaning: it’s to do with experimentation and getting to grips with things, and it’s also to do with understanding things in terms of their effects and in terms of what it means when you commit to something rather than just having a philosophical argument about it. The question is, what happens when you put your understanding to work in the world. What becoming does it produce? What kind of a dog is this? Every instance of gender exploration may be personal, but it cannot be entirely a personal affair. If you secretly cross-dress in your bedroom then you’re not really committing to it, in a sense. The commitment part, the production of something new out of your understanding of yourself, can only happen at the social level, when you demonstrate your commitment to other

9 people. One may lead to the other, but when I’m in the world, reacting to other people reacting to me—that’s where fetish ends and gender starts to happen. Initially when I thought about gender pragmatism I was thinking about how you become gendered or explore gender via an interplay between the techniques and artifacts that you engage with, and your own internal sense of your body. By ‘techniques’ I mean any kind of technologies that you attach to your body, any kind of prostheses whether that’s adornments, clothes, etc., or whatever. You try out these things, you see what effects they have, and that produces a new state of mind and body, raises other questions, and that propels the process further. Which is about navigation, not ontology or identity. It’s not that you’re saying ‘I am this, I am that’, you’re trying to become as sensitive as you can to the landscape you’re exploring. And binary gender, a concept to which we have prior commitments via our inherited practices, is ultimately just a matter of being very insensitive to that landscape of possibilities. That navigation is where euphoria comes from. And I wanted to start with euphoria because that’s where it began for me. I never thought I was gender dysphoric until I had experiences of gender euphoria, and then I realised, maybe I was wrong to think that being miserable was just normal and that’s how everyone experiences themselves. When I encounter transphobes I always try to reserve a certain grain of empathy, because what I thought to myself for a few years was: I don’t have dysphoria, this is just how life is, everyone’s miserable and doesn’t have an ideal relationship to their own body and can’t become something else. Why do these crazy trans people think they can just change that at will!?! Those are the kind of neurotic blockages that can lead to transphobia, and it’s fine to have them, because we are born into certain practices and commitments. The first step out of them is simply realising that what you are angry and confused about is probably not trans people but yourself and your own stasis and trappedness. Anyway, I think dysphoria comes in various blends. I would now describe my dysphoria as being social and tactile rather than anatomical. I’ve experienced throughout my life massive physical and social discomfort at trying to be a man with other men, trying to play that role has always been hugely uncomfortable to me. Gender navigation brings you to questions about fate, passivity, and even demons. In some sense all you’re doing is just ‘doing what you want’. You’re just following your desires. And yet at the same time there is something

10 unknown that’s compelling you, and until you get to where you’re going you don’t really know what it is. You don’t know the destination, all you know is that it becomes possible to be increasingly sensitive to feelings, choices, and possibilities. But this is not hedonism, in the sense that ‘doing (or even admitting) what you want’ is not the line of least resistance; it requires a great deal of attention and energy, it is a kind of labour, moving around in this landscape and making commitments and taking risks, trying things out. And as I said, this labour may also be likened to a kind of initiation, an ordeal. Something that someone said to me at a certain point when I was racked by doubt was that it actually doesn’t matter if you decide to change what you’re doing or to go back to being cis or hetero or whatever. Once you’ve gone over that nonexistent line you can’t really reverse it; once you’ve gone through the mirror and seen that things are completely different to how you thought, there is no going back. Is there some ‘real you’ that’s already there and is trying to get out, or is that ‘realness’ something that you need to arrive at, and construct, by navigating carefully from where you are? I never felt like I was trying to recover something that was already there. I was trying to get somewhere (anywhere!) without having the precise coordinates—i.e. I was trying to become. Before, when I was attempting to be a man, every few years I would decide to be some particular kind of man: I’m going to wear these kind of clothes, I’ll develop this type of look or attitude…and it never worked—whatever I tried it didn’t work, and then I would give up and start doing something else…and it’s not even as if there are that many models to try out! I just went through all the boring possibilities of man-being and concluded that misery and anxiety was just how life was. My sense is that men’s clothes are designed to stop you feeling your body, to limit your proprioception. That’s linked to the supposed centrality and neutrality of man as default, as universal subject position. Men’s clothes are a kind of anaesthetic. I feel like I’ve been imprisoned in them. But at the same time they also have the advantage that you never have to really think that much about your body. You can just be lazy and ignorant. Men’s clothes seem to me to be designed specifically for that purpose, and it would be nice to think that we didn’t have to generate humans like that anymore, humans who need to not feel their own body or who become accustomed to not feeling their own body. Women’s clothes are obviously made in a certain sense to

11 project bodies outwards and to make bodies public property, and at the same time to aestheticize or superficialize, to make you into a sensory being for others—but also for yourself; to make you feel your own body and be conscious of it as a tool and as a lure of course, but that also means being conscious of it as a site of pleasure, or autophilia. So of course your sense of your own body changes when you wear differently gender-coded clothing. The process of doing that—how does it feel to wear a skirt? how does it feel to wear leggings or tights?—is like producing new body parts. Wearing different clothes actually changes your internal map of your body and you begin to produce parts of your body that you didn’t have before. As a man, you knew of course that women had those parts, you had seen them, and you liked them (even if you didn’t quite know why…) but you thought you didn’t have them! But in fact you can produce these new zones. There are some asymmetries here that we need to remark on. This whole thing is about escaping what is compulsory. A transmasc might find that, once they don’t feel like they’re being forced to wear women’s clothes, they actually enjoy some of the things that are associated with femininity. And vice versa, a trans femme might want to wear nothing but skirts for a year, and then feel more relaxed and accept some of the advantages of baggy jeans! That’s what the baby trans phase is all about. In a certain sense, what we want is to have the option. No one wants to be constrained to have a certain type of body, but that’s what binary coding of gender does. The heaviness of the social coding is that you’ve either got to have this type of body or that type of body, as if each one is a package deal, when in fact there’s a very complex field of different zones, different parts of the body, and different ways you can treat them. If you wear a crop top for the first time you produce a new area of your body you didn’t have before; you feel something that you never felt before. If you wear knee socks and a skirt you’re producing a new zone on your body, between the top of the socks and the bottom of the skirt. That can be something to look at, to be subjected to the gaze, of course. But it’s also something you can feel, a new part of your body that you didn’t have before, that produces a new kind of pleasure. An ankle bracelet produces a new kind of ankle. All of these remappings of the body make you realize that your body is far more reconfigurable and fluid than you thought it was, and that you can have different types of experience of your body. Euphoria is the discovery of a

12 new continent, your own body. And that’s because your body is an egg. There’s this brilliant passage in Deleuze and Guattari where they say, in relation to gender: ‘the real question is the body, the body they stole from us in order to create opposable organisms’. They give a really interesting account of how boys and girls are produced in relation to one another in terms of what they can’t do. But before you’re trapped into that binary, you just have ‘a body’, and that body is an egg. Egg discourse is really interesting. You’ll know that there’s a trans discourse about eggs: people who you recognize as being on the verge of realising their transness are called eggs and the question is, What was the point at which your egg cracked? There’s something really fascinating about how this emerged, I don’t think anyone knows exactly where it came from, but it converges with so many other interesting things. Obviously your body literally comes from an egg. In ancient biology they would imagine that inside the egg (or more likely the sperm) there was the pre-formed germ of a tiny little woman or a man who’s then going to come out of the egg and grow and become a human. We now know that the ovum is, in fact, a very complex field of intensities, differentiations, chemical gradients. Those gradients will interact with one another to produce more complex articulations, and then the intensities of that field will interact with each other, it is a complex escalating process of production of differentiation of body parts. So the egg is not an image or pre-image of the thing that it produces. Now, obviously you can’t go back to being an egg. It’s true that in principle any of your cells could revert back to being a stem cell and could then become some another type of cell, but physically, you can’t reverse the process and go back to being an egg so as to reconfigure yourself completely and become someone or something else, another person or another species. So this begins to seem like a rather abstract, idealistic idea that has no connection to pragmatism. But stay with it. Your body is an egg because your body is this field of tensions, differentiations, relations between one part to another, and they are reconfigurable. This is what I call the eggo or ‘virtual body’—by virtual I don’t mean anything to do with the digital or being online, I mean that beneath the body that’s been constructed for you, there’s this richer field of possibilities for reconfiguring your body—and some of them might feel better. You’re born into your tribe, but it’s only when you reach a certain

13 age that you have an initiation ceremony and that’s when you become a fully fledged member of the tribe. That initiation is spoken about in many cultures as being a ‘second birth’, and often the symbol for it is the bird hatching from the egg. It’s strange and fascinating that there are all these resonances to do with the egg, and that this image has today been rediscovered and is being used for other purposes. I also like to relate the egg to ‘degeneracy’. There’s nothing that I love more than if someone calls me a degenerate, that would be the greatest compliment. Can you think of any cultural phenomenon that has been called ‘degenerate’ that hasn’t been really fantastic? And regression—people talk about young kids online, Tik Tok kids who are dressing up and being weird and doing gender, as ‘regressive’, infantile: When are you going to grow up? I take all of that in the opposite sense. Regress, be degenerate! But with the understanding that that doesn’t mean going backwards in some simple sense. Instead it’s regression in the sense of going back to the egg, unlocking possibilities. Everyone should be degenerating, becoming-egg. Your body is an egg, a system of tensions, relations of parts, the assignment of erogenous zones to one part of the body rather than the other, etc. Through your socialization you’ve been trained to register some of them and not others, and ‘techniques of the body’ or what I’ll call ‘rigging’, including clothes, are a continual reinforcement of that, because depending on what clothes you’re wearing, you’re constructing and registering your body differently. Once you start opening that up and experimenting, you realize there’s no such thing as a man’s body and a woman’s body, there’s only an egg, there’s only a virtual body. That brings us back to pragmatism, and the importance of social diffusion and particularly social media as an enabler. One of the things that for me was a source of retrospective grief and prospective joy was discovering femboy culture, because I thought it was such a powerful thing: you had these teenage boys dressing in female-coded clothes and dancing around, and they just seemed to be experiencing their own bodies with joy. Certainly there have always been boys dressing up as girls, and vice versa, on various cultural margins. But social media was absolutely crucial to this, because these boys were able to share their enjoyment with one another and to ratify one another’s existence. You’d see someone on Tik Tok saying ‘I went to school for the first time in a skirt today’ and hundreds or thousands of their peers would be applauding them. That couldn’t have happened without social media, it would

14 have been a story of one weird boy who went to school and got beaten up. Of course, that still happens, but it seems that social media is very important and plays the role of a social diffuser for pragmatic commitments. The transphobic narrative is that it’s a ‘social media plague’. Well, maybe we should see it from the virus’s point of view. What happens with diffusion through social media is the second level of pragmatism—you realise your transformation within the social sphere in order to make it real. I can’t really begin to think of how I would have done what I’ve done for myself without social media, because it’s a way to reflect your image back to yourself, it’s a way to share your joy with others, and perhaps most importantly it’s a way to lock in commitment. And that’s a part of a programme that I decided on at a certain point: to overcome all of my embarrassment and shame by just putting things out there, propagating it into the social field so that I couldn’t take it back. This touches on something that is important for me in thinking about transition: something, some little itch of desire, can seem almost random, silly, or contingent, but may truly transform things when you commit to it. In the absence of commitment and social propagation, you are stuck in this transgression thing where all you can do is step over the line and back again: transformation blocked by lack of social diffusion. That’s a positive feedback effect: you feel like you might be crazy and embarrassing and weird and you just have to lock it in until there’s no going back—you have to commit. The role of social media here appears to be like a snowballing of public commitment. For me it’s become a philosophical project so I’m committed to it in a ‘professional’ sense, it’s an interesting project that’s no longer even personal in a sense. But on Instagram there have been many moments when I’ve posted stuff where the human in me is quaking with fear of humiliation and embarrassment, and I just force myself to post it and be affirmative: no, I’m happy and this is what I’m doing. That externalization, I think, not only gives you access to an outside, it also serves as a mechanism that compels you, that tempts you to open up more and more. It actually has a positive role: the more you put out there, the more you’re able to understand what you’re doing because you can see yourself as an external object being shaped, and the more it then prompts you to to push on. Like you’re unpeeling yourself from your internality, and overcoming shame—because shame and embarrassment are the Final Bosses of social constraint. When we’re dealing with shame and embarassment we are dealing with social constraints we have internalized so much that it is actually painful to overcome them, it’s an ordeal.

15 Embarrassment is the final boss but also the first one, it’s the one that stops you even getting to the stage where you can start changing anything. So the shamelessness and degeneracy of online culture is quite positive, in terms of the way in which it can help you to overcome embarrassment and shame and inscribe yourself in an external form that drives further becomings. Gender pragmatism, instead of being like a performance or an ‘identifying’, is more a matter of these doings, experimenting with artifacts and techniques, and transforming the virtual body. And on the horizon all the time is the egg, the transcendental principle of total plasticity. Again, it’s an experimental process and it’s also a type of labour, it’s not necessarily easy, it requires attention and the development of a sensitivity about where you’re going, where you could go. This doesn’t happen without externalization, I think. So it’s not that I’ve grown up as a man and I’ve got a little femunculus of a woman in my brain and I’ve just got to reach in and get her, Oh look, it’s the real me! No, that doesn’t exist, what exists is a set of tensions between what you have been produced as, the body you’ve been produced as, and the peculiar tensions and possibilities that are a part of you, that are singular to you. There’s a tension between the person you’ve been forced to become and the virtual body ‘they stole from you’, the egg, which is however still there, immanent to you. That tension is what dysphoria is. And again, there is a question of temporality, because the process does of course naturally give rise to attempts to explain things in terms of that part of myself that was always there, but I couldn’t/didn’t find it until now. And there’s something to that. There is indeed something that’s ‘always been there’, but it’s not a fully-formed image of the ‘real you’ waiting to come out, it’s more like an itch. It’s a set of tensions between the body you’re inhabiting and the body that you could be or the things that your body wants to unfold into. All of this—transition, movement, navigation—is trans- labour, it’s a working in the alchemical sense. You don’t just ‘get liberated’, you have to continually expend effort to move across this terrain, to transform the elements. Going back to the asymmetry between transmasc and transfemme: obviously I’m finding joy in escaping being a man, and I’ve said that really it’s about opening up a field beyond the binary. But I had a long conversation with a transmasc friend which was rather comical, because it demonstrated to me

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18 how their journey was in no way the ‘opposite’ of mine. No, we need to rotate the way that we understand this in some other dimension, we need to think about it in a different way. The two of us were talking about basically the same experience, sharing details and laughing–yeah that’s what it feels like, yeah that’s what it’s like—but then we’d get to certain points where they would say It’s really nice to go into a clothes shop now and not have to look at the woman’s section and my response was What, are you kidding, the men’s section is like so drab and boring, all those clothes are like a prison! It was hard for me to put myself in the place of seeing things the other way around. They talked about how as a teenager they used to really hate having bra straps, spaghetti straps, I used to just feel like they were really like cutting into me and I had to go into the toilet and take them off and allow myself to be free for a minute. Those straps are one example of female-coded garments I have worn and I’ve experienced something that I’ve seen on women, but which I am now feeling ‘from the inside’ and it is a source of euphoria. It was a pleasurable experience to me because it was a remapping of my body in accordance with something I had seen from a distance with pleasure or yearning but had never dreamt I myself could feel. During this conversation I was slowly beginning to understand the reasons why someone would wish to go in the ‘opposite’ direction to me, while also understanding that there is no ‘opposite’ because we’re both doing the same thing, dipping into the egg. But there is nonetheless an asymmetry. The asymmetry is that, in general, men aren’t encumbered by a body in the same way that women are. In the same way that Frantz Fanon talks about double identity in the case of race—that a Black individual can’t just be an individual, they’re also aware of appearing to others as a Black person, so they always have two identities that they’re having to deal with and move between. You can’t just go out in the street and be a neutral person among people, because you’re also Black. A woman’s experience of herself as a subject is somewhat similar: you can’t just be a person, you’re always also a woman, and you’re going to be made conscious at certain points of being a woman and of what the woman’s social role and social position is. A part of what drives dysphoria for many transmascs seems to be that they don’t want to be always interpolated as being a woman: I just want to be a person, I actually would like to be able to be the default, invisible subject. Some people have to be double, and that’s extra labour. (White) men don’t have to do that and men’s clothes I think reflect that: men’s clothes help you become the default and disappear

19 into the neutral. Something which, for me, is something that’s experienced as a distressing and unpleasant imposition, but for others is liberation. Another aspect of the asymmetry was that for me, a lot of the emphasis is on being able to feel my body, while for my friend as a transmasc a lot of the emphasis is on what they could do with their body: I want to dress in a way that enables me to go on a bike ride and get muddy, I want to dress in a way where I can like go to the pub and watch rugby and no one’s going to be looking at me and I’m just going to blend in. A lot of the situations that for me were horrifying because they involved having to ‘be a man’, which made me feel very conspicuous, for them were an opportunity to be a man among men and not be subjected to being looked at ‘as a woman’ all the time. Inversely, although I am probably more conspicuous in the way I dress now, I feel a lot more calm and socially relaxed because I’m not trying to ‘be a man’ and I’m giving a clear signal that I’m not going to be playing that game…. Today we live in an extremely visual networked culture and there’s an increased interest and experimentation with gender. It’s got to the point now where men are beginning to realise that the neutrality of being the default subject position, while certainly a privilege, is at the same time just another way of your virtual body being stolen. It’s just another way of being locked out of the egg. Privilege is also repression; the universal default nowhere position is also a heist. Once you begin to break out of that default neutral man-body that doesn’t need to try, once you begin to pay attention to yourself, you also encounter an interesting breakdown of the concept of the male gaze: you can become more attentive and enjoy the beauty of your own body rather than needing to look at other people’s bodies. Where you perhaps used to look at the ‘opposite sex’ in a fascinated, yearning way, you can instead experience in a sensory mode some of the things that you used to just look at, and that’s actually more fulfilling and enables you to attain a different kind of intimacy with others based on sharing of pleasures rather than consumption of their image. (As ever, memes have the maximally compact way of expressing this part of the process: wants a cute gf/is the cute gf.) This also brings us to the concept of autogynephilia, which is extremely unpopular among trans people for good reason. This is the concept that there are two different types of trans women (the psychiatrists who talk about this aren’t interested in trans men). One is homosexual but unable to

20 admit it so they try to become a woman, the other is the autogynephiliac, who has a fetish for enjoying their own body ‘as if’ it’s a woman’s body. It’s obviously an incredibly reductive bad take in terms of understanding the psychology of transgender individuals, and there are definitional reasons why being transgender can’t be reduced to being a fetish. But there’s also a kind of truth to it, so long as we admit that cis women can also be autogynephiliac! What’s wrong with autophilia, literally, enjoying your self?! A strange thing to make into a pathology or a ‘fetish’. But these kinds of issues bring us back to the fact that, in this process, sometimes you ask What happened? and you’re confronted with an apparently hard and fast alternative: are you asserting a reality which from some deep place in yourself you know to be true, or are you manically pushing ahead with some kind of weird folly, possibly losing your sense of reality? Those two possibilities line up, ultimately, with the flawed ways of seeing gender. Which is it? Both, neither, it doesn’t really matter, sometimes you actually can’t tell, and that’s part of the joy of doing it. None of these things really exist apart from the pragmatic process of becoming. In my diagram (pp16–17) I’ve retained the strata from the first model I mentioned—you’ve got these different temporalities, phylogenesis which is the process of evolution that produces dimorphic sexual reproduction, and that’s something that’s encoded in human DNA; ontogenesis i.e. the actual production of human beings, which happens through hormones feeding back with anatomy; sociogenesis, and the production of the individual as a social being. Obviously in society today we have this interface between sexual reproduction and social reproduction where anatomy determines your institutional identity: when you’re born you get assigned one or the other. And finally that feeds into your social role, which then affects conduct—the way that you comport yourself as a person. Let’s first look at this loop between the virtual body, proprioception, and rigging. Rigging can mean when you’re setting up a machine, ‘rigging it up’, it also means make-up, producing yourself, putting a mask on, making a presentation of yourself, and then it also means the rigging of a ship. And I think it’s nice to use that because the rigging is the thing that enables you to put the sail up, and

21 that enables you to move. And rigging can also mean manipulating things in your favour. I don’t think you can consider that first loop without considering how it connects to everything else. It’s like the person stuck in their bedroom experimenting on their own, that’s not going anywhere, it doesn’t really ‘do gender’. What makes gender happen is this other loop: You rig yourself up and you exhibit yourself through the technological infrastructure. ‘Technology’ could mean anything—three hundred years ago it could be that you’re going into the town square, that’s a social technology as well. Social media today is very fast, though, and that speed makes a difference. But in any case, you present yourself through the technological infrastructure. You’ve then made a commitment in the social realm which feeds back onto other’s attitudes to you and their confirmation of who you are; you’ve presented yourself socially, and then you have this process of collective ratification: others are recognising you and saying yes, we now recognise you as occupying a different place in our conceptual schema and practices. That’s all happening through technology, and the interesting thing about technology is that it cuts through all of these strata. Technology doesn’t belong to the personal, the social, the biological, or the evolutionary, it’s something that can intervene on all these levels. That’s what’s amazing about the way human culture has developed, it has tools that are now capable of intervening at all these different levels. Collective ratification also places new demands on technology. By sending out new signals about gender into the social sphere, you’re also producing desire, you’re helping build a demand for new technologies that make gender possible in different ways. Obviously there are interventions at the level

22 of mediated cosmetic presentation, there are interventions at the level of hormones, maybe there’ll be interventions at the level of DNA. But the point is that this social loop is not only expanding it from being a personal thing to being a social thing, it’s also driving change in terms of what technology can do to intervene. And then all of this obviously is also going into social memory, i.e. the collective archive of everything that we know about ourselves and each other. That social memory is then also changing the range of available gender roles. So therefore this process of sociogenesis is also effective in shaping reality, because in the future there will—at least—be a wider range of social roles that you can be assigned to. The diagram has one form of dysphoria there between the virtual body and anatomy, and another form of dysphoria between social role and conduct. The point is that the more these circuits are accelerated, the more it becomes possible for these dysphorias to become minimised, because the social body becomes more flexible and able to cope with a larger range of possibilities. In a sense there is not just one egg, there is an egg at every stage and at every level. Take DNA, we always think of DNA as being fixed, like a kind of ultimate reality, but obviously there’s an ‘egg’ of DNA as well: a massive pool of possibilities of what could happen to an organism’s DNA and to its phenotype, through mutation or drift or whatever. Obviously it might

23 be frightening, but it’s going to happen, we’re obviously just at the dawn of meddling with that. In terms of anatomy, the relationship between anatomy and hormones is particularly fascinating because you tend to think that your anatomy just is what it is, and of course in public discourse the idea of messing with hormones or puberty blockers is met with horror, as if you’ll break the whole system. But it’s astonishing how quickly your anatomy can just happily decide it’s doing something else once you change the hormone balance. Again, we are only just at the beginning of understanding that, but for instance, it is quite amusing in relation to anatomy and the virtual body to observe that every AMAB on earth has a virtual bra size. All of us have this set of latent potentials whether we’re AMAB or AFAB, whatever anatomy we have, there is this egglike field of intensities and potentials at the anatomical level, and if you start putting the right hormones in, they’ll simply become actualised differently. Even the social has its own egg: beneath the actuality of the social as we live in it there are of course many more possibilities that could be realised: the set of relations between individuals could be configured in many different ways. And then as I’ve already talked about, you have the virtual-body egg which can be modified by clothing and cosmetics etc. The egg goes all the way down! And trans- means trying to navigate in this eggspace. But as you see, eggspace is technology: to a large extent we can’t really access eggspace without technology, because technology is the egg proxy, it’s the thing that drills down through all the strata and enables you to intervene in all these different ways. Is there room for an ‘emotional body’ somewhere in my diagram? Well, one of the things that participates in the construction of your virtual body is trauma and its emotional impact. Various forms of psychodynamic therapy recognise that all of these things are stored in the body. Take Wilhelm Reich’s idea of ‘character armour’, which is in fact brilliantly definitive of what it means to ‘be a man’…. This diagram is just a rough sketch. We could easily alter and expand various parts of this diagram with details taken from elsewhere. OTHERBODILY, NOT OTHERWORLDY: EGGS FM You can also see this as a diagram of a synthesizer. The egg is the original synth. We’ve looked at how gender is synthesized, but I wanted to think about

24 ways in which synthesized music can reflect the plasticity of the virtual body. This is fuelled by the type of musics that I personally happen to listen to and which have actually played a part in my gender transition (but that’s another story). You can say the same thing about what synthesizers do to sound. Basically there’s an egg on every level, and what synthetic music does is to try and crack this egg of sound, in the following sense. If you reimagine our diagram as being to do with sound, at the top you might have compositions, symphonies or whatever, and even pop songs; below it you might have instruments, different types of instruments that can be used in those songs and voice and so on, as you go lower and lower you have the physics of the way in which sounds interact with one another…but essentially this is all sound, sound is a homogeneous medium, all sounds are just movements in the air. Synthetic tools for making music enable us to intervene more and more precisely at all of these levels, to make sound at the level of the molecular rather than just at the level of instruments as preconstituted entities. This gradually opens up the terrain of the molecular basis of sound. So the distribution of sound then is no longer a matter of choosing your instruments from a fixed menu and using them in one of a number of traditional ways to assemble various notes into a melody. I want to start with a quote from SOPHIE about making synthetic music. All of the sounds in all the SOPHIE tracks, obviously they’re not physical instruments, but they’re also not pre-constituted instruments from a soundbank on a synthesizer, they’re all ‘handmade’ so to speak: I don’t use any samples but rather think of materials and shapes can sculpt sound through synthesis that can perform similar functions as standard dance music instruments whilst being more connected and contributing more to the actual conceptual content of the song. You can have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture in theory, any sound, so why would any musician want to limit themselves? The places our imaginations can take us are so far away from what we’re presented with. There are obvious links between what SOPHIE is talking about in terms of sound and music and what I’ve been talking about in terms of gender. In a sense it’s a question of grammar: gender can be thought of as a type of grammar in the sense that binary gender is a certain way in which all these things

25 are ‘meant’ to fit together, and escaping binary gender is to discover a wider field. In the same way, Western music has been a codification, a grammar of how you take instruments, place them in relation to one another, make them make certain sounds within a certain compositional structure. And that’s been gradually falling apart for centuries. felicita told me that they thought of PC Music as a group of people who were all interested in disrupting the grammar of music in different ways. In felicita’s early digital music, they had experimented with Persian scales and non-standard tunings such as just intonation, and then ‘I discovered (pitch) sliding, and that was the answer to everything: to slide from one event to another.’ Which is indeed a form of being ungrammatical, sliding under the surface of the grammar of music, getting to the plasticity of the egg. That’s what synthesizers and synthetic sound do, or what they can help us to do. It’s always the same egg, though. Sound is a consistent medium, whatever you’re doing, however you make it, sound is sound. You can make any sound with any method of synthesis…eventually. If you want to have the sound of Jennifer Aniston reading a Shakespeare sonnet you can synthesize that out of pure sine waves, it’s just going to be a very inefficient way of going about it. In the words of Vincent Lostanlen, researcher in machine listening, ‘this is what’s so fascinating about computer music: synthesis algorithms are not music-makers but music-making-makers’. There are different ways of synthesizing sound, there are different ways in which you can assemble parts in order to make a complex sound. Each mode of synthesis is implicitly a model of sound, of how sound works and can be analysed, and none of them are ‘right’, because sound is just sound, but each method of synthesis has a particular idea about how to build sound and that’s reflected in the types of sounds they facilitate access to. FM synthesis was invented or discovered in the late sixties and became very prominent particularly in pop music in the eighties. Up until the seventies, most synths were using either additive or subtractive synthesis. The thing that produces the sound is a VCO (voltage control oscillator), you can think of it as something that just cycles round, more signal, less signal, etc., and the job of a synth is to convert that voltage cycle into a sound wave. The simplest synthesizers have one VCO and it makes a sine wave, or another simple type of wave, a sawtooth or square wave, all of which result in different sounds. Additive synthesis simply means you can take more than one of these and add them to one another and you end up with a more complex wave and therefore a sound which has more interesting texture and characteristics. And of course you can also adjust volume to shape the sound. Subtractive synthesis is the same thing but the other way around, you take one wave away from the other.

26 FM synthesis historically emerged more or less at the moment when the first digital soundmaking tools were built. So it’s actually an older invention but it’s recently had a revival, and SOPHIE, along with other PC Music and other hyperpop artists, have used FM synthesis heavily. In the sixties, John Chowning, who discovered FM synthesis, had been inspired by a very famous paper from 1963 by Max Matthews, ‘The Computer as Musical Instrument’. This was the first time that someone had systematically presented the possibility that the computer, as a multi-purpose digital device, could be used to manipulate sound in ways that analog synthesizers couldn’t achieve. Chowning was one of the first people who decided to test out this hypothesis, and he had various problems in his relationship with institutions: What are you talking about, this is never going to happen, people aren’t going to use computers to make music! He ended up at Stanford, where he and his team were one of the first to build digital music workstations. Like so many things in the history of synthesizers and electronic music, FM synthesis was discovered by accident. Chowning was taking a sine wave and then he was taking another one and, rather than adding them together, he was modulating one with the other. What does that mean? It means that if you have this wave that’s being produced by a VCO and it’s regular, it’s just going up and down, and then you’ve got this other wave, you can use the cycle of the second one to control the speed of the first one, and you end up with a different kind of waveform. When you do that, you’re essentially just doing vibrato, you are just altering the pitch up and down. But what Chowning discovered was that if you keep on increasing the frequency, you get some really interesting effects. He found that you can produce sounds that have a richness, a texture or timbre that gives them more character. Chowning discovered that certain ratios between the modulating signal and the modulated signal produced rich harmonics: ‘I did more experiments and realized that I was hearing […] a complex wave using two oscillators that I imagine probably had eight or ten harmonics.’ Now, every natural object produces harmonics: any object that you hit is going to produce a fundamental frequency but it’s also going to produce a set of other frequencies above it, and that’s what gives an instrument its particular feel, the combination of all these different frequencies interacting with one another. Early synth music often sounds weird and spacey and otherworldly, and a part of that is because it’s using simple isolated waveforms with no harmonics, which are things you don’t usually

27 encounter on Earth. If you walk out into the world you’re never going to hear a pure sine wave, if you hear a cricket or someone sawing a piece of wood it might be something close to a sawtooth wave, but you’re never really going to hear such a thing in its pure form. And that’s part of the fascination of those analog synths, they present you with unnatural alien soundscapes. Well, what Chowning discovered was that you could produce quite natural-seeming sounds, some of the classic examples with FM are that you can produce bell tones, wood-sounding tones, breathy flute tones. You can make your sounds richer by adding further modulator waves. Harmonics in nature are rarely purely harmonic, and another thing Chowning discovered was that using FM synthesis one can move continuously from harmonic to inharmonic spectra, exploring the boundaries at which our perception of sound crosses the boundary between harmonic musical notes and textured sound or even noise. Using FM, then, you can build up complex sound with very few components. Also, with digital FM, you can use it to produce a sound that would be extremely laborious using any of the earlier methods. So as a result it’s cheap, it’s an extremely economical way to produce rich interesting sounds that approach the timbre of natural sounding objects. But we can hardly talk about the technical aspects of FM synthesis without also talking about its cultural and historical aspects. Some of Chowning’s colleagues suggested, well, you can produce all these different types of sounds, what you need to do is to produce a soundbank, a range of different types of sounds. And they did that and they showed it to various makers of electronic instruments and eventually Yamaha were the people who bought the soundbank and the FM technology and made one of the most successful and famous synthesizer ever, the DX7. These were truly the sounds of a generation! As Lostanlen describes, this was quite an exacting task, though: ‘FM analysis’ is not so straightforward as additive synthesis or wavetable synthesis […] if you are given a recorded sound like a marimba, it’s not at all obvious how to identify the right FM parameters for it. […] There is a formula, but it involves special functions which are difficult to evaluate […]. The search space is very high-dimensional and ‘rugged’ (does not gracefully increase/decrease in similarity [as you adjust the parameters], so for the longest time, FM synth was a game of trial and error and careful human listening, and patience.

28 But, he continues, this only begs the question How come the solution exists at all in the search space? What makes FM synth a better search space than anything else? And here I’m not sure what to say…we know for a fact that FM synth promotes harmonicity, vibrato, which are typical of some sustained tones (bowed strings, woodwinds)…we also know that modulation index induces some sort of “brassiness” which is very convenient to control as a correlate of loudness… In any case, at this point FM synthesis played an economically important role in terms of the spread of synthesizer music. This is counterintuitive in relation to what I said before about the fact that synth music enables you to reach down into the egg, to manipulate sound molecularly. Because in actual fact, what drove the entry of synthesizers into pop music over this period was something quite different, it was the fact that with FM you could make things that actually sounded like instruments. Before that, it had been difficult for producers to incorporate synthesizers into popular music because these egregious, strong, pure sounds synths made didn’t sit well in a mix. It was difficult to produce anything that featured synthesizers together with other instruments. The DX7 made it possible to place synthesizers into the mix of a pop song and to produce a type of music that was recognisable to the mass market as pop music. In addition, this was predominantly in the eighties, during the great period of the rise of consumer mass media, and for instance if you’re making a TV advert, you can make the soundtrack with a DX7 instead of hiring an orchestra. So economically it had an impact, and made a great difference in the takeup of synthesizer technology and the public perception of synthesized music. In a sense it was like synthesizers disguising themselves as instruments in order to move into the cultural mainstream, slowly moulding expectations and opening the sonic Overton window. FM synthesis actually existed even before Chowning, in the sixties some people were doing analog FM synthesis, but the technology actually doesn’t really work that well using analog machines. It was the digital implementation of it that made sense in technical terms and therefore in economic terms and hence shunted it into the musical forefront. What’s interesting to me about the resurgence of FM in the 2000s and 2010s and up to the present is that it is used to create sounds that are problematically un/natural. FM gives you access to a certain way of understanding

29 and constructing sound that makes it possible to produce the type of sounds that would come from a natural object. But it also alllows you to stretch and warp ‘nature’. I would propose that FM seems more suited than other methods of synthesis to make sounds that have the sonic character of physical acoustic objects, even when they are outlandish. FM sounds tend toward sounding physical or bodily in a certain sense, and I feel like that is the way in which SOPHIE was using them. And I think other artists who are transgender or trans-adjacent or queer are using FM sounds in an expressive way to talk about bodies and about the plasticity of bodies. SOPHIE: I try to imagine a hyperreal world of sounds that we’re sometimes used to from blockbuster films and that kind of thing, sounds which cartoonize and exaggerate naturally occurring or organic sounds and phenomena and materials that don’t exist at the moment. An example would be that there’s a piano that’s five miles wide…. Again, you can create any kind of sound with any kind of synthesis, but it seems to me that certain ways of working with sound enable you to approach the sound world in different ways. This can provide a tool for thinking when you’re making sound: the early history of synthesized music and analog synths often produces various kinds of ‘spacey’ sounds perceived as otherworldly, and that’s both what they were valued for in certain circles, and what prevented them from becoming mainstream: that they produced sounds that didn’t belong to our world but opened up a kind of expansive, hypnotic immersion in an alien sound environment. FM allowed something else to happen, and at the same time as those DX7 sounds are quintessentially ‘normcore’ in a way, they’re not doing anything super advanced with sound, they’re trying to emulate instruments—at the same time it opened the gates to what I want to call an otherbodily rather than otherworldly type of sound: a way of producing impossible bodies that reflect a renewed plasticity of the virtual body. All of this is speculation, and I am of course aware that different musics mean different things about gender to different people. Indeed, this is an expected consequence of the broad multi-level model of gender and gender navigation outlined above. For instance, when the artist Xylitol talks about her experience of electronic music and clubs she foregrounds not just sonic specificities but also the ‘gendered yearning’ of certain strains of garage, house,

30 and jungle, along with the social and bodily aspect of the environment: Dancing… gave me a space to explore my sense of being a body in the world in ways that weren’t open to me in my everyday life […] I was attempting to sublimate the desire I felt to divest myself of gender (or—in retrospect—the expectations my assigned gender placed upon me) through music—as a means to escape myself and inhabit another body, to dissolve my fractured sense of identity into something kind of amorphous […] if only for a fleeting ecstatic moment on the dancefloor, the psychic space to re-imagine “what my body could do and what it could become.” 3. VOCAL EGG There is another way in which we can think about trans-plasticity in relation to sound, and this is vocal training. One of the effects of hormones in puberty is of course that testosterone triggers physical changes that produce the classic male voice characteristics. If you transition you may feel that you want to mitigate or reverse the gendering effects of that developmental difference. But in doing so you will need to look beyond the prepackaged surface of ‘mens voice/woman’s voice’ and, precisely, understand your voice as a synthesizer. One of the most brilliant voice coaches on YouTube, transvoicelessons, proceeds in her first lesson from pitch to weight to resonance—literally like a synth course, introducing all the parameters, but with the additional difficulty that there are no knobs to turn. Learning how to control each of these parameters in isolation is a matter of being very attentive to feedback from your own body and ears—and a large amount of practice. Before you can control, and play your own music, you have to learn to hear. Once again we have a pragmatic feedback loop. The human voice is (simplifying somewhat) produced by two resonance chambers, and only by learning to feel, attend to, and discriminate between these spaces of your body and how they can be altered, can you hope to learn to control them and remap the relation between your gender, your vocal intentions, and your body’s production of sound.

31 What we are talking about here is accessing your vocal synth, your voice-egg. And once again, what you need to do when persevering in this difficult process is to keep your eye on the horizon, on the ideal continuity of the voice-egg, while pragmatically starting from where you are, learning to build your sensitivity to the instrument you are playing—your voice—and, through practice, developing the capacity to navigate, to be able to recognise the parameters and deliberately adjust the knobs and dials of your vocal synth.

32 REFERENCES Éric Alliez, Duchamp With (and Against) Lacan (2022) Imogen Binnie, Nevada (2013) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980) Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic, Cute Accelerationism (2024) Robin Mackay, Russell Haswell, Florian Hecker, ‘Blackest Ever Black’ (2012) Transvoicelessons, <https://www.youtube.com/@TransVoiceLessons> SOPHIE, interview with Arte: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ifh0tDrwBA> SOPHIE, PhD interview with Dr. Michael Waugh, 2014. Talk with John Chowning and Holly Herndon, HKW, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1uzjFDQM3c> Xylitol quoted in David Stubbs, Fear of Music (2009) SSTRAPP (Sonic and Somatic Transdisciplinary Research and Practice Programme): <https://sstrapp.bidstonobservatory.org/> Thanks to Ben Cronkshankingly, Hannah Diamond, felicita, Florian Hecker, Amy Ireland, Vincent Lostanlen, Rhea Myers, Raven, Rex, Laura Robertson, Tia Trafford, V and Storm, Terah Walkup, Xenogothic, and Xylitol for conversations that enriched this text. Thanks to Inigo Wilkins, Zara Truss Giles, and Quieting for inviting me to participate in ‘Synthetic Disruptions’, and thanks to Bidston Observatory for providing a good approximation of ‘a cave on a mountain someplace’. Typefaces: Replica by Norm, Meta Mascot Quirky by Formless Twins

www.the1989.it /2023/08/25/89-domande-a-maya-b-kronic-urbanomic/ ’89 domande a Maya B. Kronic – Urbanomic & CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) - 2024 tobia ⋮ Name? Maya B. Kronic (@mayabkronic). How did you choose your new name? Does it have any special meaning? During the arduous process of translating Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne’s book Duchamp Seen (From the Other Side) , Éric mentioned to me that he had a small supplementary note dealing with how Duchamp’s use of slippages in the oral dimension of language, collapsing language onto the tongue and the ear, in tandem with the invention of his femme alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, blows a hole in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s (extremely binary) ‘symbolic order’. In a protracted fit of delirium, this short addition grew in size to equal the book it was meant to supplement. Since the artist and the psychoanalyst share a common love of spoonerisms, puns, and wordplay, I had to write a great many footnotes overexplaining bad French jokes. Caught up in the madness, and on the way to escaping from the binary myself, I decided to invent an alter ego (or id) so that the mammoth double-volume would have a double translator. Once the anagrammatic Maya B. Kronic was hatched, I began using it to track my gender transition on social media, and friends started earnestly asking me whether they should call me Maya. I accepted my fate: ‘Names have powers and destinies.’ Did this change cause you any problems of any kind? Ultimately, names and pronouns are a secondary affair. The process of gender transition for me was about contacting my body, enjoying the tactility of dressing the way I wanted, and overcoming a lifetime’s discomfort and anxiety that came from my inability to play a certain social gender role. I choose the ‘they’ pronoun purely because it is clearly the option most confusing and provocative to the complacent and conservative. A change of name indexes shifts that have already occurred below the surface of language, but also propagates them into the social field, which reinforces the commitment to become oneself. As Duchamp says of Rrose: ‘I decided that it was not enough to be one individual with a masculine name, I wanted to change my name to change […] to make another personality for myself’. So, the only potential problems would be fear of a change with unforeseeable consequences, and the forfeit of whatever social or intellectual credit had accrued to the old name—and both of those are just minor aspects of getting over myself. 1/41

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Does it bother you if someone refers to you as Robin Mackay? It’s fine, he’s on a slow fade-out. I feel sympathy and a duty of care. After all, for decades I watched, from a place where he couldn’t hear me, all of the discomfort he endured, and I know the courage he had to muster up to find me. Raven, a trans friend of mine, refers to themselves in the plural as ‘we’ out of recognition and respect for their former self, so as to include them in their current existence. As good a way as any of twisting grammar into a shape capable of reflecting the topological conundrum of identity that these kinds of transition reveal. For me, although it was apparently accidental, the anagram turned out to be an apt way of encrypting the old name and scrambling the egg. I talked a lot about these questions with the digital artist Rhea Myers for her book Proof of Work which we published last year—her work deals with crypto and secrecy in various ways. How old are you? As old as I feel. According to those I allow to feel me, younger than I am. What’s your job? Head of R&D at the UK publisher and cultural producer Urbanomic, which I founded in 2007 and which I now run with Amy Ireland. I spend most of my time editing and translating, as well as taking care of all the other aspects of running a small business and trying to keep abreast of what’s going on. Going into publishing is not a good business decision, and it’s a kind of miracle that it’s lasted this long. As I like to say, In the process I haven’t earned any money but I have earned the right, or rather the necessary accumulated force, to not give a fuck. I like to think that there is still some future prospect of my being a writer and philosopher, and sometimes I manage to find time to write, but it generally gets buried under the day-to-day of keeping Urbanomic going. At the moment my writing projects include a book on geopoetics and subjectivity, one on Gilles Deleuze and mathematics, one on gender euphoria, and one on the ethics of intensity with Amy. We’ve just published a book on cute accelerationism. On writing projects I work slowly. Day to day, I do hundreds of little media projects, sound, image and video. 4/41

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Buy here What did you study? I accidentally discovered philosophy as a teenager because of a timetable clash at my college, and I immediately knew it was what I wanted to do, or had already been doing without knowing that it existed. I went on to do a degree and a masters in philosophy at Warwick University, at the time one of the few Universities that taught Continental philosophy. In the preface of the Italian edition of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, you are mentioned as a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) an underground research group started at the University of Warwick, can you tell us something about that? Ccru was a small group of people, headed up by Sadie Plant, who set up an unofficial research programme in Warwick to deal with the question of what happens to culture in a cybernetic age, and whether you can understand culture itself as a cybernetic system. It never had any official existence within the university. I was involved at the beginning, when I designed and published the Ccru zine Abstract Culture. Later on the Ccru became a different creature, and 8/41

produced a whole cosmological mythos and occult system of divination combined with a set of weird theory-fictions. [long interview on this here: http://readthis.wtf/writing/towards-a-transcendental-deduction-of-jungle-interview-part-1/] Since Urbanomic reprinted the Ccru Writings in 2017, Ccru has taken on retrospective significance as a cultural episode, and Ccru ideas and cryptic devices such as the Numogram have become widespread memes. But at the time it didn’t fit into any existing cultural or intellectual narrative, and for decades afterward it was totally forgotten. Ccru’s foresight has become apparent in an era when it seems self-evident that we have to think about cybernetic feedback loops together with media magick, addiction and demonology, technology and schizophrenia, and that things only make sense backward, from the future to the past. What’s the weirdest thing happened during those years? I remember a shared sense of mission, a profound compulsion, that is difficult to explain, in which any practical ambition or strategic goal was absent. Undeniably, there were some cult-ish aspects to it. But on the other hand, it was just some people sitting in a room smoking, listening to jungle, talking about weird shit, and scribbling stuff down on paper, assembling cut-up texts, or making mixtapes and video collages. One thing I take from Ccru is the importance of assembling microcultures and producing systems to disrupt reality. When a group of people agrees to talk about everything in terms of certain entities—a set of time-demons, for instance—if it ‘works’, those entities become real and the world appears in a different light, new connections are revealed, and a common culture emerges that has a consistent reality of its own. At certain points uncanny coincidences piled onto one another, like a confirmation from the universe that we were doing something ‘right’. One other thing I learned was the importance of being truly experimental in your engagement with reality, to the point where you might well appear insane. Getting beyond pedestrian social control devices such as embarrassment, responsibility, and dignity. In this respect a particularly important episode was Nick Land’s performance of Katasonix when he lay in snake posture on the floor declaiming in his ‘demon voice’. [ http://readthis.wtf/writing/nick-land-an-experiment-in-inhumanism ] 9/41

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If you were a character of a movie which one would you be? I experience films as a sensory assemblage that either produces a resonance within parts of me that are hard to reach, or doesn’t. I find it hard to think about them in terms of plot, or to ‘identify’ with characters. Maybe one of the female characters in Éric Rohmer’s films who are always in Hamletian suspension, writhing in the grip of some existential predicament. What is the meaning of life for you as a human being? To follow what J.G. Ballard calls ‘deep assignments’—or as Joseph Conrad wrote, to ‘be loyal to the nightmare of my choice’. To tune into and yield to impulses whose nature is not yet clear and whose object does not yet exist—to commit myself to projects which I then can’t escape from—to invite in demons—to discover a problem, a field of tension and uncertainty, and pour energy into it to see how it might unfold—to allow something to produce itself through me. Your favorite classic movie? My mind goes blank when I’m asked to pick just one, and I’m not sure what counts as ‘classic’ now. Terminator 2? If the films of the past were made again in the present, would these be better or worse in your opinion?Undoubtedly worse. I’m actually in agreement with Martin Scorcese that, in a significant sense, a lot of the movies that are being made now simply aren’t cinema anymore. I’m open to the idea that maybe they are something else that I’m not yet able to appreciate. Whenever I encounter something that makes me feel too old, I make a concerted effort to immerse myself in it to try and engage. I’m sure even Avengers films have some cultural valence that is simply missed when you try to address them in the same register as Citizen Kane or Vertigo. That doesn’t stop me feeling sad about it, because there is so much power and so much to love in the art of cinema. A part of this, I think, is that today films are not so specific to the cinema experience: they have to function on many different sizes and formats of screens. Watch two very different films, Tati’s Playtime and McTiernan’s Predator, and see how they both make use of a screen whose dimensions dwarf the human frame, and which the eye doesn’t take in all in one go, but can move across it and search it, and at times be overwhelmed. Do you think that in human perception it is easier to kill some life forms than others, for example, an ant versus an elephant? If yes what do you think might be the motivation? A lot of it is based on the way that animals play into perceptual triggers such as faciality, cuteness, and so on, none of which can be trusted as if they provide a reliable moral 12/41

compass. It’s also weirdly anthropocentric when people decide what to eat or not depending on their judgment of its intelligence: chicken but not pork, or pork but not octopus….Why is intelligence, which we impute to ourselves, the criterion? On one hand, I think we need to develop, or rediscover, a tragic sensibility and acknowledge how absurd it is to develop fine moral distinctions on such things in the midst of the continuing holocaust of planetary devastation that is human civilization. On the other hand, I appreciate efficiency and innovation and I’m all for lab-grown meat, insect burgers, and freeing up all the space and energy taken up on the planet by cattle and using it for something more interesting. What you cannot stand on people? Complacency. Insistence on a fixed identity. Compromise with power. Professionals who are being paid to think and write who are incapable of even formulating a sentence clearly.And Crocs. 13/41

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What’s the thing that makes lose your patience the most? Academics, art people, small talk, compromise, and dinner parties. Often together. Do you think Hegel was right to put music as art at a higher level, or do you think the figurative arts, especially at an emotional level, are on the same level? Is this based on the notion that music is somehow purer, less constrained, more concrete and non-representational? The idea that sound is somehow more mysterious, less cognitive and more immersive, both more immaterial but more immediate than other media, is still quite pervasive. Interestingly, with recent computer modelling trends driven by music comparison and delivery systems, we are becoming more and more able to speak about aspects of music that we would previously have regarded as ineffable. This trend converges with everyday critical discourse on social media about endless subgenres and their ‘vibe’, which produces a collective proliferation of new categories. In some of my projects with electroacoustic composer Florian Hecker we have explored these trends, in particular through the concept of ‘timbre’. For me the most exciting thing is that, because of their cultural blindness, AI-driven ‘synthetic listeners’ can identify musical qualities that we may recognise but for which we don’t yet have words. Take this negatively or positively, but the same goes for music as for anything else: we’ll probably learn about it and produce new forms of it in the same way that PornHub allows us to learn about and produce new forms of sexual desire: collective libidinal enthusiasm plus technological modelling, responsive delivery, and recommendation slippage. So it’s maybe not a question of music being inherently superior, but a question of the availability of analytical tools, and the uneven development of our language and ability to articulate sonic phenomena because of the predominance of the visual in our cultures. Can you give us a definition of art? To follow what J.G. Ballard calls ‘deep assignments’—or as Joseph Conrad wrote, to ‘be loyal to the nightmare of my choice’. To tune into and yield to impulses whose nature is not yet clear and whose object does not yet exist—to commit myself to projects which I then can’t escape from—to invite in demons—to discover a problem, a field of tension and uncertainty, and pour energy into it to see how it might unfold—to allow something to produce itself through me. [nb. the repetition is intentional (art=life)] Your favorite style icons? I am more of a believer in partial objects or what the Japanese call moé. I fixate on tiny details of geometry, colour, curve, attitude, or movement that are detachable from any one individual, and try to construct new patterns from them. My sense of style consists of a vaguely perceived diagram of abstract calibrations. Often, I notice a certain feature, 15/41

garment, or colour combination on someone, and it enables me to give concrete expression to a part of that abstract diagram, so I steal it and add it to my inventory. If you could speak in world vision for 15 minutes what would you say? ‘We’re doomed, let’s at least enjoy it,’ then play jungle tunes for 14 minutes and 10 seconds. 16/41

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Do you think exist an objective aesthetic value or you think aesthetic value is just subjective? Generally speaking, subjects are not as idiosyncratic or individual as they think in their aesthetic ‘choices’, which are determined by broader cultural trends, historical precedents, and then by evolutionary cues, and so on. In a sense, there are objective aesthetic defaults that none of us, however ‘refined’, can evade. But they are the most boring and generic ones. On the other hand, it takes time, energy, labour to become yourself, to drag out of yourself the attitudes that are genuinely singular to you. There are things which, objectively, no one else but you, as a subject, will feel or express in quite the same way. When someone is successful at being themselves, their aesthetic takes on the aspect of given fact—it just could not be otherwise—in the same way that a good pop song can seem to have descended from the very nature of things with utter inevitability. If you could have a super power what would you choose? Not needing to sleep? When, in your opinion, can you define a person as an artist? Networkers are not artists. A lot of art, and artists, are disappointing, because it’s obvious that very little is at stake. I fall in love with artists who are risking something, and who calmly and cheerfully labour away in the service of some unutterable compulsion. Do you think that the relationship between art and drugs is just a cliché? As someone who has spent a lot of my life suffering from anxiety and depression, when I was young, drugs always felt threatening to my mental state rather than liberating, and so they never became an important part of my life. In cultural history there is undoubtedly a consistent correlation between the two, but that obviously doesn’t mean that taking drugs makes you interesting. I have been an unwilling participant in a great many conversations that prove this. Also, as all true philosophers know, you don’t need chemicals to get stoned. 18/41

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Do you have any political orientation? Accelerationist. Which is really the opposite of politics. Who is in your opinion the best philosopher in history? The collective hive mind of twenty-first-century social media. Who do you think is the best right now? There is no ‘right now’ in philosophy, because there is no superceding of the past in philosophy. At Urbanomic we try to not take an ‘editorial line’ or champion particular people, but instead publish a range of philosophical voices whose positions sketch out a map of the important tensions that run through the contemporary landscape. And the most overrated? Too many to mention. The most underestimated? Me, of course. Just you wait. Do you think that believing in God and not believing in God start from the same presumption about something that in itself we have no possibility of knowing, thus reducing even atheism to an act of faith toward the unknown? I am very wary of the present resurgence of religion, Catholicism in particular, and I insist on the idea that atheism, and nihilism, are extraordinarily productive and exciting tasks that still lie ahead of us. That one would want to abandon the adventure at this point, to infer that the death of god makes no difference, or to say that every possible stance is ultimately religious, is anathema to me. I have seen, and I resist very strongly, the subtilisation that leads people from taking religion philosophically seriously, which is fine, to actually ending up sitting in church taking comfort in priestly authority and tradition. I persist in living, I convene with human and nonhuman entities, and I love, all without the need for faith or belief in a supreme being, and I believe, I experience, that atheism is possible, even though it is not easy. If you could do a crime, or an action in general, without anyone ever knowing about it, what would you do? I have written about how, as a child, I was exposed to a lot of leftist anti-nuclear propaganda which always invoked the three-minute warning that would herald the arrival of the bomb and subsequent nuclear winter. I always got excited thinking about what you could do in those three minutes when nothing mattered any more. That was my introduction to nihilism, later compounded by my discovery of Nietzsche, the first philosopher I read seriously. Today I try to cultivate desublimation, openness, and shamelessness to the extent that I do what I want and I don’t care who knows about it. When every three minutes is the last three minutes, you think less about secrets and more about joy. I commit all my crimes out in the open, that’s how I become invincible. 20/41

What work would you have wanted to do if you were not in your profession? My earliest ambitions were to make comics, to be a video game designer, and to be a graffiti artist. I finally fulfilled at least one of those, with the graphic novel Chronosis, [https://www.urbanomic.com/book/chronosis/] where some of my sketches were turned into beautiful pages by the artist Keith Tilford. I also often think I could have made a lot of money and retired by now if I’d gone into marketing. I spent quite a few years as a programmer, too, and although I wouldn’t like to do it professionally, to me coding is a very calming and satisfying activity. In your opinion is there such a thing as unnatural? In the case in point, if you consider man as part of nature, is everything that emanates from it to be considered natural? If not, why do you not consider man as part of nature? This is probably one of the most vexed philosophical questions of all time, but I believe it’s conceptually sound to speak about the works of the human race as a deviation from the strictly causal material realm of nature. At the same time, as Nietzsche pointed out, it would be remarkable hubris to believe that all of these remarkable works could not be entirely reabsorbed, leaving no trace. It’s a question of the scale you see things on. I believe we live in the midst of a glorious unnatural efflorescence of supernormal extravagance, and I love it and relish every new synthesis ‘against nature’ (to quote J.-K. Huysmans). At the same time, I don’t think it’s easy to locate the exact point where intelligence untethers itself from natural causation. If you could go back in time and kill a few whom would it be? Realistically, the effects would be unforeseeable, wouldn’t they, so any motive you might have for doing this would probably not work out. I’m just gonna say my grandfather, for the Terminator vibe. 21/41

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Do you think man’s life has meaning? You have to make the meaning: follow ‘deep assignments’, etc. etc. Can you tell us the most interesting anecdote concerning your eventual drug experience? The kind of geeky experiences a philosopher might report. On one occasion whole blocks of time passed without being perceived, and then I experienced those time periods being reconstructed and ordered so as to repair the continuity of my experience. Very Kantian. Another time, at a festival in Paris with Hecker and Aphex, I experienced my capacity for reflexivity slowly break down until there were just two pixels, then one, at which point I narrowly avoided plunging off a balcony. The time you did drugs the most what did you take and in what doses? Nothing impressive. These days I’m into small amounts of mushrooms, it does wonders for anxiety and concentration. What do you think people say about you? I have no idea at all and I would rather not worry about it. I have generally been a very withdrawn person and preferred not to be perceived at all. People think a book is written and then it appears as a book, and nothing happens in-between. Unfortunately the publishing industry is in fact getting more like a sausage factory, but at Urbanomic the editorial input is substantial, and every book is thought about in relation to the whole, a bit like a record label. But editorial work tends to be invisible. In a sense it’s a classically female form of unseen labour. Ironically, Maya is far happier with being visible, but even less concerned with what people think. Have you ever been in a fight? Only with ex-spouses, and I didn’t fight back. Has anyone ever offered you sexual favors to work with you? If yes, can you tell us how it went? Not yet Can you tell us when you think a person is cool and when is not? A person is cool when they put enthusiasm for projects with uncertain outcomes above what’s known. When a part of them is in contact with the knowledge that ultimately absolutely nothing has any meaning, but they are also full of cheer. When the barriers are down. If you had to tell a person to fuck off, who would you choose? And why? I prefer to be hopeful and trust that people will eventually deal with their own inadequacies and stupidity, confronting them doesn’t help. 23/41

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What is the night you spent the most money to have fun?I’ve never had money, and I don’t like going out. What’s your favorite artist? I love the cerebral, the sensory, the minimal and the maximal, the subtle and the lairy, the intelligent and the stupid, so it changes depending on mood. What is the best work you have ever done? I don’t think it’s for me to say. The one you are most proud of? Everything I’ve done both with Urbanomic and outside it forms a kind of ecosystem. It’s hard to tell where one thing begins and another ends. A lot of that involves making things happen for others, and I’m particularly proud of the books that I know probably wouldn’t have been published if it weren’t for my persistent pursuit of the authors. In general, I love the things that no one else would ever have made, and which came out of both a nonsensical compulsion and a dense stratal deposit of concepts, like the collaborative AGI Lego Box set I made with Reza Negarestani [https://www.urbanomic.com/event/unboxing-the-machines/], or the Hydroplutonic Kernow fault-map [https://www.urbanomic.com/event/hydroplutonic-kernow-fault-map/]. I’m also quite proud of the Numogram T-shirt. Right now my best project is Maya: the agent, patient, and product of ongoing research project on gender hyperstition and cute accelerationism. After all, if you like having a project but don’t like yourself, why not make yourself into a project, and project yourself somewhere you like? The one that is most appreciated? I’m not sure ‘appreciated’ is the right word, but I brought the work of Nick Land into cultural circulation with the publication of the collection Fanged Noumena in 2011, and then revived the fortunes of Ccru with Writings in 2017. Both might have remained in total obscurity to this day otherwise, and they are consistently the most widely circulated Urbanomic publications. Can you tell us a work someone else has done that you wish you could do too? That seems a really strange thing to think about, I can’t imagine! Who is your best friend in the academic world? I’m not friends with the academic world, and if I have friends there, they are friends in spite of their being academics. Is there anyone you don’t get along with? Not really, for the simple reason that I don’t spend time with a lot of people. I’m not very good at feigning interest, and I have some quite severe heuristics for judging people, but I feel like I’ve done quite 26/41

well at not making enemies. I can only think of one person who has decided to make an enemy of me, and it’s not someone I need to engage with. 27/41

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What is the thing you love the most about Venice? I did a project Our Sun with the Swiss artist Pamela Rosencranz in the Swiss Institute in Venice many years ago and she gave me a whole new way of seeing it in terms of its material elements. My vision of Venice since then has always been in terms of a sort of selection of readymade ‘artists materials’: light, water, reflection, skin. A kind of abstract material moodboard beneath which any reality has long ago disappeared. And about Italy in general? I haven’t spent enough time in Italy to say anything much! We were in Rome last year with Editions Nero at CSOA Forte Prenestino which was an amazing environment. I had a good time vintage shopping at Humana. Rome seems like a somewhat sad place hemmed in by its past. If you could choose what would you like to change about the UK? To reverse Brexit. Never mind any cultural or political questions of keeping a link with the EU. There have simply been no benefits to anyone, a huge waste of time, and a great deal of onerous problems for anyone running a small business and trying to mail anything to Europe. Like many of its natives, I have an ambivalent relationship to the UK. I fully acknowledge it is a decaying remnant of a dead civilization, and a particularly drab, depressive one at that. And yet I retain a fierce kind of love for this country, and feel that it is far from irrelevant to the contemporary moment. It is instructive to live in the mess of an old country that has, since the nineteenth century, given itself over without compunction to the depredations of liberal, then neoliberal capital. The English have always known how to yield to capital, throw all tradition and dignity to the dogs, and accelerate with gleeful abandon. Sometimes it’s ugly, but it can be breathtakingly beautiful too. The inexhaustible energy of the UK music scene in particular is testament to that. Where have you been on vacation when you were young? My father spoke Esperanto and we often went to visit fellow Esperantists in Europe, but some of my fondest memories are from the east coast of England. My audio essay By the North Sea is about the disappeared seaport of Dunwich, a weird place where Mark Fisher and I both holidayed as children, and to which we returned in 2001 to make a film project that was never completed. After Mark’s death in 2017 I went back to the project and remade it as an audio essay, which is going to be released as a CD on Hyperdub’s Flatlines label this year. Where are you going on vacation now? I don’t remember the last time I went on vacation, too much work to do. 30/41

Do you think it would be correct to create a place where a man can live in the state of nature, making him free from a choice of social belonging that is instead taken for granted? Philosophy, particularly political philosophy, is full of thought experiments to do with starting from zero or returning to it. I have worked a lot on the question of the desert island narrative and the question of what happens to subjecthood when one is deprived of social contact. 31/41

One of the books we recently published is Gilles Grelet’s Theory of the Solitary Sailor. Gilles left Paris to go and live on his boat Théorème full time. He is almost always alone and hardly spends any time on land. I am full of admiration for this genuine philosophical life experiment, and of all living philosophers, I think he has the most insight into the question of whether the subject can be removed from the social world, and what it means to do so. Favorite movies? Very random, I don’t have sophisticated tastes and have no sort of systematic education in cinema; I fall in love with films, forget them, then rediscover them all the time. I love all of Éric Rohmer’s and Jacques Tati’s work. And then Picnic at Hanging Rock, Apocalypse Now, David Lean’s Great Expectations, Barry Lyndon, Desperately Seeking Susan, Terminator II, Heat, The Wicker Man…. And recently, Barbie (over Oppenheimer, by far). What’s the topic you are most expert in? I’m not expert in anything, I’m a serial amateur enthusiast dilettante, which sometimes causes me pain and regret that I didn’t knuckle down, pay my dues, and specialise. But hopefully I have something different from ‘expertise’ to offer, something that specialists don’t have. Have you ever been in love? I am very susceptible to crushes of various types, I’m always ready for overenthusiasm. But I’m in love right now in the complete and cosmic sense, in a way that I had previously not thought was possible. An irresistible demonic possession came from somewhere outside; its inevitability propagated itself backward in time. Both utterly contingent and eternally fated, unequivocally absolute but premised upon the precarity that time lends all things. Even if it ended tomorrow it will have been forever. Where do you live?In Plymouth, in the southwest of the UK, by the sea. 32/41

Other cities where you’ve been living and how long? I spent many years in London, and it will always feel like one of my homes, but I’ve lived in the southwest of the UK for a couple of decades now and it suits me as a decompressed environment 33/41

where I don’t feel under surveillance, get left alone, and don’t have too much to distract me from work. Which languages do you speak? English, French but mostly only philosophical French. I keep trying to learn Japanese. And I can probably remember a bit of Esperanto. Favorite songs? Hannah Diamond’s. The quality you would like to have and don’t have? Being able to sleep when I need to. Being able to resist buying clothes. Being capable of any concentrated scholarly work without getting distracted and sidetracked immediately. And I wish I’d started questioning my gender much earlier in my life and realised that it was possible to have joy in myself. Have you ever been offered something in exchange for sex? Not yet If you had the possibility to remove social networks from the world, would you delete them? Not at all. We need to be able to acknowledge that like all technology, they are both positive and negative. Personally, I can measure phases of my development in terms of social media networks I belonged to and what they allowed me to explore, reveal, and discover about myself. For me as I suspect for many, gender transition would have been unthinkable without social media as a way to communicate, to tentatively show myself, to share the joy. In that context, it acts as a reflective medium, and as a mechanism to cement commitment and to propagate into the social realm something that starts out deeply private, personal and vulnerable. When you’re tired of social media, you’re tired of life. We all get tired sometimes. But don’t act as if you can deny or counteract the most significant social phenomenon of the century. Take some time, relax, come back, post, and sparkle. And what about globalization? One of the books we recently published, Japanese philosopher Hiroki Azuma’s Philosophy of the Tourist, suggests that the much-maligned figure of the tourist is an appropriate device to think about political philosophy today. We seem to be trapped between nineteenth-century imaginaries of the nation-state, national pride, belonging and particularity, which can give rise to new fascisms, and the abstraction and blandness of globalization, which is an irrevocable fact but which many thinkers address as if it’s a threat. We can learn from the tourist, Azuma suggests, how to move smoothly and without neurosis between the global and the local. The craziest experience you’ve ever had? Ccru. Everyone who was there doesn’t know what happened, or if anything happened, or if they were even there. What do you think about influencers? It’s a job, and I respect them when they do their job well, creatively and with good humour. 34/41

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Can you define yourself with an adjective? Soft. Favorite TV series? I watch a lot of TV in the background while doing other things, and I’ll watch anything. Particularly crime drama—I watched a lot of CSI back in its heyday, it was an important ingredient in thinking about the concepts of site and plot. I’ve watched all of Seinfeld multiple times. And then obscure British archive stuff like Children of the Stones. If you were an animal which one would you like to be? A lemur, for obvious reasons. Approximately how many partners have you had in your life? Double figures but not impressive. Your favorite position for sex? Bottom, F2F, and in love. What time do you usually go to sleep? I have always suffered from insomnia, and, like everything in my life, no matter how much I try I can never quite manage to install any consistent system. It’s a curse. Your favorite dish? Big Mac meal. Or Haribo. Favorite fashion brand? I mix and match whatever I happen to find, and I love discovering new brands and trying new things. My most treasured items are one-off productions by the artist Hutamaki Wab. How important is it for you to be rich from 1 to 10? I used to be sceptical about the somewhat romantic figure of the creative who cares more about their work than about making a survivable amount of money. Slowly I came to realise that that’s me. I don’t always enjoy it, but I try to affirm it. So 1, de facto. And fame? I’m definitely not famous, and I really just want to be left alone, to get the work done, not be recognised or celebrated for it. How important are fame and money to impress a partner? Important to some people I guess. And what about beauty? Important, but 99% of beauty is simply when someone is really alive and takes joy in their existence. And intelligence? Depends what you mean by intelligence. Some of the supposedly smartest people are totally insufferable to be around. It’s not what impresses me. If intelligent means creative, funny and surprising then yes. 37/41

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Do you know someone being a real racist? I know a ‘hyperracist’… What are the clothes you can’t stand to see on a man and on a woman? Clothes have no gender. What’s important is to discover what works for you. What’s the item of clothing you spent the most money on? Most of my clothes come from thrift stores and cheap places. Can you tell us a number from 1 to 89? 3. Do you think that if there were no hypothetical partners to impress, human beings would pursue success so spasmodically? I honestly don’t think any of my life choices have been dictated by reproductive strategies, but what do I know of my secret innermost drives? What do you think about the cancel culture? I lived through times when Urbanomic was targeted by a small number of shrill voices that, seemingly, wanted to ‘cancel’ us or our authors. But I will never accept the implication that, as a publisher, I am somehow meant to be responsible for society’s wellbeing, and I refuse to respond to this kind of pressure. It was pretty stressful at the time, and I sensed the danger: a very small number of people can have undue influence, because risk-averse institutions will play safe by excluding figures who have had some vague reputation for being incorrect in some undefined way. It now seems like it’s in the past, to be honest. I feel like that need to demonise and embody evil in a single figure and ‘disappear’ them is not so prominent now. In the end, the worst thing for me has been seeing certain people so enamoured with being cancelled that they have made it their identity, and now think they’re dangerous outlaws by repeating reactionary talking points. For those who still invoke it, ‘cancel culture’ is little more than a weak alibi for conservativism, conjuring up the spectre of an oppressive woke majority dictatorship and issuing dire warnings against it in the name of some kind of last-ditch compact to save ‘civilisation’. As far as I’m concerned, fuck civilisation and fuck responsibility, ‘Love, honor, and serve degeneracy wherever it surfaces’ (William Burroughs). If you could choose a person you know to read this interview, who would it be? I’m not sure—I don’t know why you asked me or why I enthusiastically answered so many of your questions. I suppose, In the best case, someone who will get in touch with me and become a friend, but whom I don’t know yet. Hi! 40/41

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