So this is a little philosophical manifesto for something I'm calling xenopoetic creativity, using the idea of xenopoetics from Reza Nagaristani particularly, who published a great theory fiction novel called Cyclinopedia in 2009. And it's the idea of a poetics that comes from the outside or from outside of the human. so this is an attempt at re-theorizing that by a revision of Kant's development of the notion of the human subject that we've inherited for the last 200 years and that's basically driven the concept of modernity the way that it's theorized traditionally I suppose
so trying to think about where aesthetics can go in the 21st century with a new idea of the human subject infected, as it were, by non-human notions. Each act of speculation begins with the invocation of a limit. And whether one construes it epistemologically, ontologically, or eschatologically, a hypothetical line traced through each of these declensions will invariably reveal the silhouette of the human subject. As it is traditionally understood, aesthetics can only take place on the inside of this limit because of the pact that it has made with human subjectivity and its experience. Anyone attempting to theorize a path of resistance to such configurations and avoid at the same time
falling into the trap of naive realism or worse, that of a dogmatic metaphysics is obliged to begin from inside this limit. And yet from here the task of conceiving a rigorous realist theory of aesthetics seems an impossible paradox. The way out, as Consolmesus inferred, the French philosopher of realism, the way out is always through, impossible as the task at hand may first appear to be. Or as the nameless narrator of another aesthetico-epistemological enterprise once put it, I can't go on, or go on. A catchphrase if there ever was one.
for speculative aesthetics. So in this way the course is set in advance. One must first find a way to travel backwards from representation to presentation, from reproduction to production, from the condition to the unconditioned. In short, a way to transgress the boundary that circumscribes the primary state and conceals it from the secondary one. In order to do this we need to uncover, in the very least, a hint of a hole, a leak, or an erroneous or disingenuous moment in the premise upon which this boundary has been erected. That's right, before the fun can really begin, we're obliged to return to Kant in order to reconsider the conditions of the inauguration of that state of affairs that we now know, perhaps all too well, as human finitude, or in the
idiom of the tradition that would oppose it, as correlationism. So the Kantian prohibition arises from a moment of profound crisis in Enlightenment thought, typified by a paradoxical, simultaneous desire for openness and insularity that can be correlated with, on the one hand, the competing and divergent philosophical discourses of sceptical empiricism, an argument for radical openness via a model of experience privileging the a posteriori synthesis of heterogeneous empirical data, after experience, whereby an exceptional predicate may exceed or alter its subject, and rationalist metaphysics, and ultimately a discourse of containment and purification that argues for the subordination of unruly human experience
to a rational, a priori, in advance, analytic schema, wherein no predicate, no matter how exceptional, can exceed the parameters given in advance by its subject. and on the other hand the unprecedented economic possibilities brought about by the historical emergence of industrial societies trading in commodities. So whether one conceives the moment philosophically or economically the sudden traumatic and urgent necessity to define and stabilize a relation to novelty is evident. Proto-industrial Enlightenment society caught between the parochialism of the European Ancien Regime and the dawn of an appropriate modernity, in the words of Nick Land, wants both to learn and to legislate for all time,
to open itself to the other and to consolidate itself from within, to expand indefinitely whilst reproducing itself as the same. Its ultimate dream is to grow whilst remaining identical to what it was, to touch the other without vulnerability. This is the equally impossible paradox that haunts the birth of the modern era and provides the material conditions for the inauguration of the Doctrine of Finitude, less an advent of philosophical sincerity than a strategy for the management of excess. Land, quite uncontentiously, sees the Kantian critical project as the Occident's most profitable and prodigious investment in the ongoing systematisation and mastery, or exploitation, if you're reading it economically,
of a traumatic encounter with unprecedented alterity. Thus, in the critique of pure reason, the first of the three critiques, Kant resolves the paradox of infinite expansion and infinite reproduction by devising a philosophical position that admits the synthetic capacity of empiricism, thus critiquing what he saw as the hackneyed intractability of the rationalists, but at the same time universalises and delimits it by tethering it to the rationalist tenet of the a priori, in order to arrive at an unprecedented amalgamation of the two previously conflicting positions. Human experience is neither a posteriori and synthetic, nor a priori and analytic.
It's a priori and synthetic. The extremes of openness and insularity each employed in the tempering of the other. As far as knowledge is concerned, openness to alterity would be permitted, provided that it first passed through the legislative terminal of the a priori forms, space and time. This move, the crux of Kant's so-called Copernican revolution, at once ties knowledge irreversibly to experience, outlaws all forms of realism, and delegitimizes metaphysics, effectively setting the scene for the rise of postmodern anti-realism and the so-called end of metaphysics, which would unfold over the 200 succeeding years of the doctrine's reign. The virtuosity of the a priori synthetic model lies in the relocation of the conditions for the experience of external objects
in the human mind itself. So when an object is perceived, its raw sensory material, what Kant refer to as the sensible manifold, is processed in the mind by the pure forms of intuition, space and time. These forms are universal to human consciousness and inhere within the mind rather than in objects themselves. So in order for anything to enter into human experience, it must pass through these forms, which imbue it with an exchange value, calculated in the universal currency of the human subject, a kind of transcendental galerta, yielding it up to the synthetic function of the categories of judgment that complete the process of exchange, inscribing the object of the phenomena. Thus the entirety of the external world merely reflects back onto us the image of our own minds.
The most we can ever represent to ourselves, the most we can ever know, the pinnacle of human knowledge after Kant is simply the transcendental apperception of the conditions under which objects conform to the human experience of them. The catastrophe of alterity had been averted for the time being. Nevertheless, the systematization of human experience was far from complete. The first critique necessitated a second, and the second necessitated a third, By the time he wrote the third critique, the critique on aesthetics, the critique of judgment,
the problem of excess had shifted to the apparent lawlessness of matter. As Kant himself puts it in the introduction to the work, despite the assurance of the transcendental laws nature's manifold empirical forms might still be infinitely diverse and heterogeneous a raw chaotic aggregate without the slightest trace of system there are few horrors quips land comparable to that of the master legislator who realises that anarchy is still permitted in order to begin the dirty work of extending transcendental subsumption to the empirical material world The third critique argues that we must presuppose that nature does in fact conform to a set of coherent and predictable laws functioning as a totality.
Even if we cannot identify a purpose for them, we can perceive in them a purposiveness. This presupposition assures the coherency of nature's objective appearance to us, but one that rests upon aesthetic judgments rather than epistemological ones. Thus the rationalisation and control of otherness continues, but now is a two-pronged philosophical domestication of art and matter. Against the dominance of critical reason that seeks the underlying order in everything by positing it as intentional, Land asserts the existence of an irrational surplus, both artistic and material at the same time. This is Land. the eliminable and beautiful danger of an unconscious creative energy,
nature with fans. But how do we hold on to a thought like this amidst the austerity of the critical project, he asks. For it is perceptually threatened by collapse, by a reversion to a depressive philosophy of work, whether theological or humanistic. The three great strands of post-Kantian exploration, marked by the names Hegel, Schelling and Schopenhauer are constantly tempted by the prospect of a reduction to forgotten or implicit labour to the agency of God, of spirit, of man to anything that would return this ruthless artistic force of the generative unconscious to design, intention, project, teleology. Kant's word, genius, is the immensely difficult and confused
but emphatic resistance to such reductions. the thought of an utterly impersonal creativity that is historically registered as the radical discontinuity of the example of irresponsible legislation as order without anybody giving the orders. Kant's explication of genius is the only moment in the third critique where he explicitly theorizes production rather than judgment. And it is here, according to Land, that an insurgent force is admitted into the critical project. For it turns out that an intensely significant moment of lawless synthesis is required to sustain a system of lawful synthesis by furnishing it with material for its judgments. Kant describes it thus. Genius, he writes, is a productive faculty,
a natural endowment for producing that for which no definite rule can be given, and consequently originality must be its primary property. Its products must at the same time be models. i.e. exemplary, and consequently not themselves derived from imitation. They must serve that purpose for others, as a standard or a rule of judging. It, genius, cannot indicate scientifically how it brings about this product, but rather gives the rule as nature. Where an author owes a product to his genius, he does not know himself how the ideas for it have entered into his head, nor has it in his power to invent the lack of pleasure, or methodically and communicate the same to others in such precepts that would enable them to produce similar products.
So genius produces its object precisely by negating the exigencies of the a priori in a heady, pre-transcendentally initiated and therefore unconditioned act of uninhumited synthesis. The resulting object or artwork is entirely original, yet reveals a new rule that could not have been inferred from any earlier principles or examples for judgment. What is remarkable about this configuration is that, as Rachel Jones notes in her essay on the place of genius in a critical project, a conceptless mode of production has the capacity to generate a determinate object to which a concept can then be attached, which means that certain art objects, those which can't designate as fine art in his critique, come to us from outside thought.
an alien affordance that seems to introduce a radical possibility into the Kantian framework, but not one, nevertheless, that Kant neglects to police. This is Kant. To ask whether more stress should be laid in matters of fine art upon the presence of genius or upon that of taste is equivalent to asking whether more turns upon imagination or upon judgment. It's not hard to guess in advance what Kant's answer is going to be. For in lawless freedom, imagination with all its wealth produces nothing but nonsense. The power of judgment, on the other hand, is the faculty that makes it consonant with understanding. Taste, like judgment in general, is the discipline or the corrective of genius. It severely clips its wings and makes it seemly or polished,
but at the same time gives it guidance, directing and controlling its flight, so it may preserve its purposive character. In an echo of the third critique's founding gesture, namely delivering the problematic heterogeneity to a pre-supposed order posited within the transcendental ground genius' lawless mode of production must be subsumed under the legislative power of judgment precisely because it is recuperable to the human program of transcendental conditioning, let alone the concept the insurrectionary possibility of genius remains unrealized, it's inherently inhuman lawlessness, nature gives the rule to art, is ultimately subsumed under human law. And yet, the disruption has been registered. Land. One only has to read the second critique
alongside the third to notice the immense disruption that art inflicts upon transcendental philosophy. Kant only manages to control this disruption by maintaining art as an implicitly marginal problematic within a field mastered by philosophy, even though he acknowledges that the autonomy of reason is to the heteronomy of genius, what fidelity of representation is when compared to creation, poverty and wretchedness, the message scarcely seeps out. Nonetheless, Land assumes too much by taking the failed insurrection of genius alone as sufficient evidence for the existence of an impersonal, generative force lurking in the shadows of the critical project. Instead, it is Jones who provides the more thorough investigation and in doing so reveals a twist in the plot
narrated up until now by Land. Like Land, she identifies the problem of excess haunting the third critique. And like Land, she reads judgment's management of genius as an illicit and disingenuous moon. But Jones's version of Kant has a perverse streak that Land, who surely would have appreciated it, has missed. And it hinges on a strange passage concerning crystal formation. As exemplified in the development of ice crystals, the process of crystallization, as Kant describes it, transforms matter unpredictably, moving, as it were, by a leap from a fluid state into a solid one, forming and reforming the whole shape of objects both inside and out, their external figure as well as their internal fabric,
in a manner that is not deducible and advanced from mechanical rules. Crystallization doesn't squarely fit into the organic or the purely mechanical schemata that Kant offers as possibilities for nature. Ostensibly, the passage points forward to the examination of teleological judgment, but Jones perceives a necessity to map it back onto the account of aesthetics, for without this move, the complex series of reciprocating analogies between art and nature that structure the critique of judgment, what can't cause logical symmetry, remains incomplete, a deliberate elision in order to protect the primacy of judgment over production. While the production of art is mapped through nature in the discussion of genius, there's no reciprocal mapping of production in nature through a model of artistic production,
despite one being readily available. Thus Jones, completing the unfinished analogy, concludes that Kant's description of crystal formation is the material instantiation of genius a model of artistic production that devastates the inhibited synthesis of Kantian transcendentalism and yet stands outside the disciplining purchase of judgment According to Jones, the critique's repressed mode of production raises the possibility, at least, that another kind of non-Newtonian, non-organic, self-organizing matter ought to be recognized, one on par with the imagination, understood in a non-psychologistic sense as a productive power capable of generating unforeseen constellations
through the organization of its materials where matter is restructured without following pre-given rules. it is not insignificant that this model of active materiality exemplified by crystallization as Jones notes might be enough to generate both the figure and fabric of its products a problem for the fundamental tenet of hyalomorphism that supports the critical project and forms the basis of what Meir-Sue refers to as the correlationist two-step in a non-dialectical reduction of the dualism between transcendental form and empirical content to a self-producing and self-representing matter. The notion of representation itself is relegated to the status of a transcendental illusion, a misprision of primary processes.
Thought, judgment, conceptual representation are all simply depotentiated versions of a functional potency generated by a productive, primary, synthetic, material intensity. a catastrophic thing for Kantianism as it licenses the collapse of the critical project into imminence from the side of materiality rather than ideality the ideal conditioning of matter inverted to disclose the material conditioning of the ideal a transcendental materialism the materialist reading of crystallization is the breach in the restricted economy of Kantian concept production through which the real emerges and the key to an alternative aesthetic economy repressed in the dominant phenomenological account of modern subjectivity.
This is land. It is no doubt comforting to speak of the genius as if impersonal creative energy were commensurable with the order of autonomous individuality governed by reason. But such chatter is, in the end, absurd. Genius is nothing like a character trait. It does not belong to a psychological lexicon. Far more appropriate is the language of seismic upheaval, inundation, disease, the onslaught of raw energy from without. One is a genius only in the sense that one is syphilitic, in the sense that one is violently problematized by a ferocious exteriority. One returns to the subject of which genius was predicated to find it charred and devastated beyond recognition.
thus creativity is predicated on a de-intensification of subjectivity of its contamination with outside forces a subject that recedes the more it produces as Jones affirms on this model the transcendental production of form and the activities of thought are no longer opposed to a lifeless material substance but the shaping of matter and thought would each become an aspect of the manifold of imminent expression of a power or even a faculty of crystallization. Under the impetus of the faculty of crystallization, then, this acephalous primary production, whose attendant aesthetic, Jones hints, could be understood in relation to contemporary models of matter such as chaos theory, swarm intelligence, noise,
or theories of entropic emergence, critique collapses into creation, and the distinction between theory and practice disappears. Transcendental materialism reconfigures art as alterity that is not reduced to the personal, but accessible through strategies of non-linear dissolution, cyber-positive feedback or viral dissemination, whose orienting vector traces a path from the known to the unknown. Thus, it could be suggested, Jones concludes, that in the complex folds of the critique of judgment, there lies a hidden genealogy which opens on to a future different from that foregrounded by Kant. A future without subjects and objects. A future of material interference patterns running through the human. A future of trans, post and non.